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The Saint Benedict Medal

Continuing the Visual Tour of the Saint Aelfric Chapel at Grace Anglican Church (which I started last year but stalled), we’re looking next at the Saint Benedict Medal “Window”. There are two “windows” or picture frames which sit either in a window or on the side of the altar here – one is always of St. Aelfric, the chapel’s namesake, and the other rotates. For most of the month of January we’ve had Saint Peter there, but with the beginning of the Pre-Lent season we’re about to switch to this:

What it is

I first came to know of the Saint Benedict Medal in seeing it embedded into a crucifix, and as I looked up the meaning of its various letters I was impressed with the array of spiritual warfare verses employed. There may be a couple variations of the medal out there, but the one pictured here is fairly typical

In the center is the Cross, the letters reading downward are C.S.S.M.L. which stand for crux sacra sit mihi lux (the Holy Cross be my light). The letters left to right are N.D.S.M.D. – non draco sit mihi dux (let not the dragon be my guide). Both of these phrases have the same meter and they rhyme, making them a handy pair to memorize as a prayer against the devil’s temptations.

A circle surrounds the cross and forms the border of the medal. Four sets of letters arc around this circle, initially four more verses with which to reject Satan (and mostly from Scripture).

  • I.V.B. ipse venema bibas (drink your own poison)
  • V.R.S. vade retro Satana (get behind me, Satan)
  • N.S.M.V. non suade mihi vana (suggest not to me vanities)
  • S.M.Q.L. sunt mala quae libas (Evil are [the things that] you offer)

The word “Pax” (peace) sits atop the circle, and the four quadrants between the Cross and the circle contain the initials C.S.P.B. Crux Sancti Patris Benedicta (the Cross of the Holy Father Benedict).

Why it’s here

As an Anglican who loves the Prayer Book, I have a great fondness for St. Benedict. He is the Father of Western monasticism, codifying Early Church practice into a system that has been replicated in many ways across Western Europe ever since. And his approach to worship and liturgy, particularly centering on holy living and praying the Psalms, is extremely influential in the formation of the Anglican Prayer Book tradition. Our pattern of praying all 150 Psalms each month is a riff from the Benedictine pattern of praying all the Psalms in a week, for example.

More specifically, the Medal of Saint Benedict is a devotional tool that I think we have undervalued in 21st-century spirituality. We don’t always take the devil as seriously as we ought, and could benefit from reminders to reject his evil temptations.

As such, you’ll see it out in the chapel during the two-and-a-half weeks of Pre-Lent, and during the last two weeks of Lent (Passiontide & Holy Week). This serves a double purpose: first is the obvious emphasis on the doctrine of repentance that characterizes this time of year, and second is the tradition of veiling images in the church during the latter weeks of Lent. The Medal of Saint Benedict is not an image (like all the other entries in this “window”) and therefore doubly appropriate for these solemn moments in the Church Year.

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A brief glossary index for the BCP 2019

For those who are new to the Christian faith, or at least to Anglicanism in particular, simply handing them a Prayer Book can be a bewildering experience. This brief article has been written to serve as a sort of pamphlet to provide a brief topical introduction to the value and use of the Prayer Book (2019 version).

CONVERSION

The process of becoming a Christian is often portrayed as a moment of instant clarity and change.  While there certainly are break-through moments along the way, conversion is a process that can take a long time.  In the Prayer Book we summarize it as a three-fold taking off and a three-fold putting on.  It’s found on pages 164 (Baptism), 177 (Confirmation), 185 (both), and 194 (Renewal of Baptismal Vows).  We reject the world, the flesh and the devil (the proximate, personal, and cosmic dangers) and replace them with Jesus, the biblical faith, and God’s commandments.  The repetition of these baptismal vows at our subsequent confirmation and periodically thereafter reminds us that the Christian is both once and always converting from the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of God.

DOGMA

That which is absolutely required for true Christian faith is called dogma.  These are the non-negotiable points of belief which unite Christians of all stripes, the rejection of which identifies ancient (or renewed) heresies.  The holy Trinity and the two natures in the one person of Christ Jesus are the two primary centers of Christian dogma.  The full statements are called Creeds, of which we have received three: the Apostles’ (page 20 et al), the Nicene (page 109), and the Athanasian (page 769).

DOCTRINE

From the basic dogma of the Church spring a great many other teachings, also called doctrines, which are elucidated to safeguard the core biblical faith.  Sadly, different church traditions (or denominations) differ in doctrine to various degrees, yet despite this disunity it remains necessary for Christians to know what they are invited to believe and for ministers to remain faithful to the standards they have professed.  For Anglicans, our basic doctrinal statement is a set of Thirty Nine Articles of Religion (pages 772–790).  Other “documentary foundations” responding to more recent issues in the Anglican Church are provided on pages 766, 768, and 791–793.

LITURGY/WORSHIP

But the Christian faith is not primarily a set of points to believe or disbelieve, but rather a life that is lived, and expressed first and foremost through prayer and worship, not didactic statements.  As such, the Anglican tradition has retained the liturgical wisdom of the Early Church in the Prayer Book.  Rather than simply reciting points of doctrine, we express our beliefs through our very prayers and worship services.  Liturgy (literally, a ‘public work’) is thus an integral piece of Anglican identity, uniting our practice, faith, and ethos in a single volume.  Conforming to one another in Christ with the Prayer Book liturgy, we are thus given a common language of worship and belief, spiritually shaped and formed into One Body, and directed into our respective lives beyond the church’s walls.

SACRED TIME

With our inheritance of the liturgical tradition comes a conception of time itself that differs from that of the world’s.  Just as the Old Testament shows us that all of history is guided by God’s providence, so too do the Church’s liturgy and calendar show us that every hour, day, week, season, and year is oriented around the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  There are prayers for morning (page 11), noon (page 33), evening (page 41), and night (page 57).  There are prayers for Sundays and Holy Days (page 104).  Within each of those liturgies are variations for different seasons of the year, and the calendar as a whole is explained beginning on page 687.  Seven principle holy days outline the Gospel throughout the year: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, and All Saints’.  The various seasons are built around these holidays, and a number of other feasts and fasts punctuate the year.  This reflects the biblical witness wherein the Law of Moses taught the observation Sabbath and the three main holidays, while allowing for the creation of additional holy day observations according to custom and need (cf. Esther 10).  A handful of special liturgies for certain holy days is also provided on pages 542–595.

