A Gospel Liturgy (2)
Worship at St. John’s is “old school”. Unlike most Episcopal and Anglican churches, we make use of the classical liturgy that originated in the church of England in the 16th century in its last American edition of 1928. (Later revisions moved away from this tradition.) There are a number of good reasons why we have made this choice, but one of them is the sheer excellence of this liturgy. Many things contribute to this excellence, but one of them is its clarity about what is happening when we worship – nothing less than our transformation by the Gospel, a transformation that delivers us from guilt to gratitude by the grace of God. The architects of the old Prayer Book brought this clarity to their revision of the church’s ancient traditions of worship, and the result is a liturgy uniquely fit for its purpose. For thoughtful and responsive users, it is a precision-made instrument for spiritual renewal and transformation.
As we saw in last week’s essay, the Order of Morning and Evening Prayer is itself structured by the three moments of this gospel transformation – guilt, grace, and gratitude (or repentance, faith, and works). This same triad also structures the Order of Holy Communion, but in that order there are not one but three repetitions of this triad, one in the Ministry of the Word (the Ante-Communion), the second in the “bridge” section that runs from the Confession of Sin to the Sanctus (the preparation for Communion), and the third in the Ministry of the Sacrament (the Communion proper).
Here it is worth noting the differences between Morning/Evening Prayer (also called the “office”, because it is the “officium” or “duty” of the clergy to recite it) and the Lord’s Supper (also called the “eucharist”, or thanksgiving). The Office is focused on the immersive reading of the Bible as a whole, to the praise and glory of God’s grace. That’s why it includes psalms, longer readings from both the Old and New Testaments, and canticles of praise and thanksgiving for God’s action in creation and redemption. The Eucharist is focused not on the Bible as a whole, or the grand sweep of God’s action in history, but at the very center of his gracious action in history, and the heart of Scripture, which is the Gospel itself – the sacrificial love of Christ the bridegroom for the Church his bride. In the Office we learn about the Bible; in the Eucharist, we learn about Jesus. Both, it should be noted, are necessary. You can’t make sense of the Bible unless you se it in relation to its Christological center, the Gospel; the Christological center has nothing to be center of, if it is not seen in relation to the entire unfolding of God’s gracious action in history set forth in the Bible. It is an error to prioritize one over the other, as both are integral and complementary elements of the church’s tradition of worship from ancient times.
At the end of the 1928 Prayer Book Order of Morning and Evening Prayer is a General Thanksgiving. It was not part of the first Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, but was written about a century later by Edward Reynolds, a bishop of Norwich with Puritan sympathies. The Puritan influence can be seen in the way it frames scriptural ideas and images in a rationalized discourse. It was first printed in the appendix to the Office in the English Prayer Book of 1662, but from the first American edition of 1789 it was printed with the Order of Morning and Evening Prayer, and is probably one of the best-known and loved prayers in the whole liturgy.
Reynolds’ prayer makes explicit the Christological center of the Office’s praise and thanksgiving. “We bless for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory”. Moreover, it draws out the implications of this gratitude for our own lives in the language of offering: “And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may he unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days”. The language of “service in holiness and righteousness” is a direct quote from the canticle Benedictus; but the language of the church’s grateful self-offering echoes similar language in the Prayer of Consecration: “we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness, mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving…. And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee”. Thus the General Thanksgiving is a kind of non-sacramental eucharistic memorial and offering, that connects the Office with the Eucharist, the Bible with the Gospel, the thanks we render Christ in our worship with the obedience we render him in our lives. In the gift of ourselves, making our lives over to the service to God, the transformative work by the gospel is being accomplished in us.