Christmas pudding v. Integralism: what most aids the Church's mission?

So, why is it called Stir-up Sunday? The answer lies in the Book of Common Prayer, where the collect of the day for the Sunday before Advent reads:

'Stir-up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.'

So said the Daily Telegraph today.  The National Trust does not make the connection with the Prayer Book collect, but recognises the link with Advent and Christmas by inviting people to "kick off the festive season" and "Celebrate Stir Up Sunday with the National Trust".

In other words, it remains the case that Stir-up Sunday has a resonance in popular culture, a sense that it begins a festive cycle, that it orients us towards Christmas.  This alone should give us pause for thought when considering how contemporary Anglican liturgy has imported 'Christ the King' and displaced Stir-up Sunday.  In a context in which the Church is seeking points of contact with the culture, is it wise to dispense with a liturgical observance that retains popular resonance?

As for those tempted to be somewhat dismissive of the significance of preparing - 'stirring up' - Christmas pudding, it is precisely in such domestic customs that liturgical observances take root and sustain a cultural resonance.  As Hooker reminds us, the use of food for "our comfort and delight" is one of the "most natural testimonies" of festivity (LEP V.70.2).  It is when liturgical observances are deprived of domestic and cultural customs that they often cease to have any resonance.

When Cranmer took the old Latin Advent collect for Advent and employed it for the Sunday before Advent, he ensured that suggestive Advent terms and phrases would shape the liturgy of this Sunday.  When, therefore, the National Trust refers to Stir-up Sunday 'kicking off the festive season' there is a sense in which this captures something of the Prayer Book provision, a sense of being drawn into Advent and its preparation for the celebration of the Nativity.

Of course, all this may seem rather tame compared to 'Christ the King'.  Christmas pudding v. "the empire of Christ": surely the Church Militant can dispense with the cute domestic sensibilities of the former and robustly focus on the latter.  Whether the concern is with relativism or capitalism, with secularism or nationalism, what is more needed than a feast which proclaims "the restoration of the Empire of our Lord"?

The phrase is taken from Pius XI's 1925 encyclical instituting the feast. He also declared that it would encourage "in public life" a recognition of the blessing of "well-ordered discipline", "an excellent remedy for the plague ... of anti-clericalism".  That it would encourage a restoration of "the right which the Church has from Christ himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation".  That it would ensure an understanding that the Church "has a natural and inalienable right to perfect freedom and immunity from the power of the state".

Yes, it does make for somewhat uncomfortable reading.  And it all sounds so very un-Anglican.  The Book of Convocation comes to mind, that classic Anglican statement of - in the words of the title page - "the government of God's Holy Catholic Church, and the kingdoms of the whole world".  Amongst its central contentions are the rejection of claims that "Civil power is subject to spiritual power when they are both part of a Christian commonwealth" and that "The ecclesiastical commonwealth must be perfect and sufficient of herself, in order to her own end".  It was God's will and purpose that "first did separate the civil government from the ecclesiastical", a "joint descent" of ecclesiastical and temporal authority, so that the Church has no "temporal dominion" for there is "no such necessity of this pretended temporal power and authority in any ecclesiastical persons over kings and kingdoms".

If we want to understand the artificial and foreign 'feel' of the feast of Christ the King in Anglican liturgy, the Book of Convocation offers an explanation: it runs contrary to the long Anglican experience of respect for the vocation of the civil magistrate, an experience with much greater relevance to the Church's mission in the current cultural context than the papacy's politics of the 1920s.

Which brings us back to the Christmas pudding.  Perhaps stirring up the Christmas pudding, rather than a feast caught up with (in our current context, absurdly unrealistic) clericalist pretensions to temporal power, is what the Church Militant needs: the faithful and joyful embodiment of the Church's Christocentric proclamation in domestic, social, and cultural life.  Rather than dismissing such customs and practices as irrelevant nostalgia, they can be a formative means of gathering up the domestic, the social, and the cultural in the Church's life of prayer, orienting us towards - and marking time by - the liturgy and its proclamation.  Without them, domestic, social, and cultural life inevitably is shaped by other liturgies, other proclamations, and their practices.

In other words, the native piety of Stir-up Sunday is more missional than Christ the King.  Not only does it have a greater resonance and richer cultural hinterland, it also is oriented towards the festive season, the signs of which are now all around us.  Christ the King, by contrast, disregards all this, and stands aloof from it.  Somewhat ironically, therefore, it is not the integralism of Christ the King but the native piety of Stir-up Sunday which points to how the Church can gather up social and cultural life into Christ the Lord.