PSALMS

Arguably the very heart of all Christian liturgy are the Psalms.  This book of the Bible contains 150 song-prayers which have been on the lips of the people of God for thousands of years, and they are so vital to the Christian spiritual life that the Psalms in their entirety have always been printed as a part of the Book of Common Prayer – indeed, the longest section of the book (cf. pages 267–467)!  All attempts to learn the Daily Office of prayers in any liturgical tradition ought to begin with the Psalms: learning to read God’s word, praying it as man’s word, and thus pursuing union with Christ in spirit and soul.  Along with the Lord’s Prayer, there is no liturgy in the entire Prayer Book that omits at least something from the Psalms.  The Anglican tradition invites the worshiper to pray through the Psalms every month (page 735).

BIBLE

Also known as the sacred scriptures, holy writ, the word of God, the Bible is the full compendium (or library) of authoritative texts which the Church upholds and guards according to the direction of the Holy Spirit.  It has three parts: the Old Testament (written before Christ), the New Testament (written after Christ) and the Ecclesiastical Books (also known as the Apocrypha or Deuterocanon, also written before Christ).  Each of these sections of the Bible have their own functions (cf. Articles VI and VII on pages 773–775) and are further divided into smaller specific groupings.  Every Prayer Book has come with its own daily lectionary (Bible-reading plan); ours is introduced on page 736, and detailed on the subsequent pages.

BAPTISM

The Anglican tradition is sacramental.  This means that we receive the historic teaching regarding certain rites and ceremonies of the Church wherein God blesses us with his grace in real and tangible ways, as he promised in sacred scripture.  The first and fundamental of these sacraments is Holy Baptism (pages 160, 781–782).  In this sacrament, God regenerates the recipients, giving them birth into a new life, his Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, and entrance into the covenant community of faith.

CONFIRMATION

Where Baptism is the beginning, Confirmation is a continuation, a strengthening, a personal affirmation that the faith persists in the recipient (cf. page 174).  Typically an Anglican is baptized as an infant and confirmed as a young adult once he or she has taken personal hold of the faith.  Confirmation is also the Church’s acknowledgment of the individual’s sincerity of faith, marking him or her with the laying-on of hands by the bishop (the pastor’s pastor who thereby represents the universal church rather than merely the local).  This rite is very much like one’s ordination to mature Christian service, receiving new gifts of the Holy Spirit no longer merely to cling to faith but also to pass it on to others (page 176).

COMMUNION

The highest mystery, or sacrament, of the Church is the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, or the Eucharist.  In the species of bread and wine God’s people feed upon Christ’s own body and blood for their own life and salvation.  Where Holy Baptism is the new birth into a new life, Holy Communion is the food that nourishes that new life towards eternity.  The worshiper is exhorted to approach the Lord’s Table with reverence and thorough repentance (pages 147–148).  Two versions of the Communion service are provided in this Prayer Book (starting on page 105 and page 123); the first is the more historic form and the second is more modern.  Additional directions permit further variations to the order of service to match even more historical Prayer Book orders, but it should be emphasized that amidst this diversity of form lies a unity of doctrine.

HEALING

Although the Lord’s Supper has traditionally been termed “the medicine of immortality”, the Church has received two other ministrations for the work of healing in individual Christians’ lives.  The first is the power of the keys (Matthew 16:19 & John 20:21-23) to forgive sins.  Although the primary worship services do include the people’s confession and the priest’s absolution of sins, an additional rite for ministering to the penitent is provided on pages 222–224.  Alongside this ministration to the sin-sick soul is a second pair of rites for ministering to illness of the body (pages 225–235) involving both anointing oil and the laying-on of the priest’s hands, as taught in James 5:13-15.  There are additional prayer resources to minister to the dying, for when the time comes (page 236–242).

FAMILY LIFE

The propagation of life is one of the very first commandments of God in the first book of the Bible, Genesis.  The sacred call to furthering life is provided for in the Prayer Book tradition.  The primary liturgy to this end is Holy Matrimony (page 198 et al), which now includes a betrothal statement to help couples prepare for marriage (page 213).  Another rite that supports family life is the Thanksgiving for the Birth or Adoption of a Child (pages 215–221).  Often overlooked in today’s culture is the need not only to live well but to die well.  The Prayer Book therefore provides prayers for a wake or vigil and for the funeral and burial itself.  Pages 246 and 248 set out the basic parameters and directions that guide how Anglicans are to handle end-of-life memorials.

CHURCH LIFE

Just as human biological life is propagated through families and safeguarded in marriage, so is the Church’s spiritual life propagated through Baptism and safeguarded by specially ordained ministers.  The Ordinal (beginning on page 470) sets out that requirements and manner in which ministers should be ordained.  As per New Testament witness and Early Church practice, Anglicans have three ordained offices: Deacons (servers), Priests (presbyters, elders), and Bishops (overseers).  Each order of ministry has its own liturgy for ordination with specific requirements, instructions, and examinations, as well as distinct Scripture lessons and prayers.  Deriving from this are additional rites for the Institution of a Rector (page 513) and the Consecration and Dedication of a Place of Worship (page 523 et al).

PRIVATE PRAYERS

Alongside the liturgical tradition guiding the way Anglicans prayer when together is, of course, the need for individual devotion, worship, and prayer.  The daily liturgies of Morning, Midday, and Evening Prayer, and Compline (night prayer) are certainly robust and valuable resources for private devotion but can also be time-consuming and non-portable (online resources such as dailyoffice2019.com notwithstanding).  The Prayer Book tradition has therefore developed over the course of time various resources to aid and equip families and individuals to pray.  The Daily Offices in miniature are provided on pages 66–75, and over 100 prayers and thanksgivings are catalogued on pages 642–645.  One frequent tradition throughout Anglican history has been for laymen to take up a handful of such brief prayers and use them in various situations: before and after church, during Holy Communion, at mealtimes, at work, and so forth.

