Monthly Archives: October 2012

Richly usable words

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Thomas Cranmer’s phrases echo through English literature and popular culture.

From “God Talk: The Book of Common Prayer at 350” — a literary appreciation by James Wood in The New Yorker:

“A grand sonority (with the characteristic Cranmerian triad of ‘all holy desires,  all good counsels, and all just works’) gives way to a heartfelt request: please defend us from enemies, so that we may ‘pass our time in rest and quietness.’ It’s interesting to compare the original Latin of this old prayer, which  appeared in the Sarum Missal: ‘Tempora sint tua protectione tranquilla‘ can be roughly translated as ‘May our time under thy protection be tranquil.’ In a fourteenth-century English primer, it was translated into English, and the prayer was now that ‘our times be peaceable.’ But Cranmer has made the plea smaller and closer at hand. In the Book of Common Prayer, the language seems not to refer to the epoch (our time) but to something more local (my days); and tranquillity and peace have become the comfier ‘rest  and quietness.’”

Wood draws a conclusion that I would not when he says, “the words persist, but the belief they vouchsafe has long gone.” He does go on, however, to say that “the words are, in the absence of belief, as richly usable as they were three hundred and fifty years ago.”

I hope, for my part, that you will find your belief strengthened by the “richly usable” words of our Book of Common Prayer, and especially by the canticles, collects, and prayers of the Daily Office.

A Collect for Peace

Most holy God, the source of all good desires, all right judgments, and all just works: Give to us, your servants, that peace which the world cannot give, so that our minds may be fixed on the doing of your will, and that we, being delivered from the fear of our enemies, may live in peace and quietness; through the mercies of Christ Jesus our Savior (BCP 123).

Patterns of life

“Praying the Office just every once in a while isn’t enough. It has to become a discipline. That doesn’t mean that if you miss it once you’re lost or anything, but its power lies in the force of habits. Habits of mind, habits of devotion, habits of thought. That’s what transforms us—patterns of life.”

From a longer address on the Daily Office and the Anglo-Catholic social conscience at Derek Olsen’s blog.

A hidden dying to self day by day

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From the Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Chapter 18: The Daily Office

“But for the office to be truly a means of our transfiguration we must cooperate by continually re­newing our inner attentiveness, laying aside again and again the preoccupations and daydreams that confuse and tie us down.  This effort to keep our hearts open to Christ will be needed all our lives; it is a hidden dying to self day by day.”

Seven times a day will I praise you

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When I read the verse from Psalm 119 this morning (164), the word “seven” reminded me of a favorite hymn — King of Glory, King of Peace — with words by George Herbert:

Seven whole days, not one in seven,
I will praise thee;
In my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee

Small it is, in this poor sort
To enroll thee;
E’en eternity’s too short
To extol thee.

-George Herbert

And here’s a video of the hymn being sung at Washington National Cathedral.

Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful

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My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. (Hosea 11:8-9)

In the Gospel appointed for today, we hear Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount telling us to love our enemies.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” he asks. “Even sinners do the same.”

“But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:35-36).

Popular sentiment on Facebook and elsewhere these days runs more like this — if someone doesn’t like you, don’t keep them in your life. If someone disagrees with you, unfriend them or block their posts. Love those who love you.

But we are called to “a still more excellent way,” as Paul would describe it (1 Cor. 13). We are called to see clearly what people are up to, and to love them still. We are called to engage, not to disengage, and to be merciful to others with the warm and tender compassion of God.

Church Geek Note:

Today on the church calendar we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, translators of the Bible (1536, 1569). Just a year after Tyndale was executed for heresy (for daring to translate the New Testament into English), Coverdale completed the work and the Matthew Bible was published in 1537 in England. The Psalter from Coverdale’s Great Bible of 1539 was used in the English Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and 1662, and (with many revisions over the years) in American Prayer Books through 1928.

Our current Psalter is a translation directly from the Hebrew that takes advantage of 400 years of biblical scholarship. However, Marion Hatchett writes in his Commentary on the American Prayer Book that “the rhythmic expression which characterized Coverdale’s work has been preserved. So that the psalms may be congruent with the services in traditional language, the vocabulary has been largely restricted to that available to Coverdale” (551).

