When I was preparing this talk, I was a bit distracted at lunch. My wife asked me what I was thinking about. I said I was thinking about my talk to the Prayer Book society. A few minutes later we exchanged some comments that I thought were quite moderate about the soup that we'd had for lunch. At the same time, my three-year-old daughter called out something to my wife. She answered, "Just a minute dear, Daddy's critiquing the lunch." 
When I think about the place of the Prayer Book in the contemporary Anglican church, my thoughts do tend towards criticism. But I want to try to address you this afternoon in a reflective rather than a critical spirit. I am not going to try to tell you what ought to be done, or what shamefully isn't being done, as much as to try to say some of what I see going on with the Prayer Book on the ground, where it lives with ordinary Anglicans. I speak as someone who identifies himself as a Prayer Book Anglican. All Christians have the Bible as an ultimate authority, but I have never thought that the Bible could be our authority without an interpretive framework to understand it. As I have served within the Anglican church, the best interpretive framework has seemed to me to be the Prayer Book and the tradition stemming from it.
And yet the Prayer Book doesn't provide every detail of the kind of understanding or worship or spiritual practice that we need in order to have a full and balanced Christian life. When I was being prepared for ordination I was taught prayers that the priest could say during the Communion service, in the spaces between the prescribed prayers, to fill out the devotional content of the service for him. A fine teacher of the Prayer Book once taught me how to join my personal petitions to the general petitions of the Prayer Book services, in order to bring myself and my concerns into the worship of the church. There is, I would argue, a certain amount of "filling in the spaces" that rightly goes on with Prayer Book worship, and I want to talk about that today.
But first I want to say something about why I think the Prayer Book is important in contemporary Anglicanism. Oddly enough, one of the strongest arguments for the continued use and importance of the Prayer Book I've heard came from someone who was actually promoting the use of the B.A.S. and other more modern forms of worship. This was a very educated theological student and he was promoting modern forms of worship because "modern people seem to want something more primitive than the Prayer Book."
That, I thought, is indeed the issue. Forget the claims that the Prayer Book is outdated, that it reflects a view of the Christian faith that we have outgrown, etc., etc. Leave to one side the question of Prayer Book language, and its ability to reach modern people. The real issue is that modern people want something more primitive than the Prayer Book. Should we give it to them? I'm not the only person who has found this comment enlightening, either. I was talking to a parishioner in rural Saskatchewan, an intelligent layman, a teacher, whose father was an Anglican priest. He was very genially expressing his preference for the Prayer Book. He was doing so quite apologetically, for he knew that his view would be taken to be unfounded nostalgia, but he was sticking to his guns nevertheless. And he had certainly experienced lots of both. I shared this same view with him, that B.A.S. worship and much of modern worship tended to be more primitive than Prayer Book worship. He lit up immediately, recognizing something that his different education would not have enabled him to say. "It is," he said, "it is more primitive."
Let me try to suggest what the truth was that both I and my parishioner recognized in that comment. (I should say at this point that I am going to try to say something on the side of modern worship once I give some meaning to this criticism of it.) We can see the opposite of the primitive very clearly in the confessions and absolutions from the Prayer Book services. In the Prayer Book we confess that we live in a broken relationship with God that we cannot fix on our own. We admit that we are "lost sheep." We confess that our hearts are full of "devices and desires" that act against God's "Divine Majesty." We lament that "there is no health in us."
At the same time we are reassured that God completely absolves and forgives us. We have the comfort of being able to ask with confidence, through Christ, that "we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life." We have held before us the promise that God is leading us to everlasting life.
Do we really appreciate what a striking and unusual teaching is expressed here concerning human beings and concerning God? Or does familiarity blind us to what is really being said here? It is, of course, the Reformation teaching about man being at the same time both sinner and saved, of God being at the same time Judge and Father. The Reformers, and Augustine before them, got it from St. Paul's letter to the Romans. There, St. Paul expresses the heart of our sinful condition: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do...For I delight in law of God, in my inmost self, gut I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am: Who will deliver me from this body of death?"
