The Book of Common Prayer: History and Uses

Good morning.

Welcome back, everybody.

Um, if you weren't here at 8 o'clock, we did an instructed Eucharist, and we'll do that again at 10:30, where we talk about the parts of the service, why we do what we do.

Today we're going to talk about the prayer book.

I brought a couple of goodies, but I wanted to see for those of you who are 8 o'clock.

I didn't get to say everything I wanted to say.

Did you have questions from the service about, okay, you talked about that, but why do we do this other thing?

Is that okay to start that way?

And maybe you don't have any questions.

I don't know.

No, I thought it worked very well.

And of course, I just finished teaching the little kids the two parts of the of the church services and stuff, you know, the liturgies and uh and I I having been, like I've told you before, having been a Catholic and a Methodist, I haven't been Jewish, and that helps a lot if we talk about the candles.

That was really good, you know.

But yeah, it's nice to see all the integrate integration of all the different faiths the way you've presented it today.

Thank you.

Actually, if you come on Maundy Thursday, that's the Thursday of Holy Week, right before Easter, I promise I will tell you more about what happens on Shabbat and the context Jesus was immediately talking out of.

That's what we do on Monday Thursday.

We do foot washing first, separate from the service, if you want, and then you come to the service and hear about the institution of what we call the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist, and we leave in darkness, of course, after Judas betrays the Lord.

So if you have more interest about the Hebrew roots, you'll you'll hear that on Monday Thursday.

Any other things I skipped over or questions about the the worship service?

I was planning on doing this in two more weeks, but because we got instructions on how to take communion, I thought it better to just go ahead and hop up.

I brought a couple of visual aids that I want to tell you about first.

Uh one is this is the Gemara.

This is uh the Jewish text in which you'll find the Torah.

And then do you see that there's a commentary, commentary on the commentary, and then notes here in the margin as well.

So there literally are, as I told you, four columns in the Jewish way of studying scripture, and you're supposed to read all of them at the same time.

I have these two volumes.

This is volume one and volume two of the Gemara.

If you wanted the whole Gemara, you would need an entire bookcase with like five shelves so far wide, and that's just on the Hebrew Bible.

Not because the text is so long, not because the rabbinic commentary is so long, but because the rabbinic commentary on the rabbinic commentary is so long.

So here's the Gemara in Hebrew, and here's its essential English equivalent, and it doesn't quite work uh one-to-one, but um this is what I was talking about last week.

The other fun thing I brought you uh that we're going to talk about a little bit, that shows up in the prayer book, it's gonna show up in the sacraments, is um Andy Doyle's Apostolic Succession Tree.

So this is a document he has hanging in his office that tells you that the Lord Jesus put his hands on the apostle James, who put his hands on Justice and on Caius, etc., all the way down until you find Andy Doyle.

So these are the people who were ordained by ordinance, by ordinance giving back to the Lord, and this is the apostolic succession.

This is why we're a church in communion right now with the Roman Catholic Church and with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and with the Moravian Church, because we all accept the Apostolic Succession.

It's actually a base doctrine in the Methodist Church, so we're working on being in full communion with the United Methodist Church, although sadly there probably won't be a United Methodist Church in a few more months, there'll be the divided one.

Um and this is part of what keeps us in some ways apart from the Presbyterian Church doctrine of apostolic succession.

Just because this is neat, I'm gonna pass this around.

A question, please.

Does the Orthodox Church have Apostolic?

They do, and we're working on mending that.

Of course, uh the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church split in the 11th century.

That's not the Great Schism, by the way.

The Great Schism is something different, but we split really over who has who has most authority, the Patriarch of Constantinople or the Bishop of Rome.

What does it take to change a creed?

The Orthodox community says an ecumenical council, the bishop of Rome says, I can do it myself.

And over images, icons versus sculpture.

But we're working on healing that rift, if that makes sense.

What we're gonna do today is talk about really one of the unique things of um being an episcopalian, and that is the Book of Common Prayer.

So I was naughty this morning and I didn't get them.

Nick is going to start telling you about the history of the prayer book while I go gather enough for us, and then we'll look through them together.

So history first, and then contents and what we do with the thing and what it means to be to being an episcopalian.

Okay?

You go ahead and I'll be right with you.

Why should we bother to study the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer?

It's just a book, right?

No.

The Book of Common Prayer really is what defines us as Episcopalians.

It is more than any other thing what identifies Episcopadians in the world.

Uh and this began really with actually Henry VIII and also uh Elizabeth I, who believed that people who worshiped together could live together, maybe.

But that was the idea.

And so she insisted that we have a book of common prayer for everyone.

And this is also uh part of our membership in the Anglican Communion, is that the Anglican communion in general all uses not our book of common prayer, but a book of common prayer that begins with and and uh it was based on the um original book of common prayer.

There is a an old Latin term lex orandi, lex credendi, which translates roughly the law of prayer is the law of belief.

And so, in a real sense, we not only state our beliefs with our prayer books on Sunday morning, but we act out our beliefs as we do the Eucharist.

So um that's why our um and that's why Episcopalians, every time a prayer book has been written or revised, there has been a split in the Episcopal Church.

And in fact, even the first uh Book of Common Prayer uh that Thomas Cranmer wrote, and you can see the preface to that book of common prayer in the historical documents of the church, uh uh which are towards the back, I forget what page, but 800 something or other.

Uh, and it's um one reason that there was very high anxiety.

Last um in 18 there was a council of all the um Anglo Episcopalians held at um in Austin, and the house I was uh able to serve as an usher in the House of Bishops, and they discussed a new prayer book, a new revision of the prayer book.

It got everybody's attention, and um they decided to form a committee to look into revising it.

But uh the last time it took 15 years from the time a committee was appointed till the time the prayer book was actually published, so you got some leeway, and there were a variety of, in those days, different books issued for uh uh as trial liturgies.

