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2 Peter and Jude Together

As you go through the Daily Office this week, you might notice something surprising about the Epistle readings in the evenings.  We just finished 1 Peter, we’re getting into 2 Peter, but next is not 1 John, but Jude!  The Epistles are almost finished… but why is Jude moved before John instead of read after like it’s found in the order of the New Testament in the Bible?

Part of the reason might be chronology – some of the Epistles are offered in our daily office lectionary according to the order in which they were written.  It is very likely that St. John’s epistles were written later in his life, post-dating pretty much the entire rest of the apostolic writings.

But most likely, in this case, Jude is read immediately after 2 Peter because they are very similar books.  For those who tend to be more “critical” of the biblical text, 2 Peter is sometimes looked upon as a “correction” to Jude.  Not a correction in that Jude was wrong, exactly; more a correction in that Jude makes some confusing and obscure references, and 2 Peter offers similar teachings with cleaner Old Testament references.

In its extremely brief length, the Epistle of Jude manages to make references to

  • the origin of demons: “that did not keep their own position” (v6)
  • Sodom and Gomorrah’s indulgence “in unnatural lust” (v7)
  • a dispute between the devil and Michael the Archangel over the body of Moses (v9)
  • a cited quote from the (very) apocryphal book of Enoch (v14-15)

Despite these difficult lines, Jude has two very popular texts, one at its beginning and one at its end:

I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

and

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and for ever. Amen.

The previous epistle, 2 Peter, contains a similar warning against false teachers and false brethren who practice immoralities, but does so without quite so many oblique references.  Chapter 2 references the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Baalam, and the steadfastness of God’s holy angels.  So when you get to reading Jude on Sunday, keep Friday’s reading from chapter 2 in mind.  The similarities will be very helpful.

Apart from that, 2 Peter has a few unique contributions regarding the eyewitness authority of the apostles, which in turn is subordinate to the witness of the Scriptures (cf. chapter 1); and also reiterates some of the points regarding suffering already covered in 1 Peter.

It’s helpful that these books are short, too, so that we can read through them in fairly rapid succession and be able to notice the connections between them.  Still, it’s a good thing our lectionary moves Jude up next to Peter!

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Praying with St. Julian of Norwich

Today’s entry in the calendar of commemorations is St. Julian of Norwich.  Two quick clarifications are in order.  First, Julian is (in this case) a woman’s name.  Second, the W in Norwich is silent, so pronounce it ‘norrich’.  (Sorry, I had an history professor in college who heavily pronounced the W all the time, and it was ridiculously embarrassing.)

Saint Julian of Norwich was an ordinary medieval woman of some social status and means.  She was born in England around 1342, and had a severe illness at thirty in which she received last rites and had a series of sixteen visions of Christ.  She wrote about her visions, Revelations of Divine Love, shortly afterward, and near the end of the century wrote a longer treatise explaining them in greater detail.

For most of her life, after her near-death experience, she lived as an anchoress.  An anchorite (male) or anchoress (female) is sort of a cross between a monastic and a hermit.  As the name suggests, one is anchored to the spot, living in a small cell block attached to a church.  As an anchoress, therefore, she lived simply, singly, on the charity of others.  She had a window into the church building through which she could hear Mass and receive Communion, and a window to the outside through which she could speak with visitors and offer spiritual wisdom and advice.  Near the end of her life she was visited by another medieval woman who came to be remembered as a Saint, Margery Kempe.

You can read more of about her life here.

Apart from her name appearing in our calendar, St. Julian shows up in one other place in our Prayer Book: the Occasional Prayers section.  There, prayer #92 on page 673 reads:

O God, of your goodness, give me yourself, for you are enough for me. I can ask for nothing less that is completely to your honor, and if I do ask anything less, I shall always be in want. Only in you I have all.  Amen.

