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Readings Review & Planning Propers 9/2/19

One of the things we’re doing on this blog on Mondays is look back and forth at the Daily Office readings (or lessons) so we can better process together what the Scriptures are saying.  The other thing we’re going to do on Mondays starting today is list the recommended Propers for the Communion or Antecommunion service for each day of the week.

Readings Review

Last week: 2 Samuel 12-18, Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians 1:1-14, Amos 6-9, Obadiah, Jonah 1-2, John 19-21:, Matthew 1-3

Next week: 2 Samuel 19-24, 1 Chronicles 22, Ephesians 1-5:17, Jonah 3-4, Micah 1-5, Matthew 4-8:17

Something that begins at the end of this week and will last into early November is the supplementing of readings from 1 & 2 Kings with readings from 1 & 2 Chronicles.  As you may be aware, the books of the Chronicles cover the same span of time from 2 Samuel 1 (David’s ascension to the throne of Israel) to the end of 2 Kings (the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem).  This means that there is a lot of repeat material in the Samuel-Kings books and the Chronicles, rather similar to the overlap between the four Gospel books.  There are a few “glitches” along the way – different numbers for the reigns of certain kings, or census results, and so forth – most of which can be explained by means of different cultural perspectives (namely, who counts in a census? does a king’s reign begin when his father dies or when he begins a co-regnancy during his father’s life? etc.).  There are also a few stories that are told in slightly different orders.  In general, the Samuel-Kings books are considered the more “historic” books, and Chronicles, having been written later, are more of a theological commentary on the history.

In the context of our daily lectionary, though, the role of 1 & 2 Chronicles is simply that of “filler.”  When those books supply a story that Samuel-Kings does not, the lectionary adds it in a the appropriate place.  It makes for a slightly unpredictable reading experience, because you’ll be going through one book and suddenly a chapter from another book will jut in, but narratively it works.  And, for what it’s worth, the original Anglican daily lectionary went for the simpler course and just omitted Chronicles completely, so rejoice in re-gained ground!

Planning Propers

This is the week of Proper 17 (or Trinity 11 in the traditional calendar), so keep in mind that the historic Prayer Book default is that a mid-week Eucharist will repeat the Collect & Lessons (the propers) for yesterday.  Otherwise, we recommend…

  • Monday 9/2 = Labor Day or Martyrs of Papua New Guinea
  • Tuesday 9/3 = Votive (of the Holy Angels) *
  • Wednesday 9/4 = St. Birinus (missionary bishop)
  • Thursday 9/5 = Votive or Mother Theresa (renewer of society)
  • Friday 9/6 = Votive (of the Holy Cross)
  • Saturday 9/7 = Votive (of Blessed Mary) **

* A Votive is a “Various Occasion” (page 733 in the BCP 2019) and label in parentheses are simply a traditional suggestion.

** Choose between the Annunciation, the Visitation, or St. Mary’s Day.

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Banquet Etiquette and Pride

Surprise it’s an entry on a Sunday! I promise I’m not breaking the Sabbath and doing unnecessary work; I’m just sharing a sermon from another blog for today.
I know that many evangelical Anglicans today are uncomfortable with the Books Called Apocrypha, and tend to be a little embarrassed about their appearances in our lectionary, so I thought it might be helpful to share this sermon which uses not one but two texts from the Ecclesiastical Books to support the primary text (in this case the Gospel).
Enjoy!

Fr. Brench's avatarLeorningcnihtes boc

an exposition of Luke 14:1,7-14

We’ve got some fun stuff today!  While all four gospel books touch upon many of the same points in the life and teaching of Jesus, and there is a great deal of overlap, there tends to be a different emphasis taken on by each author, shining a different light on what our Lord had to say.  St. Luke has a particular emphasis on humanity – one could say he is the humanist among the Evangelists – concerned as he is for the poor, for the sinner, and for justice among God’s people.

Our Gospel reading today contains yet another “banquet feast” image – it’s a theme that shows up quite a lot.  And what he has to say in these two paragraphs can be read in several layers of meaning.

