Sermon for the Annual Celebration of the Book of Common Prayer
Preached on Sunday 17th June 2007
at St Edward’s Church, Cambridge,
by Jesse D. Billett
I was first introduced to the Book of Common Prayer as a student at an Anglican boarding school in Canada. Under the centrepiece of every table in the school dining hall were laminated cards printed with the Order of Morning Prayer. On certain mornings after breakfast, the headmaster, Father Farnsworth, would approach the podium and say, ‘Take your prayer cards. Let us stand.’ And we would recite Morning Prayer, standing throughout. It was excruciating. On his first day at the school, my younger brother fainted during Morning Prayer and had to be removed to the infirmary. Perhaps it is appropriate that today’s readings included the complaint of Job!
It was not simply the physical torture that usually accompanied Prayer Book services that made for rough going; there was the language of the book itself: endless prayers in an archaic dialect, sub-clause after sub-clause, all stitched together with semicolons.
But, as St Paul has reminded us today, ‘tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope’ [Rom. 5:3–4]. Hope first glimmered for me one night at a service of Compline, when I saw an older boy refuse the usual laminated prayer card, choosing instead to follow the service in his Book of Common Prayer. Like all younger boys at boarding school, I beheld senior boys with a mixture of terror and wonder, and this example inspired me to explore the contents of the Prayer Book myself. With the aid of a copy temporarily stolen from the school chapel, I immersed myself in the cycle of Sunday collects, the calendar’s seasons and feasts, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed.
All the while, the round of services continued. The words of the Prayer Book engraved themselves on my heart, even if it was to be years before I correctly understood some of the more obscure language. I first began to look forward to the weekly Communion service because I liked to hear the Comfortable Words after the confession. These were always read by my Latin teacher, Dr Stewart, a retired priest much loved by the students. Coming from him, these words really did have power to comfort a troubled teen-aged soul. And so I was set on the path that led me to what I have become: a professional liturgical scholar and a lover of the Book of Common Prayer.
It is customary for a sermon on this occasion to expound the virtues of the Book of Common Prayer: the dignity of its language; the excellent fashioning of its liturgies; its enduring relevance throughout the stages of human life and over the centuries of its history. My distinguished predecessors in this pulpit have done this with greater eloquence and insight than ever I could. But such a sermon is necessarily directed to the wider Church, where use of the Prayer Book has declined. It is not directed at a congregation like ours, already persuaded of the Prayer Book’s merits and sensible of a duty to preserve and foster the Prayer Book’s use as a living form of prayer and praise. For us simply to extol the Prayer Book, or to flay its detractors, would be smug and self-congratulatory. To grow in faith and devotion, we must yearn for a more disciplined appreciation of the Prayer Book as an instrument of prayer, not an end in itself.
To help us in this appreciation of the Prayer Book as prayer, it may be useful to hear some words of Hugh Latimer, the great Reformation martyr who stood on many occasions exactly where I am standing now:
What thing is that that maketh our prayer acceptable to God? Is it our babbling? No, no; it is not our babbling, nor our long prayer; there is another thing than it. The dignity and worthiness of our words is of no such virtue. [...] It is not the babbling of our lips, nor dignity of our words, but the prayer of the heart is the offering that pleaseth, through the only means of his Son. For our prayer profiteth us, because we offer Christ to his Father. [...] So that it is faith, faith, faith is the matter. It is no prayer that is without faith, it is but a lip-labouring and mockery, without faith; it is but a little babbling.
‘The dignity and worthiness of our words.’ When Latimer thus spoke in 1549, the first Book of Common Prayer had just been published. It was about to displace the Latin liturgy that had continued uninterrupted in England for centuries. We are accustomed to speak in superlatives of the beauty of the liturgy of the Prayer Book; but the medieval Latin liturgy was the crowning glory of Western civilization. In the sixteenth century, some of its texts were already over a thousand years old, all of them firmly rooted in the language of the scriptures. It observed a glittering array of festivals. It was served by exquisite music. Its ceremonial was visually stunning. And at a stroke, it was all swept away: the books, confiscated; the ceremonies, abolished; the music, silenced. When Latimer refers to the ‘dignity and worthiness of our words’, he has in mind, I think, this old Latin liturgy. The reformers of the sixteenth century fully appreciated its ‘dignity and worthiness’. But this was not enough. The multiplicity of the texts, the splendour of the ritual, the beauty of the music, and above all the use of a language not ‘understanded of the people’, all this distracted from what Latimer called the ‘prayer of the heart’, offered through Christ. In place of all this former richness was offered a slender, austere collection of simple services: the Prayer Book.
In the course of over four centuries, we have also come to appreciate the services of the Prayer Book for the ‘dignity and worthiness of their words’. And as with the medieval Latin liturgy, there is today a very real risk that the Prayer Book will be increasingly abandoned because its dignified words are for many an obstacle to the prayer of the heart. In many ways, responsibility for this crisis lies with us. As defenders of the Prayer Book, we are too often guilty, as St Paul would say, of zeal without knowledge [Rom. 10:2]. Permit me now to suggest three misconceptions that we have about the Prayer Book that stand in the way of our more effective use of it as a tool of prayer.
First, we often profess that the Prayer Book is a timeless work of spiritual literature to be preserved to the letter. In reality, the Prayer Book has a complicated and varied history. It first appeared in 1549. It was revised heavily in 1552. Abolished in 1553. Restored, in a revised form, in 1559. Revised again in 1604. Abolished again in 1645. Restored in 1660. Revised in 1662. Further revisions failed in 1689 and 1928. Different revising interests, some more Catholic, some more Protestant, have constantly tugged it in opposite directions. At every stage, some people have simply ignored it. When all the versions are compared, some of the revisions emerge as successful; others less so. But once a text was introduced, perhaps in answer to a particular party concern, it was very difficult to remove it subsequently, even if it was blatantly detrimental.
