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Via Media Podcast, Episode 31Anglican Basics: LiturgyBen JefferiesJanuary 23, 2020: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott.McDermott:Friends, I want to tell you about a great deal that Crossway Publishers is offering. They are publishing our book, The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism, toward the end of February, 2020. But they will give Via Media listeners 50% off the price of this book if they preorder before January 31st. So this book is a collection of essays by 14 Anglican scholars and leaders who gave talks at our Anglicanism conference titled “What Is Anglicanism?” here at Beeson Divinity School back in 2018. And these talks have been expanded into chapters in which each of these leaders and scholars answer two questions: “What is the deep character of Anglicanism?” and “What is the future of Anglican Orthodoxy?” So you can get these rich and insightful chapters in this book, The Future of Orthodox Anglicanism, for 50% off by pre-ordering before January 31st. Go to plus, and once there become a member of Crossway Plus, and that’s free, and then when you check out with the book, enter the code: VMEDIA. Not “Via Media,” but VMEDIA in caps: V M E D I A at checkout, and they will give you 50% off the price of the book.Announcer: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott.McDermott:Welcome to Via Media. Our guest today is an Anglican priest who we’ve had on before, Father Ben Jefferies. Welcome back.Jefferies:Thanks, Father Gerry.McDermott:I’ll introduce you again, though, to those of you in our listener audience who didn’t tune into our last time with Ben Jefferies. He grew up in England; lived near London until he was 13 and then came to the States, and graduated from Wheaton College, graduated from Nashotah House. He was a curate at All Saints Anglican in Springfield, Missouri. For the last three years he’s been the Rector of Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Opelika, Alabama. Jefferies:That’s right.McDermott:Just two hours down the road from us here at Beeson in Birmingham. Importantly, for the subject we are going to discuss in this segment of Anglican basics, he was on the liturgy task force for some years that produced the new 2019 prayer book for the ACNA. So, Ben, we’d like to talk to you about liturgy. You are very learned in liturgy as I’ve discovered from teaching an intensive course with you for a week on Anglican liturgics here at Beeson Divinity School. And I’ve learned a lot from you. It’s been a very enjoyable experience. So, I want to pick your brain and share a little bit of your wisdom with our listening audience here on Via Media.Let me start out with a basic question, because this is a series on Anglican basics. For Anglicans out there in the trenches, as it were. What is liturgy?Jefferies:What is liturgy? Liturgy is participating in an established text and ritual that worships God. That’s my best shot.McDermott:Okay. What do you mean “participating in a ritual?”Jefferies:With your voice, praying texts that are prayed, participating with your body, with the gathered people of God, and it might be for a baptism or morning prayer or Holy Communion, but you’re participating in that form. The purpose of which is to worship God. McDermott:But, Ben, isn’t the most authentic prayer spontaneous, from my heart, not just reading some words out of a text?Jefferies:It can be. The Lord wants our hearts ... love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind ... this is the first and great commandment. So, the Lord wants us to pray with the heart, but a prayer from the heart could be spontaneous or it could be through a form. And I think anyone who has spent any time in the church has probably seen kind of dead and sort of languishing versions of both. You can go to a free prayer session in a non denominational setting and people are just rehashing the same phrases over and over. Their hearts not in it. And it’s as dead as dead can be. And you can go to liturgies where the officiant is just celebrating like he’s reading the most boring tenth page of the newspaper and even though the content is manifestly about the resurrection of the Son of God and its implication for eternity, it’s done in such a dead and flat manner that it can be not please to the Lord or to the people of God.So, the question of sort of vigor versus sterility is more one of are we bringing our hearts into it, much more than what form is being inhabited, or whether there is form or no form. Either can be lively, either can be deadly, according to the intentions of our heart and our sort of ... the earnestness of our participation.McDermott:Do we find liturgy in the Bible?Jefferies:Yeah, manifestly. God, when he gives the command and the pattern of worship to his people, through Moses on Sinai, gives them this complexus of sacrifices to be done with minute details of exaction of make sure that the long lobe of the liver goes to the Levite and make sure that you guys can eat this bit and this bit gets burned, and sprinkle the blood on these portions of the ... I mean, it is precise. It’s a form to be participated in.So, the very first worship command we see on Sinai as then recorded by the Spirit of God, through Moses in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, is ritual liturgical sacrifice. Which then in the new covenant when Christ died on the cross and inaugurated the Kingdom of God, himself as the King after the resurrection ... First of all, before in the death and resurrection