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All Saints’ to Advent

Autumn is my favorite time of year.  Autumn in New England, in terms of nature’s visual beauty, can’t be beat.  September has my ordination anniversary, and October my birthday.  And then there’s November with All Saints’ Day and Thanksgiving, and the excitement for Advent to begin after that.  And in the liturgical calendar, November is also an interesting time of year.  Both the traditional calendar as well as the modern anticipate the transition from Trinitytide to Advent in the last couple weeks (or last few weeks) before Advent.

In the traditional calendar (assuming Trinitytide is long enough on a given year) you’ve got the culmination of the massive discipleship course on the 24th Sunday, where a focus on absolution and perfection can be found.  The “last epiphany” often chimes in there too, making a connection to the return of Christ; and the Last Sunday before Advent translates that into one last kick in the seat to get on with good works as the next season is about to start.  Thus, on the heels of All Saints’ Day, the traditional calendar points us in the direction of sainthood, bringing the liturgical year full circle.

In the modern calendar (and the Revised Common Lectionary family), the context of what’s going is extremely different, but the effect at this stage is actually very similar.  Trinitytide is not a discipleship course in the modern lectionaries, but rather a survey through the Gospels and Epistles, cycling through different books in each of its three years.  Towards the end of the season, though, the gospels reach the last parables and teachings of Jesus, bringing us to the final calls to holiness (like the parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25) and the great eschatological discourse.  Christ the King Sunday, in its modern position directly before Advent, plays well into this scheme, transitioning the modern Trinitytide into the season of Advent.

(Yes, there are those who argue, quite fairly, that Christ the King is primarily supposed to be a feature of Ascensiontide instead, but that’s a debate for another time.)

Advent, then, both old and new, begins with the same end-times emphasis in the Gospels, smoothly picking up where the previous season left off, because the lectionary has prepared us for it.

For those planning the worship, particularly choosing the music and writing the sermons, this transition can be a great gift for the congregation if we just let it shine forth.  In these few Sundays between All Saints’ and Advent, we can mix in a nice pile of hymns for All Saints, or the Church Triumphant, the Kingdom of God, the Kingship of Christ, the return of Christ and Advent.  How to execute this mix and transition of themes will vary depending upon which calendar & lectionary you’re using, and what exactly the preaching plan is, but in general this all works together.

Fun fact: over in England, their modernization of the calendar is a little different than ours.  For them, Trinitytide ends in October, and All Saints’ Sunday kicks off what is essentially a Pre-Advent season, sometimes called ‘Kingdomtide.’  The liturgical color is recommended to be red.  This strikes me as somewhat unnecessary – the traditional lectionary and the RCL already provide a Pre-Advent time without specially marking one out.  This Kingdomtide addition also makes the removal of the traditional Pre-Lent Sundays rather hypocritical.  If you poke around the Anglican Communion today, you will find some provinces have a modern calendar like ours – the American style – and others will have one like the English one.  So if you ever travel abroad at this time of year, be aware that there may be some noteworthy lectionary divergences this month.  The good news is that, despite the various methods, the general effect is mercifully similar across the board.

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There are a lot of commemorations this month…

Looking through the calendar of commemorations for the month of November, it seems as though there are rather more commemorations this month than in a lot of others.  And not just popular saints days, but particularly quite a few early British ones.  We’ve got:

And beyond them a few memorials of recent great Anglicans include Richard Hooker, William Temple, Charles Simeon, the Consecration of America’s first Bishop, and C.S. Lewis.  Not to mention a few classic saints from early times like St. Leo the Great, St. Martin of Tours, St. Cecilia, St. Clement, and St. Catherine of Alexandria.

The four names in bold, above, are people about whom I’ve written articles myself.  The rest of the links are to Wikipedia.

Now, whether you want to make a point of remembering these men and women in a Communion or Antecommunion service is up to you and/or your priest.  And you may wish to consult this Customary’s guide to handling the sanctoral calendar for advice.  Whatever so, this is a month with commemorations that particularly remind us of the deep roots we have in English spirituality and tradition.

The Lord is glorious in his saints.  O come, let us adore him!