That is the side of our Prayer Book confessions. And then immediately following is the side of our Prayer Book absolutions: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!...There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death." As we move from one verse to the next, we move from the deepest condemnation to the most profound acceptance. The change comes simply from looking from ourselves to Christ.
It is interesting that when Augustine first tried to interpret this passage, he thought that the passage about our condemnation referred to the time before conversion. But as he matured in his Christian walk, grace, he said, prevailed, and he realized that it referred to the Christian as well, outside of Christ.
Simul iustus, simul peccator. At the same time justified and sinner. This teaching is expressed with great clarity in our confessions and absolutions and it is also at the heart of our service of Holy Communion. The "full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world" gives us "remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion." We are assured each time we take the sacrament that "we are living members of his mystical body," "although we are unworthy."
It certainly could be argued that this teaching, that we are both condemned and accepted, is difficult and problematic. But I don't see how it could be argued that it is simple or primitive. When we try to teach it to someone who has never heard it before we need to call on all kinds of illustrations and explanations. To say that God simply loves us as we are is not difficult, though hard to reconcile with human evil. To say that we are simply condemned by God is not difficult, although unattractive. But to say that we are condemned sinners, yet also beloved children in Christ, is certainly not simple, it is paradoxical. It is theologically complex, because we need to know the condemnation in order to know the love, and we can't have one without the other.
And yet this teaching is grasped in a living way by any number of ordinary Anglicans. When I recently tried to bring out the way that this Scriptural teaching lay behind the strong words of the Prayer Book confessions, one lady responded immediately that we needed to keep these confessions the way they were. To look at ourselves as the Prayer Book confessions look at us "helps to purify us." Those were her words, and I think they grasped the essence of the teaching.
The Prayer Book teaching that we are at the same time condemned sinners and beloved children is complex in itself. Its social dimensions have also been complex. Going together with this Reformation teaching was the Reformation reevaluation of secular society. The Reformers rejected what they saw as a two-tier view of the church—the saint or the person in religious orders living a truly spiritual life and the secular person living at a lower spiritual level in the world. The Reformers were more skeptical about the claims to holiness of those who left the world behind and more optimistic about the ability of Christ to make holy those in the world. One can easily see why this was so. If you believe that the movement from condemnation to salvation was essentially one of looking from self to Christ, and that the Christian life was lived between these two poles, then the role of continuous religious exercises was inevitably less. A life need not be materially and socially separated from the world because the awareness of oneself as sinner and saved was enough of a separation from the world.
The characteristic Reformed teaching about our relation to the world was the teaching of the "two kingdoms." We are both citizens of the secular kingdom, and have the duties and responsibilities that belong to that kingdom. We are also members of the Kingdom of Christ, in which we are redeemed children of God. We are both at the same time—our identity in one kingdom or the other depends on whether we are looking to the world or to Christ. We can see the practical outworking of this teaching in Luther's interpretation of Jesus' command to "turn the other cheek." If someone assaults you, as a member of Christ's kingdom you are in no way to retaliate. You are to let God vindicate you, and receive violence as Christ received it. But if the striker was your child, as a parent you would have the duty to correct him or her. And if the striker was a fellow citizen, then the magistrate would have the duty of enforcing the law, and you as a citizen would have to assist him.
We are fully members of the two kingdoms at the same time, and this goes with an upward evaluation of secular occupations, and less inclination to separate oneself for a specifically religious life. This was symbolized for Richard Hooker, the great Anglican theologian, by the monarch being the head of both church and state. In the one figure of the monarch, both the spiritual and secular sides of the kingdom were united. So each citizen of the kingdom unites in himself or herself both sides.
