Advice – Page 7 – The Saint Aelfric Customary

Posted on March 3, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 8 of 12

So you’ve heard about the Daily Office, specifically the Anglican tradition of daily prayer and scripture reading, and you want to enter into this beautiful and formative tradition? Great, grab a prayer book and go! Except, maybe someone already said that and you don’t know where to start… or worse, you did try it and it was just too much? The length of the Office was overwhelming and the contents too complicated to navigate when you’ve got no experience with liturgy. We understand, we’ve all been at that place before! Some just don’t remember it as well as others.

Diving into the full Prayer Book life of worship doesn’t work for everyone; sometimes you have to work your way up toward that discipline, adding one piece at a time as you grow comfortable with each feature and learn how to “do” them all. This post series is basically a twelve-step program to help you advance in the life of disciplined prayer from zero to super-Anglican. The pace is up to you – the goal of this sort of spiritual discipline is consistency, not “how much” you do.

Step One: Pray a Psalm followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Step Two: Add a Scripture Reading
Step Three: Add more Psalms and Lessons
Step Four: Add the Apostles’ Creed
Step Five: Add Canticles
Step Six: Add the Confession
Step Seven: Add some Prayers

Step Eight: Add the Invitatory

After the Confession of Sin you’ve probably noticed a little dialogue: “O Lord, open our lips / and our mouth shall proclaim your praise” and so on. This is called the Invitatory – a fancy description of something that invites us to worship. Included in it is the Gloria Patri – “Glory be to the Father…” – which you will find is also said at the end of most of the Canticles. If you haven’t already noticed and implemented it, now’s also the time to add this Gloria Patri to the end of the regular Psalms Appointed, too.

The lines “O Lord open our lips…” are from a Psalm, but their liturgical use in the Offices dates to monastic tradition; the idea was that this dialogue was the beginning of the first morning office, effectively being the first thing the monk says each day. Although this is not the case for us, nor is it even the beginning of the liturgy, it is like the beginning of the liturgy. If you conceive of the Confession as preparatory to praising God, then the Invitatory dialogue is where our praises actually do begin.

After this dialogue, Morning and Evening Prayer diverge from one another.

Morning Prayer sees an “invitatory psalm” take place, which is traditionally Psalm 95 (Venite), though when that psalm shows up as one of the daily psalms appointed our tradition is to replace it with Psalm 100 (Jubilate). On Easter the Pascha nostrum takes their place. You’ll also see a set of Antiphons, which are brief phrases (often based on bible verses) to be said before and after the invitatory psalm. Catholic tradition is full of antiphons, but our prayer book only provides them for this one place in the liturgy. Even here, it’s optional, so don’t worry about them if you find it too much. They’re there to beautify and enrich the liturgy, so if they’re a burden, don’t worry!

Evening Prayer is simpler: we find the Phos hilaron, an ancient Christian hymn, to be read between the dialogue and the Psalms. It explores the image of Christ as our Light, which has earned it a beloved place in the liturgical tradition. The classical prayer books didn’t have anything here for Evening Prayer, so the Phos hilaron remains optional. Or you can read or sing a different hymn instead, if you prefer.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

(Opening Sentence)
The Confession of Sin
The Invitatory
Invitatory Psalm or Phos Hilaron
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Prayers
1. Lord have mercy…
2. The Lord’s Prayer
3. Suffrage
4. A Collect for (the day of the week)
5. A Prayer for Mission

This covers almost the entire Prayer Book liturgy for daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Two more steps remain to complete it, and then two extra steps to expand it further if you are so inclined.

Posted on March 2, 2020March 1, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Collects of the Day this week

Last week was a bit complicated for tracking the Collect of the Day in the Daily Offices. In a normal week, you start the Sunday’s Collect on the Saturday evening before, and use it through Saturday morning until the next Sunday Collect kicks in. Last week, however, had two holy days, one of which redefined the rest of the week:

Sunday morning: Collect for the Last Sunday of Epiphany
Sunday evening through Monday evening: Collect for St. Matthias Day
Tuesday morning and evening: Collect for the Last Sunday of Epiphany
Wednesday morning through Saturday morning: Collect for Ash Wednesday

This week we have the Lenten/Spring Ember Days, causing a similar mix-up of the Collect of the Day:

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday: Collect for the First Sunday in Lent
Wednesday: Collect for an Ember Day
Thursday: Collect for the First Sunday in Lent
Friday, Saturday: Collect for an Ember Day

One of the things that makes this tricky is the fact that we, in the 2019 Prayer Book, only have two Collects for the Ember Days. Sometimes, like in Advent a few months ago, this works out fine because a holy day (in that case, St. Thomas) sometimes cuts in and overwrites one of the Ember Days, allowing us to use both Collects on one day each. But now that we have three Ember Days unfettered, and only two Collects to use, how should we handle this? Perhaps the simplest approach is to use the first Collect each morning and the second Collect each evening.