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Readings Review & Planning Propers 11/4

What we’re doing on this blog on Mondays is looking back and forth at the Daily Office readings (or lessons) so we can better process together what the Scriptures are saying, and list the recommended Propers for the Communion or Antecommunion service for each day of the week.

Readings Review

Last week: 2 Kings 15-17, 2 Chronicles 28-29, Acts 5:12-9:31, Isaiah 9-15, Mark 8:11-11:26

This week: 2 Kings 18-22, 2 Chronicles 30-33, Acts 9:32-13:12, Isaiah 16-22, Mark 11-14

Both in Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer we are hurtling toward some major endings.  In Morning Prayer we are powering through the last century of the kingdom of Judah, recorded in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.  We’re in the reign of Hezekiah at the moment, who was one of the last great kings of Judah.  He’s featured heavily not only Kings and Chronicles but also in the middle of Isaiah, so we’ll hear some of his stories again from that book later this month.  We’ll then bounce through the lows and highs of Manasseh and Josiah over the coming week, and finally crash into the destruction of Jerusalem early next week.

In Evening Prayer we have been moving through Mark’s Gospel.  Last week we entered the second “half” of the book, where Jesus’ teachings and claims are increasingly tested.  Disagreements and questionings, even from St. Peter, characterize this half of the book, and things only continue to escalate this week.  We’ve just had the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, so now we’re in “holy week”, leading up to the crucifixion.  It’s an interesting experience reading through the Gospel books at this pace – you discover just how much attention is given to the death and resurrection of our Lord.  In this lectionary, for example, it takes about four weeks to read Mark, which means a quarter of the book is spent on Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem!  You’ll also note here (as in the other gospels) that the chapters dealing with the trial and crucifixion and death are the longest chapters in the book.

Many of us are used to thinking of the resurrection of our Lord as being “more important” than his suffering and death, so it’s thought-provoking to see the Gospels give more attention to the death than the resurrection.

Planning Propers

This is the week of Proper 26 (or 20th after Trinity 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.  Especially this week a weekday communion service probably should use “Proper 26” if it was not used on Sunday!  Otherwise, we recommend…

  • Monday 11/4 = Votive *
  • Tuesday 11/5 = Elizabeth & Zechariah
  • Wednesday 11/6 = Votive
  • Thursday 11/7 = Votive or St. Willibrord
  • Friday 11/8 = Votive
  • Saturday 11/9 = Votive

* A Votive is a “Various Occasion” (page 733 in the BCP 2019).  The traditional appointments are Holy Trinity on Sunday, Holy Spirit on Monday, Holy Angels on Tuesday, of the Incarnation on Wednesdays, of the Holy Eucharist on Thursdays, the Holy Cross on Fridays, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Saturdays.

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Will the real All Saints’ Day please stand up?

Happy All Saints’ Day!  Halloween or All Hallow’s Eve has brought us safely here at last.

“Wait, Father Brench, my church is transferring All Saints’ Day to Sunday instead.”

Actually that’s not quite how it works.  Our prayer book, on page 688, explains:

All Saints’ Day may also be observed on the Sunday following November 1, in addition to its observance on the fixed date.

Notice that this scheme gives us “two” All Saints’ Days.  What’s really going on here is the last vestige of the ancient “Octave of All Saints.”  We’ve discussed Octaves before, but it’s worth summarizing again: an octave is an eight-day period of time devoted to a special celebration.  All the highest feasts of the year had one: Easter Octave (Sunday to Sunday), Pentecost Octave (Day of Pentecost through Trinity Sunday), All Saints’ Day (November 1st-8th), and I believe a few other holidays here and there also here.  Modern prayer book tradition, with its allowance to celebrate All Saints’ Day on the Sunday within its octave, therefore preserves a piece of that ancient octave!

In short, if you’re celebrating All Saints’ Sunday, remember that today is still All Saints’ Day.  The Daily Office lectionary has a special reading for this feast day in both Morning and Evening Prayer, which is exceedingly rare in the 2019 lectionary.  So enjoy the holiday today, don’t fast, and sing For all the saints loudly on Sunday!

