Deegie

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I don’t think the Orthodox churches use them either.

By the way, Orthodox clergy are buried fully vested and during their funeral, their head faces the liturgical altar, whereas laity are buried in dignified clothing and their head faces away from the altar. Syriac Orthodox bishops are actually buried sitting up right on their episcopal thrones, or cathedras, and then usually entombed behind the altar of cathedral churches. The first bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Diocese of the West sought special exemption from the planning commission of the City of Burbank to be buried behind the altar at St. Ephrem’s Cathedral, which I have visited many times, but I have no idea if such permission was granted.

I intend to be buried in vestments as well. I'm curious about the positioning of the casket you mention. Our tradition is that the casket is placed in the position appropriate to how they experienced services. So if the body were to stand up, laity would face the altar and priests would face the people. (I presume deacons would as well, but I've actually never heard that discussed.) That means that laity are feet-first to the altar and priests are head-first. If I understand you properly, that is the opposite of the Orthodox approach?
 
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The Liturgist

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Which is why Pastor and I would like to return to the one year. However, in a Congregationalist structure, in a Synod where both are allowed, it is presently not an option in our Parish.

Because of course a Congregational structure requires consent of the congregation. I bypassed this by writing into the constitution and bylaws of my two missions a set of liturgical requirements designed to prohibit contemporary aliturgical worship, and also another article that gives the teaching elder full discretion over the liturgy within the set of parameters previously established, I gave myself room to maneuver. But, fearing abuse of this authority, the ruling elders can intervene if for example the teaching elder abuses a congregant in a homily. I don’t like the Moses Model, used by the Calvary Chapel, because while Chuck Smith was decent enough, it gives anyone who becomes a pastor in their church massive authority without checks and balances. I have long felt that with an episcopal polity, a parish should be able to obtain gracious dismissal or at least shared access and usage rights if a theological shift occurs, depending largely on whether or to what extent the diocese or the parish paid for the building, except in cases of specific canonically defined heresies. For example, while my missions are congregational, the constitution and bylaws require observance of the Nicene Creed and prohibit the congregation from having any fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association. Although its extremely unlikely a traditional congregational church would affiliate with the UUA, it did happen on such a massive scale in the late 18th century, causing us to loose Harvard, the oldest congregation, and the oldest church building, in the original 13 colonies (the Old Ship Church), among other losses. It is such a delicate balance between avoiding a situation like the Lutherans in Prussia, the ancestors of the LCMS, were put in when they were forcibly united with the Calvinists in the 1790s, or more recently the situation experienced by parishes like St. Paul’s (formerly United Methodist Church) in Alaska, while at the same time preventing the takeover of parishes by the heterodox, and this applies regardless of polity.
 
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The Liturgist

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I intend to be buried in vestments as well. I'm curious about the positioning of the casket you mention. Our tradition is that the casket is placed in the position appropriate to how they experienced services. So if the body were to stand up, laity would face the altar and priests would face the people. (I presume deacons would as well, but I've actually never heard that discussed.) That means that laity are feet-first to the altar and priests are head-first. If I understand you properly, that is the opposite of the Orthodox approach?

No, that is exactly the Orthodox approach, and I greatly admire and agree with your wish to be buried in vestments. The Orthodox are buried fully vested, that is to say, ready for presiding over a Eucharist.
 
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Deegie

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No, that is exactly the Orthodox approach, and I greatly admire and agree with your wish to be buried in vestments. The Orthodox are buried fully vested, that is to say, ready for presiding over a Eucharist.

Gotcha. Thanks! I misunderstood you.
 
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Paidiske

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I hope to be buried in a cassock, but not full vestments. Partly because I feel the cassock is enough to honour my identity, and the vestments are about a particular function which I won't be exercising in the grave. And partly because, what a waste of good vestments!