You can hear about the Green Book and the Zebra book and two or three others.

Um another question would be why do we use prayers, written prayers?

I was once with a group of um, I guess Southern Baptists or primarily Baptists, and they got real upset.

Um they asked me to pray aloud, and I did, which is unusual for an Episcopalian, but as an Episcopalian, I ended with the Lord's Prayer.

I was alone in that.

No one else said it because it was a set prayer.

At least I presume that.

I didn't um didn't do a poll or anything.

But prayer from the prayer book also keeps us in touch with sound doctrine.

The people who wrote the prayer book and the people who revised it, the people who are immersed in the Bible, the Holy Scriptures, and they are immersed in worship and prayer.

And so it keeps us in touch with what we might call sound doctrine by using the prayer book.

It also reminds us of what we ought to ask.

You know, we can all get involved in the crisis of the day or the crisis of the week.

Um, and so you've got well, right now we've got the coronavirus, and everybody's worrying about that and other viruses.

Um but the prayer book also allows us to be con express our concerns with that, but also allows us to uh not be overwhelmed by that and to remember the other needs of the world.

And so um it does that.

And it does a third thing.

Um God is with us all the time, He is closer to us than the air we breathe, and the blood in our veins.

Uh and in Jesus Christ, uh God has called us to be his friends, and so the prayer book allows us time for us to hear the good news of scripture and to read and reflect on it in the sermon.

But on the other hand, it also allows us freedom to recognize the trend that God is enormously greater and more holy and more pure, more perfect than we can ever ask or imagine.

And so we need to acknowledge that.

Um God is the creator of all things visible and invisible, all space and all time and all matter.

Um and so we celebrate his great glory and give thanks for his great glory in our liturgy, in our worship.

Um I'd uh like to observe I say he created time, and I could go on for an hour or more on time.

I'm not going to, but I'm gonna say if you recognize that God created time and sits outside of time, a lot of the conundrums about uh God are lost, vanish, and go away.

Anyway, um the first Christians had no liturgical books.

They probably worshipped in a synagogue at the very first, uh, and they would have followed the Jewish worship traditions as far as they were compatible with the Christian gospel.

We simply don't know for sure.

Um as the church moved further from Judaism and uh in the second and third centuries, we begin to see that they have liturgies.

And St.

Paul talks about it to some extent because he talks, and everybody seems to be having a meal together, and that's something that is important in the early worship.

Um I'm trying to cut a few things out of this.

Um of our liturgy, in fact, most of our liturgy, is dependent on the monastic liturgies that were developed over the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh centuries.

Monastics have traditionally five, seven, even nine times of prayer during the day, and we echo that with morning prayer, there's a noontime prayer service in there, uh, evening prayer, and at the end of the day, compliment.

And so we echo that ancient tradition that has developed uh over many centuries.

And then also many different liturgies.

Because there wasn't the mass communication we have today, different places developed different liturgies.

And if you go to uh Marion Hatchett's book, you can see all about it.

Um a commentary on the uh Book of Commentary.

He led the committee that set it up.

Um the Eastern Orthodox liturgy is again different.

Um Luther in Germany started revising his liturgy in German in 1523, and Crammer went back to Germany uh not specifically to see um Luther or visit Luther, but instead uh on other business.

But at the time he got connected with uh the Lutherans and uh too many editions of revisions of this thing.

Um and in England there were three most common liturgies in different parts.

York had one, Hertford had one, uh, Sorum had one, and we call it Salisbury now.

Um, and Cranmer, when he first wrote the Book of Commonwear, used all these as sources for it, as well as ancient liturgies and other traditional liturgies.

Um in 1549, uh good old Henry VIII uh decreed that everyone was going to use his prayer book, an act of uniformity.

There be it.

And uh Henry, having said that, um, it was a uh it happened.

Uh Cranmer's gift and uh in reading the Book of Common Prayer is to blend theology, liturgy, and magnificent English.

And the Book of Common Prayer has enriched the worship in many other Protestant uh works.

Uh it came out and was published in 1549, radically revised in 1552.

There were other revisions later.

Uh Elizabeth I, James, James I, um, Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell threw out all the books of Common Prayer, bordered and burned.

Um, and so they had to get a new one when Charles II was restored to the throne.

Um in 1789, the Episcopal Church of the United States issued their revised prayer book based primarily on the British, English, and the Scottish rites.

Um, but uh it was revised in 1892, and in 1928 we got the the 28th prayer book, which um some of us antiques are familiar with.

Um the fourth revision is what we are using now, fourth American revision, uh was published in 1979.

Um and I think in honor of the time, we'll stop our history there.

Okay, I want you to fasten your seatbelts because again, this is all fast track business, introduction to the Episcopal Church.

But please put a yield sign when you have a question.

Please interrupt with questions.

This is really meant to inform you.

But I do want to talk about this, and before we talk about this one, is as um Nick said, this is the fourth prayer book we've used as an Episcopal church.

The fifth one we would have used in the United States.

So originally we used the English prayer book, and that's what everybody used, but after the American Revolution, we could no longer use that book because we were praying for the king, who we decided was really no longer our ally or our monarch.

So we had to revise, and again, most of the revision had to do with changing American uh to reflect American government.

And we're gonna talk about church polity in a few weeks, but what's really interesting for you to know up front is that the way the Episcopal Church is governed is radically different from the way the Anglican Church is governed.

In fact, the Methodist Church is more like the Anglicans in the way of governance than the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church reflects what was going at the time, the separation of church, uh sorry, of federal and state rights.

So the revision is more thorough than just changing king to president or congress.

It really reflects that every bishop is autonomous in their diocese, if that makes sense.

Now, that first prayer book stood for about a hundred years.

