Year A: Lent 1 | The Great Liturgy
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
February 22, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page (available for three weeks after the date of streaming).
In many Episcopalian congregations, on the first Sunday of Lent it’s traditional practice to pray the Great Litany, which we’ll be doing together in a few minutes. The Great Litany is the oldest portion of our Book of Common Prayer, with Thomas Cranmer having translated it into English from multiple Latin sources back in 1544. That means this was the first ever liturgy every English speaker could understand and pray together. Prior to this prayer, apart from the sermon, only highly educated people could interpret anything being said as part of a church service. People listened to Latin and responded with Latin—largely just repeating sounds without knowing what exactly they said.
With the advent of the Great Litany, the people were able to functionally participate in the worship services, both comprehending what they heard and knowing exactly what they were saying as they responded. That transformed church services from the largely passive experiences they had been for centuries into something where people could engage their minds as well as their hearts. Worship became more than simply an experience of God’s mystical beauty. It became truly participatory, reigniting the essence of the service. So when we join in this prayer today, we share in the oldest English-language expression of Common Prayer—prayer where all were finally free to be involved.
As such a foundational document in the development of what eventually became the Anglican tradition, I thought that today we should take a look at this prayer, to make sure we’re giving it the attention tit deserves.
Often used as a processional, the older version of the Great Litany begins on page 148 in our 1979 Book of Common Prayer. As it is centuries old, some of the words in there don’t actually mean what we think they do. So today we’ll be using a version from 1998,[1] taken from the Episcopal Church’s Enriching Our Worship series of supplemental service materials, in place of the Nicene Creed and Prayers of the People. If you’d like to follow along as we talk, that one begins on page 7 of your bulletin.
The structure of the Great Litany can be a little hard to see at first, but we can distinguish different parts either by the congregational responses or content. As with most prayers, we open with the Invocation. This is the section where we specify who exactly this prayer is meant to address. In the ancient world, that may have been Ba’al or Zeus or Odin or the like. For us as Christians, we invoke the singular Trinitarian God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
After this four-part invocation, we move into requests for deliverance, which has two subsections. We start with prayer for deliverance from our own failings, from danger, and the like. After making our requests, we move into the means by which we hope for this deliverance: the life and work of Jesus Christ. After that, similarly to the Prayers of the People, which are likely rooted in the Great Litany, we move into three different sections of petition. First we pray for the Church—for unity, for boldness, for leadership within the greater Church, and for all those who make up its body. The prayers then move into petitions regarding the social order—prayers for governance and our approach to the natural world. After that, we focus our attention on more defined groups of people: the sick, prisoners, foes, and those who have gone before us. We move on to a brief section of petitions for ourselves—for the power to faithfully continue in the pathways of repentance, forgiveness, and amendment of life becoming of all Christians. And finally, today’s version closes with the Triasagion, the “holy, holy, holy” drawn from liturgies of ancient Greek-speaking congregations.
To me, one of the interesting things about the Great Litany is how its structure differs from that of our standard prayers. Prayers typically follow a three-fold pattern: Invocation—formally addressing the deity to whom you’re speaking, often with a brief introduction of the topic at hand—the Petition—the actual “asking” part of the prayer—and finally the Exchange—who or what you’re offering should the deity respond. A short example of this formula is, “Oh God [the Invocation], help me get out of this ticket [the Petition], and I’ll go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life [the Exchange]!” However, in Christian tradition, as nothing can be more important to us or God, our formal exchange is the person and already accomplished work of Jesus and his anointing.
For a longer example, flip back to page 2 of your bulletin for the Collect of the Day. (And we should probably take the time here to note that a Collect is called such because it “collects” the themes of the day’s readings. The pronunciation differs due to how and when the noun and verb forms entered our language.) There we see, “Almighty God, whose blessed son…” [the Invocation] “come quickly to help us…” [the Petition] “through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord…” [the Exchange].
Going back to the Great Litany, we see the Invocation and the Petitions, but there is no formal Exchange—at least not in the typical order. I’m not sure exactly why that is. We could argue that the Exchange takes place in the second section of the prayer, where we describe the means of our deliverance. But since that’s still structured as Petition, my guess is that its absence has something to do with the original usage of the Great Litany as part of the service’s processional. Perhaps opening with such a prayer was supposed to bring greater emphasis to Communion, where in we memorialize and celebrate the Exchange.
Now, one thing to remember with our Common Prayer is that these prayers are meant to help unite us—to collectively focus our attention on certain topics so we can learn to respond as the one body that the Church ought to be. Essentially, they provide us a good outline. No prayer is magic. There’s no benefit to simply reciting words or just sort of mindlessly droning our way through. As we pray together, the expectation is that we fill in our own specifics as we move along. Think of these prayers along the lines of how Jesus addressed the Law and the Prophets in the Gospel two weeks ago, how his actions “fleshed out” or “put meat on the bones” of the skeleton that the Hebrew Bible provides. It’s the same with us and our prayer. Use these as prompts to fill in what’s important to you! Take the different categories to help you recall your own concerns. As we pray the words aloud together, expand the ideas of the Invocation in ways that make sense to you—what is it about God that’s significant to you in this moment? When we move on to the Petition, can you think of a particular aspect of the Church or other ministry that either needs support or holds special meaning? Do particular situations in society trouble you? Bring those into your internal dialog with God. As we proclaim our Exchange, what is it about Jesus’ work or your relationship with him that carries the most joy or gratitude for you at this time? Focus your thoughts on those things, and allow that personalization to animate our united prayers.
Praying together may seem common to us now—common in the sense of being a sort of dull, everyday occurrence. Bur our capital-C Common Prayer, like the Great Litany, comes from the struggle and labor of our Christian forebears as they endeavored to free worship from the realm of the powerful and return it to the hands of everyday people, where it belongs. As we join today in this ancient ritual, consider those who have gone before us—those who’ve prayed this same prayer over the centuries—and imagine the wonder of what it was like to join in worship for the first time not simply as the observer you’ve been all your life but as a knowledgeable participant. Then, as we ourselves pray, bring your whole self into this time of worship; present yourself to God not as an isolated follower of Jesus but as a member of the greater, collected Body of Christ. Become the Church; celebrate, honor, and serve our Provider as we unite our breath and bodies through Common Prayer!
[1] Which still has some old language, such as the use of “mischief” rather than “misfortune.”