Compline - Lent III

We spent the afternoon trying to edit the audio from the cassette of Sunday morning's Eucharist. The quality is not very good, and we hesitate to post it. We would like you to email us to let us know if you would prefer hearing the service even if the quality is uneven and not up to our usual standard OR skip this week's audio. Please send your messages to webteam AT stbarnabasfalmouth DOT org (email spelled out to foil spammers).

Instead, we are offering you the raw recording of last Sunday's sung service of Compline. The pace is contemplative with pauses between prayers, hymns and anthems. The church is lit by candles and there is the perfume of incense from behind the altar.

Compline's structure is found in the Book of Common Prayer on pages 127 through 135. You may learn more about Compline here.

Some details:
Orison: 'Cross of Jesus' (Hymn 160)
Psalm (133)134: 'O come, bless the Lord, all you who serve the Lord' (Ecce nunc)
Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-7

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Collects: selected from the collects for Compline plus the Lent III collect (p. 218 BCP).
Anthem: Lord, for thy tender mercy's sake (Farrant)

Lent III service coming...

Sorry for the delay in getting Sunday's worship audio up. We used our cassette system this week. This requires our team to find the portable cassette player (and batteries) and re-play the service into the computer. We are doing that this afternoon. So the service should be available by Tuesday evening. The preaching series continued with Rev. Pat preaching on Confession and Absolution. We will remind Rev. Pat to email us the text of her sermon so it can be made available as well.

Sunday evening was a 4th Sunday of the month, so our Schola offered the Service of Sung Compline at 8pm. It is a refreshing and contemplative time for both choir and congregants. Next month, the 4th Sunday falls on Easter Sunday, so there will not be Compline in March.

Our choir sings Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil and two services on Easter Sunday, so we will rest on Easter evening and sing Compline again on April 27.

Lenten Opportunities

Falmouth had a deluge of rain this week. Whenever that happens, our sound system becomes even more temperamental due to roof or chimney leaks (for the source of which we continue to hunt) wreaking havoc with wires somewhere we haven't found yet.

So we apologize for not being able to provide the complete worship service this week. We are thankful that we captured the sermon from today. It began with a reading of the Great Exhortation from the Book of Common Prayer. We will keep the audio from Lent I up for another week.

Our Lenten preaching series began in earnest today with Rev. Kate preaching on Exhortation. Her sermon is available as an audio file. Please be aware that about 12 minutes into the sermon, there is distortion for about 20 seconds. During that time she was talking about thanking God for water every time she saw a sticker on her kitchen faucet. Listen to the sermon to see what she was talking about.

Other Lenten offerings include a comparative religions class on Wednesday evenings and Bible studies on Sunday and Wednesday mornings. You can visit our Lenten Formation Opportunities page to read about these.

Sunday Worship Notes for Lent I

With Ash Wednesday on February 6, we entered the season of Lent - the forty days of fasting and reflection before Holy Week and Easter. Today's service for the First Sunday of Lent is now available for listening on our Worship page.

At St. Barnabas, we chant the Great Litany at the beginning of the service on the First Sunday of Lent. Our worship is more contemplative with more silences. There are no preludes and postludes. Throughout the season, our 11:00 o'clock service uses Rite I (although you will hear us mixing up our responses with those from Rite II out of habit!).

As we have commented upon in the past, our sound system is still intermittently troublesome. This week's trouble spot turned out to be a loss of all but the beginning of the anthem (Allegri's Miserere) and the start of the offertory hymn. We are very sorry about this. After heavily increasing the volume levels for the dropped section, the quality was unacceptable. We ended up cutting this 'silent' part out so that you don't turn up your speakers all the way to hear the very faint to non-existent sounds of the anthem and then get blasted by the offertory hymn coming back loud and clear in the middle of verse one!

This week's sermon included the information that we will have a preaching series on Lent. Each week, Rev. Pat or Rev. Kate will examine an aspect of Lent. The topics to be covered are: Exhortation (Lent II), Confession (Lent III), Humble Access (Lent IV), and then a gathering together of the threads on Lent V.

Processional: The Great Litany
S67 and Book of Common Prayer (BCP) 324
Gospel Procession: 147
Offertory Hymn: 143
(missing introduction and start of verse 1)
Sanctus: S114
Agnus Dei: S158
Communion Hymns: 449, 443
Post Communion Hymn: 142

World Mission Sunday

Today is World Mission Sunday. We had a guest preacher and speaker: Tom Sansone, a lay leader from the Diocese of Connecticut whose home parish is working on building a residential school for AIDS orphans in Kenya. Tom's sermon was on the transfiguration. You can listen to it in our weekly audio of the entire service found on our Worship page, or if you would prefer to just go straight to the sermon, it can be found on our page of Archived Sermons.

After the service, the Outreach Committee provided lunch for Tom's talk. He spoke about his parish role in partnering with WIKS, a non-governmental organization in rural Western Kenya. WIKS stands for Women's Initiative for Knowledge and Survival. The organization is led by Kenyan native and Anglican priest, the Rev. Evalyn Wakusama, and has a joint US/Kenyan board. To learn more about WIKS, you may visit their website: www.WIKS.org

Hymns in today's service (for those of you listening online):
Opening: 460
Gloria: S278
Gospel Procession: 129
Offertory: 427
Sanctus: S128
Fraction Anthem: 333
Communion: 327, 123
(Note: we had to cut 2 verses out of #123 in the audio file due to the vagaries of the sound system.)
Closing: 618