I. Practical Advice for the Dinner Table

The first layer is just plain practical advice:

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Book Review: Saint Joseph Continuous Sunday Missal

Welcome to Saturday Book Review time!  On most of the Saturdays this year we’re looking at a liturgy-related book noting (as applicable) its accessibility, devotional usefulness, and reference value.  Or, how easy it is to read, the prayer life it engenders, and how much it can teach you.

The next few books we’re going to look at are from liturgical traditions other than our own.  Obviously it is important to well-grounded in who we are and what we believe and where we stand, but it is also important to understand that we don’t stand in a vacuum, but as a part of the greater whole of Western Catholicism, and further, universal Christianity.  So today we’re going to go with one of the more random entries on my liturgy shelf: the Saint Joseph Continuous Sunday Missal, from 1963.

As you probably know, the 1960’s was a hotbed of liturgical changes in the Roman Church, and the vast majority of the Protestant world was about to follow suit.  The council known as Vatican II ran from 1962 to 1965, and one of its earliest reforms was for the liturgy in the local vernacular.  This Sunday Missal from 1963 represents a brief slice of Roman liturgical reform where it’s all in English, but most of the “novus ordo” (new order) stuff hasn’t been introduced.  It’s a precious snapshot of the Tridentine liturgy in English, something that’s almost completely lost today.  Under Benedict XVI, Roman Catholics got their Latin Mass back, but I’m not sure they got back their historic liturgy in the English language.  Their situation is something like Anglicans having to choose between the 1662 Prayer Book with zero changes and the 1979 Prayer Book – super traditional to the point of liturgical fetishism, or super modern to the ire of traditionalists everywhere.

So, apart from historical reference, in a tradition not even our own, what use is this book to an Anglican today?  Well, if you’re one of those crypto-Papist versions of Anglo-Catholic, then I suppose this book is pretty close to your view of an ideal liturgy in English.  It may help inform how you use the Anglican Missal, or whatever other Prayer Book supplement you prefer.  But most of us, I hazard to say, are more interested in Anglican liturgy and spirituality; what does this Roman book have to offer?

When I spent three years with my church in the classical prayer book lectionary, I learned a lot about how the liturgy used to be structured.  Remember that the historic Sunday Eucharistic lectionary has just two readings: an Epistle (usually) and a Gospel.  The Prayer Book tradition appoints a Collect for each Sunday and Holy Day to go with those two readings, but that’s it.  But what I eventually discovered was that there are more “propers” to draw upon if one so chooses.  There’s also the Introit and the Gradual – short pieces, usually chanted, usually from the Psalms, that are said near the start of the liturgy and between the Epistle and Gospel, respectively.  But what are those texts, and how are they used?  That’s where this book came in handy for me: by spelling out the full text of the Roman Mass for each Sunday of the year, it showed me how they did the Introit and Gradual, giving me insight into how those two additional propers could be put into the our liturgy.

First you can see the Introit, between the “Foremass” confession and the Kyrie, functioning in essentially the same way as our Opening Acclamation today.

Introit

After the Kyrie and Gloria comes their Collect of the Day, and then we turn the page to find the Epistle, Gradual, and Gospel.  Notice how both the Introit and Gradual use an Antiphon-Verse-Antiphon pattern, though slightly differently.  The Gradual functions similarly to our (responsory) Psalm in modern liturgy.

gradual

Then we get through the Creed, Sermon, and arrive at the Offertory.  It’s interesting to note that they appointed particular Offertory Sentences to particular Sundays, whereas the Prayer Book tradition just throws a 2-3 page list at you to choose from.

offertory

And then finally, after 8 pages of Communion prayers, we get to an oft-overlooked piece of liturgy, the Communion Sentence.  As far as I’ve noticed, the Prayer Book tradition has always authorized this little piece of liturgy, but seldom (if ever) gave instructions on how to do it.  Notice here that it’s said after the sacrament has been distributed and the vessels cleaned.

communion

The Post-Communion Prayer follows the Communion Sentence – it’s almost as if that little Scripture verse is there to re-direct everyone’s attention to the reception of the Sacrament after the sometimes-lengthy process of communicating everyone, getting everyone back on track to pray the Post-Communion together.