Another tradition worth mentioning is the fact that the classical prayer books (that is, those before 1979) call for the repetition of the Ash Wednesday Collect after the current Collect of the Day throughout the season of Lent. The 2019 Prayer Book does not direct for this to be done, but with the rubrics the way they are, there is nothing “illegal” about applying this tradition in our recitation of the Daily Office. So give that possibility due consideration also!

Posted on February 26, 2020February 25, 2020 by Fr. Brench

What’s different in the liturgy now that it’s Lent?

Welcome to Ash Wednesday, the common name for The First Day of Lent. Occasionally you’ll see today called quadragesima because there are now 40 days left (excluding Sundays) until Easter Day. Let the 40-day fast begin!

One of the main questions I get from non-liturgical Christians, concerning Lent, is “what do you differently during this time?” This blog post is aimed at answering that question – partly for the benefit of those who are wondering the same thing, but also as a reminder to my fellow Anglican readers who might need a reminder of some of the changes, or possible changes, in the daily course of our liturgy.

Today’s differences

For those of us using the 2019 Daily Lectionary, or one of the historic daily lectionaries that uses the regular calendar, we may need the reminder that today’s lessons for Morning and Evening Prayer are interrupted from the regular course. At the bottom of page 740 in the BCP 2019 you’ll see the following readings appointed for today:

Isaiah 58:1-12 & Luke 18:9-14 for the Morning
Jonah 3 & 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 for the Evening

To that I would recommend another traditional-for-this-day reading, Hebrews 12:3-17, for Midday Prayer.

At the Holy Communion (or in place of it, if the Communion itself isn’t actually going to be celebrated) we have a special liturgy in the 2019 Book, starting on page 543, and prefaced by a handy introduction to this day (and Lent in general) on page 542. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday is a custom that was removed from Anglican practice during the Reformation, and not formally put into a Prayer Book until 1979, though the Anglo-Catholic movement had provided extra-liturgical material to sneak the practice back into the liturgy before it was embraced by the church as a whole. You can read last year’s note about Ash-less Wednesday here.

Also, remember that today’s Collect of the Day is now the Collect of the Day for the rest of this week!

Morning Prayer during Lent

There are some extra Opening Sentences of Scripture appropriate for this season on page 27.

The Venite (Psalm 95) should be said in full daily this season, if you don’t normally do so already. Keep in mind that you can bookend it with a Lenten antiphon from page 30!

The first Canticle, Te Deum laudamus, is recommended in our Prayer Book to be replaced with the Benedictus es, Domine on page 18. This Customary would recommend retaining the Te Deum on Sundays and other major holy days, however.

If you don’t normally do so, make a point of praying the Great Litany (page 91) after Morning Prayer on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Evening Prayer during Lent

There are some extra Opening Sentences of Scripture appropriate for this season on page 54.

The second canticle, Nunc dimittis, could be replaced by Canticle 3, Kyrie Pantokrator, most evenings. We’d recommend doing so on Monday through Friday.

The Minor Offices during Lent

The “Alleluia” after the invitatory dialogue is to be omitted now.

For Midday Prayer, it may be a good idea to make use of one the Additional Directions and make more extensive use of Psalm 119 throughout the season. Consider this two-week rotation of Midday Psalms:

<week 1> :day: <week 2>
124, 126 :Sundays: 124, 126
19 :Mondays: 119:81-96
119:1-16 :Tuesdays: 119:97-112
119:17-32 :Wednesdays: 119:113-128
119:33-48 :Thursdays: 119:129-144
119:49-64 :Fridays: 119:145-160
119:65-80 :Saturdays: 119:161-176

Consider making more frequent use of Matthew 11:28-30 as the Lesson at Compline.

The Holy Communion during Lent

There is an Acclamation appropriate for Lent on page 146, and another one for Holy Week.

This is a good season to make weekly use of the Decalogue (page 100) instead of the Summary of the Law if you don’t normally already.

The Gloria in excelsis is traditionally omitted during Lent. Consider replacing it with a hymn from the Lent section of your hymnal, just to emphasize the season difference in mood.

