laudable Practice

At Parish Communion & Holy Baptism on Low Sunday, 12.4.26 John 20:31 “But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” [1] Today is a day of two celebrations in our parish church.  It is the Sunday after Easter Day, when - as seen in our readings, hymns, and the decoration of the church - we continue to celebrate Easter, the Resurrection of Jesus. It is also a day when we are celebrating three baptisms - N, N, and N will shortly be receiving the Sacrament of Baptism.  If we are lucky, we might just hear three babies decide to loudly join in our Easter praises and remind us of their presence with us this morning. If that does happen, parents - relax. We are delighted to have N, N, and N with us for their baptisms this morning. These two celebrations - of Easter and of Holy Baptism - are not separate. They do not stand apart from each other. Both these celebrations j...

From Francis Atterbury's sermon for Easter Day 1718, ' Some Reasons assigned for our Saviour's appearing chiefly to his Apostles after his Resurrection ', preached at Westminster Abbey. Here Atterbury sets forth how the Church's ministry, doctrine, and sacraments both flow from the Lord's Resurrection and proclaim the Resurrection. Particularly significant is how this understanding of the Church in the post-Resurrection accounts in the Scriptures - "these short Accounts" - is, for Atterbury, sufficient, requiring nothing to be added for our salvation. But as our Saviour, during his forty Days Stay on Earth, fully enabled his Apostles to attest his Resurrection, so did he qualify them duly to preach his Doctrine; for he taught them the Things pertaining to the Kingdom of God, i.e. to the Gospel Dispensation, of which they were to be the Ministers, and to his Church, which they were to gather, constitute, and govern ... This Promise he had made them the ...

And if the Head be risen, the Members shall not stay behind. He is the head of the body the Church. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Our Lord is our Head, and in Him is our Nature exalted and raised up: And as he partakes of our Flesh, so do we of his Spirit, and have a pledge and argument on each side of our Resurrection. If the spirit of Him who raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you; He that raised up Christ from the dead, shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you, (Rom.viii.11.) We receive great assurance of our Resurrection; Christ hath left us (says Tertullian) Arrabonem Spiritus, the Earnest of the Spirit; and he hath taken from us Arrabonem Carnis, the Earnest of the Flesh, and carried with him into Heaven, Pignus totius summae illic quandóque redigendae; Part of our humane Nature, a pledge that inferrs the Resurrection of the rest. The Holy Sacrament we receive (if we receive as we should) is a token of our Resur...

At the early Eucharist, Easter Day 2024 Mark 16:8 “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” It seems an odd - even inappropriate - ending for the Gospel of Easter Day. The women run away from the empty tomb; terrified, amazed, struck silent. Why not straightforward joy? Why not lots of words, expounding at length to the disciples (and everyone else) about what had happened? Why not raucous laughter and celebration? Is this not what human beings do when we experience a joyful event? Of course it is. Birthdays, marriages, a sporting team winning a trophy, a national celebration: these experiences are marked by straightforward joy and celebration; by many words; by laughter. They are events and experiences we quite easily understand; they are known quantities; they are the stuff of ordinary human experience. That first Easter is different - radically different. The resurrection of Jesus Chris...

From an Easter Day sermon of the 1820s , by Charles James Blomfield when he was vicar of St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London and (from 1824-28) Bishop of Chichester, standing in the Old High tradition.  In characteristic Old High fashion, Blomfield here sees our participation in the Easter embodied in prayer, scripture, and sacrament (note this pre-1833 reference to "frequent communion") and in the call to holy living. The scripture references are a reminder of how the Old High tradition robustly and confidently regarded itself as rooted in Holy Scripture. There is a deeply Pauline nature to this emphasis: like the Apostle, the Old High tradition understood the Resurrection as necessarily expressed in ecclesial communion and holy living. In the absence of such witness to and fruit of "distinctness and splendour", the Resurrection is not being confessed. ... the resurrection of our Lord, as recorded by the  Evangelists, and as explained and improved by the Apostl...