In this Customary’s recommended rotation of praying these Occasional Prayers every two weeks, I came across this prayer on the day after Ash Wednesday, and immediately took a liking to it.  In my own emotional and spiritual life at that point, I badly needed to refresh a sense of satisfaction in Christ alone.  Words like “for you are enough for me” and “Only in you I have all” are expressions of faith and trust and reliance that I needed to meditate upon, and so this little prayer became a quiet theme for me throughout Lent.  It wasn’t seasonally appropriate one way or the other, it had no connection to the liturgy as such, it was simply a piece of my private devotions for a few weeks.  This is legitimate and good; the classical three-fold rule of worship identifies private devotions as necessary to the Christian life alongside the daily office and the sacraments.

And yet, common prayer, or at least a Prayer Book, can aid us in our private devotions.  The 123 Occasional Prayers offered near the back of our Prayer Book include over 20 labelled as being for Personal Life or Devotion.  This means that 1, they aren’t meant for common worship as such, and 2, some will befit your prayer life better than others.  There are some in there that I actually rather dislike.  But my opinions will change with my mood and spiritual condition over time, I’m sure, and St. Julian’s prayer may not minister to me as profoundly in another year.

So I encourage you to explore these prayers for your own prayer life, and explore the people commemorated in our calendar.  You never know who and what the Holy Spirit will use to minister to you both within and apart from the liturgy!

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Hymn: At the lamb’s high feast

Easter is one of those holidays, like Christmas, that has some really famous, really well-loved, really satisfying hymns to sing.  Jesus Christ is ris’n today or its twin, Christ the Lord is ris’n today, are so classic I’m tempted to say “Easter just wouldn’t be Easter without singing that song!”  There are, of course, many other Easter hymns of lesser fame that are quite fantastic for the holiday, and one of my favorites in that middle category is At the lamb’s high feast we sing.  Set to the tune SALZBURG, it bears a grandeur both lyric and melodic that deserves higher praise than it usually seems to get.

At the lamb’s high feast we sing
Praise to our victorious King,
Who hath washed us in the tide
Flowing from his pierced side;
Praise we him, whose love divine
Gives his sacred blood for wine,
Gives his body for the feast,
Christ the victim Christ the priest.

That first stanza sets us firmly in the Easter celebration, makes a baptismal reference (as is traditional in the Easter celebrations), and then moves seamlessly to a eucharistic reference.  I especially appreciate how his sacrifice is described in the active sense: he gives his blood and body; he’s not just Christ the victim, but also Christ the priest!  This is, in my opinion, an emphasis that we often lack when discussing the atonement.

The second stanza continues:

Where the Psachal blood is poured,
Death’s dark angel sheathes his sword;
Israel’s hosts triumphant go
Thro’ the wave that drowns the foe.
Praise we Christ, whose blood was shed,
Paschal victim, Paschal bread;
With sincerity and love
Eat we manna from above.

The baptismal and eucharistic references remain, but are couched in more overtly Old Testament imagery, invoking the Passover and the Crossing of the Red Sea as the foreshadowings or prototypes of these two Sacraments of the Gospel.  It even manages (in the last two lines of this stanza) to reference the Easter Anthem (The Pascha Nostrum) and invoke the context of the teachings of 1 Corinthians 10, linking the Old Testament (particularly Exodus) waters and manna images to the New Covenant sacraments.

Mighty victim from the sky,
Hell’s fierce pow’rs beneath thee lie;
Thou hast conquered in the fight;
Thou hast brought us life and light;
Now no more can death appall,
Now no more the grave enthrall;
Thou hast opened paradise,
And in thee thy saints shall rise.

The brief Passover reference at the beginning of stanza 2 – the sheathing of the destroying angel’s sword – is explored here in full force.  The death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ has brought about a great victory.  Jesus is a “mighty victim from the sky”, yet, “Hell’s fierce powers” lie beneath him.  He has conquered, he has brought us from death to life, and those evils can never reign over us again; the hope of our own resurrection to eternal life is sealed for sure.

This leads the hymn to a great doxological ending:

Easter triumph, Easter joy,
Sin alone can this destroy;
From sin’s pow’r do thou set free
Souls new-born, O Lord, in thee.
Hymns of glory, songs of praise,
Father unto thee we raise;
Risen Lord, all praise to thee
With the Spirit ever be.  Amen.