I share this in detail partly because I think it’s interesting, but also because it sheds some slight on how certain elements of our own liturgy, old and new, work in similar tradition to our own.  For example, I’ve only ever heard a Communion Sentence uttered at one church I’ve visited, and only tried saying one myself at my church once or twice.  Perhaps old resources like this one can inspire us to look at our own liturgy with fresh eyes.

The ratings in short:

Accessibility: 5/5
If this book represented the way a church worships today, it would be incredibly useful.  It’s easy to follow, the whole Mass through.  It’s got a picture at the beginning of each Sunday Mass to give a visual sense of the day’s theme.  Everything is clearly labeled.  The book is long (over 1,000 pages) but not large.  It’s got explanations of the calendar and the parts of the Mass, with color pictures, at the beginning.  The whole point of this book was to help church-goers follow and understand the Roman Mass easily.

Devotional Usefulness: 1/5
As noted previously, this book represents a form of the liturgy that probably doesn’t exist anywhere anymore.  And it’s very Roman, so the theological content of its eucharistic prayers is not entirely agreeable with the Prayer Book tradition.  And although it does have some other prayer resources in the back, this book just isn’t really “for us”.

Reference Value: 3/5
If you’re interested in how various elements of traditional Western liturgy can/did/”should” look in English, this book, or another like it, is extremely handy.  Its usefulness is pretty narrow, though.

If you chance upon a book like this at a yard sale or an estate sale, like I did, it’s totally worth shelling $5 to save it from the rubbish heap.  It’s a book cool to explore, and it looks really pretty on your shelf, too!  There’s a lot to be said for elegant, simple, beauty.

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The September Feasts

As a new month is about to begin, let’s take a moment to look ahead at the upcoming noteworthy feast days in the calendar.  September is an exciting month in general, so let’s see what’s coming up.

Foremost is the fact that the feast of Michael the Archangel, and of all angels, is on September 29th, which is a Sunday this year.  Remember that one of the lovely restorations of tradition in the 2019 Prayer Book that the 1979 nearly squashed is the fact that we can celebrate most major feast days on Sundays again!  The rubrics authorizing this can be found at the top of page 689:

Any of these feasts that fall on a Sunday, other than Advent, Lent, and Easter, may be observed on that Sunday or transferred to the nearest following weekday.

So you have the option of going “1979-style” and transfer the feasts off of Sundays, but if the order-of-options is significant then the primary suggestion is to keep those feasts on the Sundays on which they land.  This is how the old prayer books worked; this is what this Customary encourages.  As a result, this is a big opportunity to pull out those classic angel-themed hymns such as Christ the fair glory of the holy angels (although this is one of the only omissions from the new 2017 hymnal that this writer deeply misses).  This is also a great opportunity to preach about angels, spiritual beings, and all that great biblical stuff that popularly doesn’t get much attention apart from Christmas.

Also coming up this month are the major feasts of Holy Cross Day and St. Matthew’s, on the 14th and 21st respectively, both on Saturdays.

Holy Cross Day is (uncoincidentally) forty days after Transfiguration Day, thus bringing an interesting potential “third great fast” of the year to a close.  Historically, Holy Cross Day is tied to the story of the finding of “the true cross” outside Jerusalem by Emperor Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, but liturgically that feast day for us is more about the Cross of Christ at the time of the crucifixion.  It’s not quite a clone of Good Friday, though. Where Good Friday focuses on the “Holy Week” narrative of the death of Christ and our culpability in our sinfulness, Holy Cross Day emphasizes the glory of Christ on the Cross.

St. Matthew, of course, is the first Evangelist (gospel-book-writer).  The historic one-year lectionary seems to draw from his book more than the other three (not that I’ve literally counted the number of appearances of each) and some of the most-beloved gospel texts, like the Sermon on the Mount, are primarily known from Matthew’s book.  St. Matthew is also one of the apostles of whom we know a decent amount, having lived as a tax collector (the equivalent of a traitor to his people in that situation) before getting to follow Jesus.