The First Sunday in Lent is one of the traditional days to read The Exhortation (page 147).

Consider using Offertory Sentences (page 149) that are more pointed about spiritual disciplines, such as Matthew 7:21, 1 John 3:17, and Tobit 4:8-9. This could be especially effective if you normally use the same one every week, memorized from the list in 1979 Book.

The “alleluia” in the Fraction dialogue (on page 118/135) is to be omitted now.

If you don’t normally prayer the Prayer of Humble Access and the Agnus Dei (page 119/135), this is the season to start. (Pro-tip: never stop using them!)

In fact, if your congregation normally uses the “Renewed Ancient Text”, I cannot heartily-enough encourage you to switch to the “Anglican Standard Text” at least for Lent. You’ll get more direct prayers of confession and of consecration (not to mention historically Anglican prayers).

Other Spiritual Practices

The classical Prayer Books appointed the Collect for Ash Wednesday to be used after the Collect of the Day throughout the season of Lent. I’m not so sure the 2019 Prayer Book intends to allow that, so consider making use of this Collect elsewhere – in the additional prayers at the end of an Office, or after the Prayers of the People at the Communion, or in your private prayers and devotions.

On page 689 our calendar directs The weekdays of Lent and every Friday of the year (outside the 12 Days of Christmas the 50 days of Eastertide) are encouraged as days of fasting. The classical Prayer Books were more direct about the expectation (not just encouragement) that we should fast. We’re not Romanists, so we don’t have elaborate standardized definitions of what “counts” as fasting; we have the freedom in Christ to fast according to conscience, as the Bible indicates. Nevertheless, some advice is helpful, and our calendar provides some: Fasting, in addition to reduced consumption, normally also includes prayer, self-examination, and acts of mercy. It is popular to “give something up for Lent”, or to “take something on for Lent”, and almost all of those particular expressions of Lenten devotion are summed up in that one sentence. Consider how you might mark this season in your own lifestyle, and give it a go.

Posted on February 25, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 7 of 12

Step Seven: Add some Prayers

Now it’s time to develop your utilization of the Prayer Book. You’re already reading the Confession, Psalms, Canticles, and Apostles’ Creed from it, now it’s time for some further prayers. In Morning Prayer pages 21-24 and in Evening Prayer pages 47-51 you will see that the Lord’s Prayer is preceded and followed by a larger sequence of Prayers. The Kyrie (“Lord have mercy…”) comes first, and after the Lord’s Prayer comes a “Suffrage” (a back-and-forth set of versicles and responses, mostly taken from the Psalms), and after that a pile of “collects” and prayers.

A Collect is a specific form of prayer, and the Prayer Book has tons of them. The usual structure of a collect is:

an address to God (identifying a name or attribute or work of God)
a specific petition or request
a reason for that petition or request, often linking back to the address
an appeal to the name of Jesus

In the 2019 Prayer Book you’ll the first Collect listed is “The Collect of the Day” – feel free to skip that for now; we’ll add it in later. For now, we’re focusing on developing your use of the Prayer Book liturgy without adding more page-flips.

Instead, finish your prayer times now with the Kyrie, Lord’s Prayer, a set of Suffrages, the Collect for the Day of the Week, and a Prayer for Mission. Morning and Evening Prayer provide different lists of prayers for this section, so your experiences of morning and evening are going to start diverging at this point.

You’ll notice that some of these prayers in Morning Prayer draw upon the image and reality of the beginning of the day, and Evening Prayer draws upon the images of darkness and light as pictures of death and life. Time and nature are explicitly now being drawn into your prayer life, and that’s a beautiful thing!

You’ll see that there are a couple more prayers and lines of other text after the prayers we’ve listed here, but don’t worry about them for now. Historically, those have been optional, almost thought of in an after-the-liturgy kind of status, so we’re going to save those for later. You’re welcome to plough ahead and include them now if you like, but don’t feel pressured.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

The Confession of Sin
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Prayers
1. Lord have mercy…
2. The Lord’s Prayer
3. Suffrage
4. A Collect for (the day of the week)
5. A Prayer for Mission

At this point you’re almost saying the entire morning and evening offices in the prayer book tradition, congratulations!