It got reissued in the late 1800s, the revised version stood for about 30 years, and then we got the 1928 prayer book.

We've been using this one for 44 years.

So people call this the new prayer book.

I want you to hear it's 44 years old, and um really substantial is not just changing the language from right one, the thou thy, to you your, but uh there's been a whole liturgical change.

In 1928, the Lord's table was almost unequivocally called the altar and put up against the wall.

So the priest stood, and it was his, right?

His back to the congregation as their mediator at the altar.

Since 1976, by the way, you can tell that our church was built since then, because there's no ombri, which is sort of an archway above the table.

Since then, we've pulled the table out from the wall, and the priest serves not as our mediator, but as our sort of samoye at the Lord's table.

So we've gone back a little bit and said it's not just an altar, it's also the Lord's table, and the priest stands facing the people.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Revisions are an interesting thing to think about, and I want you to hear that before we begin, because there's two linguistic traditions represented here: the thousand thighs, and the reason we don't use that language, by the way, anymore, has to be with the Quakers.

I don't know if you know this, but there was a distinction in English between you, um, you polite, you formal, and you personal.

Just like in German, there's the do form and the z form.

Is there, does this attempt in Spanish?

It does, right?

There's a formal and a polite, right?

So it turns out that the is actually the personal form, like the intimate one.

And the Quakers were using it with everybody.

They threw all social convention out the window and said, we don't need to be polite.

We're all family, we're all equal, so we're gonna use all of this, the thou thighs.

And everybody else said, that's a little radical, we'll just use you now, which is interesting to hear.

It there's really something beautiful, if you know that tradition was saying, and with thy spirit, because it is a gesture of intimacy, not formality.

We hear it wrong.

We hear thy and think, oh, that's antiquated and stilted, and it's meant to be intimate.

And when we do write one, the thou thigh to God is meant to be intimate, and the you became the intimate, and the the thou thigh has become the formal.

But that's not at its inception.

Does that make sense?

So we've kind of switched what the rights mean because, frankly, of the Quaker influence.

Um, Nick spoke about revision of the prayer book, and as you know, English uh is always developing.

And um consider now that most people don't really know how to spell because they have autocorrect, for example, so who knows where that's going to take us.

Some people get their knickers in a real twist about revising this prayer book, but keep in mind that the prayer book is supposed to reflect language.

So I'm sort of in the middle of the road on this because uh one of our modern sensibilities, and you may not share it.

But I'm going to tell you, if you're a woman, you won't find feminine pronouns for God or people in this book.

And what we pray reflects what we believe, and I'm going to tell you it's wrong.

So I'm very open to this being revised to have inclusive language for God, because I believe what we pray influences what we believe and how we treat each other.

Some people say, nope, that's just you.

I don't think of God as male, even though I always use the word he.

I just use that because that's what we use.

So, in some ways, that's the crossroads that we're at.

We have additional liturgies called enriching our worship.

There's actually two more forms of the Eucharist that aren't in this book that you can get in separate volumes or online.

We've changed the marriage right to be for not only man and woman, but to be for man and man and woman and woman.

And so those kinds of things will make it into the revised prayer book.

I don't know what's going to happen with gender pronouns, but I just want to say this up front.

We do believe strongly that words matter in the Episcopal Church, and I would tell you that's why constant thinking over what we're praying, whether we revise the book completely or not, I think is actually really important to who we are as people of faith.

Again, you can come out with a different conclusion, but if we don't go to the process, we're actually doing severe injustice to our Protestant heritage.

I hope that makes sense.

That we're mindful about language when we think about it.

So here's a tour de force of the prayer book.

There's a table of contents which is super helpful.

And we get to begin with a description of what the prayer book is, and you get it from 1789, and uh what the service of the church is, and a calendar of festival days and frankly, saints.

In the Episcopal Church, a saint is not somebody who's worked miracles after their death.

That's the Roman canonized saint definition.

We did bring in all the saints' days from our Roman heritage, but there's been a new document called Holy Women, Holy Men, that has expanded who we consider to be saints, and there's almost one for every day of the year now.

People like Martin Luther King Jr.

have made it in.

Do you know what day would is Martin Luther King Jr.'s day?

It's not in January.

We don't celebrate saints on their birthday.

We celebrate saints on the day in which they pass to larger life, which is their death.

So April 4th is Martin Luther King's day, right?

That's the day he was shot in Memphis.

So that's when you'd find him.

You won't find him in this calendar.

You'll find him in the supplemental resource, holy men, holy women, which again is another reason this will end up being revised, is to sweep that into the prayer book so we don't have a bunch of supplemental materials.

We've got it all together.

Does that make sense?

You'll, of course, also find festal days like when is the feast of the Epiphany?

When is Pentecost?

Well, it's a roaming feast, right?

We'll talk about that more.

It's 50 days after Easter, so it's not set.

After the calendar comes what's called the daily office.

Now, before Thomas Cranmer wrote this book, monastics, as Nick said, were praying seven to nine times a day.

Cranmer was a Roman priest.

He was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But Cranmer, because of his Protestant leanings, and he was much more Protestant than Henry VIII.

The Act of Uniformity was not passed under Henry, but under Henry's son Edward, who was like eight.

And that means Thomas Cranmer passed the Act of Uniformity.

I hope that makes sense, so I'm telling you.

But Cranmer did treat it as monastic heritage, believe that Christians, whether monks or married, whether clergy or lay, should return four times a day, not seven, to intentional prayer space.

And by intentional prayer, I don't mean saying, God bless the food, thank you for it.

Amen.

He had scripted ones, and these stand.

And you're going to see them in right one language, but also in right two.

The difference is not just thee thou lie, there's an inclusion of things called canticles, which are hymns, statements of faith, readings of scripture that intersperse the reading.

