Ministering the Advent hope at the hour of death

Mindful of the traditional Advent themes of the Four Last Things, it was appropriate that Timothy Stanley's recent interview with Rowan Williams addressed the matter of our deathbed.  In the course of the interview Stanley said, "I would want the Last Rites when I’m dying, and if the hospital sent for the local Anglican cleric, I might not get it, because not every Anglican does it". And, Stanley quite rightly protests, "on my death bed, I would want to know what I’m going to get".  

Stanley's critique is not entirely unfair.  There are Anglican clergy - let's call them the neo-Puritans - who think that extemporary prayer and a Bible reading of their choice will suffice at the deathbed.

That, however, is weak, pale stuff.  And certainly not the Real Thing.

For that we turn to the Book of Common Prayer:

Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which confession, the Priest shall absolve him (if he humbly and heartily desire it) after this sort.

OUR Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to his Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive thee thine offences: And by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Prayer Book also provides a weighty "commendatory Prayer for a sick person at the point of departure", giving assurance of the Christian hope:

O ALMIGHTY God, with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons: We humbly commend the soul of this thy servant, our dear brother, into thy hands, as into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour; most humbly beseeching thee that it may be precious in thy sight.

And then there is the provision for administering to the sick and dying "the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ", with the appointed collect petitioning "whensoever his soul shall depart from the body, it may be without spot presented unto thee". The short Gospel reading also powerfully proclaims the hope in which participate through the Sacrament:

Verily, verily I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.

Here is the Advent hope at the hour of our death.  This why we petition in the Litany to be delivered "from sudden death", so that we may receive the ministrations of holy Church as we pass from this life. This should be the basic stuff that any Anglican priest knows and administers.  Anything less than this - including the concoctions of neo-Puritans - deprives the dying of good and godly means of the assurance of the mercy of God. As Bramhall, then Bishop of Derry, declared in a 1657 work:

The ordinary and most received custom of preparing sick persons for another world in the Primitive Church, was Prayer, and Absolution or the benefit of the Keys, and the Viaticum of the Body and Blood of Christ, which we retain.