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Balancing Stability and Variety in the Eucharistic Rite

This can be a touchy subject. Some people are very passionate about their liturgical sensibilities; some people literally couldn’t care less. Some people insist that variety is the spice of life and the worship service must be constantly changing lest it become stale and mindlessly regimented. Others insist that variety is vanity and stability in the liturgy is superior, providing consistent discipleship and formative value that would be undermined by constant changes. And of course there are ways that others still attempt to balance these conflicting poles of thought.

On the whole I am largely in the “stability” camp, and I don’t want a given church to be constantly reinventing its liturgy. I do believe that repetition is essential to growth – this is how we exercise for physical fitness, this is how artists get better at their art, this is how students learn things. Inconsistent worship breeds an inconsistent approach to theology, as worship is really the front line of theology – how we approach and interact with God in prayer is the first step of articulating actual doctrine and teaching. Thus I am very much a Prayer Book loyalist: stick to the text, and keep variation to a minimum.

But therein lies an awkward question: stick to which text?

I’ve heard it joke that the Joy of Anglicanism is getting to argue about worship for the rest of your life. And the potentiality is certainly there: every province has its own version of the Book of Common Prayer, and some are more different than others. And besides the Prayer Book there have been many edits, supplements, occasional services, missals, and alternative lectionaries, such that 100 congregations could each have a different eucharistic service order. Not to say that this is a unique feature: there are multiple versions of the Roman Rite, both historically and in the present day; the Lutherans have long since branched out from Luther’s original German Mass; Presbyterians rarely offer more than “guidelines” for structuring a worship service, and the rest of the Protestant world is largely in do-whatever-you-want mode, which usually means the congregation is at the mercy of their pastor’s private sensibilities.

So if I want a stable, formative, orthodox, and coherent Anglican Prayer Book service every Sunday morning, where do I turn? How do I decide what is best?

STEP ONE: Conformity

“Conformity” is such a bad word in modern American culture, but in terms of church worship it’s very much a value. It is good for churches to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ and to be on the same page as one another. If we are indeed one body then we really ought to be growing together in roughly the same ways. Conformity in my case means using the edition of the Prayer Book that my province of the church (the Anglican Church in North America) has promulgated, the Prayer Book of 2019. 

STEP TWO: Utilizing the Basic Options

In that book there are two Communion rites (the Anglican Standard and the ‘Renewed Ancient’), and of that book there are two version (contemporary language and traditional liturgical English). Therefore there are four choices for Holy Communion. Here’s how I treat them:

To explain, the Anglican Standard Text is the first Communion Rite in the book, and should be understood to be our standard (hence the name), so I give it pride of place. The second rite, somewhat anachronistically called the Renewed Ancient Text, is a consolidation of the liturgical experimentation of the 1960’s and 70’s which became regnant in the Episcopal church, so its place in the Anglican tradition is widespread yet still very recent. I currently only use it on the Sundays from Christmas through Epiphanytide, largely on account of the fact that the eucharistic prayers mention the Virgin Mary, and that’s the time of year most suited to emphasizing the incarnation of our Lord. I also have it down for holy days commemorating relatives of Jesus (Joseph, Mary, her parents, John the Baptist, and his parents).

STEP THREE: Tastefully Dipping into our History

There’s another feature in our Prayer Book which is easily missed, but of great significance: older orders of service are permitted, using the material in the 2019 Prayer Book. The order of events in the Anglican Communion service got revamped quite a bit in the 1970’s: the Creed and Sermon switched places, the Fraction (or breaking of the bread) was given its own place between the Communion prayers and the distribution, the Gloria in excelsis Deo moved from being an anthem at the end to a hymn of praise near the beginning (as in the Roman Rite), the Offertory moved after the Prayers and Confession. And so, in deference to the majority of our history, the 2019 Prayer Brook allows us to re-order the Anglican Standard Text to match the order of a previous authorized Prayer Book. This gives a few major options:

  1. The order of the first prayer book (1549)
  2. The standard English prayer book (1662)
  3. The first & second American prayer books (1789 & 1892)
  4. The third American prayer book (1928)

There are a few other historical options from England and Canada and Scotland, but they are almost identical to others already listed here.

Would I ever want to make use of this permission? And if so, what would be the justification for such meddling? The downsides are obvious:

  • People get tripped up easily when familiar material gets rearranged
  • I, the celebrant, am much more prone to making mistakes when I do something different from the norm
  • Parents trying to manage small children during the service have a harder time keeping up when their full attention isn’t able to be on the order of service

So if we choose to utilize these other options, it needs to be for a very good reason. After all, the rubrics permitting this change exists primarily to service those parishes that are already used to a different order and want to keep it, despite switching over to the 2019 Prayer Book.

I have two main reasons for wanting to make occasional use of the historic orders.

  1. INSTRUCTION: Both in terms of personal awareness as well as historical honesty, I think it’s good for ordinary worshipers to be exposed to samples of “the way things were” on occasion. It’s good to know that the Modern Way is not the Only Way, and to appreciate at least some of the differences that have arisen in the details of our patterns of worship over the centuries.
  2. FORMATION: Despite my preference for stability over variety, there is a value to “shaking things up” a little bit from time to time. Re-arranging a little bit of the worship service according to an historic pattern forces people to pay attention in a way that they normally may not. Hearing and saying familiar prayers in a different sequence than usual can help bring out different emphases that would be missed otherwise.

To implement the inclusion of these alternative orders, though, it struck me as too arbitrary to assign certain orders to certain Sundays of the year. So instead I assigned them to certain groups of minor feast days:

  1. The 1662 Order is for British Saints
  2. The 1549 Order is for other Western Saints
  3. The 1789/1892 Order is for Eastern Saints
  4. The 1928 Order is for Angels, Eve of All Saints, the Faithful Departed

The general logic behind this is that the 1662 order is the most uniquely English liturgy, so it befits the British Saints, the 1549 Eucharistic Rite is more generically Western, the early American Prayer Books (influenced by the Scottish order) has a slight Eastern element to it, and the 1928 prayers give a little more attention to the departed than its predecessors. Plus, by tying these alternative arrangements of the service order to minor saints days, we get a special way of acknowledging these commemorations when they happen to land on a Sunday without actually directly observing them and interrupting the calendar year.