For as Death is the end of our lives, so is the Resurrection the end of our hopes; and as we die daily, so we daily hope: but Death, which is the end of our life, is the enlargement of our Spirits from hope to certainty, from uncertain fears to certain expectations, from the death of the body to the life of the soul; that is, to partake of the light and life of Christ, to rise to life as he did; for his Resurrection is the beginning of ours: He died for us alone, not for himself; but he rose again for himself and us too. So that if he did rise, so shall we. ... as Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to day, and the same for ever; so may we in Christ, become in the morrow of the Resurrection the same or better then yesterday in our natural life; the same body and the same soul tied together in the same essential union, with this only difference, that not Nature but Grace and Glory with an Hermetic seal give us a new signature, whereby we shall no more be changed, but like unto Christ...

Above all we praise you for the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, the true paschal lamb who was sacrificed for us; by dying he destroyed our death; by rising he restored our life ... The above is the proper preface for Easter in the Church of Ireland BCP 2004.  There are a number of significant contrasts with the 1662 preface but what has particularly caught my attention this Easter is the final line.  1662 ends with "and by his rising again hath restored to us everlasting life" (emphasis added).  Indeed, this is also seen in the equivalent preface in the CofE's Common Worship, TEC's BCP 1979, and Canada's BAS.  Ireland 2004, however, appears to be embarrassed by the idea of connecting the Resurrection with  everlasting life. That said, perhaps Ireland 2004's Easter preface does have the merit of more accurately reflecting the contemporary emphasis in much theology and Easter preaching, what we might describe as the 'we believe in ...

God's singu­lar bounty hath advanced some days to a superlative bright­ness. On Easter Day  I quoted from a Restoration era Easter sermon by John Torbuck, part of a collection of his sermons for feast days under the title Extraordinary Dayes .  In the preface to the collection, Torbuck defended the practice of observing festival days on the basis that God "hath made some days twice" through some signal and pe­culiar mercy".  Such, he says, "are the Festivals of Christs Incarna­tion, Resurrection, Ascensi­on, &c.".  He notes that such "days above days" are grounded in "Articles of our Creed".  These days, in other words, set before us the redemptive events which have secured our salvation.  This is why these days have "a superlative brightness". Torbuck's account of the festival days is suggestive of why it is good liturgical practice to describe the Sundays of Eastertide, contrary to conventional contemporary Anglican p...

He was not a churchman of the stamp of Tillotson and the school that followed him. He did not lay aside justification by faith, and the need of grace, for semi-heathen disquisitions about morality and duty, virtue and vice - J.C. Ryle on George Whitefield in The Christian Leaders of England in the Eighteenth Centur y (1869).  Ryle's critique of Tillotson (shared by the Tractarian interpretation of the 18th century) might lead us to imagine that a Tillotsonian Easter would be characterised by one of those "semi-heathen disquisitions about morality and duty". Tillotson, however, would disappoint. The Lord's Resurrection, he declared, is no mere example but the cause of our participation in "a new and heavenly life": The resurrection of Christ is not only a pattern, but hath a power and efficacy in it, to raise us to a spiritual and heavenly life. When Christ rose, he did not rise alone, but many of the bodies of the saints who were dead rose with him, to sig...

From a 1671 collection of sermons by John Torbuck, Extraordinary dayes, or, Sermons on the most solemn Feasts and fasts throughout the year , a sermon for Easter Day .  Alongside the sermon's orthodox proclamation of the salvific nature of the Lord's Resurrection, the reference to the reception of the Sacrament on Easter Day is particularly noteworthy, with its insistence that it is in the Sacrament that we experience the truth "that he is alive". Well may then be rehearsed with abundance of joy, a Surrexit Dominus , the Lord is risen, since such infinite be­nefit doth arise to us from his Resur­rection. Is the Lord risen indeed? Let us be risen with him; Then is he risen indeed to us, when our affections are risen with him. Christ's Resurrection must work in us a Resurrection to grace, before it can work for us a Resurrection to Glory. Blessed and Holy is he, that hath part in the first Resurrection, on whom the second death shall have no power. Let us strive to ...