when the disciples said, “how do we pray?” Our Lord didn’t say, “Well, you know, just be thankful and cover some bases, and here’s a template.” He said, “This is how you pray.” And he gave us the Lord’s Prayer.Something I mentioned in class just today that didn’t dawn on me until recently, seeing one of those 1960s Jesus movies, is that the disciples wouldn’t have learned the Lord’s Prayer and then put it in their back pocket until Jesus ascended and then pull it out again. They would have kept praying it together with their Lord who was also praying to His Father and the disciples were patterned on liturgy from the beginning. Then the night before Jesus died he says do this thing and he establishes a liturgy. Do this thing. And then we see right away that the Church that received his command to do this in remembrance of Him were obedient and St. Paul records in 1 Corinthians 11, he says, “I pass onto you,” so he’s traditioning, “what I also receive,” he’s writing in the late 50s, early 60s, in 1 Corinthians, that the Lord Jesus on the night that He was betrayed took bread, and when He had given thanks He broke it and gave it to His disciples saying, “Take eat, this is my body.” So, the Lord institutes the liturgy. We know it’s immediately faithfully picked up. It’s recorded in 1 Corinthians and all the synoptic gospels as an institution narrative, and then as we have studied in our class all the Church Fathers carried this through with great continuity. So, the Bible absolutely presents at least a Eucharistic liturgy. We also see the gathering for the prayers in Acts 2, the famous verse, 4:22. Not just gathered to pray, gathered for THE prayers. And incidentally we see these off-handed comments of the apostles who were going up to the temple. It was the third hour and they’re going up to pray. We know that it was these liturgies of prayer accompanying the sacrifices in the midst of the temple that they were praying. As there were Jews gathering in the temple in Jerusalem. So, yeah, we see liturgies coursing through the Bible. We see liturgical creedal fragments, and hymn fragments, kind of like confetti through the New Testament. Whether they’re the fragments of baptismal hymns in 2 Timothy 2 or fragments of kind of early creeds in 1 Corinthians 15. So, there are these tokens that creeds and hymns and liturgical remembrances of the death of Christ on the cross and the Eucharist are all right there in the Church of the New Testament.McDermott:Now, you told us in class today, Father Ben, that at one time you hated liturgy when you were growing up. When you were not an Anglican. What changed your mind?Jefferies:A wonderful church. It was the Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois, led by Father Stewart Ruch, now Bishop Stewart Ruch. Growing up in England among some of sort of the really spiritually vibrant portions of the non conformist churches they sort of have a ... they view askance to the Church of England and all its ritual, kind of the way you would a sort of state church in maybe Mexico ... actually there’s not a state church in Mexico, but ... where it’s sort of overly established and so I was sort of ... the idea of liturgy was kind of poison from the get-go. When I was first invited by my friend to the Church of the Res I thought no way am I going to go to some dead Anglican liturgy. Actually the thing that allowed me to go is that a friend of mine, shout out to Maggie Ritchie who is the godmother to one of my daughters now, said, “You don’t have to do ... you’re not pressured to do any of this stuff. You don’t have to stand and sit down or say the texts. You could sleep in the back row if you want to.”McDermott:(laughs)Jefferies:And being the rebellious sort of authority bucking young man that I was, I decided, yeah, I’m going to sit in the back. I’m not going to stand. I’m not going to say any of this dead liturgy. And I did. I just resisted the whole thing. Did not fall in love with the liturgy right away. But slowly over time as I saw the spiritual vibrancy of that congregation, the faithful leadership of the liturgy by Father Stewart. The new data made me realize that all my old theory was inadequate. But here it was, a liturgy in which the people were loving God and praising God.I was studying acting at the time, and that kind of provided for me some basic framework of ways in which actually this could be awesome. That, wait, here’s this script, right? And a script is for a character. Who is the character? It’s a saint worshipping Christ, that we long to become. As I was learning in the secular theater about taking on the script and trying to inhabit the character and really get inside the mind of the character it started to kind of click with me of, wow, the liturgy helps us actually grow to be more faithful, more orthodox worshippers of Jesus in the act of doing it. So, once that thought kind of catalyzed, I started to be a bit less reluctant and I think I’ve been pretty hooked ever since. McDermott:So, this is a podcast for Anglicans by Anglicans, although we hope that some non Anglicans listen, too. And our topic today is liturgy. So, what about Anglican liturgy, Father Ben? How is Anglican liturgy connected to other liturgies by other churches?Jefferies:Yeah. You could put all liturgies that are prayed everywhere on this big ‘ol family tree, and trace back sort of common ancestors and genealogies the same way you can do family genealogy, and you can sort of trace back where did they come from. And so one of the things is we study the Book of Common Prayer is that