I had an interesting experience today.
The Byzantines have something called the Funeral of Christ service on Good Friday (Great and Holy Friday), where an iconic corpus of Christ is given a burial procession as funeral lamentations are sung. (The corpus is used in earlier services; on Thursday it is nailed to the cross, and early Friday it is taken down from the cross.) The lamentations are beautiful, both in music and lyrics. The lyrics highlight the paradoxes that are so characteristic of Christianity, and are written in exquisite language. This is my favorite service of the whole year, bar none, and as soon as I finish one service, I'm looking forward to the next one.
Anyway, one of the lamentations says, "Magnify the might of America, granting her freedom and peace forever." Or at least, that's the way it was written in the book, and the way it was presumably sung for 38 years or longer, at least as long as I can remember.
Today was different, however. It was changed. As the line was sung in Arabic, and no changes were made in the book, I do not know what it was changed to. I know it was changed because they had the phonetic Arabic and it was obviously different from what was sung (someone next to me noticed the same thing). I have a question into the pastor, we'll see what he has to say.
I'm not entirely surprised it was changed. Independent of our foreign policy, "Magnify the might of America" sounds jarring to modern ears. We are such a global culture, and Christianity seems so peaceful, to pray that the might of one country be magnified seems out of place (although the concept is fairly common in Byzantine prayers). But I'm wondering, this being an Arab congregation, whether our foreign policy has so alienated Arabs that Christian immigrants in the U.S. could no longer tolerate a prayer to "magnify the might of America". Is this a telling sign? Independent of how one feels about our foreign policy, we have to recognize its consequences and effects, even if we declare them to be acceptable.