That second line always bugs me – “sin alone can this destroy“… It is obviously meant that sin is the object, not the subject, of the verb destroy: Easter triumph and joy alone can destroy sin.  But there’s just no decent way to get the word order sorted out with perfect clarity without destroying the rhyme scheme of the lyrics.  You just have to roll with the poetry, which we moderns and post-moderns are not generally very good at doing.  Getting over that shortcoming in ourselves, however, this is a logical and fitting apex for the hymn.  Christ’s victory is over sin itself, and in his Gospel we find freedom.  And thus we praise the triune God, Father, Risen Lord, and Spirit.

There’s still plenty of Easter Sundays left… get it into your congregation’s hands if you haven’t already!  It works as a communion hymn, offertory/doxology hymn, processional, recessional… nearly anywhere in the liturgy where singing can be found!

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The Collect for Easter III

Yesterday’s Collect of the Day, which as usual serves throughout this week in the Daily Office, has an interesting history and pedigree.  In the historic Prayer Books it served for the Second Sunday after Easter, which was Good Shepherd Sunday.  In the 1979 Prayer Book, this Collect traveled to the another part of the year to serve for Proper 15 (mid/late August).  And now in the 2019 BCP it’s back in the same relative position in Eater, the Third Sunday of Easter.

Almighty God, you gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly living: Give us grace thankfully to receive his inestimable benefits, and daily to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

So let’s take a look at what makes this Collect so versatile.

Theologically speaking, this Collect works incredibly efficiently at drawing together models and doctrines of the atonement.  Jesus is both a sacrifice for sin (substitutionary atonement or something like that) and an example to imitate (moral example).  These models then lend themselves to a double application: we are to be thankful in the reception of his grace and daily to follow (or in the classical and perhaps more honest wording, daily endeavor to follow) in the footsteps of his sinless life.  The call to thanks-giving, our Eucharistic sacrifice, and to faithful obedience, our Christian duty, go hand-in-hand.  With such lofty and gospel-central themes, this prayer could make its home nearly anywhere in the Christian year, though Eastertide is most natural as the celebration of the resurrection of Christ most directly begs the question of what we are to do next.  And since the Easter Vigil and Day collects tend to focus on baptism and the resurrection life, it is only logical to move on to a eucharistic (thanks-giving) theme thereafter.

Paired with the Good Shepherd readings in the historic lectionary, this collect serves as a first line of application for the image of Jesus as our good shepherd.  Recognizing what the Shepherd does for the sheep and recognizing his voice, we learn to give thanks and to follow him.

But now, in the 2019 Prayer Book’s version of the modern lectionary, this collect is paired with Gospel lessons that deal with post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in Luke 24 or John 21.  The good shepherd connection is replaced with a “response to the resurrection” sort of mentality. Rather than latching onto a specific image (Jesus the Good Shepherd) this Collect works in tandem with the general Eastertide theme: resurrection and new life.  It may make the prayer itself feel a bit more arbitrary, but it still gets the job done.

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Book Review: The 1940 Hymnal

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.

When the church I currently serve was first planted, the former Episcopalians got in touch with their previous church and were donated a big box of hymnals.  The church had closed a camp location some years previously, and so they had a pile of hymnals they didn’t use or need anymore.  And, as it turned out, they were “obsolete” – they were copies of The 1940 Hymnal.  As a keyboardist, and still new to Anglican hymnody, I wasn’t sure what to make of this: how different was this book from the newer one I was getting to know at my then-home church?

I quickly came to appreciate the 1940 hymnal a lot, and cherish its resources.  Being from 1940, it was appointed to work alongside the 1928 Prayer Book, which has the historic one-year calendar and lectionary for the Sunday Communion services.  As a result, things were simple enough that it was able to provide recommended hymns for each Sunday and Major Feast Day of the year in a Liturgical Index in the back, along with other indexes that are standard to virtually all hymnals (author/source, tune, meter, first line of text, topic).  For the years that my church followed the 1662 BCP’s lectionary, this was immensely useful for me; otherwise that index is little more than of historical interest.