The scriptures we use in the daily office are on a two-year cycle that take you through most of scripture in two years.

Not all of them.

They take you through the Psalms every month if you do this right.

Now, if you're a Roman Catholic month, you're going to do the whole Psalter every week.

Daily office, you'll do it in a month.

And that means in two years, you've done this 24 times, gone through the whole book of Psalms.

And because we do that, the Psalms will be printed in the back of the prayer book.

Not the whole Bible, but the Psalter, because we use the Psalms more than we use any other texts as a way of gathering, whether you sing it or not.

These are sort of the hymns of the monastic community.

Cranmer said, look, we should pray in the morning.

We should pray at noon.

That's the lunch time, which remember, until recently, that was the biggest meal of the day was lunch, not dinner.

Dinner was the smallest meal of the day.

We've changed that for a couple of reasons, mostly social and having to do with money, actually.

An ostentatious display.

Then we do an evening prayer, which would be after dinner, and we do, it's called Compline, which would be directly before going to bed, if that makes sense.

If you have never done the daily office, I have friends that do all four every day.

I have some people who do morning prayer once or twice a week.

I would encourage you to do it.

Give it a shot.

You don't actually need other people to do the daily office.

It's nice when you have them, but you don't need them.

There doesn't have to be a homily.

You read the scriptures.

If you want, you can find them online, printed out in the daily office.

There's also a two-volume set that has the readings parsed out literally by day in the two-year cycle, two volumes, and you can just refer to that and the prayer book.

So really, for the longest time, you had the Bible or the Daily Office, the readings from Scripture, the prayer book, and the hymnal.

So you were balancing three three volumes.

I don't know if I want to say much more about morning prayer than the first time.

Yeah, I just call attention to the prayer uh starting on page 136.

There is uh a section of daily devotion for individuals and families.

And these are very short.

You can lengthen it because there are opportunities to pray for others, and there are opportunities to do readings beyond the reading as you see fit.

I used to do the noontime one as part of my lunch break at work.

Um so be aware of those that you don't necessarily have to do all of morning prayer, write one or two.

That can give you a start on a way to uh be present with God.

Yeah.

And remember, Lent is not about taking on everything and being overwhelmed.

It's about baby steps towards greater life and longer days.

So I would suggest if you've never done this, give morning prayer a try once a week.

We do it on Wednesdays here if you want a community, or take it on as you do breakfast, even.

Again, the contents go morning prayer right one, then we do evening prayer right one, then we make the switch to morning prayer right two, and then we get to do uh noonday.

There's not a right one and right two at noonday, there's just one.

So that's all in common.

Then we do uh evening prayer right two, and then we have one compline.

Okay, so evening and morning, you have two choices.

Noon, you have one choice, compline, you have one choice, and as Nick said, you also get to have uh daily devotions for for families, and and that's divided.

There's morning, noon, evening, and at the close of the day, and they're a much shorter form.

So it could be you say, I don't know about all this morning prayer, go to daily devotions and get the condensed, the reader's digest version, if that makes sense.

This is what's great about the prayer book is it has options.

And I want to tell you, I actually think that's really great.

And the way that we use the prayer book well, I think, is not just to pick the one we like and settle for it.

We all have things we like, but including things we don't like or gravitate towards helps us appreciate diversity and even more why we like what we like.

I hope that makes sense to you.

That's part of the reason why we use right one at both services in Lent.

Next year we'll use right two at both services in Lent because we get too easily settled into what we now there's comfort in returning to what forms us, but there's also value in being pushed, pushed to think why we appreciate it and that those other ways of thinking beyond our right.

I hope that makes sense.

Please by way uh prayer available for a candle or your iPhone.

Take it with you.

It's also available on Alexa.

So you can tell Alexa uh Episcopal Prayer, and it'll bring it up.

So isn't that great?

This is the only book printed today that has no copyright on it.

There is no copyright on the Book of Common Prayer.

So uh that's why it's available in so many different places.

Um the next thing we get beginning on page 159 are the colics.

And the colics are designed to match the intention of the seasons.

And notice it begins with Advent.

On page 159, the church year starts with Advent, not New Year's Day.

It starts with getting ready for the Feast of Christmas.

And the colics do a couple of things.

Of course, they help us collect ourselves, but more than anything, the colics are meant to be the interpretive key to the lectionary.

So the daily office, you'll go through most of Scripture every two years.

In the Revised Common Lectionary, you'll go through some major bits every three years.

And the readings, there's four on a Sunday.

There's usually a Hebrew Bible reading, a psalm, an epistle, or the apocalypse, but that's an epistle too, uh, and always a gospel.

Anytime there's a Eucharist, there has to be a gospel, whether that's a funeral, a wedding, or Sunday morning.

Um real lectionary preaching, most of my colleagues don't seem to know this.

We say we're a lectionary church.

Real lectionary preaching means the preacher takes those four different readings and ties them all together to show that the Bible speaks as a coherent whole from many ages, many periods, and now informs us together.

And the collect is the key in the minds of the lectionary writers to the common thread.

I don't know if that makes sense.

But that's why we have them.

And you'll see them both, it's called traditional and contemporary.

And what that means, of course, is right one, right two.

They're very, very close.

Very close.

There's some special days.

So not only is there every Sunday, but there's things like at baptism.

Baptism will trump Lent, if that makes sense.

If we're doing a baptism in Lent, we'll use the colic for baptism.

There's one for the departed, for Holy Cross Day, for peace, for the nation.

And you can find those as you go through the colics for the day.

Then we get into sort of uh special liturgies for special days.

We just did one on Ash Wednesday.

That's on page 264.

It there's an address we read.

Why do we use ashes?

What's the whole business?

If you're ever wondering, why do y'all do that?

It's right here in the book.