So for example earlier this year August 20th was on a Sunday, and that was the commemoration of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. So on that day we used the 1549 order of service to denote his commemoration, though the Scripture lessons and sermon remained in the regular Sunday sequence (I was preaching through Romans at the time). The next time this’ll happen for my church is on January 28th, on which day we’ll again use the 1549 order this time to celebrate St. Thomas Aquinas, a giant of Western Medieval theology. And then in March we’ll use this method to denote St. Patrick’s Day as well!

This approach gives you maybe three or four Sundays per year with historic orders, which is rare enough that it’s not destabilizing the congregation’s ability to follow the regular liturgy, but often enough that they kinda-sorta remember “I think we’ve done this before”. That way it’s a little jarring (“oh right, I have to pay careful attention to follow this”) but not overwhelming and having-to-start-from-scratch each time.

SUMMARY THOUGHT

So that’s generally how I go about trying to balance variety and stability. I’m not saying this is a perfect system that everyone should try to emulate, but I think these are sound ideas that provide just enough variation without throwing people off too much. It really matters to me that people get to know our liturgy, grow to cherish its prayers, and make them their own – and sometimes you need both familiar repetition as well as fresh encounters to make that happen.

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Days of Special Private Devotion

One of the great strengths of the liturgical tradition which I don’t often write about here is the fact that we can draw from common worship – from the shared practices of the Church – in our own private prayers and devotions.

It may be that you want to study, read, or otherwise spend time with the Scriptures beyond the 4ish chapters of readings per day supplied by Morning and Evening Prayer. You could spend extra time on your own reading more of the Bible, perhaps drawing from other lectionaries or from the resources for a holy day. It may be that you want to keep praying more psalms besides the Office’s allotment, perhaps engaging in a weekly plan for praying the Psalms or at some other pace.

An idea that I wanted to describe today is the idea of observing special days for private devotion. The Church makes a big deal of Easter, Christmas, of the Epiphany and Pentecost, and a host of other holy days not to mention the Lord’s Day in general. You may well have family celebrations for some of these days too. But there may be other occasions that are relative minor in the Church’s grand scheme of things which are special or significant to you, and on your own (apart from the formal liturgy) you may want to spend a little extra time in worship.

For example, in my own private devotions there are a handful of commemorations that are significant to me for various reasons, and there are a couple devotional practices that are of special importance to me, so I like to put these together and match them up a bit.

First of all, there’s the praying of the psalms. I have come to cherish this ancient practice, and sometimes I just sit down with a psalter and read, pray, or even sing some psalms apart from the liturgy. So I figured why not, in the course of picking out a handful of days of special personal devotion, assign the Psalter across those occasions?

I also love reading the Bible in general have a particular affinity for the Old Testament. So how about grabbing some parts of the Bible to read on some of these special occasions too?

Now, for identifying some of those days for myself.

  1. King Charles the Martyr (30 January) is a significant figure both in my study of history as well as my appreciation for the Anglican identity. His martyrdom was commemorated in the 1662 Prayer Book, so there’s already precedent for such a holy day. How about around that day I pray the first seventh the psalter (1-25) and read a book like Lamentations or Ecclesiastes?
  2. Augustine of Canterbury (27 May) was the first Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the key renewers of Christianity in Britain. For that commemoration, I might want to go through the next seventh of the psalter (26-41) and read the pastoral epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus) to reflect on my own ministry.
  3. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (20 August) is an important figure to a group of priests I’m in fellowship with. That’s a good opportunity to pray some psalms of desire (42-72) and read the Song of Songs, a book that was immensely special to Bernard. He also wrote a long hymn in love to Jesus which I might attempt to sing through.
  4. The Nativity of Mary (8 September) is my ordination anniversary, so I have a fondness for that commemoration. That’s a good time to read the fourth seventh of the psalms (73-89) and read a book of the Bible that’s reflective of both Mary’s love and Mary’s knowledge of Jesus, like 1 John.
  5. The Consecration of Samuel Seabury (14 November) and
  6. Saint Aelfric (16 November) are right on each other’s doorsteps, so that’s a good opportunity to take a longer book and split it in half between them, such as The Wisdom of Solomon, chapters 1-9 for one day and 10-19 for the other. Psalms 90-106 and 107-119 would also be good matchups for those days, respectively.
  7. Finally, the season of Advent one of my favorite times of year, including the subtle lead-up to it in the month of November. As the first Sunday in Advent finally arrives, that’s a good time to finish both the Psalter and the Bible, symbolically speaking, with psalms 120-150 and the book of Revelation.

There are other practices you might want to consider for highlighting your own special days of devotion. Times of silence, songs to sing, places to go, people to visit, even giving alms, showing hospitality, or providing service and aid to another… there are many ways that we can mark special days. Perhaps the anniversary of the death of a loved one will see you visiting his or her grave, or reaching out to a surviving relative. Perhaps for your baptismal birthday you may want to go to a weekday worship service at church. Perhaps you want to take up a special Lent devotional book or a pious Advent calendar to highlight a special time of the year. Perhaps on a day of sorrowful memory you might give yourself to fasting.

Sometimes it’s particularly meaningful to an individual to make personal days of memory, interest, or inspiration. Explore with possibilities – this is where we can make our own traditions!

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Introducing the Reconciliation of Penitents

The Reconciliation of a Penitent is, in one sense, an ironic inclusion in a Book of Common Prayer.  Liturgy, by nature is corporate, involving as much of the gathered church as will assemble.  The private confession of sins to a priest, however, is not public worship.  In this light it is no surprise that classical Prayer Books did not include this rite in full text, and only pointed to it in rubrics and exhortation.  However, the fully-printed inclusion of this rite in modern times speaks to another sense of what Common Prayer is.  Not only does “common” refer to what the Church does together, but also to what the Church does in common, yet separately.  Just as many individuals pray the Daily Office without a gathered congregation are nevertheless participating in the greater Prayers of the Church, so too is the use of the Reconciliation of a Penitent a participation in the Church’s liturgical ministry.