Among the optional commemorations, the two most noteworthy entries are St. John Chrysostom on Friday the 13th (lucky him) and Cyprian of Carthage on Sunday the 15th.  The former is sometimes referred to as “the Augustine of the East”, being a major preacher and teacher of his day, influential in the East like Augustine of Hippo is in the West.  The latter, of course, will not be celebrated this year because his caliber of feast day cannot be observed on a Sunday in any calendar tradition, but you can still feel free to offer a Collect in his honor at the end of the Prayers of the People at the Sunday Communion liturgy if you wish.  Living in the 200’s, Cyprian represents a fairly early generation of Christian leaders and teachers.  His most famous work was De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate (On the Unity of the Catholic Church), one of the great written products of the Early Church.

One more September commemoration I’d like to note here is one that’s not found in the 2019 calendar: the Nativity of Mary on September 8th.  It’s also on a Sunday, and therefore also a day that we can’t really celebrate either.  I mention it partly because it’s a significant feast day in the Roman calendar, and partly because it’s the ordination anniversary of yours truly.  (I apologize for the self-indulgence.)  Some people say there are already enough feast days in the calendar to commemorate the Blessed Virgin Mary, others say “the more the merrier”, so I leave it to you to decide to what degree it’s worth taking note of our Lady in corporate worship a week and a half from now.

As usual, we’ll note most of these days here when they arrive.  But it’s always important to know these celebrations are coming, before they get here, especially with St. Michael’s on a Sunday about a month from now.

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Prayers of the People (Old & New)

One of the primary improvements found in the 2019 Prayer Book over its predecessor in 1979 is the restoration of a great of deal of classical prayer book content that was displaced, obscured, or even omitted in ’79.  The “Prayers of the People” in the Communion service was once of the hardest-hit features of classical liturgy in the ’79 which is substantially restored in the 2019’s Anglican Standard Text.

The classical approach was to read through all those prayers, straight through, and the 2019 puts in congregational responses – “Lord in your mercy / Hear our prayer” – which is hardly more than a cosmetic update to help people keep focused.  A few changes of wording have been made, and at least one new addition made (namely the petition for the advancement and spread of the Gospel), and one slightly-controversial line in the final petition pointing back toward the 1549 Prayer Book’s approach to handling prayers for the departed. A sober and attentive article on this subject can be found here, in case you’re curious or concerned.

What we’re going to look at today though is not so much the content of the prayers (I dare say the above paragraph and link are a sufficient headstart into your own comparison if you really want to do that), but instead the function of the prayers.  In modern liturgy, the Prayers of the People are a sort of thing unto itself.  The Sermon has been delivered and the Creed has been said, and now it’s time to pray for a little while.  When we’re done we move on to the Confession, absolution, and Offertory.  It all fits together into a logical progression: intercede, confess, receive absolution, and celebrate with offering.  It’s logical and sensible, but it’s not particularly profound; as far as I understand it thus far, this is primarily a functional progression of liturgy.

The classical prayer book order was more, for lack of a better term, mystical about the Prayers.  Until the 1979 book changed things up, the Sermon was followed by the Offertory, and the monetary gifts would be brought up front along with the bread and wine for Holy Communion, and then the “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church” began, read by the Celebrant (rather than a Deacon or lay reader).  These prayers included an optional line for God to “accept our alms and oblations”, referencing the Offertory gifts, and in a sense anticipating Holy Communion itself.

In a way, the “Prayers of the People” were like the preparation for Communion itself!  As the people got ready to approach the throne of grace, their intercessions were sent ahead, along with the very elements that God would provide to feed them.  These Prayers would then be followed by an Exhortation, the Confession & absolution, and then the Communion prayers would follow immediately.  This is probably the most-changed part of the liturgy from old to new in terms of “order of service.”