The Prayer Book is the heir to this aspect of the Reformers' teaching as well. The words with which we offer ourselves after receiving communion are particularly reflective of the Reformed attitude: "we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee." A "sacrifice" is particularly apt, as it reflects the nullity of our ends as centred in ourselves, and yet the value of our ends as consecrated by God. "And although we are unworthy, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses..." Where is this "bounden duty and service" lived out? Primarily in the secular kingdom, in the realm of our duties to our families, our employers and our communities. It is lived out in the knowledge that our selfish ends stand condemned, and yet our fulfilling of our duties can be lived out acceptably to God through Christ.
These thoughts bring to mind the comment of Alan Hayes in his article "Praying in Two Tongues," where he characterizes the spirituality of the Prayer Book as one where the primary locus of the encounter of the divine and human is in the world, and the spirituality of the liturgical movement as exemplified in the B.A.S. as one where the liturgy is the primary locus of that encounter.
Of this second aspect of Prayer Book worship, the relation of secular and sacred that it presupposes, again we must say that whatever else it is, it is certainly not simple or primitive. To see your brother or sister as at once redeemed child of God, and at the same time member of a family, called to an occupation, citizen of a community, is not an easy matter, and only because we have inherited this complex balance of spiritual and secular as an assumption of our Western society and political order do we find it natural.
If we take these two Reformed teachings together—that we are at the same time condemned sinners and redeemed children of God, and that we are at the same time both members of the kingdom of Christ and members of the secular kingdom—and allow that they both are part of the substance of Prayer Book worship, then I think we can see easily enough why it might be perceived that the worship of the B.A.S. tends to be, although it is not necessarily, more primitive. What is the kind of worshipping communion or community that is fostered by the two different books? Doesn't the Prayer Book tend towards a communion of worshippers that are thought to unite complex opposites in themselves—both redeemed and sinner, both spiritual and secular. Doesn't the B.A.S. tend towards an idea of community that although it is aimed at the spiritual, really ends up with the common denominator of the worshippers as natural beings? Isn't the aim of the Prayer Book to know ourselves in our complex identities as belonging in a unity to the orders of things that are ordained by God? And isn't the aim of the B.A.S. a more immediate felt union with the divine and the world around us that tends to bypass some of that content that the Prayer Book includes? And if so, wouldn't it be just to characterize the B.A.S. as more primitive? It is the intuition of these differences that would lead many worshippers, I suspect, to nod their heads with my teacher friend and agree that that is the case.
I hasten to make several qualifications here. First of all, despite the fact that the words of the B.A.S. services do not express with anything like the clarity of the Prayer Book the complex Reformed theological structure of traditional Anglican worship, this does not mean that they cannot be taken in the same sense. We can mean what the Prayer Book confessions mean when we say the B.A.S. confessions, even though they do not say that explicitly. We can take the B.A.S. communion service to mean what the Prayer Book communion service means, along with whatever additional emphases might be present, even though it does not say it nearly as clearly. And then the benefits of language that may be more intelligible and appealing to some would be realized without sacrificing the meaning of traditional Anglican worship.
Secondly, even if we accept the idea that in some way the idea of communion with God and the community present in the B.A.S. is more primitive than that of the Prayer Book, this does not necessarily imply a criticism. A couple going on a eco-tour of Costa Rica are in some sense looking for something primitive, but that does not make them a primitive couple. A person undergoing therapy may be trying to get in touch with primitive childhood feelings of loss or grief but that doesn't make him or her a primitive person. And if modern worship tends to be more tangible and more immediate, so in many ways does modern culture. The modern world is full of complex people seeking simple things without necessarily denying their own complexity. No doubt the changes that have swept over the worship of the church have not been without reasons. In the strong attachment that some people have to the passing of the peace, for instance, we see an undoubted need for a closer bond with fellow worshippers that we would be foolish to ignore. At the same time, there may be an element of "either/or" here as we find out when we try to incorporate the passing of the peace into a Prayer Book service. It doesn't fit very easily.