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The Singing Schedule has changed

Did you know that The Saint Aelfric Customary offers a sing-the-hymnal-in-a-year plan, for the Book of Common Praise (2017) put out by the Reformed Episcopal Church – a subjurisdiction of the Anglican Church in North America?  It’s true, and you can read about it here.  Like the Bible, thanks to the daily office lectionary with its expansion, and like the options in the Prayer Book itself, the principle of completionism is at work here.  The idea of completionism is that if (or as) these books are fully authorized and endorsed by ecclesiastical authority, it is right and good for the Christian to (at least have a means to) read or make use of every page in its appropriate time.

Even if you’re not using this daily hymnody plan, at least skip to the last paragraph for a calendar insight.

With the hymnal, as we draw near the end of the liturgical year, the pace of the hymnody has changed.  From Trinity Sunday until this past Sunday (Proper 24) it has brought us two hymns almost every day of the week, working through the bulk of the General Hymns half of the book.  The “Christian Warfare” section has been running its course for the past week or so, some of it lining up neatly with the war stories of 1 & 2 Maccabees.  But now we’re down to one hymn a day, allowing more room for the Morning & Evening Hymns, and generally decreasing the time it takes to say the Office.  But there’s another practical reason also…

As the month of November approaches, the number of holy days increases.  The second half of October is unusually rich with major feast days but November starts off with All Saints’ Day, which is one of the seven principle feasts of the year, and includes Thanksgiving Day.  Both of these holidays have a substantial number of hymns associated with them, and therefore the regular progress through the hymnal is slowed at this to make room for the numerous special hymns of the season.  More than half of the days in November have at least one holiday hymn appointed for them.  So if you’re not normally a user of the hymnal in the rounds of daily worship, this time of year is a good one to consider picking one up and giving it a try on occasion.  Here are some of the hymns coming up, for your consideration:

  • 23 Oct. (St. James) – #195 Rise again, ye lion-hearted
  • 28 Oct. (Sts. Simon & Jude)- #169v20 From all the saints in warfare
  • 31 Oct. – #617 Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
  • 1 Nov. (All Saints’) – #186 For all the saints, #193 Lord, who shall come to thee
  • 2 Nov. (Commemoration of the faithful departed)
    – #187 Behold a host, arrayed in white, #319 O Lord, my God, I cry to thee
  • 3 Nov. (now filling out the All Saints/Souls Octave)
    – #191 Who are these like stars appearing
  • 4 Nov. – #192 I sing a song of the saints of God
  • 5 Nov. – #194  The saints of God! their conflict past
  • 6 Nov. – #318 Tempted and tried
  • 7 Nov. – #320 I fall asleep in Jesus’ wounds
  • 8 Nov. (now leading to Veteran’s/Remembrance Day)
    – #215 Thou by heav’nly hosts adored
  • 9 Nov. – #216 Rejoice, O land
  • 10 Nov. – #217 God bless our native land
  • 11 Nov. – #218 God of our fathers, whose almighty hand
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Leading up to All Saints’ Day

There are three major feast days in October, in the modern calendar, and with All Saints’ Day on November 1st we get a pretty close succession of four holidays in close proximity.

This unusually “thick” part of the calendar actually make for an excellent introduction to why we have Saints Days at all in the Anglican tradition.  Even though it’s been a staple of the Prayer Book order since Day One, there are many life-long self-identifying Anglicans who know almost nothing about the purpose of these holidays, and are even uncomfortable with talking about “saints” at all.  This is a real shame!  The discipleship value, not to mention spirituality, is great, and to lose this part of our tradition leaves a gap that can only be filled with lesser things.  So if you need or want an introduction to why we celebrate saints days, or know someone else who needs such an explanation, here’s an article using the next four holy days as an example: https://leorningcniht.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/the-testimony-of-the-saints/

In the meantime, consider yourself reminded of the upcoming holy days:

  • Friday the 18th is St. Luke’s Day
  • Wednesday the 23rd is St. James of Jerusalem’s Day
  • Monday the 28th is Sts. Simon & Jude’s Day
  • Friday the 1st of November is All Saints’ Day, which the calendar permits may also be celebrated on the Sunday immediately following (see page 688 of the BCP 2019).  This is one of the last vestiges of an Octave – wherein the holy day continues its observance for a full week after its official date.
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Your Own Commemorations

I recently read a reflection on the Church’s calendar, in which the author says: “The church year means that we don’t accidentally exclude a truth or event that is important for the life of our souls.”  What a clear and simple way to explain such a profound truth!

