'The best commentary': advice from Jeremy Taylor on preaching at Christmas

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.

In this Advent Ember Week, with Christmas close, this petition from the Litany has a particular relevance, bringing us to pray for bishops, priests, and deacons who will preaching on the feast of the Nativity. In his 'Rules and Advices' to his clergy, Jeremy Taylor emphasised the importance of preaching at the principal feasts:

Let every Preacher in his Parish take care to explicate to the people the Mysteries of the great Festivals, as of Christmas, Easter, Ascension-day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary; because these Feasts containing in them the great Fundamentals of our Faith, will with most advantage convey the mysteries to the people, and fix them in their memories, by the solemnity and circumstances of the day.

The 'Rules and Advices' were given by Taylor to his clergy at the primary visitation of his diocese.  In a sermon accompanying the visitation, Taylor addressed how "the great Fundamentals of our Faith" were to be expounded.  He begins by rooting those fundamentals in the rule of faith, defined by the Apostles' Creed:

There is a 'classis' of necessary articles , and that is the Apostles' Creed, which Tertullian calls 'regulam fidei, the rule of faith;' and, according to this, we must teach necessities: but what comes after this is not so necessary.

Here is what is necessary, what must be proclaimed as necessary to the Faith. Taylor continues:

Next to this analogy or proportion of faith, let the consent of the Catholic Church be your measure, so as by no means to prevaricate in any doctrine, in which all Christians always have consented. This will appear to be a necessary rule by and by; but, in the meantime, I shall observe to you, that it will be the safer, because it cannot go far.

This points to how sermons on principal feasts must be shaped and defined by creedal orthodoxy. And while "the Catholic Church hath been too much and too soon divided", this is what "all Churches ... and all Christians" confess:

in these things all Christians ever have consented, and he that shall prophesy or expound Scripture to the prejudice of any of these things, hath no part in that article of his creed; he does not believe the holy Catholic Church, he hath no fellowship, no communion, with the saints and servants of God.

Finally, Taylor directs his clergy to ground their preaching in the patristic witnesses:

Frame your life and preachings to the canons of the Church, to the doctrines of antiquity, to the sense of the ancient and holy fathers. For it is otherwise in theology, than it is in other learnings. The experiments of philosophy are rude at first, and the observations weak, and the principles unproved; and he that made the first lock, was not so good a workman as we have nowadays: but in Christian religion, they that were first were best, because God, and not man, was the teacher.

Taylor is here echoing the direction given to preachers by the 1571 canons:

especially shall they see to it that they teach nothing in the way of a sermon, which they would have religiously held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old or New Testament, and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from this selfsame doctrine.

Preaching at the great festivals, not the least of which is Christmas, should drink deeply from the wells of patristic thought, for here - as Taylor beautifully states - we are much closer to the divine source of our salvation. 

The rule of faith; the consent of the Catholic Church, expressed in creedal orthodoxy; the doctrines of antiquity and the sense of the ancient fathers - these should guide and direct bishops, priests, and deacons preparing to preach at the celebration of Our Lord's Nativity, leading them to richly expound from the Scriptures the light and life, grace and truth of the Incarnation. It is for this we pray in the Litany when, in these days before Christmas in Advent Ember Week, we petition that bishops and clergy should have "true knowledge and understanding of thy Word", to be set forth "by their preaching". As Taylor puts it:

the practice of the Catholic Church is the best commentary ... Then we speak according to the Spirit of God, when we understand Scripture in that sense in which the Church of God hath always practised it.