The presence of this rite in the Prayer Book itself was first enacted in 1979.  The practice of private confession to a priest, however, has always been authorized in the Prayer Book tradition.  In the Exhortation to Holy Communion (BCP 148) the congregation is invited to come to the priest to “confess your sins, that you may receive godly counsel, direction, and absolution.”  This invitation, in turn, is taken from the third Exhortation in all the classical Prayer Books.  The absolution of sins is also one of the special roles and duties of the priest, as stated in the Ordinal (both classical and modern).

Furthermore, the historic rites for the Visitation of the Sick direct the priest to ask the sick person if “he repents him truly of his sins”, and if his conscience feels troubled he should be moved to make “a special confession of sins”.  The priest’s absolution is provided, the 1662 version reading thus:

Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to his Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive thee thine offenses: And by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

Thus the inclusion of a form for the reconciliation of penitents, apart from the context of the visitation of the sick, is entirely within the scope of historic orthodox Anglican practice regardless of party or churchmanship. 

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This our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving

I: Story Time

Before I became an Anglican, I was doing my seminary-required units of mentored ministry at a congregational church. It was the church of my childhood; we were not a part of any official denomination (nor are they still), and there was no standard confession of faith apart from a fairly typical statement on the website that pointed to the infallibility of Scripture and the content of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus when it came to many points of doctrine, there was a great deal of wiggle room and it really came down to how much the senior pastor promulgated or enforced his views in and through the board of elders and the various volunteers who taught Sunday School and led Bible studies.

And so it came to pass, towards the end of my tenure there, as I was growing towards Anglicanism, I was invited to assist the senior pastor with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. It was done monthly there, which is a lot more frequent than your typical non-denom evangelical church, but there was still no consistent form of prayer. It was not seen as a sacrament there, anyway, so the liturgy didn’t really matter as such, so long as the words of institution were quoted along the way. So I, for my portion of the prayers, decided to pick up the Prayer Book and try out a section of it. (Full disclosure, it was the Episcopalian book of 1979, which is all I knew at the time, and probably the best fit anyway since some of its eucharistic prayers are fairly generic and inoffensive across denominational lines.) But I ran into a problem with the pastor when he was proofreading what I’d prepared: “And we offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to you, O Lord of all…” The word “sacrifice” was a problem, and it was axed.

II: The Sacrifice(s) of the Mass

The fear, of course, was that we’d be falling into the errors of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the “Sacrifice of the Mass” and all those other scary terms that evangelical protestants are supposed to be wary of. What this pastor didn’t realize (and what I was yet too untrained to understand either, let alone explain) is that the term sacrifice has quite a broad meaning, whereas the Roman error is quite specific.

The issue which the Reformers raised regarding Roman teaching centered around the notion that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice that in its very celebration is efficacious toward the remission of sins and relief for the souls in purgatory. The Reformers rightly axed the efficacy of the Sacrament for those in purgatory because they knew Purgatory itself was a false medieval development, and they rightly recentered the efficacy of the Sacrament for the living upon the Cross of Christ, wherein our one, true, propitiation is found.

As a result, the Lutheran Book of Concord asserts

There are chiefly two kinds of sacrifices, and no more, in which all others are comprehended. The one is a propitiatory sacrifice, by which expiation is made for guilt and punishment, God is reconciled, his wrath appeased, and remission of sins obtained for others. The other is a sacrifice of thanksgiving, not to obtain forgiveness of sin or reconciliation, but made by those who are already reconciled, in order to give thanks for the remission of sins, and for other favors and gifts they received.

Augsburg Confession XXIV(XII):19

This exact same distinction was taken up in the English Prayer Books, which describe Holy Communion as “this our Sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving“. It is a phrase which pointedly rejects the Roman notion of Eucharistic sacrifice being propitiatory ex opere operato (from the work itself), and instead highlights that the sacrifice we make is one of praise and thanksgiving before God (hence the name eucharist, meaning thanksgiving).

Another sacrifice that is made at Holy Communion is an oblation or self-offering:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively [living] sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that all we who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction.

Book of Common Prayer

This prayer, also found in every Anglican Prayer Book shortly after the “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” line, further enriches and expands and corrects our understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass. Not only do we remember Christ’s own propitiatory sacrifice of himself upon the Cross, not only do we offer our own sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, but we also offer up our selves entirely unto God (directly quoting and applying Romans 12:1).

III: Summary Thoughts

In retrospect, I am still a little disappointed that my congregational pastor was not familiar with the biblical language of sacrifice, in its broadness, to recognize that there is ample room for right (and fruitful, and even necessary) use of the term in Holy Communion, though I recognize that as one of the general blind spots of the modern evangelical tradition. I’m also aware that within Anglican circles we like to argue about liturgy to an incredible degree – in what order our prayers should be said, which translation to use, what the implied doctrinal logic is behind a given liturgical rite and form. But in any case, the language of a “sacrifice of thanksgiving” and the sacrifice of “ourselves, our souls and bodies” are common threads throughout our tradition, whether we say them before or after the ministration of Communion, whether we directly quote the Scriptures or paraphrase them in a modern-language rite.

With such richness of tradition and thoroughness of teaching at our disposal, we are amply equipped to form Christian worshipers with a robust biblical, creedal, and patristic faith precisely as the Reformers sought to restore. While I don’t doubt there is an end in sight to the hand-wringing we are prone to make over details, I firmly believe that we can be absolutely confident in the orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition’s handling of Holy Communion. For, when it comes to worship, we mean what we say, and we say what we mean.

Posted on by Fr. Brench

Beyond Sunday Communion part 4: Morning Prayer & Litany & Communion

The Prayer Book tradition of worship is rich and robust, providing not only rites and rituals for individual worship services but indeed for an entire life of Christian worship. As a part of this ambitious large-scale schema, it should come as no surprise that there’s more to worship than simply going to Holy Communion every Sunday morning. There are the daily rounds of prayer, punctuated by the [Great] Litany a couple times per week, various pastoral offices for key stages in the natural and spiritual lives of a congregation and family, and pointers toward the development of private devotions to enable the individual worshiper to flesh out his or her own life of worship apart from the gathered Church.