There are a number of truths and events that are important to our individual lives, too: birthdays, wedding anniversaries, baptism and confirmation anniversaries, graduations, new jobs, new homes, and so forth.  Dates and events like these form the skeleton of a Family Calendar that helps dictate the liturgy of your ordinary life.  It’s quite a neat comparison to how the Church Calendar sets up the framework for the liturgy of worship.

But there are a few spots where the Family Calendar and the Church Calendar might, and in a way should, intersect.  Just as there was once a tradition of a Family Bible with the names, birthdays, and death days and so forth, we can do the same with our Prayer Books.  Every Prayer Book has a calendar of commemorations, sometimes called “black-letter days”.  These calendars vary from book to book, and since they’re all technically optional, an implicit suggestion is that local churches can add to (or ignore) this calendar as is appropriate for their context.  The addition of St. Aelfric in this Customary is an example of that.

In that spirit, it can be a good idea for individuals to add in their own special commemorations in their own prayer books – not frivolous occasions, but ones that can and should be remembered in prayer somehow, such as deaths of family members and friends.  If you’re a parish priest, the death dates of members of your flock may be worth recording too.  It can help with the grieving process, it can help us remember the departed in an appropriate context, and even remind us to reach out to others who may be grieving more long-term.  I’ve already got seven names in my book, two of them are this month:

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The distinction between Anglican and Ecumenical commemorations may be somewhat irrelevant for this purpose; this is more a third, “Personal”, category anyway.

Also keep in mind that the Prayers of the People in the Anglican Standard Text (on page 111) has a fill-in-the-blank spot in which the names of the departed may be remembered.  One tradition is to name the departed on or close to their death date (sometimes called their obit), and another tradition is to name all of them at the All Soul’s Day service (which for most of us Anglicans actually will probably be All Saints’ Sunday).  Whatever you do or don’t do, remember that your copy of the Prayer Book is your copy; invest your spiritual life into it!

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What does “Proper 9” mean, anyway?

You have probably seen reference to this before, on this blog if nowhere else lately, that the previous two Sundays have been called “Proper 8” and “Proper 9”.  If you look inside our 2019 Prayer Book (as well as the old 1979) you’ll see these names in the Collects and Calendar sections.  There’s a further bit of explanation in the new book, which you might find handy – “PROPER 9 Week of the Sunday from July 3 to July 9” – but still doesn’t answer the question – what does “Proper” mean?

The term proper originally referred to parts of the Mass that changed from day to day or week to week: it was a feature of the Mass that was proper to a particular occasion or date.  Traditionally this included things like the Introit, Collect, Epistle, Gradual, Gospel, Offertory Sentence, Communion Sentence, and so on, but in the Prayer Book tradition the Propers were simplified to three things: Collect, Epistle, Gospel.  These three things are printed together, for each Sunday and Major Holy Day of the year, in the Prayer Book, such that you don’t actually need a Bible in hand to follow the entire Communion service.  The advent of the three-year lectionary, with its further addition of an Old Testament lesson and Psalm, has made such a feature much too large to fit in the Prayer book, so now our Communion lectionary is just a table of lessons, rather than the actual texts themselves.

With the radical revisions of the 1970’s came a revolutionary new liturgical calendar.  Pre-Lent was gone, Epiphanytide was almost completely revamped, and the season after Trinity Sunday was utterly rewritten.  You can read a little about how the historic Trinitytide season worked on this page.  The modern calendar, which our 2019 Prayer Book has inherited (this is my only significant complaint about the new book), does not build on “Sundays after Trinity” like the historic one, but instead has a set of “Propers” – that is, collects and lessons, tied to the secular calendar dates from late May until about four weeks before Christmas when Advent starts.  This means, given the shifting date of Easter from year to year, that although “Proper 29” will always be the last one before Advent, the first Proper Sunday will be different each year.  On average it starts around Proper 5 in roughly the second week of June.