Posted on February 19, 2020April 15, 2020 by Fr. Brench · 3 Comments

Create Your Own Prayers of the People

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On page 140 of the 2019 Prayer Book, the following Additional Direction is found:

In both the Anglican Standard and Renewed Ancient Texts, other forms of the Prayers of the People may be used, provided the following concerns are included:

The universal Church, the clergy and people
The mission of the Church
The nation and all in authority
The peoples of the world
The local community
Those who suffer and those in any need or trouble
Thankful remembrance of the faithful departed and of all the blessings of our lives.

For the most part this is a clone of the rubric in the 1979 Prayer Book, which also authorized a create-your-own-adventure approach to the Prayers of the People, providing a similar structure of required topics. I think the wording of ours is a bit more positively specific, but the freedom is basically the same.

Now, this is “Weird Rubric Wednesday”, a new series of posts that I’m running about weird, strange, or surprising things that the 2019 Prayer Book permits. As the intentionally horrific and obnoxious banner picture at the top of the page indicates, I’m running this partly for the humour, and cautioning against abuse of the system. But some of these will have serious and positive suggestions, too. How you deal with the Prayers of the People is going to be one of those mixed entries.

Ideally…

The two Communion rites in our Prayer Book provide their own default Prayers of the People. Ideally you should just use them as-is. Tampering with them is permitted, but almost never necessary. The special occasion once in a while may be well-highlighted by an edited set of Prayers here, but on the whole this is supposed to be a stable piece of the liturgy. If you always keep the congregation guessing from week to week, then you’re only teaching them to rely on you, or to rely upon their own spontaneity, rather than provide the spiritual formation available in the mature historic prayers.

Try your hand at Puritanism

One of the great practices of the Free Church tradition is the “pastoral prayer”, in which the pastor prays at length for, well, anything and everything. This can be a train wreck if he’s unprepared, but it can also be a beautiful moment of pastoral love and care for the flock. The Puritans, in particular, had a thing for insanely long prayers, and this rubric offers them a victory in our 2019 liturgy.

Personally I don’t recommend opting for this, but it may be a positive idea to pray, as a pastor (priest, deacon, or otherwise) for your congregation at the end of the traditional set Prayers.

Shaken, not stirred

Another thing you could try here is to pull out the Occasional Prayers near the back of the Prayer Book and grab a collect or two for each of the required topics to create your own Prayers of the People. This would result in a very piecemeal set of prayers, with little-to-no sense of flow to them, so I would not recommend that for ordinary Communion services. But that might be a cool idea to try out in an Antecommunion service on your own! It’s also worth noting that the list of topics in the rubric above also closely matches the organization of the Occasional Prayers, so this scheme would be easier to fulfill than you might think.

Outsourcing

This rubric also gives you the freedom to grab any other Prayer Book, official or proposed or supplementary, and use their Prayers of the People, assuming they meet the simple required topics. This could mean the 1979, or England’s Common Worship, or the Kenyan Prayer Book, or another province. Or, to channel that #broke/#woke/#bespoke meme, you could go all-out #bespoke and use the 1662 or 1928 Prayer Book’s Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church. How ’bout dat?

For ever and ever, Amen.

Pray the Great Litany as the Prayers of the People. Pray some or all the Psalms. Pray all the Occasional Prayers. This liturgy could last all day, baby! DON’T STAWP!

Posted on February 18, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench · 2 Comments

Learning the Daily Office – part 6 of 12

Step One: Pray a Psalm followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Step Two: Add a Scripture Reading
Step Three: Add more Psalms and Lessons
Step Four: Add the Apostles’ Creed
Step Five: Add Canticles

Step Six: Add the Confession

Alright, it’s time for something distinctly Anglican: the prayer of confession at the daily office. While confessing our sins before God is a universal practice (if grossly underutilized among many Evangelicals and Pentecostals today), it is a distinctly Anglican practice to include it in the Daily Office. You will find it starting on page 11 for Morning Prayer and page 41 for Evening Prayer. There is a paragraph that the Officiant (the person leading the Office) reads aloud, followed by the prayer of confession itself, followed by a choice of three responses. Two of those responses are statements of absolution to be read by a priest or bishop, but the third is a prayer for forgiveness that is to be read by anyone when no such minister is present, and that is what you’ll read when you’re doing this alone.

You’ll also see three “opening sentences of scripture” listed before this Confession set; feel free to read one of these first, too, as they serve as a sort of “call to worship”, beginning to direct your focus upon God and his Word before the act of self-examination and confession.

In the Daily Office we confess our sins at the beginning of the liturgy. This teaches us:

that it is only in repentance that we find salvation;
that we can only approach God in humility, not pride or presumption;
that true worship comes from a “broken and contrite heart”;
that there is no “health” (salvation) in us apart from God’s grace.