The question, again, is not whether the Prayer Book is outdated, etc. etc.; the question is whether the alternative liturgies, with their simpler more naturalistic idea of community, are an effective way of reaching out to people with the same cultural assumptions, or whether they represent a failure of nerve and a falling away from a Prayer Book liturgy which represents clearly and accurately the best and most Christian foundations of both our church and our society. Are more hugs, more affirmations of ourselves, more assertions of community what we need to warm up a chilly Anglican identity? Can we have them and still have, as well, the foundational teachings which have forged our identities as Christians in the western world?
These are questions which could be discussed at great length, but my own answer in a nutshell is that we must offer people principally the liturgy which embodies the best and most sophisticated vision of what it means to be a Christian in our world, and that that is the Prayer Book liturgy. We will do more in the long run to recapture secularized Protestant people with a liturgy that will enable them to return to the spiritual homeland of non-secularized Protestantism, than with a liturgy that reflects the culture more directly. The secularized Protestants themselves may think they need something else, and that is certainly an issue, but really the Prayer Book offers them the Christian rationale for their way of being in the world. Reaching out to their more contemporary needs and wants should be something that is done by "filling in the spaces" in Prayer Book worship, and to that I want to turn now.
I should say that partly because of my own background and partly because of the task that I see as I have just outlined it, reaching out to secularized Protestants with the principles of real Protestantism that are their true foundations, if they only knew it, I am going to speak about filling in the spaces with Protestant "filling". Although I attended St. Bartholomew's in Toronto for several years, and although I attended the Friday afternoon rosary there regularly, I still know little about filling the spaces in a Catholic direction. Catholics, please don't be offended!
There is one important way in which Protestants are our natural allies. The teachings that are embedded in our liturgy of being simultaneously condemned by the law and saved by grace, and of being at the same time in the secular and spiritual realms may be complex and subtle theologically, but they are also taught and believed in countless Protestant churches across North America and the world. Many deep and wonderful Christian lives are lived according to just these principles in non-Anglican churches—in fact it often seems that they are more taught and honoured in other churches than in our own. However the particular character of Anglicanism seems to give a unique slant to the ways these teachings can be received in our own church. The fact that they are an integral part of our liturgical worship—that we learn that we are condemned and yet at the same time redeemed through the weekly recurrence of confession and absolution even more than in sermons—should help Anglicans to see these things as part of a birth to death journey rather than in the more conversion-oriented scheme of other Protestants.
Nowhere in our tradition do I see these truths applied more intimately within the context of an life journey than in the poems of George Herbert. Herbert wrote at a time when the truths of the Reformation, forged in the fires of controversy, had had time to be assimilated at a pastoral level, and he teaches them, not as against Catholic "errors" but to the problems of the heart in ordinary living. In one poem, he addresses his over-critical conscience:
Peace, prattler, do not lour:
Not a fair look but thou dost call it foul;
Not a sweet dish but thou dost call it sour;
Music to thee doth howl.
By listening to thy chatting fears,
I have both lost mine eyes and ears.
Prattler, no more, I say:
My thoughts must work, but like a noiseless sphere.
Harmonious peace must rock them all the day:
No room for prattlers there.
If thou persistest, I will tell thee
That I have physic to expel thee.
And the receipt shall be
My Saviour's blood. whenever at His board
I do but taste it, straight it cleanseth me,
and leaves thee not a word—
No, not a tooth or nail to scratch,
and at my actions carp or catch.
Yet if thou talkest still,
Beside my physic, know there's some for thee:
Some wood and nails to make a staff or bill
For those who trouble me:
The bloody cross of my dear Lord
Is both my physic and my sword.
Herbert's poem brings out beautifully what he thought the practical consequences of the Prayer Book service of Holy Communion, as well as of the Cross of Christ, ought to be for a perfectionist, facing a critical conscience. It's clear that he didn't see confession, absolution, and communion as an expression of isolated devotion, however deep. He thought the services were to be used for practical spiritual benefit. And yet don't we find Anglicans who have been attending that service all their lives, who have never made any connection between their self-criticism and their worship? Who do not know Holy Communion as the medicine for their self-critical attitudes? When perfectionists talk to one another do they direct each other to Prayer Book churches because in the strong words of the confession and absolution, they find relief, and a new grace-filled attitude? I wonder. Even more I wonder whether A.A. members direct each other to Prayer Book churches, because in the worship there they will find perfectly reflected what they have learned in A.A. about their own weakness and God's grace.
