laudable Practice

At Parish Communion on The Sunday before Advent, 23.11.25 Jeremiah 23:5 “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” [1] The words are those of the prophet Jeremiah, speaking to God’s ancient people Israel, in a time long before the birth of Christ. And it is in those centuries long ago that our journey this morning begins. Jeremiah’s words of hope about a king descended from the line of David stand amidst other words spoken by the prophet - words of challenge and warning for the people of Israel. Their faithlessness, their worship of false gods, their refusal to walk in the ways of the Lord; this was bringing close a time of calamity. Jeremiah foresaw what would soon come to pass.  The bitterness and shame of defeat, of banishment, of exile, far from the Promised Land.  The kingdom established in times past by the great King Da...

November opened with All Saints' Day, rejoicing with the Communion of Saints in "those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee". In mid-November, in these Islands, we had the sombre, emotive observance of Remembrance Sunday. Friends in the United States have just celebrated Thanksgiving, a day with deep cultural resonance, giving thanks unto God "for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them". Next week we will be readying ourselves for Advent. For many of us this will mean the Advent Procession in the darkness of an early December evening. Christmas carol services will also be fast approaching (no matter what the online Anglican/Episcopal 'Advent Police' insist).  It is a liturgically crowded and busy time of year, with feasts and observances rich in meaning. This is precisely why I value Stir-up Sunday and do not observe the 'feast of Christ the King' on the Sunda...

We are in the dark days before Advent.  The darkness, the cold, the quiet landscape on the cusp of Winter, with the only liturgical marker being the Stir-up collect: this gives particular character to these days, days when we wait in cold and darkness for Advent.  We might even think of it as an ecclesiastical 'microseason', to use a term beautifully explored in Nature's Calendar: The British year in 72 Seasons (2023).  Indeed, the book identifies a late November microseason which falls around Stir-up, entitling it 'Even the Light Grows Cold', saying of this microseason: As November unfurls the light lowers, casting long shadows. This is the moment in the year when the bronze and golden leaf fall comes to its end, and in these conditions our eyes recalibrate ... Our colour vision shifts in late November, when the axis of the earth has shifted so that the sun's rays reach us at oblique angles and the colours of deciduous foliage have first transmuted and then di...

From a sermon by John Keble for The Sunday before Advent. In this rather beautiful introduction to the sermon, we can quite clearly hear the voice of the author of The Christian Year , evoking Autumn passing into Winter, on the cusp of Advent: The time just before Advent is a very serious and thoughtful season to all who take notice of time as the Church invites them. It is just the season of decay: the last leaves are falling, and the last flowers are ceasing to blow. We naturally look back and begin to consider how the weeks and months have passed, since those leaves were fresh: how many things we meant to do then, more than we have really done, how unlike in many respects the face of things now is, to what we wished and expected then. Also, we must be very blind or very thankless, if we fail at such times to notice the many mercies, more than we could expect, and very far more than we deserve, which our gracious God has continued to us: kind friends, beloved kinsmen, peaceful times...

We came on foot to a certain place where the mountains, through which we were journeying, opened out and formed an infinitely great valley, quite flat and extraordinarily beautiful, and across the valley appeared Sinai, the holy mountain of God ... Now on reaching that spot, the holy guides who were with us told us, saying: "The custom is that prayer should be made by those who arrive here, when from this place the mount of God is first seen." And this we did. So opens the account we have of Egeria's pilgrimage. Recently re-reading Egeria for the first time in some decades, I was struck by her reverence for and joy in the holy sites associated with "holy Moses": The spot is also shown hard by where holy Moses stood when God said to him: Loose the latchet of thy shoe, and the rest. Now it was about the tenth hour when we had arrived at the place ... prayer was made in the church and also at the bush in the garden, and the passage from the book of Moses was read ...