This conversation prompted me to look at the suggestions in Michno's A Priest's Handbook, which say:
The priests appointed begin the vesting of the body while the others present begin the recitation of the Psalter, starting with Psalm 1 and continuing without Gloria Patri.
Traditionally the body is vested in cassock, amice, alb, cincture (or cassock-alb) and Eucharistic vestments. (The colour may be violet, green or white). When the vesting is completed, the recitation of the Psalter concludes with the versicle and response "Rest eternal..." The officiant then says the Commendatory prayer.

Which reminds me that one of the things I don't like about the way Michno treats the burial of a priest, is that it is all about them being a priest. There is no acknowledgement of, room for or involvement of the priest's family at all, which seems extraordinary to me in an Anglican work.
 
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Philip_B

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I hope to be buried in a cassock, but not full vestments. Partly because I feel the cassock is enough to honour my identity, and the vestments are about a particular function which I won't be exercising in the grave. And partly because, what a waste of good vestments!

This conversation prompted me to look at the suggestions in Michno's A Priest's Handbook, which say:
The priests appointed begin the vesting of the body while the others present begin the recitation of the Psalter, starting with Psalm 1 and continuing without Gloria Patri.
Traditionally the body is vested in cassock, amice, alb, cincture (or cassock-alb) and Eucharistic vestments. (The colour may be violet, green or white). When the vesting is completed, the recitation of the Psalter concludes with the versicle and response "Rest eternal..." The officiant then says the Commendatory prayer.

Which reminds me that one of the things I don't like about the way Michno treats the burial of a priest, is that it is all about them being a priest. There is no acknowledgement of, room for or involvement of the priest's family at all, which seems extraordinary to me in an Anglican work.
One of the practices I have observed in our Diocese is the priest (deceased) is laid in the coffin wearing wearing alb and stole, and inside the Church the Chasuble is used as the pall cloth, with a chalice and Pattern set on top of the coffin, which are then removed as the casket leaves the church.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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I intend to be buried in vestments as well. I'm curious about the positioning of the casket you mention. Our tradition is that the casket is placed in the position appropriate to how they experienced services. So if the body were to stand up, laity would face the altar and priests would face the people. (I presume deacons would as well, but I've actually never heard that discussed.) That means that laity are feet-first to the altar and priests are head-first. If I understand you properly, that is the opposite of the Orthodox approach?
Speaking from the context of my former profession as a Funeral Director, I had not been involved in the funerals of any Orthodox Clergy, but have with Catholic Clergy.

Traditionally, for the wake when often held in the Church, the open Casket, with the remains vested, is placed feet towards the Altar. Prior to the beginning of the Funeral, the lid is placed on the Casket, it is draped with a Pall, and the casked is turned 180 degrees so the head is towards the Altar, and feet towards the congregation.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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Because of course a Congregational structure requires consent of the congregation. I bypassed this by writing into the constitution and bylaws of my two missions a set of liturgical requirements designed to prohibit contemporary aliturgical worship, and also another article that gives the teaching elder full discretion over the liturgy within the set of parameters previously established, I gave myself room to maneuver. But, fearing abuse of this authority, the ruling elders can intervene if for example the teaching elder abuses a congregant in a homily. I don’t like the Moses Model, used by the Calvary Chapel, because while Chuck Smith was decent enough, it gives anyone who becomes a pastor in their church massive authority without checks and balances. I have long felt that with an episcopal polity, a parish should be able to obtain gracious dismissal or at least shared access and usage rights if a theological shift occurs, depending largely on whether or to what extent the diocese or the parish paid for the building, except in cases of specific canonically defined heresies. For example, while my missions are congregational, the constitution and bylaws require observance of the Nicene Creed and prohibit the congregation from having any fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association. Although its extremely unlikely a traditional congregational church would affiliate with the UUA, it did happen on such a massive scale in the late 18th century, causing us to loose Harvard, the oldest congregation, and the oldest church building, in the original 13 colonies (the Old Ship Church), among other losses. It is such a delicate balance between avoiding a situation like the Lutherans in Prussia, the ancestors of the LCMS, were put in when they were forcibly united with the Calvinists in the 1790s, or more recently the situation experienced by parishes like St. Paul’s (formerly United Methodist Church) in Alaska, while at the same time preventing the takeover of parishes by the heterodox, and this applies regardless of polity.
Except that the Confessions (Book of Concord) clearly state that rituals and vestments are "adiaphora" despite also stating that conforming to the norm preserves order in the Church. While in our constitutions, we must adhere to the, you can read into that pretty much whatever you want on items that are not "doctrine" in the BOC; unfortunately some do just that.
 
