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Worship the Triune God who is Love –

Worship Him in Ancient Prayer, Soaring Song, in the

Timeless Eucharistic Mystery!

We are St. Peter’s Parish of the

Anglican Province of Christ the King,

A vibrant community of faith and a part of His Body.

Come and worship Him with us, in the beauty of holiness.

Come and see!

 

This week at St. Peter’s, May 19-26, 2013:

Sunday, May 19, Whitsunday (Pentecost): 8:00 a.m., Holy Communion & Homily; 10:00 a.m., Sung Eucharist, Sermon, Church School, Coffee Hour, Vestry Meeting.

Whit Monday: Noon Mass.

Whit Tuesday: 6:30 p.m. Mass.

Wednesday, May 22:  Noon Mass; 7:00 Inquirers/Confirmation Class.

Thursday, May 23: 6:30 p..m., Evensong; 7:00, Scripture Class.

May 26, Trinity Sunday: 8:00 a.m., Holy Communion & Homily; 10:00 a.m., Sung Eucharist, Sermon, Church School, Coffee Hour.

From the Rector’s Desk:

An observation, one that occurs to me every year when I look at the calendar in springtime: Passover and Easter always circle round each other. One comes first one year and the other the next. This year, the first night of Passover was the Monday of Holy Week, March 25. The nearness in time of these feasts is no accident and there is a lesson for all of us in that.

The Jewish liturgical calendar is lunar. Ancient Israel got it from Mesopotamia, where people measured the year by the moon’s cycles. God acknowledged that way of measuring time in the Law He gave through Moses at Sinai (see Exodus 12 and Deut.16).

Our Christian church year tracks the solar calendar of the Roman Empire. Except where the date of Easter is concerned. The Church celebrates Our Lord’s Resurrection as a “movable feast.” What moves it is the moon, and we sun-following Christians (say that aloud and let the pun – it’s also a prayer – hit you) make the moon guide our holiest holy day because of Easter’s Jewish roots.

Jesus kept the Passover with His disciples. In commanding them to “take and eat” of Him in bread and wine, He linked His own atoning death, resurrection, and ascension with the Exodus from Egypt that Passover commemorates. (See John chapter 6.) In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul thus likens Christ to the lamb sacrificed at Passover and which, since the Temple’s destruction in the year 72, has been represented on the synagogue’s Seder plate by a lamb bone.

Some early Christians celebrated Easter when Passover starts, on the 14th of the Jewish month Adar. Those in the Church who disagreed with them called these Christians quatrodecimans (“fourteeners”). They may once have been a majority in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), but the Church as a whole had rejected their position by the year 325 when the Council of Nicea, that of the Creed, met.

You see, the way the lunar calendar works, if Easter were tied to the Jewish dating of Passover, it would not always be on a Sunday, and that was deemed far more important. So much more important, in fact, that the Council forbade the practice of observing Easter on Passover.

Until they faded from history about 150 years later, the “fourteeners” kept their Pascha (the Greek for Passover and a cognate of the Hebrew “Pesach” which, most literally, means “to skip”) on Adar 14th. With their demise, the festivals’ uncoupling was complete.

“So what,” one may say? Fair enough. The lesson here is in what results from the festivals’ relation in time today. On our American calendar (based upon that of Christian Western Europe), it makes for a dance between the sun and moon, heavenly bodies God created to rule each in its own sphere (Genesis 1:16).

They are siblings in His scheme of things, as Francis of Assisi wrote so beautifully in his Canticle of the Sun, and we are siblings of them and of one another also. Maybe, instead of arguing, we should do like our feasts already do and ask one another, “Shall we dance?” It’s just a thought … and a prayer. Amen+

Reach Father Mautner: 708-363-2887, or email michael.mautner@yahoo.com.