This points out the need for our teaching and preaching to fill in the spaces and use the teaching embodied in our liturgy to address the pressing needs of people. An unfortunate part of the current crisis of authority in the church is that it leaves us addressing over and over again the issue of authority. Which prayer book shall we use? Which teaching will we believe? I feel a great debt to the work of the Prayer Book Society itself for its part in ensuring that I can still use the Prayer Book. But in my ministry it has often seemed that the question of the authority of the Prayer Book and its teaching has overshadowed the use of the Prayer Book in addressing the practical spiritual needs of people.
The Prayer Book presents its teaching within a context of worship, doctrine, and meditation that has given Anglicanism a unique character, and this is something we have to offer to the world. Consider another poem by George Herbert, one of his poems entitled "Prayer." It begins this way:
Of what an easy, quick access,
My blessed Lord, art Thou! how suddenly
May our requests Thine ear invade!
To show that state dislikes not easiness,
If I but lift mine eyes, my suit is made:
Thou canst no more not hear than Thou canst die.
This verse shows clearly the truth that is there in our absolutions, that simply by looking to Christ we find ourselves reconciled to God through his mediation. And yet our easy access to God presupposes penitence and confession. What would happen if we paraphrased this verse in contemporary North American style? I'm going to try that, asking you to imagine me wearing an expensive suit, and speaking in an accent that I won't specify or try to imitate, because I have good friends from the southern United States.
"The Lord is easy to talk to! You can talk to him any time and you can be as casual as you like—he doesn't care! If you just want something from him in your heart then he hears you! How could he not hear you? He hears everything!"
The difference I tried to bring out between the original and the paraphrase is that in the original the mystery of Christ's mediation against the backdrop of human sinfulness colours the whole. It is as much a meditation on our status before God in Christ as it is about prayer. In the paraphrase it becomes more of a practical and moralistic exhortation to prayer—"just go ahead and pray!" Similarly the way that the Prayer Book presents its teaching about sinfulness in the context of redemption and redemption in the context of sinfulness, and the whole in the context of worship makes up a unique whole. I take it that this is part of what the Prayer Book has meant when over the last few years it has talked about the Prayer Book "system."
George Herbert is a great example of prayer book teaching having the spaces filled in and applied to life. I find a similar application of reformed teaching brought to the pastoral level in the church cantatas of Bach. Bach also worked in a time when the pastoral implications of the Reformation had been well worked out and his cantatas, each a musical mediation on the same Scripture readings that we use each Sunday in the Prayer Book eucharistic lectionary, are similarly a model of the application of Reformed truth to life. I find them very helpful in preparing sermons.
Another place that I have looked in order to "fill in the spaces" is an organization dedicated to healing prayer called the Order of St. Luke. It is an organization that is particularly helpful to Prayer Book people because, although ecumenical, it was founded by Episcopalians in the pre-Charismatic era. So it allows for the Charismatic approach to healing prayer but does not insist on it. Just last week our chapter of the Order of St. Luke held a healing service at the Cree community of Montreal Lake, recently devasted by three random shootings. The service we used was the familiar Prayer Book service of Holy Communion, slightly modified with some prayers for healing. When we gave people the opportunity to come forward and be prayed for, they started to come forward and about two hours later the stream stopped. Each person told the prayer team what it was they wanted prayers for, and the team tried to use their intuition and their understanding to do a little reading between the lines and making the prayers personal. It seemed to me that this format allowed for a personal and confessional element that may seem lacking otherwise. The Cree people seem to take to it very naturally. They are, by the way, as thoroughly Anglican as any group you could find, and I think they have something to teach us about how the Anglican faith meets our personal lives.
