Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles
Our Church Year
Current Liturgical Season - Eastertide
WORSHIP
Worship provides the center for our community of faith. Each of our services offers an opportunity to gather together for fellowship, share joys and concerns, hear the Word proclaimed, celebrate the Eucharist (Communion), experience the unity of our faith, and feel God's presence.
The people of God who are the Church of the Holy Apostles gather together to raise our voices in worship each Sunday morning:
At 8:00 a.m. (Holy Eucharist -- Said Service, no Music)
At 10:30 a.m. (Holy Eucharist -- Hymns and Service Music
From Easter Sunday (05 April 2021) until the Day of Pentecost, or Whitsunday (23 May 2021) we are in the liturgical season of Eastertide.
The liturgical color is white (symbolizing the hope of the resurrection, as well as the purity and newness that comes from victory over sin and death) or gold/yellow (which symbolizes the light of the world brought by the risen Christ that enlightens the world, as well as the exaltation of Jesus as Lord and King).
English is unique in calling the Feast of the Resurrection as ‘Easter.’ Most other languages use some version of ‘Pasch’ to refer to this day, from the Latin (Pascha) and Greek (Πάσχα, Paskha), from Aramaic: פסחא, cognate to Hebrew: פֶּסַח, Pesaḥ). No-one knows for sure why the original Old English word we now know as ‘Easter’ came to be used. According to the Venerable Bede (in his De Temporum Ratione, I, v), it related to Estre (or Eostre), a Teutonic dawn deity – goddess of the rising light of day and spring. Another possibility is that the word derives from the Christian designation of Easter week as in albis, a Latin phrase that was understood as the plural of alba (“dawn”) and became eostarum in Old High German, the precursor of the modern German and English term. There are other theories as well – the bottom line is, that is what we call it.
Easter is liturgically a 7-day feast – so we celebrate Easter Day (Sunday), Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday, etc. "Eastertide" is the name for the entire 50-day liturgical season (the 50th day is the Day of Pentecost).
Like everything else of importance in the church, Easter has been the subject of its own controversies. One of the better known disagreements centered around the dating of Easter. The discussion – complex and interesting – has actually continued into the 20th Century, with calls to find a fixed date for Easter. The Council of Nicaea (325 AD/CE) decreed that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21). As it stands now, therefore, Easter can fall on any Sunday between March 22 and April 25.
The article on Easter in Wikipedia provides some good basic historical and ecclesial information on the Feast: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter ...
... as does (obviously from a Roman Catholic perspective) the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05224d.htm
For a more Protestant perspective, you could check out a Church of the Nazarene-based website’s article at http://www.crivoice.org/cyeaster.html
