This week's collect for extra-ordinary time

In doing my daily office this week, this week the extra Ordinary Time — due to the extra-long season after Trinity — busted the two websites I use to show me the collect and lessons for Morning and Evening Prayer. So had to look up what the actual rules are for this occasion. (I would have realized that on Sunday, but I went to three different 3-year lectionary churches and used CradleOfPrayer for daily office).

This year Easter was April 1, 10 days after the earliest possible date. We also Advent 1 on December 2 — a week after Thanksgiving and one day before the latest possible date (Dec 3 as we had last year). So there are a total of 26 Sundays after Trinity in 2018, and there theoretically could be 27.

If you look at the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:

• The Sunday lessons (and collect for the week) in the Trinity season go from 1-24, and then there is “The Sunday next before Advent"
• The daily lectionary goes from 1-24, and then it lists the 3rd, 2nd and 1st Sunday before Advent. So this week — the week of the 2nd Sunday before Advent — the morning OT lesson is reading through Lamentations. Next week, we get to do Joel — a favorite because it’s short but punchy, and that (outside the Daily Office) we only hear on Ash Wednesday (“rend your heart and not your garments”). There is no chance of running out of lessons.

So the problem is scheduling one or two Sundays (depending on whether there are 26 or 27 Sunday after Trinity), plus reusing that collect the rest of the week for Daily Office. For the latter, we need a Collect for the 25th Sunday after Trinity (and possibly the 26th Sunday after Trinity).

During MP at the college chapel, I couldn’t figure this out on my iPad, with the websites and a PDF of the BCP; this is one day I needed the paper BCP. So when I got back, I flipped through the book and found the relevant rubric, just before the Collect for Sunday next before Advent, on page 224:

¶ If in any year there be twenty-six Sundays after Trinity, the service for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany shall be used on the Twenty-fifth Sunday. If there be twenty-seven, the service for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany shall be used on the Twenty-sixth, and the service for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany on the Twenty-fifth. If there be fewer than twenty-five Sundays, the overplus shall be omitted.

The logic of this is that in a year with an early Easter, you didn’t have as many Sundays after Epiphany. This year we had three Sundays, followed by Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima, so weeks 4,5,6 did not get used. With clericalism, we just let the clergy worry about this, but anyone doing the Daily Office needs either to know the rule or at least where to look. If I ever teach the Daily Office, it’s a point I’ll be sure to make.

Meanwhile, I'll make myself a note so I have it next time:

Collect for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity

O GOD, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of eternal life; Grant us, we beseech thee, that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves, even as he is pure; that, when he shall appear again with power and great glory, we may be made like unto him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where with thee, O Father, and thee, O Holy Ghost, he liveth and reigneth ever, one God, world without end. Amen.

Collect for the Twenty-six Sunday after Trinity

O LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion; that they who do lean only upon the hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

ACNA co-sponsors CCM-bluegrass Xmas concert tour

From the ACNA email blast this afternoon:

Getty Music Presents Sing!

Celebrate the Season at

Sing! An Irish Christmas

Enjoy an evening of inspirational carols and hymns with Keith and Kristyn Getty — and their band of top Irish & American instrumentalists fusing Celtic, bluegrass, Americana, classical and modern sounds into an evening of singing and celebration.

Dear Friend,

For the seventh year in a row, modern hymn-writers Keith and Kristyn Getty are returning with Sing! An Irish Christmas. As someone who appreciates great songs of the Christian faith, we hope you'll join us for the annual gathering of historic carols and congregational singing.

Sing! An Irish Christmas continues the great legacy of singing beloved holiday hymns.

Featuring classic Christmas carols as well as popular modern hymns and carols from the Gettys, the Sing! An Irish Christmas tour will make stops in renowned concert venues like Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in DC - where it has had the distinction of being the only Christian concert to play during the Christmas season.