whatever prayer book you’re using or might have in your hands right now, it is a revision of a previous edition. If you have the 2019 in your hands the one before that was 1979, 1928, 1892, 1798, 1662, 1559, 1549, and then that’s all in the Reformation era of Books of Common Prayer, which themselves genetically source back to the medieval Rite of Sarum, which itself is sort of a very elaborate development of the Patristic liturgies that were in the Gallican liturgies in France, which themselves can be traced back to the liturgies right back to the ancient Roman world at the heirs of the first centuries of the Church as we see fragments of contained in Hippolytus and Justin the Martyr and the second and third century respectively, showing that all of these things ... although they developed through different languages and they get different regional flavors they’re all doing the same sorts of things. They’re bringing forth the word of God. They’re reminding us of the sacrifice of Christ. They’re rehearsing the words of institution with incredible fidelity ever since the Lord instituted them in the Upper Room. They’re bringing in prayers for the needs of church and state in different ways.You can see great commonalities amidst the diversion. It’s really pleasing. I mean, when I first learned that every liturgy on the planet has a Eucharistic liturgy, there’s probably a footnote there somewhere, but every Eucharistic liturgy has the sursum corda. We all say “lift up your hearts, we lift them to the Lord.” We all say the words of institution. We all give thanks to God for His work in different words. It brings forth a kinship with Christians across time and space, that we’re worshipping the same God in the same patterns, following really what St. Paul said to Timothy, “Keep the pattern of sound words that I passed on to you.” This pattern of sound words. That’s what liturgical kind of conservatism, the bringing forward of the great tradition really does. McDermott:So, you talked about Anglican prayer books being revisions of previous prayer books. How about the 2019?Jefferies:I’m a big fan.McDermott:What is (laughs ... Yes. What is it revising and why?Jefferies:Sure. The revision of 1979 really brought together some of the great fruits of the liturgical movement in the first half of the 20th century, which are culminated in Vatican ... a lot of sort of the same insights which are put forward by Vatican II. This idea of gathering the actions of the liturgy into sort of discreet units so that we can ... rather than just pin point back and forth between confession, praise, intercession, worship, kind of all mixed together in this kind of pastiche, having a more clear sense of now we’re repenting, now we’re offering, now we’re thanking. So, it really re-shaped the structure of the Eucharistic liturgy in particular. It also brought back in a number of seasonal elements and really unique things from the great tradition that for one reason or another had been left off. So, we have more seasonal elements, including special liturgies for Holy Week, which were not in any prayer books prior to 1979. That was wonderful about 1979. By virtue of being done in the 60s and 70s there were a few sort of unfortunately dated pieces that came along with that, some prayers which just ... the famous prayer C, you know, “intergalactic space” and “our island home.” The language feels very dated. And then in addition there was a pastoral impulse to soften some of the deep penitential language from the historic prayer book tradition. And the impulse is fair, to not want it to be sort of ... sort of as if we are beating our backs, but I think they softened it too much and actually extracted sort of a necessary ... the prayer book always carried forth this sort of deep ascetical penitential tradition. And the ’79 really effaced that. So, the 2019 sought to do a couple of things. Prune off some of the 60s and 70s isms, bring back in some of the richness, including the penitential spirit, as well as a number of really rich wonderful prayers that were either made optional or erased in some rites, like the Prayer of Humble Access. Things like that. Bring those back into the sort of mainstream tradition as it was. And also to make prayer more common. There’s four ... actually, there’s seven Eucharistic liturgies in the ’79 prayer book. We have two, which is not quite one, I mean, one would have been amazing, but the lay of the land of churchmanship’s today one wouldn’t hold them and the whole spirit of the Elizabethan settlement is gather as many Anglicans as we can together and two rites would do that in a way that one wouldn’t. So, unity. In some ways it steps back from 1979 and in many ways it continues things. I think it’s really a great repository when you think of sort of the theological assertions it makes about Eucharist and baptism it seems to sit at about halfway between the 1662 prayer book and the 1928 prayer book. And here I’m actually ... I’m grateful when last I was here, in my enthusiasm I overstated a few things and some folks on the internet kind of suggested some more careful comments. They were right, and I’m glad to be a bit more careful about that. Hopefully this, what I just said, is a bit more careful.McDermott:Some Anglicans talk today about ... Well, not just Anglicans, some Lutherans and others talk about living a liturgical life. In other words, liturgy is not just something we do on Sunday morning. Or maybe even not just in the daily office. But can you talk about that? What does it mean to live a liturgical life