Reflections from Saint Paul's Church

Anglican Identity - Part II
One of a series of sermons on the roots and character of Anglicanism, this sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Church, Salem, on Sunday, 29 January 2006.

I have promised to spend some time during this Epiphanytide talking about what it means to be an Anglican Christian. In doing this, I do not mean to suggest that Anglicanism is superior to other ways of living the Christian life. It is certainly superior for me. It suits my temperament and it nourishes me in ways that I need to be nourished. Clearly, it does not work for other people, otherwise everyone would be an Episcopalian.

On the other hand, there are those who would reduce Anglicanism to some kind of lowest common denominator in order to fill the pews. I would love to have the pews full every Sunday, and I think that if more people really understood what Anglicanism is about the pews might be full, or at least fuller. I believe that Anglicanism is an extremely rich way of living the Christian life. Again, I do not imagine that it is for everyone, but I also do not believe that there is a lowest common denominator that would satisfy everyone. So, what we have to offer–what I hope we as a parish have to offer–is a way of living the Christian life that is indeed rich and that has much to offer those who would give it a real try.

You will note that I have been speaking not about church and going to church, but about a "way"–what is often referred to as "the Anglican way"–of living the Christian life. I do not think of being a Christian, let alone being an Episcopalian or Anglican, as something that is related merely to going to church on Sunday. Going to church is, of course, an important part of how we live the Christian life. For me, to miss church on Sunday for any reason other than being ill is, frankly, unthinkable. Keeping the Lord’s Day, the weekly remembrance of the Resurrection, is a central part of the Christian life, and it is not merely an obligation, it is something that I do not want to miss, something that I think I cannot afford to miss. But it is also only the beginning.

I would like you all to do something. Pick up a Prayer Book from the pew rack in front of you. Don’t open it, just look at the edges of the pages. Virtually all of the Prayer Books in this church have a fairly narrow brown line running along the edges of some of the pages. In some of the books, those particular pages may even seem to be a little loose. Now, open the book to the part with the brown-edged pages. What service does it open to? The Eucharist, of course. That is the service for which these Prayer Books are all most frequently used. But now, ask yourself a question: Why do we need such a fat book, if we only really use about 20 pages of it?

The answer to that question is: the Anglican way. There is nothing that identifies Anglicanism more than The Book of Common Prayer. In spite of appearances, it is not just our Sunday missalette. Our Prayer Book is a unique document. No other communion or fellowship of ordinary Christians has anything quite like it. Its essential message is that liturgy and daily prayer are the very heart of Christian living. As an English priest named Martin Thornton once wrote: "To the seventeenth- or indeed nineteenth-century layman the Prayer Book was not a shiny volume to be borrowed from a church shelf on entering and carefully replaced on leaving. It was a beloved and battered personal possession, a life-long companion and guide, to be carried from the church to kitchen, to parlor, to bedside table; equally adaptable for liturgy, personal devotion, and family prayer...."

Thornton saw prayer as the center of what it means to be a Christian. And what The Book of Common Prayer provides is an orderly and comprehensive way of making prayer the center. Another way of describing it is to say that the Prayer Book provides a system. That might sound like an odd way of putting it, unless you stop and think for a moment about what the opposite of a system is. The opposite of an orderly system for doing something–anything–is disorder, chaos.

The word "disciple" does not happen to appear in any of today’s readings, but they are all about discipleship, about how Paul became a disciple of Jesus, and about the meaning and cost of discipleship. What is a disciple? What does the word mean? A disciple is someone who is under discipline. Discipline is orderly, systematic. Discipline is a way of advancing one’s skills. We are all called to be disciples, disciplined followers of Jesus. Imagine the first disciples, imagine Paul, imagine what they all had to do to become disciples: they left their jobs, their homes, and set out on an entirely new life, to learn the discipline of discipleship.

What the Prayer Book is is a manual for becoming better disciples. We can tag along behind Jesus, dropping behind and getting lost when we get tired or lose interest, or we can begin to practice the serious business of being a disciple, being intentional, orderly, systematic, disciplined. The Prayer Book helps us to do this in at least three significant ways.

One of the very first things one finds in the Prayer Book is "The Calendar of the Church Year". In one sense, it is not a very helpful calendar. It gives dates, but not days. It tells you that Christmas falls on December 25^th, but it does not tell you what day of the week Christmas will fall on. You have to use this calendar in conjunction with an ordinary calendar to find out stuff like that. But this calendar tells you something else that is important. Sadly, in my experience, very few Episcopalians recognize and practice what the calendar tells us. Most Episcopalians are, at best, Sunday-only Episcopalians. They do not have much time for church, or for God, on any day of the week except Sunday. That is sad for two reasons. For one thing, it means that they miss the tremendous riches and encouragement the church has to offer every day. Secondly, it means that they will grow much more slowly as disciples. Just like athletic training and many other disciplines, you only get better at it if you work at it.