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Philip_B

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I wanted to add that I am a strong advocate for the use of a Pall Cloth. A long time back I worked for a Crematorium, and I was very aware of the inordinate pressure being placed on people to buy a more expensive coffin that people in order to give due honour to the deceased person. Both my parents funerals saw them in simple pine caskets. Had a Pall be available I would have been happy with MDF, in them end it is either up in smoke of buried out of sight with a very short space of time.

The cost of living may well be rising, but the cost of dying I suspect outstrips it at the moment.
 
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Paidiske

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And don't mention the cost of burial plots.

I think the fashion in coffins is changing again. I'm seeing more people choose "environmentally friendly" options which don't look as impressive.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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I wanted to add that I am a strong advocate for the use of a Pall Cloth. A long time back I worked for a Crematorium, and I was very aware of the inordinate pressure being placed on people to buy a more expensive coffin that people in order to give due honour to the deceased person. Both my parents funerals saw them in simple pine caskets. Had a Pall be available I would have been happy with MDF, in them end it is either up in smoke of buried out of sight with a very short space of time.

The cost of living may well be rising, but the cost of dying I suspect outstrips it at the moment.
When I was a Funeral Director, and I was taking a family into the selection room, I always started by telling them that there is a wide variation in price. The price does not reflect the quality of the casket, as all of them are built to perform equally as well; it is the material that they are made from, and the type of finish that determines the cost, and if Cremation has been selected, only caskets made of wood or wood products may be used. Many funeral homes would stock some really ugly low-end stuff to push people to buy higher priced caskets, I did not. Cloth covered wood composites and nicely finished inexpensive woods like willow and cotton-wood. Pine is looked upon as almost a premium wood now, and a plain pine box is just not obtainable. For those who wanted low cost direct disposition, I made my own wood composite disposal caskets out of 3/4" particle board.

In death, we are all beggars with nothing; the Pall certainly symbolizes that God sees us all the same in both life and death.

Further to Liturgy; when we returned to Cassock and Surplice/Cotta for the Elders, some criticised us for being too Catholic, and said most other Churches the Elders wear suit and tie. Pastor quoted or Confessions regarding allowing and encouraging traditional vestments, and explained that one elder may have an old, threadbare, and ill fitting suit, while another one might have a beautifully tailored $3,000.00 suit. The vestments are an equalizer, in that it symbolizes again that we are all the same when we come before the Lord in life and in death. No more arguments from the "crypto Reformed" faction since. LOL

Below is a from a Funeral at our Church this past Thursday, Pastor is praying the prayer of commendation prior to leaving the Church for the cemetery (BTW, that's me on the left side of the chancel; I served as acolyte and crucifer in the Church and at the Cemetery):
upload_2021-10-23_8-12-6.png
 
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Shane R

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I intend to be buried at sea. This is offered at no cost to veterans of the US Navy. We used to do burials at sea regularly on my ship; it was the busiest you'd ever see the chaplains get.

Matins, Vespers, Compline
How often are these services seen in your district? These have nearly gone the way of the dodo in the last couple of LCMS districts I've lived in. If it's not a communion service, most churches have Antecommunion rather than Matins. I was talking to the local guy a while back and he told me he hadn't seen Matins as a regular service since leaving Concordia Ft. Wayne.
 
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I intend to be buried at sea. This is offered at no cost to veterans of the US Navy. We used to do burials at sea regularly on my ship; it was the busiest you'd ever see the chaplains get.


How often are these services seen in your district? These have nearly gone the way of the dodo in the last couple of LCMS districts I've lived in. If it's not a communion service, most churches have Antecommunion rather than Matins. I was talking to the local guy a while back and he told me he hadn't seen Matins as a regular service since leaving Concordia Ft. Wayne.
It would be about 50:50 here in Ontario.
 