One odd feature is the fact that Proper 1 is the week of the Sunday from May 8 to May 14, which is so early that neither it nor Proper 2 will ever be used on a Sunday!  They exist solely to provide for weekday Communion services of those weeks when Pentecost is that early, because the modern calendar has (again, sadly) one away with the Pentecost Octave.  Don’t worry, the Scripture lessons aren’t wasted, as they are duplicated with the corresponding Sundays in the latter weeks of the modern Epiphanytide.  Yes it’s complicated, but thankfully most people don’t have to worry about the mechanics of all this.  I only explain it here because someone out there is bound to be curious!

You can also look at the rubrics on page 614 for a few further notes about this portion (half) of the year.

To attempt to summarize this long answer into a short one… when you see “Proper 9”, don’t imagine it has any great special meaning.  It’s merely the 9th set of Propers (Collect & Lessons) in a line of Sundays spanning from May through November.  There are 29 in all, and we just jump right in to them after Trinity Sunday each summer.

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Sanctoral Calendar

When you look at the liturgical calendar of the Roman Church, with all its various types, classes, or ranks of feast days, you will quickly appreciate the simplicity of the Prayer Book tradition.  It’s either a “red-letter day”, that is, a holy day mandated in the book, or it is a “black letter day”, a commemoration that you can celebrate if you want to, or ignore if you want.

But the priest may find, after considering how best to celebrate some of the names in our calendar, that not all commemorations ought to be treated equally.  Certainly, yes, all God’s children are equal in His sight, but as we look to the examples of those who have gone before us, there is a marked difference in the impact of Augustine of Hippo and, say, Samuel Shoemaker.  Pastorally, it’s worth helping our flocks identify who the ‘major players’ are in church history, who the great theologians and teachers are, who lived truly holy lives that we can strive to emulate.  And thus we stumble back into the Western tradition of feast days of different ranks.

The Saint Aelfric Customary sets forth a four-tired rank of saints days, and it’s very simple.

  1. The Major Feast Days (“red-letter days”) are the ones specifically named and mandated in the prayer book.  They each have their own set of Collect and lessons for Holy Communion that day, and usually impact the Daily Office Lectionary with at least one special reading.
  2. The Minor Saints Days are “black letter days” which are identified as the most prominent.  If you have a weekday communion service on one of these days, they ought to be celebrated, as if they were a major feast.  Unlike major feasts, though, these aren’t celebrated on Sundays, and don’t impact the Daily Office.
  3. The Commemorations are the “black letter days” entirely unchanged – they’re still optional, at the discretion of the celebrant to observe or not.
  4. The Memorials are the “black letter days” that are set aside as not for observance at Holy Communion.  This is born out of a respect for the liturgical tradition of not naming new Saints without either due process or clear consensus.  And since the Anglican tradition has no official process, we can only gain new saints by martyrdom or by clear consensus.  The names in our calendar that do not meet these terms are therefore categorized as Memorials.

You can download the Saint Aelfric Customary version of the Sanctoral Calendar here.

Note also that this calendar “elevates” three commemorations to Major Feast Day status:  Aelfric, Augustine of Canterbury, and King Charles I.  This is due to the fact that they are the three “patron saints” of this Customary, and therefore ought to be especially available to those who use this Customary.

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Happy Birthday, John the Baptist!

This is one of the big feast days of the year, in some country’s traditions the most-celebrated of all Saints’ Days (especially in Scandinavia for some reason).  Rather than give you a single write-up about this feast day in Prayer Book tradition, we’re offering you a variety of angles to explore at your leisure.

#1 – the Natural Connection

https://leorningcniht.wordpress.com/2017/06/24/the-gospel-according-to-astronomy/

#2 – the Christmas Connection

nativity

#3 – the Calm Before the Storm