Whether we say it in church or not, the book is a resource to what we do in church.

And this becomes an interesting way you can use common prayer.

If you're interested in being confirmed, read the confirmation service.

It'll tell you what's going to happen that day.

And then we'll get to do it.

Not only will it have the service, but it usually has directions in it.

Like make sure this is going to happen here, and here's sort of what it means, and these are up to you, and these aren't up to you.

There's things, of course, like Palm Sunday in here, and then we do uh Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

These are special services, Holy Saturday.

If you don't know what day that is, that's the day before Easter where Jesus is dead in the tomb.

Most Americans don't celebrate that, but if you live in Bavaria, for example, that is, in some ways, the most set apart day of your year.

The Easter Vigil, which is a sunrise service, we do it here on Easter morning at six in the morning.

Our choir shows up and they grass a little, but it's it's meant to be you're keeping the vigil on sunrise.

So you don't do it Saturday afternoon when it's convenient.

You come early.

And that's how we do it here.

Um, the baptismal service is in here and it includes things like the baptismal covenant.

And then we get into directions for the Eucharist.

And as maybe you heard this morning, the Eucharist is certainly the oldest tradition in Christian worship that there is.

It used to be that our Jewish brothers and sisters would gather, of course, on Friday night for Shabbat at dinner.

They might go to the synagogue on Saturday morning, and the earliest Christians, being Jewish people, would also gather on Sunday, which they called the Lord's Day, for a common meal.

So very, very, very old.

And it begins with the decalogue.

We did that the last two weeks in Lent.

Um we're not doing it going forward in Lent.

It's there.

And of course, it's the Ten Commandments.

The Decalogue are the Ten Words.

There's the penitential order, which is really there to make sure when we think about confession that we're thinking fully.

One way to say it is, oh, it's really just beating ourselves up.

But you know, there's some really amazing things in here.

Like we haven't cared for the earth.

And that's old language.

We realized in the Industrial Revolution what we were doing to the planet.

And that's here.

And that's really, really interesting to think about.

Expanding that we don't just think about the things that we feel, uh, that there are things we're doing to the world and one another that we don't think about.

And that's what I want to tell you is part of the value of the penitential order and the prayers of the people.

The prayers are supposed to represent who's on your mind, but also to remind you, you're not thinking about everybody like immigrants.

And you should.

And that's why we have six different forms.

In fact, here we use ten, because according to the rules, you can make up your own prayers of the people as long as you're representing the people.

And I think we do a good job of that, actually.

I think the different forms help us remember there are other people.

The Eucharist we we talked about this morning in the service, we're going to do it again.

You'll see it in service two.

Now, at the first Eucharistic prayer, there's two choices.

There's prayer one and prayer two.

Prayer one is more from the Scottish Rite language, emphasizing things like sacrifice.

And prayer two softens that a little bit.

I'm going to tell you.

Prayer one is in here.

It may speak to your piety.

It's really hard for me to pray it.

It's hard.

So I use prayer two exclusively.

That can bother you.

You might like prayer one.

Good news, it's in here.

In prayer two, Eucharist two, right two, there are four Eucharistic prayers, and they represent a lot of different modalities.

We use them throughout the year, but if you're wondering what's the oldest form of the Eucharist, it's prayer D in right two, not one of the prayers from right one.

Prayer D in Rite II comes from the 200s.

It's got a little contemporary language, but the words itself are the oldest words we've yet to discover from the patriarch Hippolytus.

Prayer C is a little more modern.

And then prayers A and B have slightly different twists.

We use prayer A in Epiphany.

We use prayers B typically in Lent and in Advent.

So we tend to use these seasonally.

In Pentecost at this church, we use prayer C, and then we use enriching our worship for a month, and then we come back to prayer C, and we might come back to prayer A because Pentecost is so long.

That's sort of how we do it.

There are also not just colics, but prefaces.

And you'll find these, for example, on page 380.

So we say, like the Lord be with you and with thy spirit, lift up your hearts.

And then I go on to say a preface dependent on the Sunday or the season, right out of the book.

Again, that's our interpretive key to how we should be thinking about God nourishing us that particular season, if that makes sense.

Prayers of the people come next.

Now, if you're in right one, there's only one form.

In right two, there's six.

And again, the reminder is there's many ways to think.

The right one prayer has no response.

In the right two, responses can vary.

So there's the intercessor, and the congregation might say something back, like, Lord, hear our prayer, or for those who minister to the sick, the friendless, and the needy.

So it depends how much you share the prayer language literally.

I want to tell you what I think is great about written prayers that I didn't get as an evangelical, is that often my feelings can so overwhelm me I can't really quite find the right words to express them.

And what I find about prayers Christians have been praying for more than a thousand years, that's what we have here, is the ability to express my feelings in words that I couldn't arrive at on my own.

I don't know if that makes sense.

There's an eloquence not only of language, but of breadth and a thoughtfulness.

So I'll tell you, we never pray that our political candidate will win an election.

We pray that elected officials will pursue justice with compassion.

And that is a very different way of praying than we get what we want or that person's bad.

We pray that God will incline the hearts of our officials.

The prayer book does that really well.

Because otherwise, we drift into this way that, oh, God, if candidate Q wins, we're going to hell in a handbasket, and that is not how we ought to pray.

This is where the book is very informative.

Okay.

Communion under special circumstances.

This is where you get to hear that if you can't have communion but you want to, it's just as good.

What page 1997?

Page 397.

So there's rubrics for communion, like thoughts.

And hey, if you've got a feeding tube, you can't have it.

You can't.

But if you want to, you still get the nourishment in your spirit.

I mean, this comes out of the prayer book.

Just a footnote.

The rubrics are these little italic comments you see in the book, you know, in between the lines.

And in the old days, it was written in red.

So that's why they're called rubrics, the red letter of instructions.