that goes beyond church on Sunday?Jefferies:I want to read from the preface to the 2019 prayer book, which was signed by Archbishop Foley Beach and Archbishop Emeritus Robert Duncan, as chiefly written by Archbishop Robert Duncan, he wrote about the idea of the Book of Common Prayer and its development is that, “according to this pattern of prayer book worship, communities of prayer, congregations and families, rather than the monasteries of the earliest centuries, would be the centers of formation and of Christ-like service to the world.”So, the idea is that, I think it was Aristotle who says you are what you do repeatedly. So, if you’re a monk praying for six hours a day, combined with all your offices, you are becoming ... you actually are being transformed into a worshipper. That liturgy and this is one of the great ideas that James Smith has really put out there that doing things repeatedly shapes who we are and our own desires.In the middle ages this became the exclusive domain of monks and part of Cranmer’s genius was to unprofessionalize monasticism back like how it was in the early centuries where monastery and church in the city were deeply connected together, that families and parishes would be houses of prayer. So, to live a liturgical life, to get to the question, means praying with the people of God as often as you can. At your church when they offer the liturgies of the offices or Eucharist, and at your home – to pray Compline with your family or by yourself. To pray morning prayer or noonday prayer and have your life saturated in the prayers of the Church.Then saturated by the prayers which are then also themselves colored by the seasons of the Church. You’re fasting more seriously in Lent and in Advent. And you’re feasting in Christmastide and Eastertide, and so even the food that’s going into your belly is being governed, as it were, by the role of the life of a Christian in the Church. So, your food and your prayers and your time ... you’re no longer just living for entertainment and pleasure, the pleasures that choke out serious Christian life, but on a Saturday night that you’d be preparing your heart by praying Compline in expectation of the worship in the morning with the people of God. So, it’s allowing your life to be shaped by the liturgies in private as well as in public. McDermott:I think that E. L. Mascall is the greatest Anglican theologian of the 20th century. And he wrote some tremendous books; among them being “Christ the Christian and the Church,” which just came out with a new edition in 2017, I believe, from Hendrickson. He’s also got Corpus Christi, a beautiful Eucharistic Theology that I believe you’re going to try to bring out and reprint or republish. And I look forward to that. And Mascall said the purpose of life is to be transformed into home adorans, the human being who is lost in adoration of the triune God. And something that I noticed when I transitioned out of being simply an evangelical, now I believe in the classic sense of evangelical, I am still an evangelical, a Christian who is devoted to the evangel, the gospel – but something I noticed when I transitioned out of being simply an evangelical and becoming a liturgical evangelical, was that using the prayer book for morning and evening prayer transformed my devotional life. I mean, for years and years I did the evangelical daily quiet time. But I found it was dominated by Bible study and my prayer was dominated by petition and intercession for others, but very little in the way of adoration.Jefferies:Yes.McDermott:And what I have learned and hopefully is becoming a habitus that Aristotle talked about and Thomas Aquinas talked about, and Jonathan Edwards talks about, a habitus, a habit of life. A habit of the heart.What is becoming a habit of the heart, and I hope I’m becoming that more and more through my doing the daily office every day, morning and evening, with a few times when I have failed to do it for various reasons, is that I’m spending more time in adoration. Because the daily office forces you to adore and not just be obsessed with supplication and intercession is wonderful to pray for others, but to lose yourself in adoring the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Praising and simply adoring. Do you want to talk about that at all?Jefferies:Yeah. I just couldn’t agree more. We know from the scriptures that it is what we will be doing for eternity, is gathering around the throne of the Lamb and worshipping him. And one of the things you hear all the time and is sort of on the lips of many in our culture is, “Eternity just sitting around playing a harp, singing all day?” Whenever I hear that I just think to myself, oh, you’ve never really gotten to experience the joy of true worship. Because when you have you realize that would be amazing. Think of the best time you’ve ever had worshipping the Lord – that’s the first taste of eternity. As we pray each liturgy and part of this duel of the flesh and living for the Spirit and not the flesh is the long and slow growth curve of actually learning and beginning to taste enjoyment in it. For many years the daily office to me felt like this heavy burden of school. Where it’s like, well, just praying my morning prayers; but knowing it to be a trusty discipline and trusting that the Lord would use it. I believe this is good and our Lord condemns praying empty words, so I can’t just mumble through this. I need to mean it. And over time I began to love it and that reshaping, that habitus, that we’re getting molded to be fit for eternity. To do