Today’s Prayer Book bears the marks of all these accidents of history. A striking example is the famous ‘Black Rubric’ at the end of the Communion service, which carefully explains that, although the people are directed to kneel when they make their communion, this indicates no worshipping or adoration of the bread and wine. It was added as an afterthought in 1552 to placate extreme reformers suspicious of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. It disappeared in 1559, but returned in 1662. It has been retained in all subsequent editions down to this day; but it is a relic of the theological debates of another era. Not everything in the Prayer Book is relevant or valuable. This example also shows how things in the Prayer Book that we look on today as optional or inconsequential—for instance, I am sure that we have all attended Prayer Book Communion services at which we have received communion standing—were, in their original setting, carefully considered and strictly enforced. The way we celebrate Mattins in this church on most Sundays is not authorized by the Prayer Book at all. Our changes to the printed order are only authorized under the new Common Worship. So we deceive ourselves if we say that we hold the 1662 Prayer Book to be altogether timeless and inviolate.
A second misconception is that the language of the Prayer Book is comprehensible. One bishop of the Church has suggested that anyone who can read a motorcycle manual should have no difficulties with Prayer Book English. This may well be true; but this would also imply that we ought not to let people attend Prayer Book services before they have passed a test and been issued with a licence. Liturgical licensing would have to apply to clergy as well as the laity. Many priests, when pronouncing the words of institution at Communion, do not know how to parse ‘Drink ye all of this’ correctly, so that it becomes clear that the meaning is ‘Drink from this, all of you’, rather than ‘You, drink all of this!’. The meaning of this sentence as it is printed in the Prayer Book is genuinely ambiguous, and at a central moment in the liturgy. In many other, less crucial places, the Prayer Book is obscure and difficult. How we must discourage newcomers to the Book of Common Prayer by insisting that its language should not present a barrier to their understanding! And how we allow ourselves to remain in ignorance by not taking making sure that we have understood the Prayer Book correctly!
The last misconception about the Prayer Book that I would draw to your attention, related to the previous two, is that the text will mean the same thing to us in the twenty-first century as it meant in the sixteenth, and that the apparent literal meaning is the correct one. This morning we have prayed together, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.’ A friend once said to me that whenever he reached this point of the confession he would always add under his breath, ‘I may be an offender, but I’m not miserable.’ If we are to be faithful users of the Prayer Book, however, we must shed some of our assumptions about the theological meaning of a sentence like this. The confession before Mattins and Evensong was added to the Prayer Book in 1552, and I would not argue that it is successful in every way. But it is in our Prayer Book, so we should try to pray it well. It is based on the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where St Paul laments that he fails to do the good thing that he desires, and does the evil thing that he hates. You can see the parallel here with, ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.’ He concludes this disquisition with the cry, ‘O wretched man that I am!’ [Rom. 7:24] St Paul is a ‘miserable offender’, because he, like us, cannot accomplish by his own strength the good to which he aspires. But in the very next verse, he exclaims, ‘I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ This is not a wallowing in guilt. It is a precise and important theological proposition. We live in a selfish age, and we are often absorbed in ourselves. We pray this confession and are tempted to evaluate the prayer against our own assumptions about ourselves and about God. But we are here invited to turn away from self and turn towards Christ, without whose aid we can be no more than ‘miserable offenders’. On every page of the Prayer Book we are drawn out of ourselves and into Christ.
I have suggested to you three steps to enrich your experience of the Book of Common Prayer. First, learn to see it in its historical context without canonizing every one of its details. Second, be disciplined to understand clearly those passages that are ambiguous or difficult, and don’t dismiss the frustration of others who find the Prayer Book intimidating or confusing. Third, allow your assumptions to be challenged by reading passages that you find difficult or offensive in a spirit of openness to the scriptural and theological underpinnings of the text. As we grow in our understanding of the Prayer Book, we will be better able to communicate to others how it has drawn us closer to God. In so doing, we will ensure that the Book of Common Prayer remains a ‘prayer of the heart’, offered through Christ.
But what of the ‘worthiness and dignity of the words’, of which Hugh Latimer is so dismissive? Are we still permitted to enjoy the Prayer Book’s language for its own sake? Master Latimer says in one place, ‘Praying is not monkery.’ Nevertheless, as a student of medieval monastic liturgy, I cannot resist concluding with a monk’s point of view, written around the year 845:
It is especially during the time of [the Divine Office] that we realize that we are in God’s presence. For this reason, the Lord himself has given us the words with which to pray, and these same words are few. So that when we gather to pray to God, by attending to the meaning of the words our minds may be made tranquil and serene unto the full enjoyment of that Invisible Light, at least to the extent that our human nature will permit. For we are not able at all times to see God, on account of the various earthly preoccupations in which we are entangled. Our mind is divided, and our eye cannot always remain fixed on God.’
How apt these words are to describe the experience of praying the Prayer Book! The Book of Common Prayer has never been a purely intellectual or theological document. Its beautiful words have a power to quiet our earthly worries and draw our distracted minds, however briefly, towards heaven. As we diligently strive to pray the Prayer Book with understanding, let us give thanks to God for this marvellous gift and for all that it has meant to us and to generations that have gone before. May he continue his good work through it in us. Amen.