As Anglicans we might shy away from getting personal. I know that I somehow picked up the idea that in Anglican worship we were supposed to be wholly occupied with the objective wonders of our faith, and that pointed application of the faith to individuals and strong emotional responses were somehow to be left for Pentecostals! Then I read what George Herbert, surely an authority for ceremonial Anglican worship, said about preachers. They ought, he said, to look at and aim their speech at particular people, "now to the younger folk, then to the elder; now to the poor, and now to the rich: "This is for you, and this for you;" for particulars ever touch and awake more than generals." That and his comment that you should never preach for more than an hour because people couldn't concentrate for more than that really opened my eyes about the glorious tradition of Anglican worship!
This is a very obvious statement for Prayer Book Anglicans but it is worth repeating that in the church year and the Prayer Book lectionary we have one of the greatest teaching tools ever conceived of by the church. It can convey complimentary Scriptural truths in a wonderful way—the Cross and the Resurrection, the Incarnation and the Ascension, the Holy Spirit and the Trinity. And it is easy to give it a popular appeal. Only it seems to me that we need to try to approach the church year according to what Luther called the theology of the cross, rather than the theology of glory. We need to bring forth the truths of the great festivals, as well as of the ordinary Sundays in Trinity, as addressed to the sinners we confess ourselves to be, not as if we somehow owned these truths just by celebrating them.
I want to say just a word about Essentials. When I went to the Ottawa conference in Ottawa I was concerned about the direction the organization would take. When I heard that there would be two streams, the Federation and the Network, for those who were working under the episcopal structure and those not, I was deeply relieved, because I thought they had got it right. It seems unthinkable that Canadian Anglicans should be forced to become a breakaway group simply for holding to Scripture. Essentials was making the statement that it would not be separated for such a reason. At the same time Prayer Book Society members in particular are pressing for more definition about when it is legitimate to be a Network member and when obedience requires that one hold to the existing structures. My conviction is that this is a proper concern and the legitimate business of the whole Essentials movement. It should not be left solely to the individual consciences of Network members. The Anglican way of church discipline, it seems to me, has always been to define the church as a broad tent that anyone should be able to belong to and then require that Anglicans belong to it. Indeed, the destructive aspect of those promoting same-sex blessings, it seems to me, is that they try to make a tent that real Anglicans cannot belong to, and then call that Anglicanism.
I want to say something about the Alpha course as well, because it is one of the most popular ways right now of "filling in the spaces." The Alpha course has been criticized from both liberals and conservatives. Some don't like it's straightforward acceptance of the authority of Scripture. But others have trouble with the fact that the fundamental Protestant account of salvation, the dialectic between law and grace that we began with, is hardly at the core of the programme, although it is assumed by it. Other courses are being developed which put more emphasis on the essentials of salvation. It seems to me that the Alpha course offers much Christian content and presents prayer, God's guidance, healing and many other subjects to people as a kind of adventure in the Christian life that they can share. This seems to me to be a much needed approach. Surely those who are attracted to the Christian life through the appeal of these spiritual adventures will end up much closer to the Prayer Book and scriptural understanding of themselves through what they learn.
A few years ago, at the church my parents went to in Ontario, the wife of the rector made a point of standing through the prayer of consecration when every one else was kneeling. This was an intelligent woman with a PhD in computers. She felt she had to lead the charge towards modern worship. I can't say exactly what she was thinking, but I suspected that boiled down, it was "humanity good, negativity bad." "Body good, abstractness bad." She certainly saw her attitude as the attitude of modernity. But I believe that the Prayer Book represents a truer modernity. The Prayer Book attitude of penitence and self-giving in the world seems to me the true root of what is good in modern society.
That woman's attitude seems to me akin to another of George Herbert's poems:
I struck the board and cried, "No more! I will abroad.
What, shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store...
Call in thy death's head there: tie up thy fears...
Herbert ends the poem this way:
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, "Child!"
And I replied, "My Lord!"
It seems to me that the modern church strikes the board and cries "no more!", over and over. May the Prayer Book continue to help the children of God to hear him calling, and to reply, "My Lord!"
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