Excuse me.

You're good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Confirmation file is next.

That's on page 413.

There's the service of marriage, and I will tell you, having married a number of people, like 30 plus, the marriage rite needs updating.

I will tell you, it does.

The New Zealand rite has some enrichment for our service of marriage.

Our service of marriage is great.

It just could use a little enriching.

That's what I want to say.

Thanksgiving for a child or adoption of a child.

The rite of reconciliation.

So we do confession and absolution in church.

That's general.

But sometimes it's very helpful for us in our spirituality to be able to sit and say exactly what's on our mind to another human being and hear that person say, I've heard what you have to say.

Now I want you to hear what God says.

Put that behind you.

It's not just for sin.

It's not.

This is what your priest here says.

It's not just because you made a morally evil choice.

It's for things like, I put my child in public school in the third grade, and if I'd only just blank, it would have been better.

I'm a bad parent, or I just can't get behind that decision.

It's for a moment of anything that separates you from being in your presentation.

With God for the priest to say, God's finished with that.

God isn't worried about that.

So quit worrying about that.

And that's what the words of absolution do.

Yes.

We're at the confirmation area.

And I'm gonna kind of go for that one.

So uh when we actually do that service on the 5th, yes it is.

So will that be after, as it says here, the sermon is given, and then we have the candidates?

Yes, and it will be a long service that day because it's Palm Sunday.

The sermon will be super short, and I'm giving it, which is unusual, but it's the bishop's birthday the day before, and he didn't want to, and I'm happy because he's longer-winded than I am.

So it'll be short, and what we say, we remind the baptismal covenant.

So when we're infants or young, the baptismal covenant, frankly, is said by the people about what they'll do for us.

But confirmation is the day when you say, I buy into this, I intend to live my life in these ways, and I'm affirming that publicly.

And when the bishop lays, in this case, his hands on your head, he's going to say, I'm blessing you.

I'm glad you want to do that.

Do it with my blessing and encouragement, because boy, um life is hard.

And then we need a little more blessing on our way.

I mean, that's really what the service is meant to do.

And remember, go ahead.

I would explain if you have it already been confirmed in a different religion or in a different place.

I was confirmed as a child as a Roman Catholic.

So is that good for the It's good.

So what we say is if you want to be received into the episcopal way of doing it, you can have a special service where you say, Look, I was confirmed, but boy, my life has changed.

My commitments to God haven't, but the way I'm going to express them are now more in line with this way than that way.

So, Bishop, I want your blessing on that.

And the bishop will say, Come on.

I mean, that's really how it goes.

So technically, you could do either one.

I mean, we're sitting in this class to be prepared.

No, not right, not right.

If you've been confirmed Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, even if you've been confirmed Methodist, we ought to not confirm you, Episcopalian.

We ought to receive you into the church.

The reception will be done that day, too.

Yes.

And if you were confirmed in the Episcopal Church when you were 16 or 60, and here you are five years later saying, Boy, my faith has really changed and I want a blessing in living it out, you can reaffirm your confirmation vows.

Because let's face it, there are very few milestones on our Christian journey.

There are very few.

And confirmation might be your very last one.

Marriage in for everybody.

Confirmation and for everybody.

The nice thing is it's not repeatable, but just like baptism, we can reaffirm, and we do this on baptism of the Lord.

I throw water on you to say, remember it.

We can stand up and the bishop can say, Yeah, I'm glad you're saying this publicly.

You want to do this again, let me bless you again.

So what will Andy do that day?

Andy won't be here.

It'll be Hector.

No, I'm saying for reception.

Is that done the same day as Hector?

It is.

But the bishop coming as Hector, not Andy.

I'm sorry, Hector.

So Andy's coming next year.

So how how then when we all arrive and do this?

I'm going to present you.

Okay.

So I'm your sponsor.

You're confirming first, then you'll say off of reception, which is where I guess I need to slide back because I've been a Catholic.

Yes, and then reaffirmation third.

And we'll do it right out of the book instead of printing all that in the bulletin.

We'll do it right out of the book because here it is, a little different for each one.

Now you're going to do everything up until the same bit, but the bishop is going to give each of you a different prayer according to what you're doing.

Does that make sense?

Because you're looking for a different kind of blessing, you get one.

So it's lovely.

I mean, it really, you should read this ahead of time.

It's really lovely.

One other thing that I find interesting and significant.

When the bishop lays his hands on your head, you are in physical contact indirectly with Jesus Christ.

There is a steady continuum of laying on of hands of bishops from the apostles right down to Bishop Andy, Bishop Hector.

So think about that as he lays his hands on your head.

I think that's interesting.

That's really what apostolic secession means, right?

Is this all goes back to Jesus?

Yeah.

And we are all connected.

We're all connected.

Yes.

You're going to find after marriage ministration to the sick.

We'll talk about sacraments, I think, next week.

And hey, it turns out these are great prayers you can use.

In fact, any of you can anoint somebody who's sick with oil as long as a priest blesses the oil.

Right?

So the priest blesses the oil, you can use it.

If you want, as a Lenten discipline, to carry around some holy oil, by all means.

I will give it to you.

Because there is no more intimate way of praying.

I'm going to tell you than putting your hands on somebody's head while you pray for them.

I can almost like feel energy almost every time I do it.

There's ministration at the time of death.

We don't do last rites in the Episcopal Church.

We don't.

We do ministration at the time of death.

And I would tell you more often than not, I don't know when somebody's dying, so I don't dare say, depart now! Now! Instead, what we do is we commend people to the Lord.

And I'll tell you that prayer commendation, I could give that to my daughter today, and it wouldn't be weird.

End your arms, most merciful Savior, when we commend your child, Emory.

Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming.

Receive her into the arms of your mercy and give her rest with the saints of light.

