My broken record - different, yet the same

I've blogged about this before and I doubtless will again, but it is a great joy to belong to a Church where the basic form of the Liturgy is the same no matter where I go.  We visited St. John the Theologian Orthodox Church in Panama City, Florida, and we plan to return on Wednesday for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

St. John is my Patron Saint, so it was a particular blessing to have his icon prominently displayed for veneration.  St. John's is a small Greek parish in Panama City, and meets in what was obviously at one point a Protestant Church.  It is quite small -- smaller even than our little parish in Hiram, Georgia, both in attendance and in the size of the parish building itself.  Most of the service was in English, but most of the hymnody was in Greek, and prominent portions such as the Lord's Prayer and the Trisagion Hymn were sung in both English and Greek.  As was the practice at the last Greek parish I attended, the priest at the end handed out the antidiron and offered a blessing in lieu of having the parish venerate the cross.  Unlike the last Greek parish I attended, the sermon was after the Gospel reading, as it is in our home parish.  We communed, and the priest and parishioners could not have been nicer.  We look forward to returning.

When I visit other Orthodox parishes, I am constantly struck by how trivial the differences seem and how utterly familiar the Liturgy is even when it is not done the same way we do it.  I shouldn't be, but I am.  One reason we left the Lutheran Church was the "to each his own" form of liturgical practice that is not at all what we were raised with, but was in fact prominent in our area.  There was no catholicity, there was no sense of oneness to the Church.  There was only what we do here, which was sorta-kinda like what they do down the road, but not in any real fundamental sense.  This is not to denigrate this -- certainly Lutherans are not alone in this typically Protestant worship mindset.  But it is not what we understood the Church to be.  It is not catholic.

This is also not to say the Orthodox Church walks in lockstep.  As melxiopp kindly pointed out the last time I blogged on this topic, there are in fact material differences in how some Orthodox parishes celebrate the Liturgy.  And without question, there is freedom for that in Orthodoxy, and there is also concern about an overuse of that freedom.  We are, in that, no different than anyone else.  The devil is in the details.  Other Christians have worship wars over whether to add a rock band, or a keyboard, or modern lighting and video screens.  We bicker over whether the curtain and the Royal Doors are shut, or how loud the prayers are spoken.  That is not to make light of these concerns, nor to be triumphalistic about the failings of others.  It is, rather, to say it is refreshing to have such uniformity, even as we could always do better.  As Lutherans, we were raised in the faith on liturgy, catholicity and tradition.  It's good to have all three again.