What is often missed in today’s church culture, however, is that the original Prayer Book pattern for worship on Sunday morning was actually a three-part affair: Morning Prayer, The [Great] Litany, and the Holy Communion. Until relatively recent times, all three of these were appointed to be said in every church every Sunday and Holy Day. Granted, this was often shortened in actual practice, and by the late 19th century it was probably more common for people to attend just one service rather than all three in a row. Yet the full pattern of worship is still present even in our modern Prayer Books, and the typical malnourished Christian of today could benefit greatly from a retrieval of the spiritual rigor of our forebears. To that end, we’ve been looking at different combinations of worship services that you could carry out on Sunday mornings in your church.

Morning Prayer & The Litany & Holy Communion

We’re wrapping up this sequence of articles by going for the gold: how might you run a 100% Authentic Anglican (TM) Sunday Morning Worship Service? I’m going to present three ideas on how to execute this trilogy of Prayer Book services: the start-and-stop approach, the compound marathon, and the finessed liturgy.

The Start-and-Stop Approach

I would consider this the ideal for Sunday morning worship, personally. You start with Morning Prayer by the book, with a little bit of music. Then there’s a little break for study, discussion, catechesis, whatever’s going on. Then you return to the pews and kneel for the Great Litany. But rather than concluding the Litany outright, you open it up for spontaneous prayer. Or if the congregation is charismatic-influenced, open it up for prayer and praise! After the reading and studying of the Word in Morning Prayer and the long detailed prayer coverage of the Litany, and with the climax of the Eucharist ahead, this is also a perfect opportunity for the Rites of Healing: offering sacramental confession and the anointing of the sick. Then, after another breather, it’s time for the full Communion service.

While this would be quite a full morning for all involved, there are mitigating factors worth considering. First of all, the priest doesn’t have to lead everything! He should be present to pronounce absolution in Morning Prayer, available for ministry after the Litany, and only then must he take up the mantle to officiant Holy Communion. As for the congregation, not everyone necessarily comes to all three services. Prospective members and “seekers” will receive the instruction and prayer they need in the first two services; Holy Communion isn’t for them yet. Lots of people would probably still show up only for the Communion portion and skip the first two. But imagine the robust spirituality that would be fostered in those who did show up for all three! What a blessing that could be to the church and the community.

The Compound Marathon

Like the first approach, the Compound Marathon is a walk-through of the Morning Office, Litany, and Communion in full, one after another, with no breaks in between. You could omit the closing sentences from Morning Prayer, just so it doesn’t feel too much like you’re sending everyone away 1/3 of the way through, but otherwise this is literally three worship services in a row.

This is the least attractive idea to my sensibilities. With no transitions between each service, people will be very aware of an awkward “we’re done, but we’re not done” sense and the overall impression will probably be very foreign to everyone involved.

But it is the simplest way to bring the three services together. The less verbal guidance required to help the congregation through the liturgy, the better, so finishing out each service before moving on to the next is going to be the path of least confusion. This is also the most instructive approach: those who’ve never experienced Morning Prayer or the Litany before will get to experience them both in full without anything clipped out! In that light we find where this strange idea might actually make sense: the church could make a special occasion of “exploring the fulness of our tradition of worship” and do Morning Prayer, Litany, and Communion all together as a one-off special event.

The Finessed Liturgy

But if you want to use all three liturgies together on a regular basis, and/or the congregation is already at least somewhat familiar with them, then you’re best off following the actual rubrics when it comes to moving from one service to the next.

Morning Prayer starts off on page 11 and runs until (but not including) the Prayer for Mission on page 24. Then the Litany begins (page 91) and runs through the Kyrie on page 96. At that point, the Communion service begins with the Collect of the Day on page 107/125.

Additionally, some other factors could be considered:

  • The Confession & Creed may be omitted from the Office.
  • The Psalms and Lessons in Morning Prayer may be able to be shortened.
  • Reading the Canticles is much quicker than singing them.
  • The Great Litany can be lengthened or shortened at the officiant’s preference, so abbreviating its intercessions is a legitimate move, as long as the congregation is able to follow you.
  • A hymn (or the Gloria) might sit nicely between the Litany and the Eucharist’s Collect of the Day.
  • The Prayers of the People in the Communion liturgy technically aren’t supposed to be skipped, but in light of all the prayer that has come before you’d be well within your rights to shorten them drastically.

This sounds super long, yes. But don’t be intimidated! The two biggest time-sinks in a worship are the sermon and the singing. And remember that the great majority of the Prayer Book liturgy is about reading and praying the Word of God (Scriptures) to the Word of God (Jesus), so there’s no such thing as time wasted there.

Personal note in conclusion

Of all the combinations, this is the one I’ve never tried before in my church, I must admit. On paper, I was set to try it out a couple times, but I always chickened out. Someday I probably will muster up my resolve and give it a go, and when I do I will almost certainly use the Finessed Liturgy approach, as well as clearly identify the Sunday ahead of time with a special reason for observing the full tradition of Prayer Book worship. It may be a special holy day, or a historically-minded occasion. And I will make it clear that it’s a once-time event so as not to scare my flock with an unasked-for spiritual workout in overdrive. If I were to make the observance of all three services a regular part of parish life, I’d separate them out (as in the first approach) to provide space for particular ministerial and practical needs in between.

Posted on by Fr. Brench

Beyond Sunday Communion part 3: Morning Prayer & Holy Communion

The Prayer Book tradition of worship is rich and robust, providing not only rites and rituals for individual worship services but indeed for an entire life of Christian worship. As a part of this ambitious large-scale schema, it should come as no surprise that there’s more to worship than simply going to Holy Communion every Sunday morning. There are the daily rounds of prayer, punctuated by the [Great] Litany a couple times per week, various pastoral offices for key stages in the natural and spiritual lives of a congregation and family, and pointers toward the development of private devotions to enable the individual worshiper to flesh out his or her own life of worship apart from the gathered Church.

