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Use of incense and censer in our churches

By Father John,

Favoured : 32

Orthodox Censer

Anyone who walks into an Orthodox Church - especially someone who is not an Orthodox Christian or even a Christian - will notice something unusual, and that is the smell of incense. And if they walk in during a service, they will see how incense is used and the ‘tools' used to burn it.

Of course, you are familiar with what a censer is by now and you know that to make that censer smoke, an altar server, deacon, or priest will put a few pieces of specially prepared incense on top of burning charcoal.

Why do we use incense and censers during our services?

The answer could be short or long, depending on what you already know. I am going to start with a brief introduction to the use of censers in church assuming that you already know that this practice was borrowed from the Old Testament and that in the Old Testament worship, burning of incense was ‘prescribed' by God Himself as an offering of incense (Exodus 30).

However, before going directly to the explanation of this usage in Orthodox Church worship, I would like to briefly dwell on the development of Church tradition. Generally, traditions in the Orthodox Church were established very early in Christian history when the Church (and I mean the mystical body of Christ, not the buildings) decided to use ‘outward' objects or procedures to emphasize some inward meaning and to underline one or more teachings. This happened primarily after the edict of St. Constantine the Great (approx. year 312 AD) when masses of people from different religious backgrounds started coming into the Christian Church. Please, note the Church never uses something that has had no explanatory or instructive meaning! At no time did the Church use censers, incense or for that matter any other object just because it looked nice during the service or because it was different. Remember, at that time the church was still one (until 1054) and ‘different' denominations did not even exist! Nor did the use of objects come into church practice in an attempt simply to beautify the service! We do not have ‘empty' objects or articles in our churches, nor do we have meaningless traditions in the Orthodox Church.

Therefore, the use of incense has been adopted by the church because the church (again, in her entirety) saw an opportunity to use it for instructional reasons and purposes of meaningful worship.

Burning incense in Church is done mainly to emphasize the importance of something forthcoming in the service. It is used to ‘wake up' our senses and ‘tell' us about the approaching part in the service that is liturgically, soteriologically[?] and theologically important. Burning incense produces smoke and a nice smell (some of you are probably ready to argue this) and hopefully draws the attention of worshipers to heavenly things:

Smoke - our prayers warmed by our Christian love are going up just like smoke or if you want to reverse this, we need to have a loving heart to produce prayers that would reach heaven;
Smell - reminds us about the divine essence of the service.

Those are simple, practical sides of censer and incense usage.

Censer Theological and, therefore, deeper meaning is assigned to the use of incense as well. We were created in the likeness and image of God. By becoming a Christian, we ‘put on Christ' (Gal. 3:27) and are called to God's perfection (Matt. 5:48). The main theme of the Orthodox Church is theosis or becoming God-like (John 10:34) not by essence but by grace. We cense the Altar Table as God's throne and the Holy of Holies in Christianity. We cense the icons in the church that remind us about our continuous presence in heaven on earth and give us vivid examples of successful stories of personal theosis of the saints. We cense the bodies of our departed this life brothers and sisters in Christ before and during funeral services to show that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19-20), and that our unity in Christ is not broken by temporal separation through death (John 11:25-26). We also cense the people present, the living members of the Church to underline our unity with the saints through the grace of God and through sharing in the image of God. Everybody and everything is being censed during the service to emphasize the essential unity of those in heaven and on earth, as well as our participation in heavenly things during services. That is why we not just have a liturgy but Divine Liturgy where people are united with Christ, through Christ and in Christ our God!