Almighty God, you planted in the heart of your servants William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale a consuming passion to bring the Scriptures to people in their native tongue, and endowed them with the gift of powerful and graceful expression and with strength to persevere against all obstacles: Reveal to us your saving Word, as we read and study the Scriptures, and hear them calling us to repentance and life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Faith Alive: Being Apostles

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Now during those days, Jesus went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles. (Luke 6:12-13)

Then Ananias said to Saul, “The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear his own voice; for you will be his witness to all the world of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.” (Acts 22:14-16)

We hear this morning from both books in Luke’s “orderly account” — the Gospel that bears his name and the Book of Acts — about the naming of Jesus’ first apostles and the dramatic conversion of Saul, who became Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles.

Being an apostle implies both a close relationship to Jesus and a mission to share his message.

If we are in relationship with Jesus, we will do what he does — spend the night in prayer to God and follow the way of the cross, which we will find is “none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP 99).

If we are sent on a mission like Paul, we will not delay but will instead live into our baptism now by sharing the Good News of what the living Lord is doing in our lives.

Immediately after reading the lessons in either Morning or Evening Prayer, we recite the Apostles’ Creed, the early baptismal creed of the church.

Every day, twice a day, we reconnect to the very first apostles of Jesus Christ and pledge ourselves — using the same words their followers used — to share in their mission.

“Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.” (BCP 102)

Some shouted one thing, some another

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Then the tribune came, arrested him, and ordered him to be bound with two chains; he inquired who he was and what he had done. Some in the crowd shouted one thing, some another; and, as he could not learn the facts because of the uproar, he ordered him to be brought into the barracks. (Acts 21:33-34)

This morning, as I read the biography of St. Francis provided in the Church of England’s Twitter feed, I was reminded that Francis, too, was bound in chains early in his life when his father took him to court for selling bolts of cloth (and the horse that had pulled the wagon) and giving the money to a local church.

In both cases, public opinion was sharply divided over these followers of Christ. In both cases, neither side of the debate got at the heart of the matter.

Was Paul teaching against Jewish law and actually bringing Greeks into the Temple? Was Francis undermining good order by his dramatic poverty and his embrace of lepers?

We’ve seen in history what happened to these two followers of the Gospel.

Paul’s radical new community — no longer male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free — became more accommodated to Greco-Roman society, even within the time period of the Nw Testament, and ultimately became the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Francis’ Friars Minor, even during his lifetime, preferred to live in convents like the other monastic orders — approved bastions of the Roman Church and medieval society 1,200 years on from the New Testament days — rather than following his simple rule of begging and preaching.

What still gets lost in the debate, even today, is the central question each of these men faced: How complete is Christ’s claim on my life?

Some shout one thing, some another, but what is the voice of the living Lord trying to say?

What to do with these emotions?

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Let his days be few,
and let another take his office.

Let his children be fatherless,
and his wife become a widow. (Psalm 109:7-8)

The Daily Office lectionary this morning suggests omitting several verses of Psalm 109, one of the psalms known as an “imprecatory” psalm because it asks God to curse one’s enemies.

This particular psalm gained some notoriety earlier this year in an email circulated by Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal asking people to pray for President Obama and citing these verses. What to do with these emotions?

I like this introduction to the Psalms in A New Zealand Prayer Book: He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa: “The wide appeal of the psalms rests on their ability to give words to some of our deepest feelings in the face of life’s experiences. Whether for joy, worship and exaltation, or degradation and rejection, or hope, faith, love, anger, or despair, the psalms contain verses that reflect such moods. In them the various writers expressed to God the thoughts of their heart and spirit. The richness of the psalms still speaks to us and in them we too can find words to match many of our moods and express them before God. In turn God can still address us through these psalms.”

Psalm 109 and others like it “give words to some of our deepest feelings” — feelings of anger and bitterness and the hope that our enemies will suffer — but “in turn God can still address us through these psalms.”

As we pour out our rage, we do so in the light of Christ, who “stretched out [his] arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of [his] saving embrace” — not just us, but our enemies, too.

As we choke out our bitterness, the Word of God “opens our lips” so our mouths can instead “show forth [his] praise.”

Though these imprecatory verses of the Psalter do not express the Christian understanding of God’s relationship with people (which is why they are usually omitted from our public worship), they do still express our very human frustrations and fears.

They may, in fact, help us in our private prayers to more honestly bring all of our concerns to God in order that we might be freed from anger and made whole again.