It's a lovely prayer, isn't it?

Repeatable.

Any of you can do it.

You get to hear next what we do better, I think, than any rite there is, which is the burial rite.

And uh, if you've not been to an Episcopal funeral, you're missing out because it's not ridiculous or frivolent.

I can't tell you how many people say we don't want a funeral, we want a celebration of life.

The fact that we're afraid of words like death and funeral, I'm gonna tell you, is morbid and sickening.

Um this service does it right, it admits we die.

But even at the grave we make our song, hallelujah, hallelujah.

So there is this tension in the service we do really well, that um this person we're gonna miss, and they're with the Lord.

And I think that's right.

Next, you get to see the ordination services.

So if you're ever wondering what bishops do, you get to find out in the prayer book on page 511, and you can see the service.

It's uh not likely that you'll see the ordination of a new bishop in Texas for I'd probably say more than 10 years.

I think we're probably pretty set.

Although who knows what Andy's going to do?

Um, he didn't have to retire.

Bishops must retire when they're 72.

Um you can call that ageism, but it's interesting.

That's what we insist upon.

Um a bishop can retire whenever they want, but they can't serve past the age of 72.

Anyway, you'll find bishop there, you'll find priest next if you were at Jenny's.

Much of that came from here, but much of it also came from the Anglican prayer book, the one used in Canada and in England, and from the New Zealand book, because Jenny had been both of those places and they were significant to her.

You'll find ordination to the diaconate in here as well.

In the Episcopal Church, we're deaconed first and then ordained as priests second.

Not everybody.

Some people stop at the diaconate.

To be a priest, you have to be a deacon first, a priest second.

To be a bishop, you're ordained a third time.

We're the only major tradition that has three ordinations for a bishop.

I just want you to hear that.

We have something for celebration of new ministry.

Usually that's what happens when a rector comes and you sort of you call that installation of the rector.

We didn't do that here.

We did a different form that's in enriching our worship when I came called renewing our ministry, because this wasn't my ministry, it was yours, and we're renewing it together under a new leadership.

But I like that version better.

That's why I chose it.

Um consecration of a church.

Um, hopefully, we'll get the stained glass windows in the chapel done before Hector comes, but I don't think so.

Um when it's all done, we'll have that place not consecrated anew.

It's already sacred space, it's part of the sanctuary, but we'll have an additional blessing of the space by a bishop.

As I said, this is fast.

Next comes.

A blessing is different from a consecration.

Okay.

A blessing is sort of like a reaffirmation, if that makes sense.

It may be interesting for you that we consecrate certain items, like those purificators, they've been consecrated.

So when they're done, we don't throw them away, we burn them or we bury them.

And before we do that, we deconsecrate them.

We essentially do the burial rite for our sacred items before we bury them or uh cremate them.

Again, the Psalter comes next.

And then you get, I think, one of the best uses, honestly, for the prayer book in daily life, which are these set prayers on Thanksgivings.

They're there to enrich the way you pray for the government, for our country.

Uh I'm asked to do the blessing at the city council meeting three times a year, and I pull it right out of here.

I do it for sound government.

I add some words to it because I pray for the mayor and the council members by name.

Um, how interesting.

I guess no other clergy does that because uh last time I did that, they said that was so thoughtful.

How'd you think of that prayer?

Um, it's on, it's number 22.

And it's it's really quite lovely.

Um again, if you're in a time of distress and you need quiet confidence, that's in here.

If you uh need self-dedication, that's in here.

And then there's some wonderful thanksgivings in here as well, which again, they're better than just saying, Oh, thank you, God, I got for I got what I wanted, you get lines like, We thank you for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

I mean, what a wonderful prayer that is.

So I commend to you.

Those are really, really helpful and formative.

Then we get a catechism.

Now, unlike what you may be used to, a catechism reminder is really a way of internalizing a narrative through question and answer, and it's scripted.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters use a catechism every Passover.

It's called the Haggadah or the Haggadah, and the youngest person in the room asks the oldest person four questions.

Why is this night different from any other night?

Why are we using flatbread instead of chala?

Why are we using bitter herbs?

Why are we dipping our hands in this salt water?

And the oldest person has to impute wisdom.

Now, the youngest person in the room could be 97.

They have to ask these questions for it to work out because essentially what they're doing is reconnecting to the story.

Now, the great thing about this catechism is it's not a definition of faith, it's an outline.

That means you don't have to buy this word for word to be an Episcopalian.

It gives you an outline of faith practices.

What are we by nature?

We're part of God's creation made in the image of God.

So again, it parses all this out and it's divided between human nature, God the Father, the old covenant, God the Son, etc.

It's an interesting read.

But reminder, this is not what it means to be an Episcopalian.

This is an outline of faith.

Next, you get historical documents.

Very few people read this, including like the longest creed you've ever seen.

And the most complicated.

And the most complicated.

You think the Nicene Creed is long.

You read the Athanasian Creed.

You get to hear the preface to the first prayer book, which Nick mentioned, the articles of religion established under Queen Elizabeth that define a little bit of what's going on.

The Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral.

And then we get into this bizarre bit, a table-defined Easter Day.

It may surprise you, we don't link Easter with Passover in the Roman Church.

The Orthodox Church does that.

We got off that train a long time ago, regrettably.

I'm just going to tell you.

I think it's silly, but this is what we have.

Then you get to see the lectionary, which we're following every Sunday.

So if you're ever wondering, what are we going to do next week?

It's in here.

This is a table.

And um, and at the very end, you get the daily office, which remember the lectionary takes you through the Bible every three years, the daily office every two.

Now, I will tell you, a lot of people say this book is what it means to be an Episcopalian.

We have a common prayer book, and I want you to know that's changing a little bit.

I will tell you, it's it is unique to the Episcopal Church, but maybe you've read that there's a New Zealand prayer book.