The Contents of the 1940 Hymnal are as follows:

  • #1-111 The Christian Year
  • #112-136 Saints’ Days and Holy Days
  • #137-138 Thanksgiving and National Days
  • #149-184 Morning and Evening
  • #185-228 Sacraments and other Rites of the Church
  • #229-234 Litanies
  • #235-252 Hymns for Children
  • #253-265 Missions
  • #266-600 General Hymns
    • #266-277 The Blessed Trinity
    • #278-315 The Praise of God
    • #316-367 Jesus Christ our Lord
    • #368-379 The Holy Spirit
    • #380-398 The Church as God’s gift
    • #399-403 Holy Scripture, the Church’s gift
    • #404-490 Personal Religion
    • #491-548 Social Religion
    • #549-581 The Church Militant
    • #5822-600 The Church Triumphant
  • Directions for Chanting
  • The Choral Service
  • Morning & Evening & Occasional Canticles
  • Service Music for the Holy Communion

Most of these sections subdivide further into smaller units.  Some of these sections are labeled in ways that suggest the liberalizing trend in the Episcopal Church even back then.

At the end of each liturgical season section is a list of appropriate selections from the General Hymns that would also do well to fill out the season, which I found very helpful.  A rather mixed blessing, however, came in the balance of the number of hymns for each season.  There are 111 season-based hymns in here, and 34 of them are for Christmas!  Twelve days of the year get nearly a third of the hymns.  Advent got short-changed.  Lent was a bit lacking in representation, too, especially when looking among the General Hymns for good penitential lyrics.

There are also a lot Office hymns: 11 for the Morning, 1 for Noon, 1 for the Afternoon, and 22 for the Evening.  Clearly, Choral Evensong was a lot more common back then than it is now.

There are a few cross-denominational popular hymns that are conspicuously absent from this hymnal, most notably Amazing Grace.

But on the whole, this is a hymnal that I really came to love.  Every hymn has a full 3-or-more-part piano choral arrangement and/or keyboard accompaniment.  The print is clear (if a bit faded in the physically older copies we used).

Accessibility: 4/5
Like most hymnals, this is well-organized; and like most Anglican hymnals, it is conformed to the Calendar.  The indexes are easy to navigate.  You don’t need a separate edition for the pianist to accompany the singers.

Devotional Usefulness: 3/5
Some of its sacrament-related hymns lean high-church.  Some of its national and “social religion” hymns may feel a bit too “worldly”.  The calendar and the translation of the liturgy are out of date if you’re using a modern prayer book.  There is a distinct lack of songs dealing with subjects like penitence and the Holy Spirit.  Depending upon how you feel about these issues, this rating may bump or down a notch accordingly.

Reference Value: 4/5
If you only have a “contemporary” hymnal, like the Episcopalian hymnal of 1982, then this book is of immense value in preserving a number of gems that got lost in the update, and I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy of this if you like to read or sing hymns.

My church used this hymnal for eight years, seven of which I was the music minister rummaging through it for songs to sing each Sunday.  I became well-acquainted with its shortcomings, but on the whole was very happy with it, and was in no rush to “upgrade” away from it.  If you’re a music minister, or a hymn enthusiast, this almost definitely belongs in your collection.

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Reading 1 Peter in Eastertide

This evening the Daily Office Lectionary begins its trek through the epistle 1 Peter.  As you may recall, 1 Peter is one of the three books that gets highlighted in the Epistle lesson slot during Eastertide in the Sunday Communion lectionary.  It’s kind of neat that we get to read this book in the month of May, either to reinforce or contextualize the Sunday readings if it’s that year, or giving us the book’s coverage on the years that don’t touch upon it on Sundays.

