Confirmation & Festal Eucharist

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Above: This year, Bishop Dietsche laid his hands on 25 individuals who were confirmed and received into the Episcopal Church. Welcome!

About Confirmation & Reception:

Once a year, we celebrate at Saint Thomas the Sacrament of Confirmation and Reception. Those who have never had the laying on of hands of a bishop of the apostolic succession are confirmed into the Episcopal Church; those who have already been confirmed by a bishop of the apostolic succession (such as those previously confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church, or many Eastern Orthodox Churches) are received into the Episcopal Church.

Candidates for Confirmation and Reception are baptized Christians who are ready to publicly affirm their Christian faith and who wish to be a part of the Episcopal Church. The adult candidates prepared for Confirmation and Reception by attending the Rector’s Christian Doctrine Class; the younger candidates prepared with other instructors.

If you are interested in Confirmation or Reception into the Episcopal Church, we’d be delighted to speak with you. We’ll repeat the process again beginning in January 2014, when a new Rector’s Christian Doctrine Class begins to prepare for Confirmation and Reception in May 2014. If you are not yet baptized, let’s get moving on that sooner rather than later. If you are already baptized and want to be confirmed or received in 2014, don’t hesitate to let us know now, and we will help you prepare. In the meantime, a good way to prepare is to attend church, and to grow in the faith alongside other Christians.

Service Details:

You’ll notice the structure of this service is very similar to Holy Baptism. At Baptism, it is frequently one’s sponsors or Godparents that make promises on behalf of the newly baptized. At Confirmation and Reception, the entire congregation renews its baptismal covenant alongside those to be confirmed and received. We do this by reciting the Apostles’ Creed, just as we do at baptisms. [To fully understand the Creed, you might consider reading or listening to the sermons in the Apostles’ Creed Sermon Series, which was preached in 2011.]

The Sacrament of Confirmation takes place at the chancel steps. Each of the individuals to be confirmed or received comes forward to receive the laying on of hands by the bishop. The Bishop concludes the ceremony with the prayer, we say the peace, the Rector greets the congregation, and then we proceed on with a Eucharist as usual. All baptized Christians are invited to make their Holy Communion at Saint Thomas.

‚ñ∫We are in the midst of Ascensiontide, which the Rector speaks about his weekly audio message.

Music notes: Of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s 104 universally accepted masses, almost half are examples of the so-called “parody mass” genre, taking pre-existing snatches of polyphony as their starting point and deploying it, with suitable adaptation and re-invention, throughout the mass to create a cyclic bond between the five basic sections. In several cases, Palestrina’s own motets serve as the models on which the masses are based; such a case is the delightful Missa Ascendo ad Patrem for five voices, published in the 1601 volume entitled Missarum liber duodecimus but based on a motet composed all the way back in the early 1570s.

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