What is often missed in today’s church culture, however, is that the original Prayer Book pattern for worship on Sunday morning was actually a three-part affair: Morning Prayer, The [Great] Litany, and the Holy Communion. Until relatively recent times, all three of these were appointed to be said in every church every Sunday and Holy Day. Granted, this was often shortened in actual practice, and by the late 19th century it was probably more common for people to attend just one service rather than all three in a row. Yet the full pattern of worship is still present even in our modern Prayer Books, and the typical malnourished Christian of today could benefit greatly from a retrieval of the spiritual rigor of our forebears. To that end, we’ll be looking at different combinations of worship services that you could carry out on Sunday mornings in your church.

Morning Prayer & Holy Communion

The most complicated pairing of traditional Prayer Book services is that of Morning Prayer and Holy Communion. The American Prayer Book of 1928 hints of the concept of running the two services together but provides no rubrics on how this is meant to be done. The 1979 Prayer Book finally followed that up with a set of instructions: cut the Morning Prayer service off after the collects and before the Prayer for Mission, and then start the Offertory of the Communion liturgy (1979 BCP page 142). Additional Prayers might be expected in between, however, to ensure the requirements for the Prayers of the People be fulfilled. The practical result of this schema is that the Daily Office serves as the “Liturgy of the Word” within the Communion service.

However, the framers of the 2019 Prayer Book consciously and intentionally did not repeat that rubric. They asserted that the integrity of the Daily and Communion offices should be maintained, and there was nothing to be gained by blending them together like that. So now we have an interesting situation, because on pages 24 and 50 of our Prayer Book we still have the same rubric as in 1979: “Unless the… Eucharist is to follow, one of the following prayers for mission is added.” So if you want to combine Morning Prayer and Holy Communion into one worship service, the Office ends at the same place as it does for switching to the Litany, which is the same place the original Office ended, which is the same place as the 1979 Book to move on to the Offertory in Holy Communion. Except in our case, the “Liturgy of the Word” in Holy Communion can’t be overwritten. This leaves us with a curious range of options.

First, literally start at the very beginning of the Communion service. You could smooth the transition a little by singing a hymn to be the hinge: functioning both as the Anthem near the end of the Office and the Opening Hymn of the Eucharist. Needless to say this is the longest option in terms of the worship service’s duration. Though the other options aren’t going to be all that much shorter.

Second, skip everything you’re allowed to skip. If you want to remain obedient to the rubrics, but try your hardest to shorten this combined service, here are the things you can skip:

  • The Confession in Morning Prayer
  • The Apostles’ Creed in Morning Prayer
  • The Gloria in Excelsis Deo in the Communion service
  • The Comfortable Words and certain other marked prayers during the celebration of Communion

This is often overlooked by liturgy planners, but the real key to “saving time” when you’re concerned about a worship service lasting too long is not about breezing through the Prayers and skipping sections of the liturgy. The biggest time-user is music. This is especially true in the modern charismatic-influenced evangelical tradition – those songs can go on much longer even than the old hymns! So if you’re the sort who’s concerned about attention span and a set “finish time”, look at how you can reel in the music, rather than cut corners with the actual canonical liturgy.

That said, there is something to be said for the spirit of the rubrics rather than just the letter. Along those lines, here are some other things to consider to smooth the transition from Morning Prayer to Holy Communion and make it feel a bit more unified and a bit less repetitive.

  • Use the Confession in Morning Prayer instead of the Communion (that way you can skip a bunch of the follow-up material, including that oft-time-consuming Peace!)
  • Trim the Prayers of the People (after all Morning Prayer does have some basic intercessions built in already)
  • Alternatively, chop off all the prayers from Morning Prayer (concluding it with the second lesson & canticle, and then moving on to the Communion. This way you get the benefit of the extra Scripture readings and none of the prayers thereafter which will get duplicated.)

In my early years as a priest, I tried out all three of those last ideas (possibly all at once). I did this on a couple festive Sundays of the year – Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, All Saints’ Sunday – for the benefit of getting two different collects of the day (in most of those cases) and extra Scripture lessons. I thought it’d be a good way to heighten the celebration of the high holy days in a way that was both Bible-centered and Prayer Book -honoring, analogous to how the especially penitential Sundays would be punctuated by the Great Litany.

Unlike my appointing of the Litany, however, the Morning Prayer + Holy Communion combo pack did not last. It’s significantly longer, it’s clunkier, and on the days that I appointed this there was usually a lot of wonderful music that we wanted to sing as well. It may be that the Office & Eucharist combination would work better in a low-music setting. It may be that this combination may better be achieved as two separated worship services with a time for Bible Study or Sunday School or Catechesis in between.

Or, hey, maybe you actually do want to plan a worship that’s 1½-2 hours long, and then a full Morning Office with a full Eucharist back-to-back is a perfectly Anglican way to achieve that!

Posted on by Fr. Brench

Beyond Sunday Communion part 2: Morning Prayer & Litany

The Prayer Book tradition of worship is rich and robust, providing not only rites and rituals for individual worship services but indeed for an entire life of Christian worship. As a part of this ambitious large-scale schema, it should come as no surprise that there’s more to worship than simply going to Holy Communion every Sunday morning. There are the daily rounds of prayer, punctuated by the [Great] Litany a couple times per week, various pastoral offices for key stages in the natural and spiritual lives of a congregation and family, and pointers toward the development of private devotions to enable the individual worshiper to flesh out his or her own life of worship apart from the gathered Church.

What is often missed in today’s church culture, however, is that the original Prayer Book pattern for worship on Sunday morning was actually a three-part affair: Morning Prayer, The [Great] Litany, and the Holy Communion. Until relatively recent times, all three of these were appointed to be said in every church every Sunday and Holy Day. Granted, this was often shortened in actual practice, and by the late 19th century it was probably more common for people to attend just one service rather than all three in a row. Yet the full pattern of worship is still present even in our modern Prayer Books, and the typical malnourished Christian of today could benefit greatly from a retrieval of the spiritual rigor of our forebears. To that end, we’ll be looking at different combinations of worship services that you could carry out on Sunday mornings in your church.

