With Every Soldier of the Heavenly Army
Announcing the moveable feasts, Epiphany 2020
Note: this essay appeared in Gottesdienst (the print journal) in the Michaelmas 2020 issue. Today would have been my son’s sixteenth birthday, and so I would like to share this with our readers today. The Proper Preface is a confession of the unity of the Church - Militant and Triumphant - and a confession of the resurrection of the dead. Requiescat in Pace, Leonidas Beane+.
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“Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven we laud and magnify Your glorious name, evermore praising You, and saying . . .”
“We shall meet, but we shall miss him
There will be one vacant chair
We shall linger to caress him
While we breathe our evening prayer.”
Our common Proper Preface concludes: “With angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Your glorious name, evermore praising You and saying,…” followed by the Sanctus. It is a confession of our joining together as a great choir: the Church Militant on earth, the Church Triumphant in heaven, along with the hierarchy of the angelic hosts, as we, like Isaiah in Chapter 6, find ourselves around the throne of God singing the thrice-holy Sanctus, bridging heaven and earth, with one foot in time and another in eternity, praising the Lord in preparation for the burning coal of the Eucharist to be placed upon our lips to purge our sins.
For those of us whose loved ones have died, the confession of the “company of heaven” is of great comfort, a reminder and confession that our sainted beloved departed of the Church Triumphant are in the Lord’s presence—even as are we, as we join with our Lord and with them to breach time and space, as our Lord condescends to commune with us in His body and blood.
The conclusion of our Proper Preface comes from the Book of Common Prayer. It seems to correspond with the Latin from the Tridentine Proper Preface of Eastertide, Christmastide, and Ascension (and other feasts):
“Et ideo cum angelis et archangelis, cum thronis et dominationibus, cumque omni militia caelestis exercitus, hymnum gloriae tuae canimus, sine fine dicentes . . . … [(And so with angels and archangels, with Thrones and Dominions, and with every soldier of the heavenly army, we sing a hymn to Your glory, evermore saying . . .])”
This gives us a more militant picture of the heavenly hosts (“hosts” meaning “armies,” translating the Hebrew “Sabaoth”).
We often think of the Church on earth as the Church Militant—and so we are. We wage war against the world, the devil, and our sinful flesh as we live here in time in the fallen order. We think of the saints in heaven as the Church Triumphant—and so they are. In Christ, they have triumphed over the world, the devil, and the sinful flesh, even as they await the consummation, the resurrection, and the great reunion between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant in eternity. But this doesn’t mean that the saints in heaven are not taking part in the battle, for the saints in heaven pray for us, as we confess in Apology 21:8: “[C]oncerning the saints we concede that, just as, when alive, they pray for the Church universal in general, so in heaven they pray for the Church in general.”
And so we are comforted not only that we join with our Lord and with the company of heaven in the Divine Service, we can also rejoice in the prayers of the departed saints, our unity with them in the great Una Sancta, and the protection of the angels for which we pray, evening and morning.
To the unbelieving world, death is the final victor. It claims everyone. It is non-negotiable and irrevocable. It lurks about us for our entire lives. It strikes, sometimes suddenly, always painfully, at times tragically, and it separates us from our loved ones. It creates a crisis for those who wish to see transcendence and meaning, when all they can muster is materialism and lack of purpose. The fear of death creates a sense of spiritual nihilism and material hedonism. People desperately look for meaning in transient pleasures, as evidenced by the recent fads in funeral practice, including the more recent designs etched into tombstones.
Unbelievers look for a sense of a metaphorical “eternal life” in the form of our beloved departed “living on in our hearts.” Non-Christian (and sadly, some Christian) believers in an afterlife may seek after signs and engage in superstitions—or worse yet, partake in séances and spiritualism, real or imagined, to seek communion with their loved ones. But we Christians have the revelation of God’s Word that we human beings are both material and spiritual, that mankind was created in God’s image, that we are beloved of the Lord and redeemed by Jesus Christ at the cross, that we are baptized into Christ, and that we are nourished by His very flesh and blood. And that is where the real communion happens—where eternity breaks into time, where the spiritual is enfleshed in the material, where Christ is central in the Church’s adoration of Christ, and the Church’s union with Christ.
Sadly, even Christian people fall prey to the sentimentality of the world – especially in our own cultural reality of emotionalism.
But this maudlin feelings-based version of Christianity is not new. There is a sad poem from the War Between the States that wallows in self-pity over the loss of a son during the conflict. It is called “The Vacant Chair.” It points to the constant reminder of the vacant chair that brings sadness and grief to the family, even in the midst of their prayers. The poem, which was later turned into a song, never mentions the resurrection, the reunion that we as believers confess, and certainly no objective hope of the mercy of God as conveyed in Holy Baptism, the Word, or the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The poem is all about the grief, and is devoid of hope. I’ve always loathed the song. Admittedly, some of my bias is probably attributable to the fact that it is a Yankee composition, but the main reason is that it entirely misses the point of the Christian faith itself.