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The Liturgist

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It would be about 50:50 here in Ontario.

@Shane R

It is worth noting also that many Prostestant liturgical books, especially of 20th century provenance, but also going back into the Calvinist liturgical praxis, unfortunately allowed for a blurring of the historical textual-liturgical distinction between Matins and Ante-Communion, so for example, unfortunately, the one main problem with contemporary United Methodist liturgics (perhaps one of our Methodist friends might talk to us about this), I think, is the idea of a “service” which may or may not (usually not, at least not weekly; the weekly Eucharist is well established in contemporary Anglicanism outside of the extreme low church end of the spectrum, and in Lutheran Evangelical Catholic parishes, for example, Mark’s LCC/LCMS parish; I find this disappointing as an admirer of John Wesley, because it had been his desire for Methodists to receive communion weekly).

At the same time, even the BCP is not above a low church blurring of the boundaries between Ante-Communion and the Holy Communion service and Morning Prayer or Coral Mattins as it is sometimes called. You are I am sure doubtless of the rubrics in several editions of the BCP that allow for the use of Morning Prayer from the Divine Office in lieu of what we would now call the “Liturgy of the Word”, in antiquity the Liturgy of the Catechumens, which is basically the Ante-Communion liturgy as used from antiquity, the Eucharistic synaxis which precedes the Liturgy of the Faithful and the Eucharistic anaphora, or functions in Anglicanism and other traditional liturgies, as an Ante-Communion or “Missa Sicca,” (“dry mass” with no Eucharist, historically used in the Roman Catholic Church by hunters and by Carthusian monks, not o be confused with the Mass of the Presanctified or the Byzantine Presanctified Divine Liturgy), and also particularly in the Byzantine Rite (Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Eastern Catholic), with its long tradition of the Typika service, which can be used in lieu of a Divine Liturgy in the absence of a priest, led by a reader or deacon, and also on some days mandated by the Typikon, a sort of directory of liturgical rubrics, with particular emphasis on the liturgical calendar, because of vesperal divine liturgies and the limit of one Divine Liturgy per celebrant per altar per diem.

And of course in Anglicanism, which revived the Ante-Communion as a regular item of worship primarily due to the need for a broad church accommodation of Catholic and Protestant elements, to prevent a schism on Lutheran-Reformed lines of the sort which led to the Wars of Religion in Europe. This of course led to the liturgical model decried by the great Anglican liturgist Rev. Percy Dearmer, whose Parson’s Handbook bemoaned the extreme prevalence of Morning Prayer, the Litany and Ante-Communion as a single integrated service, without a weekly Eucharist.

That all being said, I find myself wishing for the Divine Office from Anglican churches on Sunday mornings, specifically, Morning Prayer, the Litany and Choral Eucharist, alternating with a Said Eucharist, Litany and Choral Mattins, rather than what was in the US the fairly common pre-Covid Episcopalian practice of a Said Eucharist followed by a Choral Eucharist (in my experience the said service was the one worth going to in those parishes that did not have a good, traditional music program, since at the Said Service you would tend to find an atmosphere of elevated churchmanship and an interesting and usually more elderly congregation with a consciously high churchmanship and a strong sense of Anglican identity).
 
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The Liturgist

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How often are these services seen in your district? These have nearly gone the way of the dodo in the last couple of LCMS districts I've lived in. If it's not a communion service, most churches have Antecommunion rather than Matins. I was talking to the local guy a while back and he told me he hadn't seen Matins as a regular service since leaving Concordia Ft. Wayne.

The deterioration of Divine Office services across Protestantism is tragic, and the commendable effort made by the Roman Catholic church to increase communal celebration of the Divine Office by reimplementing it as the “Liturgy of the Hours” has not been entirely successful; I know of only a few RC churches, one of which is an FSSP regional center of sorts, which have the Divine Office, and I don’t know of any churches who are doing the novus ordo Liturgy of the Hours right now (aside from the obvious - Cathedrals and monasteries, etc) . By the way, on that note, would any of you know of an Anglican / Episcopalian parish in the Los Angeles-Santa Barbara-Orange County area that has Choral Evensong?
 
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Paidiske

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(in my experience the said service was the one worth going to in those parishes that did not have a good, traditional music program, since at the Said Service you would tend to find an atmosphere of elevated churchmanship and an interesting and usually more elderly congregation with a consciously high churchmanship and a strong sense of Anglican identity).

That's an interesting comment. In my experience, the said service is usually small in attendance, shorter and done more simply (so, for a church which might use incense at its main service, the said service would have no incense; that sort of thing). I would not generally have described it as having "elevated churchmanship" at all.

My current parish is extremely unusual in that the earlier service is the better attended; but it is not a "said" service (in non-Covid times when singing is permitted, which it currently is not here).
 
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The Liturgist

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And don't mention the cost of burial plots.

Indeed, its an absolute tragedy, especially for Christians among whom great value is placed in traditional burial, for example, almost all of the various Eastern churches, including Eastern Rite Protestant churches (the Mar Thoma Syrian Church in India, which is part of the Anglican Communion alongside the Church of South India and the Church of North . Clark County, Nevada and many other US counties (indeed, every one I have looked into) will bury you however free of charge if you die impoverished*.

The caskets etc. are obviously low end, but I myself greatly prefer traditional simple caskets vs. overpriced expensive caskets. Any casket or coffin can look splendid with proper palls or flag covering. We once did a beautiful funeral for a lay leader in the church with a simple casket shrouded in a Christian flag.

I believe that given the universality of death, and the need for solemnity, there is a case to be made for government assistance for all funerals, the choice of burial or other modality, such as burial at sea or indeed cremation, being accommodated as a form of freedom of worship and religious, moral freedom and freedom of conscience (for example, those who would donate their bodies for science and medical applications).

*In other countries I expect cremation would be imposed. Indeed in Japan it is required by law for all residents who expire there, regardless of wealth, which represents a form of discrimination against members of the Japanese Orthodox Church and other Christian communities as well as the Jewish community and the Muslim community.
 
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The Liturgist

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That's an interesting comment. In my experience, the said service is usually small in attendance, shorter and done more simply (so, for a church which might use incense at its main service, the said service would have no incense; that sort of thing). I would not generally have described it as having "elevated churchmanship" at all.

My current parish is extremely unusual in that the earlier service is the better attended; but it is not a "said" service (in non-Covid times when singing is permitted, which it currently is not here).

Indeed, the atmosphere at my retired Episcopalian colleague’s parish, at the said communion, was more notably high church in climate, because the BCP was used directly, and the small elderly congregation which attended that service took great pride in it, with one distinguished elderly gentleman who was also a senior leader of the parish; he was part of what I think you call the Vestry, serving as Reader (there was also a deacon). Interestingly, the attendees of that service were also usually out in force at the major festal services, for example, at Christmas Eve, despite those being choral services; one regular at the said service served as a thurifer at Christmas Eve and other occasions when incense was used.
 
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Clark County, Nevada and many other US counties (indeed, every one I have looked into) will bury you however free of charge if you die impoverished*. ..

*In other countries I expect cremation would be imposed.

I believe here a pauper's funeral tends to be a burial. But I admit I have not looked into it in some time.

Interestingly, I'm aware of at least one not-for-profit funeral company, which uses the money it makes on funerals for those who can afford them, to provide full funerals for people who cannot. (I know of them because they were seeking clergy who would be willing to take a funeral without asking for a fee. I was shocked to think there were any clergy who would refuse to take a funeral without a fee, if the person's circumstances were so straitened).

Indeed, the atmosphere at my retired Episcopalian colleague’s parish, at the said communion, was more notably high church in climate, because the BCP was used directly....

Oh. I tend to think of the BCP (by which, in Australia, we mean the 1662 book) as something which would be strongly avoided by anyone who was seeking a "high church" option.
 
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