Common Worship: Times and Seasons

Common Worship

Times and Seasons

Church House Publishing

Copyright

Published by Church House Publishing

Church House

Great Smith Street

London SW1P 3NZ

Copyright © The Archbishops’ Council 2006

Index © Meg Davies 2006

First published 2006

ISBN 978-0-7151-2091-0

ISBN (for this ePub Edition) 978-0-7151-2238-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, except as stated below, without written permission.

Texts for local use: the arrangements which apply to local editions of services cover reproduction on a non-commercial basis both for a single occasion and for repeated use. Details are available in the booklet A Brief Guide to Liturgical Copyright (see Copyright Information here for further information).

Designed by Derek Birdsall RDI and John Morgan

Ebook compiled by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

    Contents

A note on using this Common Worship EPUB Edition

Introduction

Codes for Seasonal Material

Authorization

The Calendar

Rules to Order the Christian Year

Advent

Christmas

Epiphany

Lent

Passiontide and Holy Week

The Easter Liturgy

Easter

Trinity to All Saints

All Saints to Advent

The Agricultural Year

Embertide

Acknowledgements

Sources and Copyright Holders of Seasonal Material

Index of Biblical References

General Index

Copyright Information

A note on using this Common Worship EPUB edition

This Common Worship eBook is designed for use on any device able to read EPUB electronic books, such as an iPad using iBooks, or a Nook or Kobo eReader.

The following notes on navigating this publication on an eReader may be helpful, bearing in mind that using a prayer book is likely to be quite different to the experience of reading a novel or similar.

Finding your way around easily

♦  The Contents list contains links to each section of the book.

♦  You can access the Contents list from any section in the book by clicking on the underlined main heading.

♦  You will also find underlined cross-reference links – e.g. from a service to the text of The Lord’s Prayer. Click on the underlined ‘here’ to go to The Lord’s Prayer. When you have finished reading The Lord’s Prayer, press the Back button to return to the section you have just left.

♦  Selecting the Menu will also give you the option to search the text for a particular word or phrase.

Personalizing your Common Worship eBook

♦  You can bookmark particular sections to mark a place to which you want to return (in much the same way as you might use a ribbon in a printed liturgical book). Click on the bookmark icon in the menu bar.

♦  You can also add a note or highlight a particular section with a note, which may be helpful when planning worship or studying. Check the user guide for your device/eReader application for how to do this.

Introduction

Times and Seasons: the Christian Year

The purpose of this volume is to provide the parishes and other Christian communities of the Church of England with resources to celebrate the times and seasons of the Christian year.

Christ died once for all for our salvation, on a particular date in human history. His death, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews insists, is a unique and unrepeatable event. But this event, like his incarnation and his resurrection, which are also events in the stream of history, transcends history: it is one day and every day. Every day is both Good Friday and Easter Day, because Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are present to us every day. It is hard to comprehend so much eternal reality in a single day, and it is not surprising that the first Christians should, almost from the beginning, have celebrated the mystery of the Lord’s passion on a particular day, the weekly anniversary of his resurrection. Over time, an annual cycle of commemoration was laid over the rhythm of the week. This provided the Church with a way of meditating deeply on the successive episodes of Christ’s saving life and death, from his conception in Mary’s womb, through his death and resurrection, to his ascension to his place at the right hand of the Father and the descent of the Holy Spirit promised by him. Other kinds of Christian commemoration have been added to the Christian year – originally, those of the apostles and martyrs, who had in a distinctive way witnessed to the passion of Christ.

    The liturgical year thus provides a structure for the Church’s collective memory, a way of consecrating our human experience of time in the celebration of God’s work – in Christ and in human beings made holy through Christ – a work which is both unrepeatably in time and incomprehensibly beyond time. It asserts a Christian understanding of time as a context of God’s grace, against the world’s purely functional reckoning of time. This act of Christian remembering has proved, over time, to have an extraordinary depth. Through the structuring of our Christian memory, the past is able to come into our present, in a process of anamnesis (only weakly translated by our English ‘remembrance’):

Paschal Lamb, thine Offering, finished

    once for all when thou wast slain,

in its fullness undiminished

    shall for evermore remain.

