laudable Practice

At the Eucharist of Ash Wednesday, 18.2.26 Matthew 6.16 “And whenever you fast, do not look somber, like the hypocrites, for they mark their faces to show others that they are fasting.” [1] On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, it is difficult not to recognise that this day begins a season of fasting. We heard it in the introduction to our liturgy: “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Lord to observe a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial …” [2] We heard it in the first reading from the prophet Joel: “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting …” [3] And we will hear it again in our final hymn, referring to our Lord’s time in the wilderness: “Forty days and forty nights, thou was fasting in the wild …” [4] Lent is a time for fasting. Depending on our age, health, and circumstances, this may mean abstaining from one of the day’s meals throughout Lent; or it may mean simplifying our diet in Lent; or...

In contrast to Roman Catholic Europe, one of the distinguishing features of Protestant Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was the rejection of the Lenten fast from meat. This flowed, of course, from the magisterial Reformation, across jurisdictions, rejecting papal Canon Law and its Lenten abstinence obligation, regarding this as an offence against Christian liberty. In Ductor Dubitantium (1660), Taylor provides a characteristically Protestant critique of the law of Lenten abstinence. As discussed in an earlier post , this is certainly not because Taylor disregarded the discipline of fasting - and nor, of course, did the magisterial Reformers. There was, however, no divine or apostolic command to fast during Lent. As Taylor therefore declared in rejecting the Lenten obligation, "the Conscience is at liberty". In this extract, Taylor emphasises how a law of Lenten abstinence promotes the erroneous belief "that the keeping of Lent is so sacred, so principal a point of ...

In an 1825 Ash Wednesday sermon, entitled ' Penance and Penitence ', Charles James Blomfield - then Bishop of Chichester, appointed to the See of London in 1828 - demonstrated how penitential season was approached in the pre-1833 Church of England. Blomfield had associations with the Hackney Phalanx. The preacher at his episcopal consecration in 1824 had been John Lonsdale, who had links to the Hackney Phalanx. The Old High Howley of London, translated to Canterbury in 1828, cultivated Blomfield as his successor. Blomfield's sermon, in other words, functions as an important indication of how Ash Wednesday and Lent were regarded and observed before 1833. The sermon is abundantly clear on how the season was to be approached with penitential seriousness: A more important, or more awful act of religious duty there can hardly be, than that for which we are met together this day; to make a solemn, a united, and I trust a sincere confession of our sins to him, from whom nothing is...

On 12th June 1775, the Second Continental Congress - weeks after Lexington and Concord, and only days before Bunker Hill - issued a proclamation calling for the inhabitants of the American colonies to observe 20th July as "a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer", seeking the "gracious interposition of Heaven" in order to aid "a speedy end ... to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American colonies, without farther effusion of blood". And so it was on 20th July that the members of the Continental Congress gathered in Christ Church, Philadelphia , to hear Jacob Duché - Rector of Christ Church - preach on a text from Psalm 80, "Turn thee again, thou God of hosts, look down from heaven: behold, and visit this vine". The sermon's title identified the vine: ' The American Vine '. As with the vine in the psalm, the American Vine was blessed with goodly roots and soil, allowing it to flourish: Our sober Ancestors broug...

To the people of Vienna (Mamercus being their Bishop, about 450 years after Christ) there befell many things, the suddenness and strangeness whereof so amazed the hearts of all men, that the city they began to forsake as a place which heaven did threaten with imminent ruin. It beseemed not the person of so grave a prelate to be either utterly without counsel as the rest were, or in a common perplexity to shew himself alone secure. Wherefore as many as remained he earnestly exhorteth to prevent portended calamities, using those virtuous and holy means wherewith others in like case have prevailed with God. To which purpose he perfecteth the Rogations or Litanies before in use, and addeth unto them that which the present necessity required. Their good success moved Sidonius Bishop of Arverna to use the same so corrected Rogations, at such time as he and his people were after afflicted with famine, and besieged with potent adversaries. For till the empty name of the empire came to be settl...

From The Paschal or Lent-Fast, apostolical & perpetual (1662), a sermon before King Charles II and then expanded for publication, by Peter Gunning, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, becoming Bishop of Chichester in 1669.  The title of the work goes on to describe "an answer to the late printed objections of the Presbyterians against the fast of Lent".  In the dedication to King Charles II - "The most Christian Catholick Defender of our Holy Faith and Church" - Gunning noted of the Easter feast and its preceding fast, "Your Majesties own Royal Ancestours have even in ancient Ages preserved here, and transmitted to posterity This Holy Feast and Fast". This extract opens with Gunning pointing to the petition in the collect of the First Sunday in Lent following the reference to the Lord's fast in the wilderness, "Give us grace to use such abstinence": What a lame Exception therefore have you given against the Churches excellen...

‘When ye fast’: the ‘red meat’ of the Lenten fast  At the Ash Wednesday Eucharist & Imposition of Ashes, 2022  Joel 2:12 & Matthew 6:16 (the appointed readings in 1926/1662) From the reading appointed for the epistle on Ash Wednesday, words from the prophet Joel: “Turn ye even to me, saith the Lord … with fasting”; And Our Lord’s opening words from the Gospel reading: “When ye fast”.   When your Rector kindly invited me to preach at this Ash Wednesday Eucharist, he urged that the sermon would have ‘red meat’. Now, we might wonder about such advice for an Ash Wednesday sermon.  Red meat? On a day when the readings traditionally appointed declare - clearly and explicitly - that we are entering into a season of fasting?  Would it not be wiser to use a more appropriate term - with less mention of meat - for a sermon on the first day of Lent, the season of fasting? Before answering that question, let us first think about fasting.  It can, perhaps, s...