The First Epistle of St. Peter is a sobering book to read; it deals plainly with the subject of enduring persecution, noting that many churches in the region of Cappadocia have already begun to experience that.  As such, the letter looks keenly at the eschaton, the End of history, while acknowledging that the “Last Days” are already begun.  The letter also looks firmly back, at Jesus Christ, firmly grounding the Christian’s identity in the completed work of Christ.  Related to that, 1 Peter also contains one of the most strongly-worded teachings about Holy Baptism, if couched in one of the most difficult contexts in the entire New Testament.  It even makes space for ethical and pastoral instruction.

In Year A of the Sunday Communion lectionary, the suffering-related texts tend to get omitted.  It’s understandable, when choosing highlights to summarize the book in the Easter season. but still obviously a bit of a loss compared to the depth of the book itself.  So the Daily Office, here, is where we really get to dig into this (and every) book.  In an evangelical culture so used to focusing on the writings of St. Paul, a careful read of this book can be a refreshing perspective check.  Enjoy it!

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Hymn: the way, truth, life

There’s a perfect hymn for Saints Philip and James Day which works perfectly with both the Collect and the Gospel lesson:

1 Thou art the Way: to thee alone
from sin and death we flee;
and he who would the Father seek,
must seek him, Lord, by thee.

2 Thou art the Truth: thy Word alone
true wisdom can impart;
thou only canst inform the mind,
and purify the heart.

3 Thou art the Life: the rending tomb
proclaims thy conquering arm,
and those who put their trust in thee
nor death nor hell shall harm.

4 Thou art the Way, the Truth, the Life:
grant us that Way to know,
that Truth to keep, that Life to win,
whose joys eternal flow.  Amen.

This lovely reflection on Jesus as the way, truth, and life, is an excellent pairing with yesterday’s holy day.  And also, as I commented in that post, the 5th Sunday of Easter will also be a good candidate for singing this hymn, as its collect is derived from the traditional collect for Philip & James.  Check it out; consider appointing it for your church’s worship service that day if you’re on the modern calendar; or just enjoy it on your own!

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Philip & James, Old & New

It feels a bit silly to approach a “mere” major feast day with an “old & new” comparative article.  That sort of analysis is usually better spent upon whole seasons rather than individual days.  But this holiday in particular has undergone some interesting transformation and reassessment and repurposing.

First of all, let’s consider the traditional Collect.  Roughly adapted to modern idiom, it reads:

O ALMIGHTY God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life; that, following the steps of your holy Apostles, Saint Philip and Saint James, we may steadfastly walk in the way that leads to eternal life; through the same your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

This collect, dropping the mention of Philip and James, has been repurposed as the Collect for the 5th Sunday of Easter in the modern calendar.  This is pretty neat: the collect was considered so great that it got moved to a Sunday where it will be heard by the majority of church-goers (rather than only the few who participate in the liturgy during the week).  And placing that Collect in Eastertide means that it’ll always be generally near the May 1st holiday it originally belonged to.  The modern collect for Saints Philip & James Day still draws upon the “way, truth, and life” quote, pairing with mostly the same Gospel reading as in the traditional lectionary, which is good, though the petition and application of the Collect comes out rather differently:

Almighty God, who gave to your apostles Philip and James the grace and strength to bear witness to Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life: Grant that we, being mindful of their victory of faith, may glorify in life and death the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The other major change is the Epistle.  Traditionally, the reading was James 1:1-12.  Those verses did have some thematic connection with the traditional Collect, but a more significant consideration is the identity of James.  There are, today, typically three men named James in the New Testament:

  1. James the Great/Elder, Apostle, brother of the Apostle John, commemorated on July 25th
  2. James the Less, Apostle, commemorated with Philip on May 1st
  3. James of Jerusalem, kinsman of Jesus, author of the Epistle of James, commemorated on October 23rd

For a good portion of the Church’s history of biblical interpretation, James the Less and James of Jerusalem have tended to be considered the same man.  But, now that scholarly opinion prefers to see three different characters named James, it was decided that the epistle of James should be not read on the feast day for the “wrong James”, so a different epistle lesson was appointed instead: the popular “jars of clay” passage, 2 Corinthians 4:1-7.