Morning Prayer & The Litany

Let’s say the priest is on vacation. You could get a supply priest from elsewhere in the diocese to fill in for him, sure, but there are plenty of homegrown options available as well. How about save the parish a little money, time, and effort, and instead whole Prayer Book services that don’t require a priest? Take advantage of the situation as an opportunity, and make use of the other two Anglican services traditionally expected on Sunday morning: the Morning Office and the Great Litany!

Of all the possible combinations of services, this is the easiest one to work out. You proceed through Morning Prayer normally, and when you get to the rubric on page 24 (right before the Prayer for Mission) you skip over to page 91 and start the Litany. Simple!

There are really only two questions to ask yourself in the course of such a plan.

First: do we want to pause between the collects and the start of the Litany? In the original Prayer Book, the Daily Office ends with those collects, so anything else that followed it was extra. Singing an anthem at that point would have been perfectly natural, and indeed has remained a staple of Choral Evensong and Sung Mattins to this day. This is also the traditional point at which to include a sermon. The sequence could therefore be:

  1. Morning Prayer through the collects
  2. Hymn or anthem
  3. Sermon or Homily or Bible Study
  4. The Great Litany

The other question is: how do we want to conclude the Litany? Ever since 1928, the final section of the Litany has been cordoned off under a subheading (“The Supplication”) and rendered optional. As you prepare a Sunday service composed of the Office and Litany, you have to decide whether to include the Supplication or not. The rubrics in the center of page 97 explain where the Supplication supplants the shorter ending. The simplest explanation is that the top half of page 97 is the shorter ending, and the bottom of half of page 97 (leading to page 98) comprise the longer ending.

Because the Supplication is particularly “gloomy” – praying for aid against danger, and deliverance from unnamed afflictions, I recommend including it throughout Advent, Lent, and any other penitential occasion. In my own practice, I always include the Supplication whenever I pray the Litany on a Friday, and always skip it on Wednesdays. Again, find a pattern that works for you and your congregation, remembering that what is normal and familiar is sometimes best, and sometimes familiar normality needs to be challenged.

Posted on by Fr. Brench

Beyond Sunday Communion part 1: The Litany & Communion

The Prayer Book tradition of worship is rich and robust, providing not only rites and rituals for individual worship services but indeed for an entire life of Christian worship. As a part of this ambitious large-scale schema, it should come as no surprise that there’s more to worship than simply going to Holy Communion every Sunday morning. There are the daily rounds of prayer, punctuated by the [Great] Litany a couple times per week, various pastoral offices for key stages in the natural and spiritual lives of a congregation and family, and pointers toward the development of private devotions to enable the individual worshiper to flesh out his or her own life of worship apart from the gathered Church.

What is often missed in today’s church culture, however, is that the original Prayer Book pattern for worship on Sunday morning was actually a three-part affair: Morning Prayer, The [Great] Litany, and the Holy Communion. Until relatively recent times, all three of these were appointed to be said in every church every Sunday and Holy Day. Granted, this was often shortened in actual practice, and by the late 19th century it was probably more common for people to attend just one service rather than all three in a row. Yet the full pattern of worship is still present even in our modern Prayer Books, and the typical malnourished Christian of today could benefit greatly from a retrieval of the spiritual rigor of our forebears. To that end, we’ll be looking at different combinations of worship services that you could carry out on Sunday mornings in your church.

The Litany & Holy Communion

Perhaps the simplest combination of Anglican traditional rites is the use of the Great Litany with the Communion service. The Litany is a longish prayer list with full congregational participation throughout. It’s repetitive to the modern sensibility, but instructively thorough and succinct – a real balm for the “Father God we just—” prayers that often ramble on too long in current popular evangelical practice. There are three main ways that the Litany may be appended to the Communion service.

The first and probably least desirable method of including the Litany in the Communion liturgy is to replace the Prayers of the People with the Great Litany – starting at its beginning (page 91) and ending it just before the Kyrie on page 96. This is not how the Litany was or is meant to be used, and this has no historical precedence. I mention this only because it is permitted by the Communion rubrics to replace the Prayers of the People with something else that meets certain standards, the Litany easily fulfills those standards, and a congregation who has never seen the Litany before in their entire lives might be most easily introduced to it in a familiar spot in the known Communion liturgy.

The second and third ways to bring the Litany into Sunday worship, connected to the Communion service, is by starting with the Litany itself and switching over to the Communion at a certain point.

One way to do this is to treat the Great Litany as if it were a “hymn, psalm, or anthem” at the start of the worship service. You go through as much of the Litany as you want, using whichever ending you prefer to choose (the rubrics on page 97 note what these two endings are), and after that begin the Communion service at the Acclamation. This has the benefit of simplicity and breadth of coverage: the congregation experiences the Litany in its full, nothing of the regular service is omitted, and (as a handy bonus) they’ll experience the two worship services most closely to how the historic Prayer Books intended for them to be observed. The downside, of course, is the length of all this. Plus the stop-and-start where Litany ends and Communion starts may be a jarring experience for a congregation unused to the larger breadth of Prayer Book worship.

Lastly, the other approach is to utilize the rubric on page 96, which direct that the Litany be terminated there at the Kyrie and the Communion liturgy picked up at the salutation leading into the Collect of the Day. This is the “combo-pack” invented for the 1979 Prayer Book, and honestly makes for a smooth transition from one service to the other, thanks especially to the Kyrie being a familiar component to both orders functioning as a hinge linking them together. The 1979 Prayer Book further allowed the Prayers of the People to be skipped when the Litany is used like this, though our 2019 Book has not retained that particular allowance.

In my own experience, I have used (parts of) the Litany in place of the Prayers of the People once or twice, but most often I go with the third, rubrical, choice. With occasional exception, I appoint the Litany seven times a year: Advent 1, Epiphany 3, Lent 1, Lent 5, Easter 6 (Rogation), Proper 10, and Proper 20. This way, my flock develops at least a little familiarity with the Litany without feeling overburdened by a lengthy devotion that “nobody else has to do!” You may find another pattern of use may suit your context better. The Additional Directions on page 99 provide a few suggestions to this end, also.