So it’s time to start your morning and evening prayer times with this confession. Sometimes you’ll read it quickly and move right along. Sometimes you’ll dwell on the words, or need to dwell on the words, along the way, letting their truth sink in and sober you up to reality. Sometimes a moment of silent self-examination will be necessary – think on your sins in the past day and release them to the Lord for forgiveness and healing. Sometimes this will feel merely a perfunctory feature of the Daily Office… remember this is a discipline, after all, so it’s there to shape and form you. Your heart will not always be as “into it” as other times, just like how certain psalms may appeal to you less or more than others. The point is that this is the pattern of worship you are growing in to, and that you have this opportunity to repent every time you approach the Lord in prayer.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

The Confession of Sin
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Lord’s Prayer

This makes your recitation of the Daily Office about fifteen minutes in length each morning and evening. Apart from the Canticles, the format and order of Morning and Evening Prayer are identical for you. But that will soon change.

Posted on February 12, 2020February 7, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 5 of 12

Step One: Pray a Psalm followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Step Two: Add a Scripture Reading
Step Three: Add more Psalms and Lessons
Step Four: Add the Apostles’ Creed

Step Five: Add Canticles

In terms of content and outline, you’ve already reached a distinctly historic Christian pattern of worship. This step adds in “Canticles”, which are occasionally Psalms but usually Psalm-like texts from other parts of the Bible, to be read after each Scripture Lesson. This is where you really start entering into the liturgical history of the Church!

Functionally, this step does not introduce anything new; you started with learning to pray the psalms, and the Canticles work exactly the same way. Experientially this is purely a matter of logistics: all the Psalms Appointed for the morning or evening are prayed together, then you get the Lessons, both of which are followed by a Canticle.

In Morning Prayer, find your canticles starting on page 17 – you’ll see two choices (Te Deum laudamus and Benedictus es, Domine) for the first one and the Benedictus for the second. In Evening Prayer, find your canticles starting on page 45 – the Magnificat and the Nunc dimittis. There are also Supplemental Canticles for Worship starting on page 79 and I do have a guide to choosing among them, but it’s simplest to stick with the primary ones provided in the Morning and Evening Office liturgies and get used to them first. The supplemental canticles are just that – supplemental.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Lord’s Prayer

This makes your recitation of the Daily Office about ten to fifteen minutes in length each morning and evening. You are now also engaging with four different places in the Prayer Book: the middle of the Morning Prayer liturgy, the middle of the Evening Prayer liturgy, the Psalter, and the Daily Office Lectionary.

Once you get used to this, you’ll be well-positioned to fill out the rest of the Daily Office liturgies. Chances are that the next couple steps will progress quickly.

Posted on February 4, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 4 of 12

Step One: Pray a Psalm followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Step Two: Add a Scripture Reading
Step Three: Add more Psalms and Lessons

Step Four: Add the Apostles’ Creed

This is a small step, logistically speaking, but it’s a milestone in your development of the discipline of the Daily Office. This is your first not-from-the-Bible ingredient in your prayer life, and this may be especially foreign or challenging for you depending upon your background.

As Anglicans we emphasize our adherence to creedal orthodoxy; that is, we look to the great Creeds (in our case three of them) to summarize the dogmas of the Christian faith – dogma being that which must be believed. When we include a Creed in a worship service, it is for multiple reasons.

It is a formation tool, helping us to internalize the basics of the faith.
It is a teaching tool, helping us to understand what we read in the Bible.
It is a particular form of prayer: a confession of faith.

Although none of the Psalms literally say “I believe ___”, there are many confessions of faith found within the psalms – proclaiming God’s goodness, or mercy, or love. The reciting of a Creed is a development of that form of prayer, stating more explicitly a number of key points of doctrine regarding God, the person of Jesus, the Gospel, the Holy Spirit, and the Church.

Furthermore, we use the Apostles’ Creed in the Daily Office not only because it’s the shortest creed but because it was historically associated with the rite of holy baptism – this Creed (as best we can tell) was formed as the summary of the faith that was proclaimed in the Early Church when someone was getting baptized. So as we confess our faith with this creed in Morning and Evening Prayer we are essentially re-affirming our baptismal vows, recommitting ourselves to God and his Church and his Gospel.

It’s a small thing to add, but it’s a major addition to take in!