At Mattins and Evensong on this Friday, the collect remains that of the Sunday next before Advent: "Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord ...". Tomorrow at Mattins we will pray the Stir-up collect for the last time this year.  As the late November sun sets tomorrow afternoon, 1st Evensong of Advent Sunday will be said or sung. Advent will begin and Cranmer's great words will ring out, heralding in the season: "give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light". We are on the cusp of Advent. This morning it is cold and dark.  The fields remain sodden after recent heavy rain. Sunrise is well after 8am. There will be less than 8 hours of daylight. We are now in the dark days before Christmas. There are, however, no Christmas decorations yet to be seen in the neighbourhood.  That will come on Sunday or with 1st December.   For now, there is a sparseness that reflects the dark days, the bare landscape turning to Winter, the colder weath...

Since Advent 2021, laudable Practice has journeyed through the liturgical year with the sermons of Joseph Holden Pott. Associated with the Hackney Phalanx, the Old High circle which deeply influenced the early 19th century Church of England, Pott's  A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year  was published in 1817. The sermons have offered a significant insight into how Old High theology and piety was articulated from the pulpit. Today's final extract is from the sermon for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, the Sunday next before Advent.  Based on the reading for the epistle, from Jeremiah 23, Pott emphasises how the righteousness of Christ is both the ground of our justification and is to bear the fruit of righteousness in the Christian life. This reflects an enduring Old High theme, echoed many times in Pott's sermons, on the necessity of good works. This, of course, echoed the collect of the Sunday: "plenteously bringing forth the fruit of...

The annual cycle of the Church’s year now ends with the Feast of Christ the King. The year that begins with the hope of the coming Messiah ends with the proclamation of his universal sovereignty. The ascension of Christ has revealed him to be Lord of earth and heaven, and final judgement is one of his proper kingly purposes. The Feast of Christ the King returns us to the Advent theme of judgement, with which the cycle once more begins. So says Common Worship: Times and Seasons about the Sunday before Advent. It all sounds so busy. Frenetic. Loud. Hectic. November has been a busy ecclesial month, with All Saints' Day and Remembrancetide.  In the United States, the month ends with Thanksgiving.   The festive season is fast approaching.  Do we really need a quite artificial feast foisted upon a Sunday in late November? We have celebrated the kingship of Christ on Ascension Day and the Sunday after Ascension Day.  This ensures that the kingship of Christ is rightly...

From Parochial Sermons, from Trinity to Advent Sunday (1846) by Henry James Hastings (who was also the author of A Plea for the Prayer Book As It Is , 1858), an extract from the sermon for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, the Sunday before Advent. This powerfully combines the collect's opening petition, "Stir up", with the Gospel of the day, St. John's account of the miracle of the loaves: Let us all keep duly in mind that we are now come to the close of another ecclesiastical year. In looking back upon it, have we not reason to fear that much has been lost of spiritual good and advancement, through our own negligence and supineness and sloth and indifference - means of grace have been abused, sacraments have been neglected, sabbaths have been wasted, the word of God has been put aside, religious habits have not been cultivated, the Saviour has not been loved and trusted in. Will not these things lie heavy upon us in eternity? Let us gather up the fragments tha...

That Anglican guides should avoid, and if possible forbid, spiritual "tension" is worth a heading to itself.  This evil is very prevalent, yet completely inconsistent with almost everything for which English spirituality stands.  Empirical guidance, not dogmatic direction; affectiveness curbed by doctrine; recollection, continuous and gentle, not set periods of stiff devotion; domesticity not militarism; optimism not rigour; all leads naturally into a balance, a sanity into what Julian called "full and homely" and what Taylor meant by "an amiable captivity of the Spirit" - Martin Thornton English Spirituality (1963).  If we desired a summary of the differences between Stir-up Sunday and the feast of Christ the King, it might be suggested that it is offered here by Thornton.  Stir-up Sunday is a gentle, yearly recollection of the approach of Advent.  It is marked by domesticity: the familiar words, the cultural resonances, the echoes in the landscape of t...