Special discounts for ACNA pastors & congregations are available by emailing info@gettymusic.com

Guest artists for select concerts include:

Archbishop Foley Beach, Joni Eareckson Tada, Tim Keller, David Platt, Paul Tripp, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Ricky Skaggs, Alison Krauss, Matt Redman, Sierra Hull, John Patitucci, Trip Lee, Phil Keaggy + many more! 

Check local concert listing at 

www.gettymusic.com/christmas for more details!

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The ACNA website explains the “guest artist” remark:

From Archbishop Beach: “I am grateful for the partnership we have with the Gettys! I and many in the Anglican Church in North America continue to be enriched by their ministry. As we prepare for the coming Christmas season, this tour is an opportunity to hear and sing some of the great hymns of the Faith. I’ll be participating in the concert in Atlanta on November 28th. If you or your church are looking for a fellowship opportunity this Advent, this is an excellent one to consider!”

Keith and Kristyn Getty are doing 16 concerts from Nov. 28 to Dec. 21, including two Presbyterian, one Baptist, one Lutheran and two (California) non-denominational churches. Tickets appear to range from $15 to $130 (at Carnegie Hall). The promotion video suggests the music is a mix of secular and sacred Christmas carols, Getty praise hymns and other music, all performed in a Celtic-bluegrass-Irish/American folk style.

Since the Getty website doesn’t name the “special guests” or mention the ACNA, it is not clear the ACNA role other than the Abp.’s guest appearance on Nov. 28. However, the Getty website does talk about the partnership with several pages:

• New Wineskins — some free hymns distributed by the Gettys
• Foley Beach’s talk on “Liturgy and Beauty: The Liturgy of the Anglican Church” at the Getty’s annual Sing! conference earlier this year

I’m vaguely curious as to what a Christmas-CCM-folk-bluegrass concert looks like, but I can’t make any of the dates. Instead, I’ll be celebrating Advent at a local Lessons & Carols service, and of course listening to webcast of the 100th Kings College Cambridge service

Rev. John Mason Neale, D.D. (24 Jan 1818 – 6 Aug 1866)

On Wednesday, I gave a campus ministry talk on the influence of J.M. Neale, adapted from my recent research. Below is the handout I distributed to the students.

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Born to Cornelius and Susanna Good Neale; named for Puritan cleric and hymn writer John Mason (1645–94). Cornelius was ordained a Church of England priest in 1822 and died in 1823. J.M. married Sarah Webster in 1842; three children: Agnes Neale, Vincent Neale, Mary Sackville (Neale) Lawson.

Cofounder of Cambridge Camden Society, later the Ecclesiological Society; from 1841-1866 co-editor (with Benjamin Webb) of its journal, The Ecclesiologist.

In 1846, he became warden of Sackville College, an almshouse in East Grinstead, but was inhibited by the local bishop from 1848-1860 for his “Puseyite” tendencies. In 1855, he founded the Society of St. Margaret, a women’s religious order that trained nuns to minister to the poor, which, after relocating to East Grinstead in 1856; his daughter Agnes was later its Mother Superior.

Died in 1866 at Sackville College, and buried 10 Aug 1866 in St. Swithun Churchyard, East Grinstead, West Sussex, England.

Hymns

A great and mighty wonder All glory, laud, and honor Alleluia, song of gladness, Art thou weary, art thou languid Brief life is here our portion Christ is made the sure foundation Christian! Dost Thou See Them Come, ye faithful, raise the strain Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord Fierce was the wild billow For thee, O dear, dear country Good Christian men, rejoice Holy Father, thou hast taught me Jerusalem the golden, Jesus, name all names above Jesus, the very thought is sweet Lift up, lift up your voices now Now that the daylight fills the sky

O come, O come, Emmanuel O happy band of pilgrims O Lord of hosts, Whose glory fills O sons and daughters, let us sing O thou who by a star didst guide O Thou, Who through this holy week O what their joy and their glory must be O wondrous type! O vision fair Of the Father's love begotten Safe home, safe home in port That Easter day with joy was bright The day is past and over The day of Resurrection The day, O Lord, is spent The Royal Banners forward go The world is very evil To the name that brings salvation

