Preaching and the English Liturgy

Sebastian Dabović preached and taught in English throughout his American ministry and is credited with an early English rendering of the Divine Liturgy, placing him among the pioneers of the movement to make Orthodox worship and proclamation intelligible in the language of the New World. His practice — an American-born priest preaching Orthodoxy to Americans in their own tongue — belongs to the same current that would run through Hapgood’s 1906 Service Book to the translation families of the twentieth century.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

The Preacher in English

Sebastian was, by the testimony of his own books and of those who remembered him, a preacher and lecturer as much as a builder of parishes. His 1899 volume Preaching in the Russian Church takes its very title from this vocation, gathering the “lectures and sermons by a priest of the holy Orthodox Church” that he delivered in the course of the mission’s life (Sebastian Dabovich, Preaching in the Russian Church, 1899; see The English-Language Books). St. Nikolai (Velimirović) remembered him precisely as one who “preached and lectured indefatigably” — the sermon and the lecture were his characteristic instruments, and he wielded them in English before an English-hearing public (St. Nikolai, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America, St. Herman Press). For a Church that in his day preached mostly in Slavonic, Greek, and Arabic to congregations of immigrants, an Orthodox priest lecturing on the faith in fluent English was a novelty and a portent.

This preaching in English was the natural expression of his pan-Orthodox, missionary conception of the priesthood (see The Tireless Traveler). A priest who served Serbs, Russians, Greeks, and Arabs, and who ministered to the Americanized children of immigrants and to inquiring native Americans, needed a common tongue; and in the United States that tongue was English. Sebastian reached for it not as a concession to assimilation but as a tool of mission — the way to make the Orthodox faith speakable and hearable in its new home.

An English Divine Liturgy

Beyond preaching, the biographical tradition credits Sebastian with producing an early English translation of the Divine Liturgy — an attempt to render the central act of Orthodox worship itself into English (OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org, and the Tacoma parish Life, both used as locators, crediting him with compiling an early English translation of the Divine Liturgy). This is a claim to weigh carefully. The comprehensive, standard-setting English service book of American Orthodoxy is Isabel Hapgood’s of 1906, and nothing here displaces Hapgood’s achievement or her priority as the compiler of the full liturgical corpus in dignified English (see the repository’s English Liturgy Movement). What the sources credit to Sebastian is an earlier and more limited effort — a working translation of the Liturgy for use and instruction, of a piece with his catechetical books — rather than the complete, authorized service book that Hapgood produced with Tikhon’s blessing. Stated at that scope, the claim is credible and coheres with everything else known of him; stated more grandly, it would overreach the evidence. The collection therefore reports it as an early, partial, pioneering rendering, not as the foundational English liturgy.

Sebastian and the English-Liturgy Movement

Sebastian’s place in the larger history is best fixed by setting him beside the movement the repository documents in its English Liturgy Movement file. That history runs from the felt need for English worship in the immigrant mission, through Hapgood’s landmark 1906 Service Book — cast in the cadences of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and blessed by Tikhon — to the rival translation families of the later twentieth century and the still-unsettled debate over hieratic versus contemporary English (repository, English Liturgy Movement). Within that arc Sebastian stands at the early, missionary end, alongside figures like St. Raphael of Brooklyn, who in his multilingual Syro-Arab mission blessed the serving of the Liturgy in English “where the people needed it” (repository, English Liturgy Movement; see Alongside Tikhon and Raphael). Sebastian’s distinctiveness within this company is that he was himself American-born — not an immigrant hierarch accommodating English for pastoral reasons but a native son for whom English was a mother tongue, writing and preaching Orthodoxy in it as naturally as breathing.

The Meaning of His Priority

The Englishing of American Orthodoxy is often told as a story that begins in earnest with Hapgood and unfolds through converts and the twentieth-century translation families. Sebastian’s witness complicates and enriches that story by showing that the impulse toward English was already alive in the 1890s, and already embodied in a priest of the mission itself rather than imported later by converts (see the repository’s account of the movement’s roots in the immigrant mission, English Liturgy Movement). He is evidence that the American Church did not have to wait for outsiders to teach it English; it raised up, in its own first American-born priest, a man who wrote his catechism, preached his sermons, and rendered his Liturgy in the language of the country. That his efforts were early, partial, and soon overshadowed by Hapgood’s fuller work does not diminish their significance as a first, indigenous reaching-toward the tongue in which the great majority of American Orthodox now worship. In the long argument over the language of the American Church, Sebastian was, quietly and early, on the side the future would take.

See Also

References

  • Dabovich, Sebastian. Preaching in the Russian Church: Or, Lectures and Sermons by a Priest of the Holy Orthodox Church. 1899.
  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (His preaching and lecturing; St. Nikolai’s testimony that he “preached and lectured indefatigably.”)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — used as locator for the credit of an early English translation of the Divine Liturgy.
  • Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, Tacoma. “St. Sebastian (Dabovich).” orthodoxtacoma.com — used as locator for the English-liturgy and English-catechism claims.
  • Orthodoxy in America (this repository). The English Liturgy Movement — Hapgood’s 1906 Service Book, St. Raphael’s multilingual practice, and the translation families.