At the Altar of Incense

Sorry, this one is personal. But surrounded as I am both by little groups and mega churches which claim to be 'Biblical' I always find myself asking those who adhere to them how often they use incense. The answer is always "never!" And for me that ends the argument because it is my firm belief that in order to understand something of the mind of God, you have to be open to the continual use of incense in the services of the Church. This is both the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer and of Holy Scripture, however much we, both as individuals and as Churchmen, tend to ignore it. But on the feast of the Nativity of Saint John Baptist we should find it especially hard to do.

Why? Because it was when John's father, the priest Zacharias, was at the altar of incense in the temple that the angel Gabriel announced to him John's birth and told him what the child was to be called. That place and time have, as the sainted Dr. William Howard Frere, C.R., wrote in his revision of Procter's A New History of the Book of Common Prayer always bothered 'Protestants' because it seemed to close to the ceremonial law of Israel which they have rejected. I suspect they are also bothered by the fact that one of the magi's gifts was frankincense as well. It speaks to strongly of the fact that Christianity is a "yon side religion" with just too many things beyond the bare rationalism of Reformation fundamentalism.

The Book of Common Prayer never specifically orders the use of incense in the services of the Church, but from Elizabeth I's prayer book of 1559 the Act of Uniformity has ordered; "Such Ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof, shall be retained, and be in use, as was in this Church of England by the Authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward the sixth . . ." Certainly thuribles and incense boats were among them and we know by the complaints of Elizabeth's bishops to their friends in Zurich that incense was used. Bosher in his book The Restoration of the Church of England pointed out by quotes from the period that prayer book services in the chapels in France during the Commonwealth astonished the French by their copes, profound bows, and clouds of incense. And incense continued to be used in the cathedrals of England until a canon of Ely brought to an end in 1770 by complaining that it caused him headache. Rationalism and the beginning of secular humanism had set in.

But the prayer book reminds us of its scriptural intent and importance with the Sentences as the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer. "From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my Name shall be great among the Gentiles: and in every place incense shall be offered unto my Name, and a pure offering: for my Name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts. Mal. i, 11." "Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as the incense; and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice. Psalm cxli. 2."

And then there is the Book of Revelations with its description of the worship in heaven. Hard core Evangelicals and 'Protestants' of all varieties just might as well consign themselves to hell because you know they are not going be be comfortable with all those bowls of incense burning before the throne of God. And that is why every oratory, mission, parish or cathedral in the Continuum ought to be preparing its people for heaven by the regular use of incense because if Holy Scripture teaches us nothing else, there is no way that we can escape the fact that God likes it, likes it a lot and "the Bible tells us so!" It even gives us his own recipe as to how it is supposed to be mixed.

So if we as Anglicans are going to be good Biblical and New Testament Christians, we need to make sure that we imitate the worship of heaven as it is revealed in Holy Scripture. And that means that we are going to have to use incense both at the offices, in processions and at the celebration of Holy Communion. After all, we have he words of Jesus in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them." We read them as well, but it is only too plain that we frequently don't hear what they say, what they order. We are so stuck in our own defense against the very word of God that we can not hear it and certainly don't want to obey it. In things great and very small, it is time for that to change.

An Interesting Bit of Verse

'For this, Seditious Spirits in disguise
Swarm in the Church, tho' they that Church despise:
Loudly they boast her Ancient rights and Fame,
Whilst underhand they play a Popish Game.
The Seed of Loyola with Artful Pains
First fixt this High-Church Poyson in our Veins,
Infecting too, too many of our Youth,
Who, blindly led, fell from the Cause of Truth.

Does that read like an attack upon the Tractarians, the early ritualists or even the late nineteenth century Anglo-Catholics? If you thought so you would be wrong. It was written and published in 1708, more than a century before the beginning of the Tractarian Movement. Those lines came from a poem titled: The Seditious Insects: or, the Levelers assembled in Convocation. I present it as evidence that as Frere wrote in the early twentieth century, the Church has always had its enemies who were in his words "too little of Churchmen to obey her, but too much of Churchmen to leave her."