References

• “J.M. Neale,” Hymnary.org, URL: https://hymnary.org/person/Neale_JM
• J.M. Neale, A Few Words to Church Builders (Cambridge: Cambridge Camden Society, 1841), URL: https://archive.org/details/fewwordstochurch00camb
• J.M. Neale and Benjamin Webb, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments (London: T.W. Greene, 1843), URL: https://archive.org/details/symbolismchurch00webbgoog
• Eleanor A. Towle, John Mason Neale, DD: A Memoir (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), URL: https://archive.org/details/johnmasonnealeme00towl
• James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: the Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1962).
• Barry A. Orford, “Music and Hymnody” in Stewart J. Brown, James Pereiro, and Peter Nockles, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 376-386.
• J. West, “Neale’s Hymnal Noted and its Impact on Twentieth-Century American Hymnody,” The Hymn, 69, 3 (Summer 2018): 14-24.
• J. West, “How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement,” Forward in Christ 11, 4 (October 2018): 18-20, URL: http://bit.ly/FIC-Neale-2018

New research on John Mason Neale

My first papers on church music were published last month, and one is now online. Both are on John Mason Neale, who — as I mentioned in January — is being honored in this the year of his bicentennial.

Neale’s Hymnal Noted

The main paper is about his most influential hymnal, Hymnal Noted, published with music editor Thomas Helmore. As the second paragraph summarizes:

In Hymnal Noted, Neale (1818-1866) and his colleagues compiled 210 hymns, with 105 unique texts translated from medieval Latin sources; many of these translations were later included in the major English hymnals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. AB this paper will show, the influence of Hymnal Noted also extended to the United States. Of the 105 texts, twenty-six were adopted by one or more of the twenty-four twentieth-century hymnals from the largest American Christian denominations, with hymns such as “All glory, laud and honor,” and “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”

The paper reviews the history of hymnody in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, Neale’s career, his contribution to hymnody, and then specifically Hymnal Noted and its impact. It was published in The Hymn, the main US journal for scholarship on hymn music. I had presented the original version at the 2017 Society for Christian Scholarship in Music conference — my first appearance at any academic conference for religion, liturgy or music — and got great feedback, a sense of the norms of the field, and met some of today’s established and up-and-coming scholars.

The published paper benefitted greatly from the editorial process. In particular, I greatly appreciate the patience of interim editor Robin Knowles Wallace, an endowed chair at the Methodist seminary near Columbus.

How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement

Stained glass window in St Swithuns
Source: Forward in Christ, Oct. 2018

In writing the original paper, I felt that the Neale bicentennial should not go unremarked among American Anglo-Catholics; because of my involvement in the Forward in Faith church planting task force, I reached out to the Forward in Faith magazine, Forward in Christ. The editor, Fr. Michael Heidt, graciously agreed to run 1,650 words on Neale in the October issue.

While in my January blog post, I emphasized Neale’s hymns, I felt this audience would also be interested in Neale’s impact in other areas. One part was about how Neale and his Cambridge colleagues created the gothic revival in English church architecture — including in their showpiece Victorian Gothic church, All Saints’ Margaret Street, which I was fortunate to visit in June. The other was how Neale was among those who pushed the envelope of liturgical practice — sometimes at great risk to his career and livelihood – to reinstate medieval practices decried as “Romish” by many English Protestants. While incense and the chasuble remain controversial, it’s hard to remember that choir vestments, candles, and singing the communion service were also controversial 150 years ago.

The article appeared in the printed glossy magazine, and the full text is available for free on the Forward in Christ website. The website includes one of the pictures from the magazine: the stained glass window showing John Mason Neale and two others at St Swithuns, East Grinstead, where he was laid to rest on August 10, 1866. The other picture in the magazine is a recent interior picture of All Saints’ Margaret Street, which is available on their website.

