Very interesting. I was of course using your church as a hypothetical to explain why the Episcopal Church needs to follow the example od its new shall we say companion, ACNA, and upgrade the title of the Presiding Bishop. Also by the way I inadvertantly libeled ACNA; actually the 2019 BCP, following Episcopalian tradition, is in the public domain, however, for expediency, they used the New Coverdale Psalter which aligns better with the more literal, less dynamically equivalent text of the 2019 book than the Rite II Psalter in the 1979 BCP, but the New Coverdale Psalter is under copyright.
I myself believe churches should be immune from copyright restrictions; I strongly suspect the First Amendment overrides intellectual property rights in the US and only the major Christian music publishers, whose music I generally don’t want to hear, as only a handful of chorales from the 20th century, relatively speaking, I would use, and I would happily throw money at the estates or Herbert Howells or George Dyson or Healey Willam, my congregations are so far from being able to sing Rise Up My Love, My Fair One or Take Him Earth for Cherishing.
By the way, those two anthems, which express the hope of resurrection, were both written, by Willan* and Howells respectively on the occasion of the death of their young sons. Isn’t that just heartbreaking? Yet there is hope in the Gospel of our Lord, which is why I wish we could sing them.
Continuing this theme, also under copyright, possibly, but expiring soon, as it dates from the 1930s, is also an American hymn, a chorale in the Luther-Wesley tradition called “I serve a risen savior” traditionally sung on Eastern Sunday, which is a confession of faith in the Resurrection of our Lord composed by an American for the benefit of a friend who doubted the resurrection as a historical event or possibility.
*
@MarkRohfrietsch you’ve heard of Healey Willan, perhaps even used him? I regard his work as the apex of Canadian ecclesiastical music, to date. Ironically the best recording of it I have found in use at a service was one of his mass settings in use at a Lutheran church in Toronto; being Anglo Catholic aside from his settings of the Anglican divine office, which Lutherans can also use, his work more easily adapts to Lutheran use than that of many Anglican parishes, since it is very much a setting of the Latin Mass in the pattern of Bach or Luther, basically the pre-Tridentine Roman Rite with the Canon and other material removed (pointlessly, in my opinion; I love Luther but his approach to liturgics was hit or miss, unlike Cranmer, who was consistently good, but lacking the flourishes of brilliance or the frustrating omissions of Luther’s liturgical corpus...and yes in the space of these two parentheses I did just risk offending 160 million Christians in two denominational families in the interests of objective comparison of 16th century Anaphoras, but the Eucharist is important and how we pray it is important, which is why some forms of liturgical experimentation like the Anaphora of Cain and the Anaphora in honor of the Millenium Development Goals of the United Nations, used by St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, really bother me ).
My actual opinion is the Anglican communion service is preferable to the Lutheran mass insofar as it contains an anaphora and in the US and Scotland, an epiclesis, but Luther deleting the Roman canon made no difference since as I noted earlier Roman Rite priests prayed it silently, or in a low voice. But if he had, I don’t know, maybe obtained the translation of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom that Thomas Cranmer had access to, and used that anaphora, which the Ukrainian Lutheran Church actually does, in modified form, with references to a sacrifice removed, even though the wording in dispute is a “rational and bloodless sacrifice” “a mercy of peace, an offering of praise” and “thine own of thine own we offer unto thee on behalf of all and for all” and the Lutheran doctrine of the Divine Liturgy as something God does for us, as
Gottesdienst, which translated literally means God’s Service, is explicitly contained in the start of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom when the deacon says to the priest in the altar “It is time for the Lord to act.” In fact I think the text of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom need not to have been modified by the Ukrainians at all, and you’re already using the Great Litany, sans the Mariological devotion, but, since we know Luther was a fan of that and its not an intercession, even that should be fine.
One liturgy which I expect you would not want to use in a Lutheran church is the Ethiopian Orthodox Divine Liturgy of St. Mary, which is packed with intercessory prayers to the Theotokos, to the extent that the first time I read it, for a moment I thought the Anaphora, the Eucharistic Prayer, was addressed to Mary, which startled me, but then I realized I had skipped a page. But that, plus the fact that an Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy requires at least two priests and five deacons, plus a number of
debteras (cantors), and takes up to six hours, and I would guess that the greater number of Lutherans, and Luther himself, would not be pleasantly surprised if a Lutheran parish decided to switch to that format one Sunday morning.
(also Enoch, which was, I was taught, the reason Luther wanted to delete the Epistle of Jude, is, as I like to point out, canonical in the Ethiopian church)
I think these two versions say it best...