If you find this appeals to you, and you want to capture this sense of eucharistic anticipation in the Prayers of the People in the 2019 book’s liturgy, there are things you can do.  You can go all out and use the instructions in the Additional Directions to re-structure the entire liturgy to the “1662 Order.”  *SEE FOOTNOTE*  But if that’s too radical a change for your context (or you prefer the 1928-informed order of the eucharistic canon over the 1662 order), there are three things you should do to help tie the Prayers of the People more clearly to the celebration of Holy Communion:

  1. Do not hold announcements after the Peace.
  2. Always appoint a Communion Hymn at the Offertory.
  3. Have the bread and wine brought up to the altar at the same time as the monetary gifts.

In most cases, those are the two things that separate the Prayers of the People from the Communion.  The Peace already easily turns into a greet-everyone-in-the-room moment, and when it’s followed by the weekly parish announcements the flow of the liturgy is basically dead at that point, only to be revived with the Offertory – but almost as if a second worship service is starting.  If you want the Prayers of the People to reclaim any semblance of Eucharistic preparation, you’ve got to hold those announcements somewhere else (the old order called for them after the Creed and before the Sermon).  And then you have to follow that up with Communion-themed offertory music, lest that anthem also break the link.  The bread and wine, too, need to be involved in the Offertory (as was its traditional purpose anyway), so it’s clearer that the money is secondary and the sacrament is primary.

If none of this interests you, or strikes you as necessary, that’s fine.  The modern liturgical order clearly has a different logic to it, and it’s not always easy or reasonable to use one prayer book and pretend it’s a different one.  But, as always, it’s important to know and understand how classical Anglican liturgy worked, so we can at least be honest about when we’re following it and when we’re doing something new.  And the opportunities for teaching and spiritual formation in our congregations, too, can be greatly enriched by such perspective!

 

** UPDATE **
It turns out that we do in fact have the option to conform the liturgy of the Anglican Standard Text not only to the 1662 Order, but to any subsequent book.  This permission is spelled both on pages 7 and 104, and a member of the ACNA liturgy committee confirmed that this is the intention of those rubrics.

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Reading Colossians

We’ve been reading from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians this week, in the 2019 Prayer Book’s daily lectionary, and I wanted to single out this little book for further reflection today.  The Revised Common Lectionary (including the 2019 version) also just took us through much of this epistle back in July and early August, and some of us may even have preached on those lessons, making this read-through all the more fruitful now.

There are, of course, many commentaries and study guides out there, but one I would recommend is Fullness and Freedom by R. C. Lucas, an evangelical Anglican with a prolific ministry at St. Helen’s in London.  He was my parents’ first pastor, quite a few years ago, and (like J. I. Packer) is miraculously still alive and rocking the world for the Kingdom.  My church’s Facebook page has shared a number of photo clips from his book on Colossians and Philemon, which you may enjoy perusing.

Otherwise, perhaps you won’t mind my rambling:

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National Prayers and Theology

You may be familiar with the phrase lex orandi lex credendi – it is a Latin phrase roughly meaning “the law of prayer is the law of belief”.  It is a principle that what we believe, we must pray; and what we pray, we inevitably believe.  Praying and believing is a two-way street, and when there’s a disconnect between the two, something has to give.  A bad prayer life will erode orthodox beliefs; good theology requires good worship to support it.

That is why (as most of you readers probably already know) the historic, liturgical, tradition of Christian worship is full of carefully-worded prayers, dialogues, exhortations, and quotations.  Entire essays and theological debates can turn on the interpretation of a single word in the Communion prayers!  It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this attention to theological content and tone is applied even to the Occasional Prayers – a collection of 125 extra prayers near the back of the 2019 Prayer Book that (like its predecessor in 1979) probably goes mostly unnoticed.

If you peruse this list with that in the 1979 book, it’ll look very similar at first – same basic arrangement, lots of identical prayers, and so on, but you’ll also find that greater care for orthodoxy has been exercised.  As a result, you can even use these prayers to help point in the right direction for some basic theological questions.  For example, what is a biblical view on the government?  The intersection of politics and religion is a hot topic in any age, but it is perhaps especially perplexing in the modern era of democracy and representative government.

