On an Advent Collect

Missal, with the text for Advent (Durham, England, 14th c.)

"Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer appoints the collect for the First Sunday of Advent to be repeated every day in Advent until Christmas Eve.  The prayer thus sets the tone for the whole season—indeed, for the whole liturgical year—and invites reflection.

“Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light”

The prayer opens with language taken from Romans 13:12, part of the Epistle lesson (Rom 13:11–14) associated since at least the medieval period with the first Sunday of Advent and retained in the first year of the three-year cycle of the current Revised Common Lectionary.  (The lesson appears, for example, in the 14^th-century English missal shown in the image above.)  The English reformers expanded the lesson to begin with verse 8: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  

The expanded lection helps us see that to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light is nothing more nor less than to love.  For St. Paul connects the love command (vv. 8–10) to the section about knowing the time (vv. 11–14) with a simple kai touto, “and this.”  Thus, St. Paul effectively says in verse 11 that we are to love, knowing that it is time to walk in the light of the coming day of salvation.  Because the night is far spent, because the reign of sin and death is near its end, we are to put on the armor (hopla, lit., “weapons”) of light (v. 12).  We are to no longer give our selves as “instruments of unrighteousness” (hopla adikias), but to present our bodies to God as “instruments of righteousness” (hopla dikaisoynes) (6:13), as “ a living sacrifice” (12:1).  In short, we are to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13:14), to immerse ourselves in the life of the risen Lord.  United with our Lord in a death like his in baptism, we are to “walk in newness of life,” living to God, considering ourselves “alive to God in Christ Jesus” (cf. Rom 6:4–11).  Knowing the time, we are to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.” (Eph 5:2).

“Now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility”

Now is when we are to love one another.  Like St. Paul, the collect assumes that we know the time, “that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.  The night is far spent, the day is at hand” (Rom 13:11–12a, KJV).  Now is the time of the shadows before the coming dawn, a time when the continuing effects of sin and death require from us sober watchfulness and mutual encouragement if we are to not be conformed to this devastated world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds (12:2).

Advent Prayers in "The Leofric Missal" (England, 9th–11th c.)

Now we are to let our minds be conformed to of Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8).

“That in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal”*

The prayer concludes by directing our attention to the second advent of our Lord, to the day when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10–11).  In light of his coming, “what sort of people ought [we] to be in living lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” (2 Pt 3:12)  We are called to be a people whose lives of love point to the coming renewal of creation, “where righteousness is at home” (2 Pt 3:13).  We are called to be a people whose obedience to the Lord Jesus proclaims his sovereignty in a world that does not yet acknowledge Christ as King.

* The collect’s aspiration clause corresponds closely to a post-communion prayer in the Gelasian Sacramentaries of the 8^th century, a family of western service books from which, together with the Gregorian Sacramentaries, the Roman Missal derives.  (An early example of the prayer is found in the “Leofric Missal,” brought to England in the 10^th or 11^th century.  See the last prayer, beginning Preces populi tui, in the righthand image above.)  That prayer translates roughly as “...that they may rejoice at the advent of your Only-begotten according to the flesh, may at the second advent, when he shall come in his majesty, receive the reward of eternal life” (Trans. Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book [HarperOne, 1995], p. 165).

"Read, Mark, Learn, and Inwardly Digest": On Eating Scripture

Sandro Botticelli, "Madonna of the Book" (ca. 1483)

“BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.”

The collect for this the penultimate Sunday of ordinary time was composed for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549.  The prayer was originally paired with the readings for the second Sunday of Advent, and it draws its language from the epistle lesson for that day: Romans 15:4–13.  There we read, “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (v. 4).  The acknowledgement clause of the collect (“who has caused all holy Scriptures, etc.”) corresponds to the first part of St. Paul’s sentence, and the collect’s aspiration clause (“that, by patience and the comfort of they holy Word, we may, etc.”) to the second part.  (The last phrase of the collect makes reference to Colossians 1:27.)  In the collect’s petition clause (“grant that we may, etc.”), we ask for what we need in order to maintain hope.  We ask God—“the God of steadfastness and encouragement”, “the God of hope” (Rom 15:5, 13)— for what we need to be the sort of people who can take courage from Holy Scripture and so hold steadfast to our hope in Christ.  And what we need is to truly hear the words of Scripture.  Accordingly, we pray for the grace to hear the words of Scripture, “so that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15:13).

The collect recognizes, with the long tradition of the church, that hearing the Word of God in the manifold words of Scripture is demanding.  To drive the point home, the collect glosses “hear” with a concatenation of verbs: “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.”  Scripture does not instruct us in hope automatically; rather, we must chew, ingest and ruminate on the words of Scripture in order to discern in them the comfort (in the sense of the late Latin confortare, “greatly strengthen”) of God’s holy Word.  What is offered to us in the words of Scripture sometimes does not seem palatable, but when we “inwardly digest” it we will, like the prophet Ezekiel, find it sweet as honey in our mouths (Ezek. 3:3).  We will discover the sweetness of Christ, “for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man.”*  Tasting for ourselves the goodness of the Word become flesh increases our appetite for our Lord.

