laudable Practice

At Parish Communion on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 11.5.25 Revelation 7:9-17 “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” [1] Sometime around the year 112AD - a few decades after the last books of the New Testament had been written and less than a century after the death and resurrection of Jesus - a Roman bureaucrat called Pliny, governor of a region in what is now northern Turkey, wrote to his imperial master, the Emperor, describing his response to the growth of the new Christian faith in the region: “in the case of those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have observed the following procedure: I interrogated these as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed...

Low Sunday 27.4.25 John 20:28 “Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” [1] It is Doubting Thomas Sunday.  A day when we celebrate Thomas as the patron saint of doubters.  A day when we affirm the role of doubt in the Christian life.  A day when we are encouraged to have doubts about the Christian faith. Well, no, actually.  Apart - obviously - from the words of John’s Gospel quoted at the outset, all that I have just said is nonsense. It is wrong. It is not Doubting Thomas Sunday.  On this Sunday after Easter Day we rejoice in Saint Thomas the Apostle’s great declaration of faith concerning Our Lord Jesus Christ: “My Lord and my God!” [2]. Saint Thomas is not the patron saint of doubters.  He is, rather, the Apostle who gives full-throated expression to the most explicit statement of the Christian faith in the entire New Testament [3]. And, no, the Sunday after Easter Day is not a day when we affirm - or, worse, encourage - the place of doubt in our Chr...

Amidst many Anglican posts during Holy Week and Easter on 'X' of Chrism Eucharists, foot-washings, altars of repose, and Easter Vigils, there was another current to be detected. Small in number, perhaps, but some posts on 'X' during this highpoint of the liturgical year might be regarded as suggesting that the ordinary, modest, reserved Anglican piety of the Old High tradition can continue to have resonance and appeal. We begin with the excellent Episcopalian Reformed theologian Fleming Rutledge on Good Friday: It is a minority POV these days, but for me today, a noonday service with powerful sermon and the "old" Prayer Book service with all the readings and prayers but no communion and no "veneration of the cross" seemed perfect to me. — Fleming Rutledge (@flemingrut) March 29, 2024 Good Friday is surely a day for such a stark, unfussy liturgy, not overwhelming the senses, a liturgy which stills us in heart, mind, and soul before the myster...

Another Eastertide sermon from Cornelius Duffie - rector of Saint Thomas, New York City 1824-27 - in which we see an Old High emphasis on the penitential aspect of Eastertide.  This is reflected in the collects of the First and Second Sundays after Easter: "Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may alway serve thee in pureness of living and truth"; "and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life".  It is a reminder that a straightforward 'the 40 days of Easter are celebratory', a liturgical season in which penitence should be minimised and de-emphasised, obscures a significant aspect of Pauline teaching, that our participation in the life of the Resurrection requires a dying to sin. As the epistle of Easter Day declared, "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth". It is therefore right and proper that the penitential aspects of both Morning and Evening Prayer and t...

An Eastertide sermon from Cornelius Duffie - rector of Saint Thomas, New York City 1824-27 - in which we see how a distinctive Old High emphasis on the necessity of sanctification and good works is related to the hope of the Resurrection (note the staple Old High references to 'working out our salvation with fear and trembling' and 'making our election sure'). Sanctification prepares us to share in the Easter hope. Without the renewal of sanctification, we do not bear the fruit of the Resurrection life. We might, then, consider the sermon an exposition of the call of the  Easter Anthems : "Not with the old leaven ... reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin". Now, my brethren, seeing that life and immortality are brought to light, is there nothing in the hope set before us in the Gospel, to make us anxious to know whether we are doing what God requires us to do, in order to secure it? Is not the prospect of a future and better existence the most e...

From  A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year , Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - an extract from a sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter, on the opening words of the Gospel of the day, "Jesus said, I am the good shepherd".  Mindful that Pott was born in 1759 and ordained in 1783, and that the series of sermons was published 16 years before the beginning of the Oxford Movement, this extract is a powerful example of how a richly sacramental vision, with a clear understanding of apostolic ministry and its succession, was present in the pre-1833 Church: it is time for us to remember, and the present season being the glad memorial to our minds, that there was a joyful promise of a speedy gathering together of the same flock which were scattered. This was accomplished when "the God of peace brought again from the dead that great shepherd of the sheep". Thus was the triumph of the resurrection set in ...

From  A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year , Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - an extract from a sermon for the First Sunday after Easter, on the disciples encountering the Risen Christ on the road to Emmaus.  Reading this passage, it is difficult not to think of similarities with Newman's Sermons Plain and Parochial , which itself reminds us that Newman's theologically rich and engaging preaching stood in continuity with earlier Old High preaching, rather than contrasting with supposed 'High and Dry' sermons. ... a wide field opens to our view at this season, when we stand, as it were, between the periods of our Redeemer's resurrection and his return to the realms of light; and when the public offices and service of our Church invite us to commemorate that term of our Lord's continuance in the scene of his ministry and converse upon earth ... the state to which we belong, is by avowed profes...

The peace of Easter At early Communion on Low Sunday, 2022  John 20:19-31 “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you’ … Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you’ ... [And a third time] Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you’." At one level, 'Peace be with you' was an ordinary, everyday Hebrew greeting: wishing another flourishing and well-being. The circumstances, however, give these words of the Risen Jesus deeper meaning. The circumstances mean that these words are much more than a pleasant formality. They speak of what the Resurrection means; of what Easter means. The words have deep roots in the Scriptures of Israel.  When the Prophet Isaiah glimpses the time of the Messiah, he describes him as “Prince of Peace”; he speaks of the Messiah’s reign inaugurating the time of peace, when swords are beaten into ploughshares, the wolf living with the lamb. Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, had drawn on this when he said to the di...

From  A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year , Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - an extract from a sermon for Easter Day. Here we see the lively sacramental piety of the pre-1833 Old High tradition, with the Holy Communion received on this greatest of feasts being the means by which our participation in the Risen Christ is "sealed and effected": They began to apprehend the special operation and effects of his triumphant resurrection, as it formed a demonstration of the life to come, and as it became the earnest and commencement of that living intercession by which men were invested with the benefits of Christ's death as a sacrifice for sin, and enriched with every other privilege of his glorious kingdom. It was then that the measures of divine grace, which had been before applied in secret streams, and by smaller currents, began to be poured out, and openly entailed upon that Church which was quickened a...

According to most contemporary Anglican calendars, it would have not been permitted to have celebrated Saint Mark's Day yesterday.  When a saint's day falls on a Sunday, the contemporary liturgist has little hesitation in telling us that the Sunday should take precedence.  When that Sunday is in Eastertide ... well, then there is no choice.  In the words of the Church of Ireland BCP 2004: Festivals falling on a Sunday of Eastertide are observed on the Monday following or at the discretion of the minister on another suitable weekday in the same week. This obviously is required when Easter Day or its octave day, the First Sunday after Easter, fall on 25th April.  When it comes to the Third Sunday after Easter, however, we might begin to wonder.  Why should the feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist not be celebrated on such a Sunday in Eastertide? The very fact that Mark the Evangelist wrote his gospel, after all, is because of the Resurrection.  It is the Resurr...

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...