References

• J. M. Neale and Thomas Helmore, Hymnal Noted: Parts I & II (London: Novello, 1851, 1856), available at https://books.google.com/books?id=2E3Dya5ON5oC
• J. West, “Neale’s Hymnal Noted and its Impact on Twentieth-Century American Hymnody,” The Hymn, 69, 3 (Summer 2018): 14-24.
• J. West, “How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement,” Forward in Christ 11, 4 (October 2018): 18-20, URL: http://bit.ly/FIC-Neale-2018

Thank you to everyone for their help and encouragement. I would be glad to email a scan of the printed copy of either article to anyone who’s interested — please contact me.

Singing to end all wars

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the War to End All Wars, what we now call World War I. With nearly 1 million dead from England and the rest of the United Kingdom, this date has been observed as Remembrance Day for the past century: the Church of England and other churches in the U.K. will be solemnly marking this occasion. Anyone who’s read biographies of Lewis, Tolkien and others of that generation know how much a mark the war made on the British people.

In the U.S., today is unlikely to be a big deal. The deaths were a factor of 10 smaller in absolute terms and 20x smaller in proportion of the overall population. The president (as any president would) is in Europe, not the U.S., to mark the occasion.

There isn’t really anything in the U.S. lectionary for Veteran’s (née Armistice) Day, and today’s readings don’t really lend themselves a sermon on the subject. However, I did find it was possible to gently remember the occasion through a choice of hymns.

The obvious hymn for the occasion is “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee”, which is missing from my favorite hymnal but #376 in Hymnal 1982 and #375 in Book of Common Praise 2017. This hymn was a pleasant surprise when, in our wanderings earlier this century to find a suitable Episcopal church, we found it was a quite popular recession hymn. I was struck how clever the adaptation was: the tune from the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th (“Ode to Joy”), with words that are roughly a paraphrase of Schiller’s 18th century text that was used in Beethoven’s German original.

The fit is that the melody is the EU national anthem, something hard to miss if you watch an EU gathering on TV. (Officially there are no words, but I recall seeing Europeans singing Beethoven’s words on TV). Of course, the EU is an institution created to prevent a repeat of World War II, but given that the 1918 Armistice did such a terrible job of preventing a repeat of World War I, in reality the Marshall Plan, Common Market and European Union were a do-over of what should have been done to provide peace 100 years ago.

Still, this was vaguely unsatisfying. Looking through the various topical indices, none of the first lines had an obvious fit to a more general desire for peace. But then a (sung) phrase kept rattling around in my brain: “Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.”

It turns out this is the end of verses 1-3 of the 19th century hymn, “God the Omnipotent! King, who ordainest.” The verses were fairly stable until the late 1970s, the first two in 1842 by Henry F. Chorley (a London music critic and opera librettist) and the last two in 1870 by Rev. John Ellerton, a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge and a contributor to Hymns Ancient & Modern.

The words I have sung from Hymnal 1940 (#523) since my childhood are:

God, the omnipotent! King who ordainest
Thunder thy clarion, the lightning thy sword;
Show forth thy pity on high where Thou reignest,
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all merciful! Earth hath forsaken
Thy ways all holy, and slighted Thy Word;
Bid not thy wrath in its terrors awaken;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all righteous One! Man hath defied Thee;
Yet to eternity standeth thy Word,
Falsehood and wrong shall not tarry beside Thee;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all provident! Earth by thy chastening,
Yet shall to freedom and truth be restored;
Through the thick darkness Thy kingdom is hast’ning;
Thou wilt give peace in thy time, O Lord.

The same words are in BCP2017 (#613). Despite the strong imagery, H82 (#569) only gently updates it, replacing “Man” with “Earth” in verse 3. In all cases, we are singing either to petition God for peace in our time, or to acknowledge our trust that he will do so at the time of his choosing.

What I remember most about the hymn, however, is the march that makes it both memorable in imminently singable. The real irony, however, is that the tune was the Tsar’s national anthem — at least until the Romanov family was executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. So singing the tune also marks a link to an earlier era of Europe that (for better or for worse) came to a violent end in 1917-1918.