And so the battle persists. Those of us who think of ourselves as Prayer Book Anglicans or Prayer Book Catholics and who believe that real high churchmen value the Church and express that by a full and complete obedience to our own version of the Book of Common Prayer, must remain aware that the Church still contains those whose real loyalties remain outside "the doctrines, discipline and worship . . . .of the church" as expressed in her classical formularies.

The Geneva Bible of 1559

One of the advertisements which I receive regularly on the internet is for the Geneva Bible of 1559. It is touted as the version of the Bible brought to America by the Puritans and consequently as the Bible not only of the Reformation but also of the American Revolution. It is a clever sales idea, but as an Anglican one that I must reject. Why? Because one of the things which an American child is quite unlikely to learn in the government schools is that the major leaders of the American revolution and the writing of the Constitution were not members of the denominations, but Anglicans. And that would make the real Bible of the American Revolution and the American founding precisely The Authorized Version of 1611, commonly called the King James version.

Since most American know very little of English history even as most Britons know very little of American history, it is probably time that we run through the facts. One of the great myths of American history is that the Pilgrims who came to what is now Massachusetts in 1620 were coming to this country for purposes of religious freedom. Absolutely nothing could be farther from the truth. For some period of time these folk had been living in Amsterdam and not in England, and in the Dutch states they had every bit of religious liberty which they could have desired. They didn't like it. Why? Because the freedom of Amsterdam threatened the absolutist ideas of this little group. They were afraid that in the middle of all that freedom their children would wander away from their version of the "True Faith." Hence their choice to come to America where they could set up their own little version of a religiously totalitarian state which allowed of no freedom of religion to anyone whose views or faith differed from their own. We face a similar situation today in that the very political and ideological heirs of the Puritans have done their best to control the levers of public opinion and admit no orthodoxy except their own.

A few years later with the Cromwellian revolution and the overthrow of both the monarchy and the Church of England, the same experiment was tried in England. It did not take very long for the majority of the English to decide that they didn't like it and the king returned from exile in 1660 and both the monarchy and the Church were restored. That meant a return to the services of the English Book of Common Prayer and the use of the King James version of the English Bible. And it was this version of both prayer book and Bible that a clear majority of the leaders of the American Revolution were raised on. The result was that when the Declaration of Independence was adopted two thirds of those who signed it were Anglicans. And the convention in Philadelphia which wrote the American Constitution was comprised of fifty per cent Anglicans plus one. There was another nominal Anglican but he was one of the two delegates to that convention who were deists.

One of the great American myths generally told by persons of a certain political persuasion is that the framers of the American system of government were deists and not Christians. These are the people who in fact hate the Church and hate Christianity, because the faith of English Christians has always led them to demand greater freedom for ordinary people. Take that first great document of liberty, the Magna Carta. The leader of the Baron's revolt against King John was none other than the archbishop of Canterbury and the place where it is easiest to see an original copy of that great document is at Salisbury Cathedral. By modern standards it was not much, but it contained that magical phrase, "the Church of England shall be free." John Lackland had attempted to sell it to the papacy.

One of the features of the Geneva Bible is the included commentaries. Rather than giving the reader the freedom to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" the text of Holy Scripture, these commentaries told the reader what the Scriptures meant and what he was to believe. And of course it was an interpretation heavily slanted from a continental Calvinist view. Among the reasons that King James authorized a new translation of the Bible based upon the best available Hebrew and Greek manuscripts was precisely the political and religious slant of these commentaries. He and the Church of England wanted a text that was the most faithful to the meaning of the original without the inclusion of later opinions.

In modern America we have a like situation in that we have people telling us what the Constitution means which is frequently almost the precise opposite of what the text actually says.