(G. H. Bourne)

This powerfully creative remembering has deep roots in Jewish tradition, and especially in the Passover meal. The shared preparation and consumption of this meal is a memorial action (zikkaron; cf Exodus 12.14 and 13.9), through which God’s redemptive power in the past act of the Exodus can be freshly experienced in the present.

The rhythm of the Church’s times and seasons also affects those who take part in them. It is one of the primary ways in which Christians learn, and are strengthened in their grasp of, the story of Christ – just as Jesus himself was familiar with the Jewish festivals, and with the way that the annual remembrance of Passover shaped the identity of the chosen people. One of the essential features of this educative remembering is that we imagine ourselves, in our act of worship, to experience events in the past as present reality or future hope. We speak naturally at Advent of looking forward to the birth of the Christ-child, and we experience the joy of his birth as a present reality, though we know in our minds that it is an event in the past.

Times and Seasons:

the Scope and Contents of the Volume

Inevitably, space has imposed limitations even within a large book. This collection concentrates on the major liturgical cycles of the Christian year, especially from Advent to Candlemas and from Lent to Easter (of which Pentecost is seen as the conclusion). To these, together with festivals of long observance in the Western Church such as Trinity Sunday, is added a collection of resources for the festivals and seasons of the agricultural year and resources for the Embertide seasons, when prayer is offered for the ministry of the Church and for vocations. The relation between the liturgical calendar and the folk calendar is complex, and Christians were often skilful in adapting, and so to speak ‘baptizing’, already ancient popular customs. We see this clearly in the way that the imagery of light becomes progressively more prominent in the traditions of Christmas the further north one travels. The agricultural seasons have been intimately connected with the rhythms of the English Church for so long that we have included them in this volume. There are, however, important areas that do not find a place in it.

¶    The social and economic needs of the city do not fit obviously into an annual cycle in the way that the rhythms of the agricultural year do, and the pace of urban change is so rapid that we have not devised a corresponding set of urban liturgies. This is work well worth doing by others.

¶    We have not included material for the ever-increasing number of Sundays that are designated to some special cause, or area of ministry. These do not form part of the Church’s collective memory in the same way as Ascension Day or Ash Wednesday, or even the more recent Bible Sunday, and they are best left to local judgement and private initiative. It is not difficult for those who wish to keep any of these special Sundays to find the materials they need.

¶    We have limited ourselves to the provision of material for use in churches and designated places of worship. It would clearly be possible – indeed, desirable – for there to be resources to help Christians to observe the times and seasons of the Christian year in homes or workplaces. This need can be met elsewhere.

¶    Nor have we (with a few exceptions) included material with a particular view to its use at services where children are present. We would again encourage others to meet this need.

This book contains liturgical material for the seasons of the Christian Year and for the principal feasts and holy days from which they take their character. A companion volume, Common Worship: Festivals, contains liturgical texts for the festivals of the Christian Year, principally those of the saints.

This collection incorporates and revises much that is already in use in the Church of England in three publications: Lent, Holy Week, Easter (1986), The Promise of His Glory (1991) and Enriching the Christian Year (1993). Again, limits of space have meant that not everything in those collections can be reproduced here; and room has also had to be made for additional material, where the earlier volumes did not cover a portion of the year or where the experience of using them has suggested a need for additional provision.

The provision for each season is of broadly three kinds. There is a collection of individual elements, such as proper prefaces, intercessions and acclamations, which can be inserted as appropriate into a service of Holy Communion or a Service of the Word. There are outlines of services, which show how particular building blocks can be put together into an appropriate structure. Finally, there is a small number of fully worked-out services.

The volume has been designed for use by those who are putting services together, rather than for direct use at the lectern or holy table. The ‘short passages of Scripture’ can be used to encourage reflection at various points in the service, especially in a Service of the Word; they are not intended to revive the practice of starting a service of Holy Communion with a sentence of Scripture, rather than with the invocation of the Trinity and the greeting of the people by the president. The widespread use of ‘dismissal Gospels’ is a response to the recent rediscovery of the way in which the conclusion of the service can be used to emphasize the missionary implications of worship. As God’s people are sent out from the celebration, they take with them the command of the gospel to spread the good news, and to be salt for the world.

Codes for Seasonal Material

In the printed edition, for easy reference to the seasonal material, individual items have been allocated a code – for example, Adv.A1.