There's also one in South Africa.

They're different.

They're different.

So there's not one prayer book in the Anglican Communion.

There are many.

One thing that's lovely about the Episcopal Church, I'll tell you, is that you can go to St.

Christopher's or you can go to Smoky Mary's in New York.

And while some of the actions, like incense, St.

Christopher's, they have screens and like appraise bands, but the structure comes out here.

So there is similarity, even though there's a little bit of diversity, there's a lot of similarity wherever you go, frankly, worldwide.

What's interesting, like I told you at the beginning, is because this represents culture and language, in the New Zealand one, you'll find English on one side and Maori on the other side.

And you'll find in the New Zealand prayer book, we didn't pray for the nation, we pray for the Commonwealth, because that's how they describe themselves.

And you'll find in the New Zealand book a much more, I want to say, earth-centered, natural-centered way of doing it.

And I just want to hold up to you that I think that truth, personally, is not always easy to define.

I think truth is very robust.

And there's stretching and there's tension.

C.S.

Lewis, I think, said this very well, if you know Lewis, in Mere Christianity, he said God is the great break of images, the great iconoclast.

So once we settle on an image for God, God goes about breaking it to bits for our sake so that we can hold on to something bigger than what we settled for.

And that's where I would suggest to you that reading additional resources allows God to do that work.

You join God in doing that work.

So it's not just such a disaster for you, if that if that makes sense.

We open ourselves to expanding what we've settled for.

Well, I did, but and I also have five more minutes.

So any questions or comments about the prayer book?

Well, I have a question about the at the beginning of the saints, is there something or a bracket or something or not?

What does the bracket?

Um like for example, we're talking about on the calendar.

Yeah, the calendar of saints.

Yeah, and what's interesting is that those people who are in the brackets are more like modern versions.

Oh, how interesting.

Martin Luther King is in here.

That's because we made this since 1976.

That's right.

Um, you'll see, for example, that um Oscar Romero, uh the Archbishop of San Salvador and the martyrs of San Salvador, made it in 1980.

He had not been canonized, canonized in the Catholic Church, and that's why he's in brackets.

The recognition isn't quite there.

What's interesting is this was decided on in 76, but not printed and distributed in this volume until 1982, I think, right?

With the handle?

81.

Yeah, 79, 81, yeah.

That's how Oscar Romero made.

He he you know, he was one of the last people to make it in here, and that's part of him being in brackets.

Actually, there are copies of this that were issued in 79 that were um revised since.

And so the they uh so they have made some minor changes in it.

Um it it the the book I've I've got a copy at home.

It looks like this, it sounds like this almost everywhere, but it's got a very few minute changes, and it says this is a temporary use.

I forget what the term actually is, but you know.

Yeah.

What's interesting, and and I would tell you again, there's even more um brackets now, at least if we were going to update it, because you won't see Frederick Douglass in here, although he is in Holy Women, Holy Men.

We observe his death day in February.

You will find the first black priest in the Episcopal Church in here.

That's Absalom Jones.

Uh, curious to know, he was ordained to the diaconate in 1795.

That's six years after the first prayer book, we had the first black clergy person, although he wasn't priested until 1805.

So he was a deacon for 10 years, but he does show up.

So we were pretty fast, I want you to know, in ordaining black clergy.

It only took us really five years.

What makes the difference in a martyr and a saint?

Uh, okay, so a martyr is somebody who died standing up for their faith, like they were accused of being a heretic, and they held on, and they like Thomas Cranvern was burned at the stake.

So we would call him a martyr.

He's an interesting story, by the way, because he said, I'm going to recant all my heresy so that I can be forgiven.

And he said, Okay, we're going to burn you at the stake anyway.

And when he got up to the stake, he said, Um, can I say a word, please, about my heresy?

And they said, sure, you're repentant.

And he said, I don't recant of anything.

People suck.

That was his own thing.

I recant my recantation.

Yeah.

It was amazing.

So one we actually we're not even really sure whether Cranmer ever really recanted, or so he did it in order to recant this recantation.

Well, we don't know.

But uh martyrs are people who die like so, and saints may have a natural death, if that makes sense.

They may have an actual death.

A natural.

Oh, okay.

So, like in the Catholic Church, though, you can be both.

You could.

You could be both.

Oscar Romero would have been a martyr if you buy into him being a saint because he was killed at the Eucharist.

Martin Luther King Jr.

was killed at the Eucharist.

Frederick Douglass is a saint in Holy Women, Holy Men, because he wasn't killed for his faith, he died of natural causes.

I don't know if that makes sense.

You'll find some other people like that too, like Roger Williams is in here.

Curiously enough, he was a baptist, he started as an Anglican but became a Baptist.

Um, but he wasn't martyred, he just died one day.

No miracles needed.

Not in not in the episcopal version.

The truth is, and and this is interesting, we recognize some of these saints that are like big and inspiring people, but in the Episcopal Church, saints are simply people who point other people to God, dead or living.

So there are living saints.

My mother is one of them.

You have your own saints that aren't in the book.

I mean, that's important.

You have prayers that mean something to you that aren't in this book.

Like if you're an alcoholic, God grant me the serenity to accept the things about myself I cannot change.

That's not in this book.

But you pray that prayer every single day of your recovery.

So not everything we do is in here.

I tell you the same thing about the Bible.

There are books that mean a lot to me, maybe more to me than Leviticus means on certain days.

But what we said is these are the books we hold in common, even though we all are going to have our own additional resources, if that makes sense.

So this isn't the book of all prayers, it's the book of the ones we have in common.

Okay, really out of time.

Thank you for being here and bring questions next week when we talk about the seven sacraments.

Um if you bring them to the uh Narthex, I'd be most grateful.

I'll I'll help.