From Cosin's   Notes on the Book of Common Prayer   (1638), on the rubric in the BCP 1559 Holy Communion requiring the Curate to " declare unto the people, whether there be anye holy dayes or fastynge dayes the weke folowyng".  Cosin particularly refutes the Puritan (and later low church) claim that the call to observe the Lenten fast set forth in Edwardine and Elizabethan legislation was merely "politic", that is, for secular purposes. He thus demonstrates - as did Andrewes - that observing the Lenten fast was part of the discipline of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana , a discipline proclaimed in the epistle and gospel appointed for the first day of Lent: They that speak so much against us, who put some part of our religion in keeping fasting days, as if we had nothing but a politic use of keeping Lent, Fridays, and saints' eves, let them look well to this place, where the curate is bound to exhort the people earnestly towards the religious observation of...

From a 1676 Lenten sermon by Herbert Croft, Bishop of Hereford, drawing together the themes of Lenten abstinence, Holy Week, and preparation for receiving the Sacrament on Easter Day: I beseech you also remember the faithful Promise of Christ. That if we ask, seek, and knock, this Grace will be given unto us. And never more seasonable than now to seek it; for you know, Lent is the holy time appointed by the Church for Fasting and Praying, and this ensuing Week is the Holy of Holies, and more especially requires it. How you have spent the former part, God and your own hearts best know; but if amiss, I, with St. Peter, beseech you, That the time past may suffice to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in Lasciviousness, Lusts, excess of Wine, Revellings, Banquettings, and such like. Very unfit for Christians at any time, much more in the holy time of Lent. We must therefore, according to St. Paul's Directions, earnestly endeavour to redeem the time past by great Hum...

From Simon Patrick's  A treatise of repentance and of fasting especially of the Lent-fast (1686), an indication of the seriousness with which the observance of Lent was regarded by the Restoration Church, and not just within High Church circles: And now who sees not the reasonableness of this Observance, and the great benefit we may receive thereby? If instead of contending about it (for which, thus understood, I can see no ground) we would all set our selves to make the best use we can, of what the Church hath piously ordained, and for many Ages profitably practised ...  And now who sees not the reasonableness of this Observance, and the great benefit we may receive thereby? If instead of contending about it (for which, thus understood, I can see no ground) we would all set our selves to make the best use we can, of what the Church hath piously ordained, and for many Ages profitably practised. You see, how every one of us should show in all things, the reverence and the hono...

This (obviously wise and sensible) tweet from a Roman Catholic bishop in the state of Texas , issued amidst the crisis afflicting that state, is quite striking from an Anglican perspective.  The various iterations of the Book of Common Prayer do, of course, set before us the discipline of fasting and abstinence during Lent.  In 1662 the 'Forty Days of Lent' are 'Days of Fasting, or Abstinence'.  In TEC's BCP 1979, the days of Lent are 'observed by special acts of discipline and self-denial', while in the CofI BCP 2004 they are 'Days of Discipline and Self-denial'. None of this, however, amounts to a 'law of Lenten abstinence'.  While parliamentary statute and royal proclamations required Lenten observance from the reign of Edward VI to that of Charles II, the 1604 Canons imposed no duty or law of fasting, and no ecclesiastical sanction for non-observance, beyond requiring clergy to announce the approach of fast days during public worship: E...

In an  Ash Wednesday 1682 sermon in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, Peter Manby, Dean of Derry, challenged "the popular mistake and abuse of the Word Superstition" regarding Lenten discipline.  The sermon begins by emphasising the discipline of fasting during Lent: Not to trouble you with any needless enquiries into this mysterious Fast of our blessed Saviour; I shall treat of it no otherwise than as matter of example to us, and shall endeavour only these two things, First. To evidence our obligation to the Virtue of Abstinence; especially at this time, so solemnly observ'd by the Christian Church ever since the Apostles days. Secondly. I shall recommend it from the consideration of those good Fruits and Benefits that result from it. As to the first; if Abstinence be a Christian duty, the neglect of it must be our sin; and whether we be obliged to it or no, we may soon be advised by the many precepts and examples both of the old and new Testament ... As the preparin...

For Shrovetide, a 1680 Quinquagesima - "Shrove-Sunday" - sermon , preached in Norwich Cathedral, which takes for its text words from the Epistle appointed for the opening Sunday of Septuagesimatide, "but I keep under my body and bring it into subjection".  The sermon explicitly commends "the Fast of Lent":  I am come the second time upon a Shrove-Sunday (I cannot tell whether by chance or choice) to perform the Pulpit-Office of the day; and I know not how I should better manage that Province, than by minding you of the approaching Fast of Lent, nor how better to dispose you for that, than by presenting you with a Map of St. Paul's Austerities. If I should propound unto you this day the example of Christs forty days fast in the Wilderness; you would say happily, that was Miraculous ... who is like unto the Lord our God? who by the power of his Divine Nature could support the frailties of his Human: well therefore we press not Christ's example, but w...