The first part of the code is a ‘season marker’. Each section or sub-section of the book has either a three-letter code (indicating a season, period or theme) or a two-letter code (indicating a Sunday, Festival or occasion). These are printed in the top corner of each right-hand page in the section or sub-section concerned.

The second part of the code consists of a letter (indicating the type of material – for example, Invitations to Confession, Kyrie Confessions, and so on) and an individual number. These are printed in the left-hand margin next to the item concerned.

Key to Season Markers

Authorization

The following material is authorized pursuant to Canon B 2 of the Canons of the Church of England for use until further resolution of the General Synod:

¶    The Calendar

¶    Rules to Order the Christian Year

¶    Texts marked † in the list of sources

¶    Affirmation of Faith (here)

¶    Certain texts included in the services

The following form of service has been approved by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York pursuant to Canon B 4 for use within their respective provinces:

¶    A Service for Remembrance Sunday

The remaining material in Common Worship: Times and Seasons has been commended by the House of Bishops of the General Synod for use by the minister in exercise of his or her discretion under Canon B 5 of the Canons of the Church of England. (The following texts are commended for use when an authorized confession is not required: Chr.D1, EpU.C1, EpU.D1, EpU.D2, Eas.D1.)

The Calendar

For Rules to Order the Christian Year, see here.

In the printing of the Calendar, Principal Feasts and other Principal Holy Days are printed in bold; Festivals are printed in roman typeface; other Sundays and Lesser Festivals are printed in ordinary roman typeface, in black. Commemorations are printed in italics.

¶    The Seasons

Advent

The First Sunday of Advent

The Second Sunday of Advent

The Third Sunday of Advent

From 17 December (O Sapientia)

begin the eight days of prayer before Christmas Day

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Christmas Eve

Christmas

Christmas Day – 25 December

The First Sunday of Christmas

The Second Sunday of Christmas

The days after Christmas Day until the Epiphany traditionally form a unity of days of special thanksgiving.

Epiphany

The Epiphany – 6 January

The Baptism of Christ – The First Sunday of Epiphany

(The Second Sunday of Epiphany when 6 January is a Sunday)

The Second Sunday of Epiphany

The Third Sunday of Epiphany

The Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas)

– 2 February

Ordinary Time

This begins on the day following the Presentation

The Fifth Sunday before Lent

The Fourth Sunday before Lent

The Third Sunday before Lent

The Second Sunday before Lent

The Sunday next before Lent

Lent

Ash Wednesday

The First Sunday of Lent

The Second Sunday of Lent

The Third Sunday of Lent

The Fourth Sunday of Lent – Mothering Sunday

The Fifth Sunday of Lent (Passiontide begins)

Palm Sunday

Monday of Holy Week

Tuesday of Holy Week

Wednesday of Holy Week

Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Easter Eve

Easter

Easter Day

Monday of Easter Week

Tuesday of Easter Week

Wednesday of Easter Week

Thursday of Easter Week

Friday of Easter Week

Saturday of Easter Week

The Second Sunday of Easter

The Third Sunday of Easter

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Ascension Day

From Friday after Ascension Day

begin the nine days of prayer before Pentecost

The Seventh Sunday of Easter – Sunday after Ascension Day

Pentecost (Whit Sunday)

Ordinary Time

This is resumed on the Monday following the Day of Pentecost

Trinity Sunday

The Thursday after Trinity Sunday may be observed as

The Day of Thanksgiving for the Institution of Holy Communion

(Corpus Christi)

The First Sunday after Trinity

The Second Sunday after Trinity

The Third Sunday after Trinity

The Fourth Sunday after Trinity

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity

The Sixth Sunday after Trinity

The Seventh Sunday after Trinity

The Eighth Sunday after Trinity

The Ninth Sunday after Trinity

The Tenth Sunday after Trinity

The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity

The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity

The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

The Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity

The Last Sunday after Trinity

Dedication Festival – The First Sunday in October or The Last Sunday after Trinity, if date unknown

All Saints’ Day – 1 November

The Sunday between 30 October and 5 November

may be kept as All Saints’ Sunday or as:

The Fourth Sunday before Advent

The Third Sunday before Advent

The Second Sunday before Advent

Christ the King – The Sunday next before Advent

¶    Holy Days

For the key to the typography, see here.

January

1   The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus