Lift up Your Hearts (Mid-week)

Figure in posture of prayer (orans), Roman Catacombs, 2-6th centuries

Lift up Your Hearts

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

March 18, 2015

We hear it every week as part of the opening dialogue of Holy Communion:

 Lift up your hearts

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give God thanks and praise. 

This opening dialogue is called the sursum corda, Latin for “lift up your hearts.”  It sums up what is about to happen:  a Great Thanksgiving, in Greek, a Eucharist (eucharisto in Greek means “give thanks”). 

 When Protestants call it the Holy Communion, they are emphasizing coming together as one to share in common the one bread and one cup Christ gives us.  When Catholics (whether Roman or Anglican) call it the Mass, they are emphasizing how after coming together we are sent out into the world, since the word comes from the ending line in Latin ite missa est, “go, you are dismissed.”  When Eastern Orthodox call it the Divine Liturgy, they emphasize how such worship in a shared meal is a duty shared by all; leitourgia means a public work donated out of obligation to the greater good (Rite I’s language “it is very meet, right, and our bounden duty” captures the idea well.)   All three emphasize different aspects of the Eucharist:  gathering, sending, and our duty. 

But in essence, it is a thanksgiving.  Even when we talk about it as a sacrifice, it is a thanksgiving offering, a thankful fulfillment of our vows.  In Rite II’s words “it is good and right, and a joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to” God. If we do not lift up our hearts in Eucharist, give thanks, and find joyful praise for all good things God gives us, it is not what it is meant to be:  a Great Thanksgiving. 

Gratitude and joy, thanks and hope are at the heart of faith in Jesus.  Jesus himself was joyful.   He found quirky humor and took pleasure in and thanked God for things that might drive some of us to distraction.  When faced with a uniform wall of rejection of his message by “the wise” and its acceptance by the naïve, he laughed at the joke, and praised God for it:  

 “At  that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will” (Luke 10:21).   

I wonder whether he said that word “gracious” with an ironic smile.    

Lift up your hearts.  It is meet and right, and a joyful thing. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

Smiling Jesus, Jack Pachuta, from a Romanesque Fresco 

in Boston Museum of Fine Art, about 1300.