As Gottesdienst readers may know, my fifteen-year-old son took his own life in May. He had just found out that an activity that was very important to him had been cancelled because of fears of coronavirus. As was the case with all of us, his whole social life had already been altered as the lockdown continued to be extended. This was a spontaneous act, an attack of the devil upon one of the Lord’s baptized, a pious young man who faithfully served seven years, twice a week, in the chancel with me. He knew the Scriptures and had a solid faith on this side of the grave. This was a spontaneous act that the Lord in His ineffable and infinite wisdom permitted to happen. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
There is a vacant chair in our chancel: Leo’s chair. He served as our acolyte, our crucifier, and as one entrusted to process with the Gospel Book. He assisted me and the deacon as we distributed the Holy Elements. During the distribution, he reverently did what needed to be done in the chancel without direction, always with a reverence and a piety that wordlessly confessed his vocation at that time and place. In some ways, Leo was like a subdeacon for our congregation. He was a cadet officer in the Civil Air Patrol (the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary), and carried out his ceremonial duties with martial confidence: done with excellence, and yet without an overbearing military rigidity. He truly understood what the word “reverence” means, and most certainly does even in eternity. His absence on this side of the grave has left a gaping hole during our parish’s Divine Service, and indeed, a literal vacant chair in the chancel.
And yet, he remains present with our Lord, even as are we.
Our Altar Book is on the Epistle side of the altar, just a few feet from Leo’s vacant chair. While I chant the Proper Preface, I see the vacant chair clearly in my peripheral vision. The Proper Preface for Sunday Masses contains references to the resurrection (“who on this day overcame death and the grave and by His glorious resurrection opened to us the way of everlasting life”), which, juxtaposed with the vacant chair, is a poignant reminder of the promises of God. And the words,: “and all the company of heaven—which is our shorthand in English for the confession of the presence of “every soldier of the heavenly army—is a confession of the presence of the departed saints.
The Proper Preface for Eastertide is even more explicit:
And most especially are we bound to praise You on this day for the glorious resurrection of Your Son, Jesus Christ, the very Paschal Lamb, who was sacrificed for us and bore the sins of the world. By His dying He has destroyed death, and by His rising again He has restored to us everlasting life.
Rather than filling my heart with maudlin anguish, when I see the vacant chair and I defiantly chant that ancient confession of the unity of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant around our Lord who is physically present with us in Word and Sacrament, who has destroyed death, who is risen, and whose resurrection points us to the “resurrection of the body and the life everlasting” of all who believe and are baptized, of all of us whose sins are covered by the blood of the Lamb, of all of our Lord’s redeemed who eat His flesh and drink His blood—I am comforted with the objective reality of our Lord’s victory over sin, death, and hell. Satan wins battles, but he has lost the war. And even his casualties are but temporary.
Our liturgy is filled with such gems: little confessions that perhaps often go unnoticed. But when we need to hear them, they are there for us. Without fail, our merciful Lord speaks to us. We do well to listen. For “while we breathe our evening prayer,” we certainly grieve for our departed loved ones. And yet, our prayers are answered by the Lord who is victorious, who has triumphed over the devil, whose blood shed upon the cross redeems us, even as it is miraculously given to us as the “medicine of immortality.” And unlike the poem, the “we” isn’t just our family that “will meet” and “miss him,” but the “we” that meets is the entire Church, “on earth as it is in heaven.” And yes, we miss him, but we also are in his presence and the presence of all the saints. And the Proper Preface confesses the resurrection, which gives us hope and joy and the promise of a reunion in the flesh that will never end. The Divine Service is not maudlin, but rather joyful. It is not devoid of hope, but to the contrary, overflows with hope like the cup in the 23rd Twenty-third Psalm.
In this context, the vacant chair is a reminder of the soldiers of the heavenly army, the confessors who are triumphant, the redeemed in the bosom of the Lamb, the departed who await our arrival, those who intercede for the Church, and those for whom no prayers are necessary. The evening prayers that we breathe are songs of thankfulness and praise, of the Lamb’s victory, of the Christian’s union with Christ’s death and burial, and his union with Christ’s resurrection and newness of life (Rom. 6:4–5). We, the Church—Militant and Triumphant—sing our Thrice Holy in unison, praising the Trinity in Unity, unified, but with a blended harmony.
What separates the temporal reality of the vacant chair from the eternal reality of the throne from which our Lord rules is a thin veil, a veil that in reality has been torn asunder by Him who cried out in triumph, “It is finished!”
Portrait by Tiffany Leigeber