“God is the Lord,” and the Kathismata.

After the Six Psalms, we offer up to God our petitions for the granting of spiritual and bodily mercies in the words of the Great Ectenia, then we sing a hymn of praise to God, Who hath descended to earth for our salvation, a continuation of the Angelic Hymn: “God is the Lord and hath appeared unto us; blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.” To this hymn is added the troparion for the feast, as a reminder of the mercies bestowed upon us through the incarnation of the Son of God. While the hymn, “God is the Lord,” and the troparion are being sung, the illumination of the church is increased, to signify that Christ, having come, is the Light of the world. The troparion is followed by the kathismata in their order, expressing, in the words of the Psalms, our consciousness of our unworthiness before God. In ancient times the lesson from the Apostle was expounded after the reading of the kathismata. Now the latter are followed immediately by the Small Ectenia.

This part of the Matins office, consisting of a long continued reading of Psalms, interspersed only with brief Doxologies in honor of Christ’s coming into the world, and in memory of the mercies which He brought by His coming, remind us of the time when Christ already lived on the earth, but was recognized by almost no one, while men went on waiting for His coming and prayed to God for mercy, listening in doubt and perplexity to the news that the Lord had already appeared upon the earth. Consisting, as it does, principally of penitential prayers, this part of the Matins office takes place with the Royal Gates closed.