The point of this, if there is one, is that the English Church and her daughters who have been and remain true to the faith of the Bible and the prayer book as we have received it, that is to the 'doctrine, discipline and worship' of the Catholic and Christian church as Jesus handed it over to the apostles and they in turn to the sub apostolic Church is the greatest guarantor of human freedom and dignity which the world has ever know. Those who strike out at the faith and practice of the prayer book are also striking out at the very dignity and freedom of every man. One of the doctrines of the framers of the American Constitution and government was that we receive our rights, not from government but from God. And that is a doctrine which they learned both from the Bible, the Authorized Version, and from the Book of Common Prayer.

The Feast of St George, Martyr

Today is the feast of St. George, the patron not only of England but of a very large number of countries, cities and provinces besides. It was made a feast day of the English church in the Synod of Oxford in 1222. But its importance in England increased when Edward III made him the patron of the Order of the Garter in 1348. The British war cry of "England and St George" began with the Hundred Years War as Edward III began his attempt to achieve the French crown, a claim based upon his descent from his mother, the French princess Isabella.

The prayer book collect: Almighty God, by whose grace and power thy holy Martyr George triumphed over suffering, and despised death : Grant, we beseech thee, that enduring hardness, and waxing valiant in fight, we may with the noble army of martyrs receive the crown of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Blessed George Selwyn

George Augustus Selwyn (5 April 1809 - 11 April 1878) was the first missionary bishop of New Zealand under the title of Bishop of Auckland and subsequently its first primate. Afterward he was the 90th bishop of Litchfield and died in that office.

O God, the light of the faithful and Shepherd of souls, who didst set blessed George Selwyn to be a bishop in the Church that he might feed thy sheep by his word and guide them by his example : Grant us, we pray thee, to keep the faith which he taught and to follow in his footsteps, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Scottish Book of Common Prayer

Elizabeth I, March 24, 1603, R.I.P.

As she came into the world on the eve of the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, so Elizabeth I died on the eve of the feast of the Annunciation in 16o3. Without her and her own vision of the Christian faith and the Church, there would be no Anglicanism. With what her half sister Mary had done in terms of her Spanish marriage with the introduction into England of the Spanish inquisition, any lingering sentiment for the Roman See and the Roman faith was largely vanished. But without Elizabeth's policy of re-introducing the Book of Common Prayer and supporting the English Church, it would have been overwhelmed by the doctrine of either Geneva or Zurich. Instead she returned it as close as it was humanly possible to the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Church as she herself put it of "the earliest bishops and Catholic fathers."

There have been many who have attempted to portray her as a person largely without religious faith. If that had been true it would have been much easier for her to have retained the Roman religion in England. But her actions, and chiefly those kept from the scrutiny of the world, reveal her as a person of deep faith. She attended daily morning and evening prayer in her own chapel. And there the Eucharist was celebrated with her bishops, largely against their will, acting as priest, deacon and subdeacon (to quote one of them) "in the golden vestments of the papacy" with music provided by Byrd and Tallis. In addition it was her practice to read a chapter of the New Testament in Greek and a chapter of the Old Testament in Hebrew every single day while the book in which she wrote prayers of her own composition remained a secret until her death.

Many Anglicans know of the quote which once graced the newletter of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen and has appeared in many Anglican blogs including this one, But let me conclude this post with another. "There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God." Elizabeth could not leave the world because she saw her rule as an act of service to her people, but in her very first interview with the Spanish ambassador after she became queen she told him that her colours were black and white, those of a vowed religious. I doubt if he understood but he reported everything she said faithfully to Philip, his master. And we, from the long view of history, have a much better chance of knowing that she meant every word so that in the end, she, more than any other, deserved the title of "Defender of the Faith."

Some Verses to Consider

As we near the end of Lent, and indeed we are already in Passiontide, I would like to give those who read this blog three verses from the New Testament to consider prayerfully. We all know them, but how often to we isolate them and apply ourselves to them and them to our own lives as Christians and Churchmen. I am not going to do more than give you book, chapter and verse so that you have to look them up yourselves.

The first is Matthew 18:3.

The second Luke 9:24.

The third Luke 17:10.

These should be your preparation for Holy Week and your Easter communion - if you dare.

Blessings.