Several years ago, I decided I wanted to learn the Russian language. I signed up for an extension course from the University of Wisconsin, I bought the books, and I received my assignments in the mail. And I made a point of spending at least an hour a day working on those assignments. I love languages but I have a very hard time learning them, for some reason. I did not become fluent in Russian. But I can find my way around the Moscow and St. Petersburg streets and subways, I can make purchases in Russian stores, and I can read signs and headlines in the newspaper and simple stories in books and papers. I had to learn a new alphabet, a complex grammar, and a whole new vocabulary. In fact, I carried little vocabulary cards with me everywhere so I could fill in wasted time by learning new words.  It took discipline. You cannot become really good, or even moderately proficient at anything without some discipline. Being a Sunday-only Christian is not the worst thing someone can be. But it is possible to be something much better. It is a matter of discipline and priorities.

The calendar in the Prayer Book helps us to keep track of where we are in the church year. There is much more to being a Christian than Christmas, Easter, and the Sundays that we are able to make it to church. And that brings us to the second thing one finds in the Prayer Book, and that is something called the Daily Office. The Daily Office is just what it says, part of the daily discipline of being a Christian: forms of prayer to be used every day, just like my Russian assignments. There are forms for Morning and Evening Prayer–and, for the more ambitious, additional forms for noon and night. To begin and end each day, not only with a general kind of consciousness of the presence of God, but to meet God daily in a discipline of prayer, is what the largest portion of that fat Prayer Book helps us to do.

As I have said before, this is not for everyone. At the Reformation, some people rebelled against the idea of saying prayers that someone else had written down in a book. They wanted to talk to God in their own words. The Prayer Book does not say that we cannot talk to God in our own words. What the Prayer Book does is to provide a foundation for our relationship with God that does not depend on how we feel or what we are thinking at a particular time, or whether we have just the right words of our own. There may be days when we have nothing at all to say to God, but that does not mean we should ignore him. Every family has moments when no one has anything to say–the many hours any family spends together can occasionally exhaust all topics of conversation, but that does not mean that people are being ignored. And with God we need to remember that he never runs out of things to say to us, even when we think we have nothing to say to him.

Morning and Evening Prayer make us available to God in a disciplined way, and they provide ways for us to hear God and even to speak to him, even when we think there is nothing to say. Actually, Morning and Evening Prayer are rather short on formal prayers. There is just a short section of formal prayer at the end. Most of these offices are taken up with saying the psalms and reading Scripture. In the psalms, we join with faithful believers through the centuries in praising God and pouring our hearts out in words that are usually far more eloquent than the words we think of ourselves. In Scripture, we listen to God–and we listen systematically, reading the various books according to a schedule that makes sure that we hear all of what God wants to say to us, and not just the parts we like.

Morning and Evening Prayer can be read alone, as I normally do now. But they can also be read with others, with the other members of a family, or with other members of the church. I live just a little bit too far away from St. Paul’s to come here every day to read Morning and Evening Prayer, but for most of my ministry I have lived very near my church and have joined with others who come together to pray Morning and Evening Prayer together daily. And even when we read Morning and Evening Prayer privately, the fact is that those who keep this discipline of daily prayer are joined in a very concrete way with everyone else who is doing the same thing day by day–saying the same psalms, reading the same Scripture, saying the same basic prayers. All prayer is corporate, and the Prayer Book gives us forms of prayer that unite us in word, as well as in spirit.

The Eucharist, of course, is the third major feature of the Prayer Book. I will say more about it at another time, but its centrality is clear and today I will not belabor the point. But I will mention that even then we have not exhausted the riches of the Prayer Book. The Prayer Book has services to help us mark important moments in life: baptism and sickness, confession and marriage, death and ordination. And there is also a catechism which provides a brief but helpful system of teaching the essentials of the faith. In other words, the Prayer Book really is a fairly complete system for keeping all of life in perspective, for living all of life in the conscious context of our faith in God. It is more than a manual of prayer. It is truly a manual for discipleship, a way of living and growing in our relationship with the God who wants to know each of us personally and be at the center of our lives all of the time.

The Very Reverend Gary W. Kriss

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