The Apostles’ Creed can be found on page 20 of the Prayer Book, shortly before the Lord’s Prayer in the liturgy. For now, you will be now praying the Creed immediately before the Lord’s Prayer. Some wise logistics, as a result, should be that you make a point of saving one of appointed Psalms to follow the first Lesson and a second Psalm to follow the second Lesson, in order to separate the Bible-reading from the Creed-reciting. Not every morning and evening will provide enough Psalms to accomplish this, so don’t sweat it if you run out. This isn’t the end of the road, after all, and the next step in this series will “solve” that problem anyway.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

Psalm(s) to pray
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
Psalm to pray
New Testament Lesson
Psalm to pray (usually)
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Lord’s Prayer

The length of time to do all this is still probably about five minutes, maybe as many as ten if the readings are particularly long and you’re reading them out loud. Same with the Psalms – praying them means reading them aloud – and sometimes they can be a little lengthy too.

Posted on January 31, 2020January 30, 2020 by Fr. Brench · 1 Comment

Filling in the blank: 1 Esdras

One of the interesting features of Anglican liturgical tradition is that one of our foundational documents (the 39 Articles of Religion) lists the canonical books of the Bible along with “the other books which the church doth read…” yet some of those other books are not actually covered in our lectionaries. One such book is 1 Esdras.

You can learn more about this modest little book in some previous posts here, and even a video: The Least-read book of the Bible?

I bring it up now because in this Customary’s Supplemental Midday Prayer Lectionary we are starting in on 1 Esdras today. If you’ve never read this book before and want to catch up on what you’ve been missing, now’s your chance to read a long, bit by bit, during Midday Prayer. It’s only 9 chapters long, but several of them are quite lengthy so it’s spread out through 3 weeks so you don’t have to get drowned in too many long readings.

Though, if you’re already familiar with 2 Chronicles and Ezra, then you’ll already be familiar with the majority of this book!

Posted on January 30, 2020January 29, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Commemorating King Charles the Martyr

January 30th is the commemoration of King Charles the Martyr. In the 1662 Prayer Book (though later removed) this day was one of special devotion and fasting. A particular set of Collects, Scripture readings, Psalms, both for the Daily Offices and the Communion of the Day, and even a unique anthem in place of the usual Invitatory Psalm was prescribed. I suppose it was deemed to nationalistic or something, as it has since disappeared from that book. And with its heavy pro-monarchy language, it’s no wonder that it didn’t proliferate even into the “black letter day” commemorations of the American Prayer Book until (as far as I know) 2019.

I have written about the Martyrdom of Charles I before, once on my pastor’s blog and once on here last year, and I commend those to you if you want or need an introduction to his commemoration from an historical perspective. You can also get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and check out the actual 1662 prayer book material. Just scroll to the bottom and click on “Form of Prayer for the 30th Day of January.”

This entry, today, here and now, is turning instead to the question of how one can commemorate King Charles I in accordance with the 2019 Prayer Book.

The simplest approach would be to celebrate Communion or Antecommunion using the Propers For a Martyr as set forth int eh 2019 Prayer Book. But if you want to get fancier…

The Collect of the Day

This Collect is one of the two presented in the 1662 Prayer Book. Although it is not explicitly authorized in the 2019 Prayer Book, its use can be justified because it is an authentic piece of prior Prayer Book tradition (only “translated” to modern English) and because the ACNA is preparing a Lesser Feasts & Fasts book which will most likely put forth a Collect for this and other commemorations.

Blessed Lord, in whose sight the death of your saints is precious; We magnify your name for the abundant grace bestowed upon the martyred King, Charles the First; by which he was enabled so cheerfully to follow the steps of his blessed Master and Savior, in a constant meek suffering of all barbarous indignities, and at last resisting unto blood; and even then, according to the same pattern, praying for his murderers. Let his memory, O Lord, be ever blessed among us; that we may follow the example of his courage and constancy, his meekness and patience, and great charity: and all for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

The Lessons at Holy Communion

The Epistle and Gospel here are those appointed in the 1662 Prayer Book. The Old Testament lesson is from the same book’s Morning Prayer Office for this day, and the Psalm, likewise, is a part of the Psalms Appointed for the Morning of that day.

2 Samuel 1; Psalm 10:1-12; 1 Peter 2:13-22; Matthew 21:33-41.

Midday Prayer

The Supplemental Midday Prayer Lectionary provided here appoints 2 Samuel 1 as the commemorative reading for today. But if you are reading it for Communion or Antecommunion today, then read a different option from the 1662 book, like Jeremiah 12.