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'Let the consent of the Catholic Church be your measure': Advent Ember Week, Jeremy Taylor, and Christmas sermons

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That it may please thee to illuminate all Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living they may set it forth and shew it accordingly, We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord. This petition in the Litany has, I think, a particular resonance in Advent Ember Week. Many bishops, priests, and deacons will be preparing Christmas sermons during this week. As they prepare to preach on the great festival of the Incarnation, it is right that this petition in the Litany is offered with particular intention, that the truth of the Incarnation will be proclaimed from pulpits at Christmas. Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man ... The petition in the Litany is not only a prayer that error will not be taught from pulpits by bishops, priests, and deacons in Christmas sermons; it is also a prayer that the saving truth will be procla...
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Heaven and earth in little space: BBC Radio 3's Compline on the Sundays of Advent

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At 10pm on the Sundays of Advent, the prayers, psalms, and anthems of Compline are to be heard on BBC Radio 3 . As Gerry Lynch said in his Church Times review, "these seasonal broadcasts of Compline continue to be a reminder that radio does not need to be pacy to be engaging". Amidst the ecclesiastical, domestic, social, and commercial activities of the season, these broadcast services of Compline offer thirty minutes of contemplation on Sunday evenings, rooted in the Church's prayer and the Advent hope. It is an immersion in prayer and liturgical music that calls us to be still.  There is nothing rushed, loud, or demanding. We are invited to a stillness as distractions abound, even late on a Sunday evening. It is in the stillness that the words and music of Compline hold us before the One who is, and was, and is to come.  The broadcasts reflect the generous ecumenism of the Anglican choral tradition, with texts, music, and composers from across the Christian traditions....
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'Never but in heaven was there more joy and ecstasy': Jeremy Taylor, the Visitation, and heaven

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Our  Advent series of Marian reflections from Jeremy Taylor's The Great Exemplar today comes to the Visitation. Taylor offers a beautiful, rich meditation, rejoicing in the meeting of "two mothers of two great princes": It is not easy to imagine what a collision of joys was at this blessed meeting: two mothers of two great princes, the one 'the greatest that was born of woman' and the other was his Lord, and these made mothers by two miracles, met together with joy and mysteriousness; where the mother of our Lord went to visit the mother of his servant, and the Holy Ghost made the meeting festival, and descended upon Elizabeth, and she prophesied. Never but in heaven was there more joy and ecstasy. The persons who were women, whose fancies and affections were not only hallowed, but made pregnant and big with religion, meeting together to compare and unite their joys and their eucharist, and then made prophetical and inspired, must needs have discoursed like serap...
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'Those from whom you come': Advent Ember Week and Atterbury's December 1709 sermon to the Sons of the Clergy

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In this Advent Ember Week, we return to Atterbury's 'A Sermon preached before the Sons of the Clergy', preached in December 1709. As the name of the charity suggested, many of its members were sons of those in holy orders - and not a few of these were themselves in holy orders. Reflecting this, the sermon rejoiced in what has been a characteristic of Anglicanism over centuries, the common experience of clergy being descended from clergy: If then others may be allowed to glory in their birth, why may not we? whose parents were called by God to attend on him at his altar? were intrusted with the dispensation of his sacraments, with the ministry of reconciliation, with the power of binding and loosing? were set apart to take heed to the flock of Christ, Acts xx. 28, over which the Holy Ghost made them overseers, and to feed the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood; to hold forth the word of life, to speak, to exhort, and to rebuke with all authority? Tit. ii. 1...
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'Christ has always been in Christmas': clumsy partisanship or confident proclamation?

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'Christ has always been in Christmas.' So says a new campaign by the Church of England .  Reassuring, isn't it? The established Church has decided to confidently challenge the prevailing secularist presentation of Christmas as a midwinter commercial festival, 'liberated' from its unfortunate Christian roots, repackaged in a manner that conforms to the norms of ideological multiculturalism and EDI concerns. Except, of course, that this is not at all the intention behind the Church of England campaign. 'Christ has always been in Christmas' is not directed at secularism. It is, rather, directed at the disreputable anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson and - that new spectre haunting the Church of England hierarchy - ' Christian Nationalism ' (a desperately confused concept with little real meaning in the United Kingdom and Europe).  Odd, isn't it, that the Church of England has found its voice now. After decades of cold, haughty aloofness to cult...
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Dan. 9.9,10 and Advent Evensong

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To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him: neither have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in his laws which he set before us. Dan. 9.9,10 At Evensong in Advent, I use this penitential sentence (found in 1662 and 1926), from Daniel's great confession on behalf of Israel, mourning in lonely exile: In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.  And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes ... The sentence is a stark reminder throughout the days of Advent of why "thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility" - "for us men and for our salvation", in the words of the Nicene Creed, for we all stand with Daniel and ancient Israel, mourning in lonely exile and in n...
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'Whose temple she herself was now': Jeremy Taylor and the Daughter of Sion

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In this Advent series of Marian reflections from Jeremy Taylor's The Great Exemplar , we turn to the Blessed Virgin's post-Annunciation journey to Saint Elizabeth. At this point, Taylor evokes one of the most significant aspects of the Protoevangelium : Her haste was in proportion to her joy and desires, but yet went no greater pace than her religion. For as in her journey she came near to Jerusalem, she turned in, that she might visit his temple, whose temple she herself was now; and there, not only to remember the pleasures of religion, which she had felt in continual descents and showers falling on her pious heart, for the space of eleven years' attendance there in her childhood, but also to pay the first fruits of her thanks and joy, and to lay all her glory at his feet, whose humble handmaid she was in the greatest honour of being his blessed mother. Having worshipped, she went on her journey, 'and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elizabeth.' It...
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