now what we will be doing then and to be sort of outfitted for it, as it were.McDermott:Something else that the Anglican liturgical life ... Father Ben is training me into, I think, thinking better about God, is to be more Trinitarian. Jefferies:Yes, absolutely.McDermott:So, when I think of, speaking of worshipping at the throne, I think of Daniel 7. There’s the throne of the Ancient of Days and then there’s the throne of the one who is the Messiah to whom is given universal dominion. And in Revelation 4 & 5 are a glorious portrait of the celestial worship going on right now. The Father is on His throne and the Lamb is separate from the Father. So, it is much more Trinitarian. We are worshipping the Father on His throne. We are also worshipping the Lamb who stands as those slain before the throne of the Father, and the Holy Spirit ... the seven spirits of God are there in Revelation 4 & 5, and so it’s this magnificent Trinitarian worship.Jefferies:Yes.McDermott:They aren’t three separate persons as humans are three separate persons, i.e. beings, because it’s all one being, and it’s an ultimate mystery. It’s impossible to finally understand the Trinity, but nonetheless we are worshipping the Father because we’re in the Lamb, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit.Jefferies:Yes.McDermott:And so my worship ... my thinking about God has become far more Trinitarian by doing the liturgical life through the Anglican prayer books.Jefferies:Yes. I’ve found the same in that even just the Doxology at the end of each collect, just reinforces Sunday after Sunday in the hearts of the people of God that we pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit – that how the Trinity works, both in His glorious economy towards us and how the persons interrelate to themselves, they can start to make a more intuitive sense to the eyes of faith when you have hammered into your heart ... of course now I’m blanking on the specific collect doxology, but who with the Father and with the Son and with the Holy Spirit is worshipped forever. These different doxological endings. They really imprint a deep and good impression on us.I love praying with folks who are old Anglicans, from bishops to lay people who have been using the prayer book for their whole life. The prayers that come out extempore are these amazing Trinitarian synthetic wonderful prayers because the liturgies have filtered into the heart. How they even think about the God that they’re praying to is so much richer because of that prayer book formation.McDermott:Let me close with a last question, a practical question. Let’s say one of our listeners, and I bet there are a good number, are listening to this and they’re saying, “You know? It sounds like something I’d like to get into, but I’m not self disciplined. Where do I start? The daily office, morning and evening prayer, with all those readings, it sounds like it’s too much for me. Just tell me how to get started.” Jefferies:Great. Yeah, this actually comes up a lot because when someone, especially when someone first starts to like the idea of the liturgy it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with this idea of, okay, it’s every day and all of a sudden it becomes this enormous task and then you fail and then guilt kind of keeps you from it. The wise counselors, Christian pastors of old, always say with these sorts of things: start small. It’s actually hubris, pride that wants to start big. So, I would encourage anyone like that to get a 2019 prayer book and to actually begin with the family prayer section, which begins on page 67, especially if you’re a stay at home mom, a busy dad, or whatever it is. These are sort of distillations of the prayer book offices, following the same pattern. If you know Family Prayer, Morning Prayer is just that plus a bit extra. And the Family Prayer is ... each one takes less than six minutes in every case. So, you only need to set aside six minutes. What I’d encourage is to pick one day of the week to start with, where you’ll pray just one of the offices. It sounds so tiny, but it’s harder than it sounds. So, say you pick Monday mornings you’re going to do Family Prayer by yourself or with your family. And do that for a month. Just that. And you might do more, but only commit to that with an ironclad commitment. When you’re able to do that for a month then add evening prayer from the Family ... and then add a day, and then slowly work up to it by the course of the year. Once you really get an appetite for it and you feel like you’re making more space in the day, then jump into daily Morning or daily Evening prayer and you’ll have a good sense of the flow and of the things.I would add that doing the Family Prayer to still turn to the Daily Office lectionary, which you can find on page 738, and to grab a scripture lesson to join in the office readings. Because the Family Prayer only has one verse of scripture that would get ... or you could meditate on it infinitely. But to get the full richness of scripture to grab one of the Morning Prayer or Evening Prayer lessons and incorporate that just adds a couple of minutes, and then you’re praying, essentially, the core of the office – a Psalm and a scripture reading, and a collect, and the Our Father.McDermott:Great way to get started. So, thank you so much Father Ben.Jefferies:Thank you, Father Gerry.McDermott:And thank all of you for listening to us out there.Announcer: You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media. ................
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