In the end, learning to hear the Word is a matter of love.  “Hunger for the Word is a need of love. […] It is the discovery of the mystery of a Person deeply loved, in whom every truth comes together like the lines on his face.  He is the Truth, and every text of Scripture speaks of him.”**  Reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting the words of Scripture is a primary way we “seek his face always” (Ps. 105:4).  Thus, Augustine exhorts us in this life of our pilgrimage to “treat the Scripture of God as the face of God.  Melt in its presence.”***

*Article VII, Articles of Religion.

** Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina, trans. Edward Hagman (Liturgical Press, 1998), p. 65.

*** Augustine, Sermon 22.7, PL 38.  Translation from Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale, 2003), p. 50.

"Vain Repetitions"?

"For we cannot but all find by our own experience how difficult it is to fasten anything that is truly good, either upon ourselves or others; and that it is rarely, if ever, effected without frequent repetitions of it. Whatsoever good things we hear only once, or now and then, though, perhaps, upon the hearing of them, they may swim for awhile in our brains, yet they seldom sink down into our hearts, so as to move and sway the affections, as it is necessary they should do, in order to our being edified by them."  
-- William Beveridge, from A Sermon on the Excellency and Usefulness of the Common Prayer (1681)


As a neophyte Anglican whose formation was thoroughly Anabaptist and Evangelical, I have found myself wrestling with the fact that my recitation of the morning office (and other services from the Prayer Book) is sometimes just that--a recitation of words in which neither my mind nor my heart are engaged.  I do not want to become the sort of person who deceives himself into thinking that external piety is equivalent to a vital relationship with the risen and present Christ.  So when I recite the Benedictus or the Lord's Prayer with scarcely a thought attached to the words, I fear that I am becoming precisely that sort of person.  At the same time, I have decided to set down roots in the Anglican tradition, with which Prayer Book spirituality is intimately connected.  This commitment and this fear raises the question of the value of set forms of prayer.

Happily others have faced this same question before.  The Rev. William Beveridge is one such person, who along with other seventeenth century Anglican divines thought through this precise question in response to criticisms raised by Puritans.  The quote from a sermon he gave at St. Peter's, Cornhill (where he was vicar), with which I began this post is perhaps the best answer I have found.  Beveridge's answer is valuable because he recognizes the necessity that prayer affect the state of the heart, and maintains the value of set prayer precisely in contributing to the change of affections it has the potential to render.  Set prayers are valuable because through repetition of "good things," they are able to "move and sway the affections."  That the prayers in the Prayer Book are almost entirely composed of strings of scriptural references and allusions provides assurance that they are "good things', that is, that they are edifying to my faith and the faith of the Church (cf. 1 Cor 14:26, the text on which Beveridge's sermon was based).  Thus, the value of praying set forms is like that of regularly performing the same physical exercises; the latter forming muscles through repetition, the former serving "to raise up my desires to those good things which are prayed for, to fix my mind wholly upon God."

Of course, Beveridge and others understood set forms of prayer as properly belonging to what they called "public devotions."  They did not think of set forms of prayer as a panacea for a robust life of prayer, but also emphasized the necessity of private, extemporaneous prayer.  In speaking of this they emphasize strongly mastery of one's desires.  For example, Richard Baxter wrote in 1647,

"Keep [thy heart] close to the business [of prayer] until thou have obtained thine end...Call in assistance also from God; mix ejaculations with thy cogitations and soliloquies, till having seriously pleaded the case with thy heart, and reverently pleaded the case with God, thou hast pleaded thyself from a clod to a flame, from a forgetful sinner to a mindful lover; from a lover of the world to a thirster after God, from a fearful coward to a resolved Christian, from an unfruitful sadness to a joyful life."

 And Joseph Hall in 1643 exhorted us to take the smallest occasion as a "holy hint of raising our hearts up to our God."  For example, he suggests praying "Wash Thou me, O Lord, and I shall be whiter than snow" (Psalm 51:7b) when washing one's hands.  Through such exercises, he hopes to encourage "a continual acknowledgment" of God

These Anglican divines understood that we humans are literally creatures of habit, and that formation of the habits of loving God and neighbor with our whole self requires diligent training.

[NB: Rt. Rev. Anthony Burton, the rector at Church of the Incarnation, where I am an intern this summer through Duke Divinity School's Field Education program, gave me the book from which the quotations are taken:  Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the religious literature of the seventeenth century, eds. Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (London: S.P.C.K., 1962).]