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Pages 654-8 contain the “The Nation” section, prayers #27-39.  Not only are these good prayers to pray often, but they can be good prayers to study.  It might be a challenge to reverse-engineer their Scripture allusions (and that is on my longer bucket-list), but there is much to discern.  How is God described in each of these prayers?  What is the relationship between him and an earthly ruler?  What is the purpose of government and kings and rulers?  What are they supposed to do – what are their responsibilities – and how does God hold them accountable?  These prayers, while uplifting our national leaders (who desperately need all the prayer they can get, let’s be honest) also guide us toward what to look for in them, and recognize when they’ve fallen short.  Are our leaders “continually mindful of their calling to serve this people in reverent obedience to [Christ]”?  Do they “walk before [God] in truth and righteousness”?

When we pray for states, governments, and leaders, it’s very easy to bring our political views into the picture.  “May __ never get elected!”  “May __’s administration survive the other party’s character assault!”  “God save us from the ___ party!”  Prayers like these help us keep the main things the main things: a godly people, a righteous model citizen in office, thankfulness and humility, faithfulness and virtue.  Perhaps these can help us be more honest as well as accurate, getting past all the excuse-making and the partisanship and the “what about __?” distractions.

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Readings Review & Planning Propers 8/26/19

One of the things we’re going to do on this blog on Mondays is look back and forth at the Daily Office readings (or lessons) so we can better process together what the Scriptures are saying.  I’m not always going to touch on all four reading tracks, much less give a play-by-play review of the week past or preview of the week to come, but just look more generally at where we’ve been and where we’re going.  The other thing we’re going to do on Mondays starting today is list the recommended Propers for the Communion or Antecommunion service for each day of the week.

Readings Review

Last week: 2 Samuel 6-11, Philippians, Colossians 1:1-20, Joel 2-3, Amos 1-5, John 15:18-19:37
This week: 2 Samuel 12-18, Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians 1:1-14, Amos 6-9, Obadiah, Jonah 1-2, John 19-21:, Matthew 1-3

A nice feature of this late-August point in the daily lectionary is the concurrence of the end of St. John’s Gospel with the epistle to the Colossians.  Colossians is a book that leans heavily on the death and resurrection of Jesus, proclaiming his supremacy and sufficiency for all Christian life and spirituality.  We’ll look at this book further in another post this week, so suffice it to note here that we get to walk through the death and resurrection of Christ just as this epistle gets going.

You might ask why the epistles aren’t being read in canonical order.  After finishing Romans on August 17th we went to Philippians, now Colossians, and soon Philemon and Ephesians.  I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the general idea is to read these books chronologically.  Colossians and Philemon go together, at any rate (Philemon was from Colossae, and several greetings-names are found in both letters), so to read them in sequence can be beneficial for putting the larger picture together.  Having just finished Philippians and moving on to Ephesians after also keeps this group of “prison epistles” together – St. Paul likely wrote all four of these letters at roughly the same time during his imprisonment.

The Minor Prophets of the Old Testament, however, are being read in canonical order, even though that is not quite their chronological order.  Their chronology is a little more disputed, and the benefit gained from rearranging them is not as great.  We finish Amos this week and start into some of the shorter books, which will take us two-thirds of the way through September.  Take care not to skim these books – these are writings that Christian often and easily neglect, only pulling out the choice verse here and there around Christmas.  Let these prophets tell their stories, dole out their warnings, cry out for justice, and convict people of faithlessness.  There is much in there that points to Jesus, but there is also much in there that calls out sin – in any day and age!