This text, too, has a thematic role: it speaks of the ministry of the apostles, of veiling and unveiling the truth, of blindness and sight, knowledge of the glory of Christ presented in earthen vessels.  Echoes of John 14 can be found here, and so can an allegory of these lesser-known apostles: compared to other apostles whom we know better from the Scriptures, Philip and James are very much like clay jars (humble, seemingly expendable characters) who nevertheless carried the glorious and imperishable word of God to the nations.

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The Prayer Book (2019) is Online

Have you heard the news?  BCP 2019 in its final form, page numbers and all, was put online and officially announced during Holy Week.  I would have mentioned it here that day, but Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof was burning, and amidst all the other goings-on both in world events and in liturgical matters, there just wasn’t a good opportunity to say here “oh by the way, habemus librem!”  (Pardon the Papist joke.)

Anyway… the official website is here: http://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/

The Home tab doesn’t have much to say; just a couple quotes and a button to the text/download page.

The Text tab is where you can download the whole book as a pdf, or any of its twelve parts as either a pdf or a Word document.

The Purchase tab doesn’t contain any links for ordering books yet; that won’t be available until June.  But it does show the two options that are in the works – a standard pew edition and a leather covered edition with four ribbons.

The History tab provides a brief outline of Anglican history, particularly noting the Prayer Book tradition leading to where we are today.

The Resources tab, finally, has a couple articles and a video about the new version of the liturgies of the church, as well as buttons to other pages that provide bulletin leaflets for the Communion service throughout the three-year cycle, and another button to “miscellaneous” resources.  These include a bunch of bits and pieces that the old Texts for Common Prayer page housed, such as translations into other languages, supplementary liturgical resources, study notes and reports from the liturgical task force, and some other reference articles that explain some of the features of the liturgies that might raise questions in some quarters.

If you find yourself critical of something in the 2019 BCP, or even just unsure and curious, be sure to peruse that Resources page in case your issue is already addressed there!

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Happy Saint Mark’s Day!

If you’ve got a “Churchman’s Ordo Calendar” or other such liturgical resource hanging on your wall, you may see today is Saint Mark’s Day [transferred].  This may be puzzling to some people – why is it transferred, and what does that mean?

A certain calibre of holy day can be transferred in the event that it conflicts with another, higher ranking, holy day.  When you think of a “day” in liturgical time, imagine there is only room for one Communion service.  In the event that you get double-booked, a judgment call has to be made: which holy day will you celebrate, and will the other one just get skipped for the year, or get transferred to the next available day?

In the Prayer Book tradition, taking its cue from Western Catholic practice in general, we have Major Feast Days (“red-letter days” as provided in the Prayer Book) and we have commemorations (“black-letter days” listed in the Prayer Book calendar).  Commemorations are of a low rank; they get skipped if they coincide with a Sunday or other holy day.  The Major Feast Days, however, are generally required in the Prayer Book tradition, and therefore they will either replace the Sunday they land on (depending upon the season) or they will get bumped back to the next available date.

Saint Mark’s Day is supposed to be April 25th.  But this year, April 25th fell within Easter Week, wherein the Prayer Book tradition does not allow any non-Easter intrusions.  A few days ago I mistakenly stated that the old Prayer Books allowed holy days like this to be celebrated later in Easter Week, but closer inspection of the old calendar rules revealed that, even though Easter Week only provides two sets of Collects and Lessons, the whole week is still off-limits for other major feast days.  So whether you’re using an old or new prayer book, Saint Mark’s Day is still transferred to today.

If you take a look at both the major feast days and the commemorations throughout the year, you’ll notice that there’s a convenient gap through much of March and April where they get pretty sparse.  The average month has three major feast days in it, but March has just two, and April only one!  This is because of the overriding presence of Holy Week and Easter Week – every year, somewhere in this time of year, those two weeks in a row will blot out all the commemorations in its path, and cause any of those major feast days to be transferred.  So, the fewer saints days we schedule in these months, the less we have to deal with this situation.  Pretty smart, huh? 😉