Planning Propers

This is the week of Proper 16 (or Trinity 10 in the traditional calendar), so keep in mind that the historic Prayer Book default is that a mid-week Eucharist will repeat the Collect & Lessons (the propers) for yesterday.  Otherwise, we recommend…

  • Monday 8/26 = Votive (of the Holy Spirit) *
  • Tuesday 8/27 = St. Monica (saint) or Votive (of the Holy Angels)
  • Wednesday 8/28 = St. Augustine of Hippo (teacher of the faith)
  • Thursday 8/29 = Beheading of St. John the Baptist **
  • Friday 8/30 = Votive (of the Cross)
  • Saturday 8/31 = St. Aidan (missionary bishop)

* A Votive is a “Various Occasion” (page 733 in the BCP 2019) and label in parentheses are simply a traditional suggestion.

** You should use the Propers for a Martyr, but change the Gospel lesson to the actual story of the event, like Mark 6:17-29.

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Generic or Specific Saints’ Day Collects

When I started getting into catholicism (in the broad sense – Roman, Eastern, Lutheran, Anglican, hadn’t decided yet) one of the things I found myself hoping for was that there’d be more information on the Saints.  Where did the twelve apostles go, besides Paul?  What did they do, and how did they die?  It was a naive hope, of course, because we’ve all got the same Bible, and the Bible is still the surest witness to the history of that generation.

We all have access to the same histories, too, which indicate the further stories all of the apostles, but some of that is legendary, and it’s often hard (if not impossible) to separate fact from fancy.  To some degree it doesn’t matter: if we know what kind of people the apostles were (thanks to the Bible) then we can infer the kinds of things they did, even if the details have gotten muddled over the centuries.

But we can’t teach as doctrine what history only assumes and the Bible doesn’t tell or infer… so how do we celebrate saints days like today’s?  We know nothing about Bartholomew’s activity in the Bible, and assuming he’s the same man as Nathaniel we’ve only got about one instance of Jesus even speaking directly to him (toward the end of John 1).

So what we do is have a Collect of the Day that’s more generic.  The wording is a little different between classic and modern prayer books but in this case the content is the same:

Almighty and everlasting God, who gave to your apostle Bartholomew grace truly to believe and to preach your Word: Grant that your Church may love what he believed and preach what he taught; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

As you can see, we assert nothing specific about his life, only the generic fact that he believed and preached the Word of God, as did all the apostles, especially after the Day of Pentecost.  New-to-traditional-Christianity-me was disappointed at this sort of thing; I was unconsciously feeling the gnostic pull, hoping for secret knowledge and insight that was previously denied me in the generic non-denominational setting.  But it is good, in its own way, that we don’t know much about most of the apostles.  For the reason that we celebrate them isn’t for their own sake.  If that were so we’d need to know a lot about them… each would need his own biography in the Bible!  But we celebrate the saints for the sake of Christ.  We live by their light not because they shine like the sun but because they’re moons that reflect the sun’s light back toward us from another angle.  (This analogy has long been used of Mary, too, to the extent were you’ll occasionally see a moon associated with her in certain strands of iconography.)

So, with St. Bartholomew, the lesson is going to be generic but fundamental: let us love the Word which the apostles taught, and let us go and preach the same.

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Remember to use different Collects today

Just a quick entry this Friday morning – remember to use a different Collect of the Day in Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer.

  1. In Morning Prayer today, we’re still using the Collect of the Day from Sunday (Proper 15 in the 2019 book).
  2. In Evening Prayer today it’s time to switch the Collect of the Day over to tomorrow’s feast day: St. Bartholomew.

As it says on page 687:

Following ancient Jewish tradition, the celebration of any Sunday begins at sundown on the Saturday that precedes it. Therefore at Evening Prayer on Saturdays (other than Holy Days), the Collect appointed for the ensuing Sunday is used.

Although this only refers to Sundays, the principle has traditionally been applied to major holy days, such as the “red-letter days” in Prayer Book tradition.  This quote does, however, speak to tomorrow’s Evening Prayer situation, noting that the Holy Day takes precedence over starting Sunday at sundown.

In short…

  • Friday Morning: still using the previous Sunday’s Collect
  • Friday Evening: begin using St. Bartholomew
  • Saturday Morning & Evening: still using St. Bartholomew
  • Sunday Morning: begin using that Sunday’s Collect

Happy praying!