Common Prayer

When a young lad was asked by his Sunday school teacher to repeat after her: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name”, it came out as, “Our Father, who art in heaven, how’d you know my name?”

“How’d you know my name?”

Sure it may have been a slip of the tongue or then again it may have been a profound statement about the personal nature of prayer.

Prayer is personal and private, one to one, a child in conversation with a loving father.

But when we say, as our Lord taught us to say, “Our Father”, prayer becomes “common”, of the community of all believers.

Whether we are at home or in church or out in the open “Our Father” binds us to the whole family of God’s people.

It is in prayer that we communicate with God. The Book of Common Prayer helps us do that, individually and together.

It gives our corporate worship shape and structure. It testifies to the wisdom of the Church down the ages, right from the beginning, guiding us and guarding us from false notions about God.

St Luke tells us about the early Christians being baptised and “continuing steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship and in the breaking of bread and in prayer”.

That fellowship came into existence on the day of Pentecost when most Church members were Jews.

Says Luke: “They continued daily with one accord, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved”

He adds: “Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour”.

And later it was also St Paul’s practice to worship in the Jewish synagogues until he was driven out.

So in the early church Jewish elements in public worship such as set times for prayer, readings of the scriptures, homilies, psalms and prayers, were very much part and parcel of the life of the local Christian congregations.

The Christians later added devotions of their own not least the commemoration of the Resurrection on the first day of the week.

They also had separate meetings with the most distinctive feature of these being the celebration of the Eucharist, “breaking bread from house to house”.

It all sounds very homely and so it was. Someone would bring the wine and the bread, they would take turns, perhaps they had a rota!

And in the early literature prayer is simply described as “the duty of all”. It was private. Then as numbers grew they had to find a space apart for public worship.

This Common Prayer was at set times and structured around the Eucharist and included elements of worship inherited from the Temple. There is a wonderful resonance with our Book of Common Prayer today in the Eucharistic liturgy.

“Lift up your hearts” and the comfortable words, are the most ancient part of our service dating from around 250 AD.

And the habit of reading the Bible as part of our Common Prayer is straight out of the worship tradition of the first congregations.

Of course the Bible – the Church’s book – grew out of the life and experience of these congregations. The Church was practising regular, public worship before the New Testament was written.

The forms and structures of those services were well established when the Old Testament was received by the Church and subsequently completed by them in the New Testament record of God’s full and final revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ.

So out of practice and fellowship, out of doing what Our Lord commanded, the Church found direction and purpose in the world. In its common prayer there was ‘gladness and singleness of heart’, adoration, time for confession of sins, thanksgiving for all God’s gifts and prayers of supplication “so that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight”.

In common prayer and in the breaking of bread there was mission and mystery, the Divine engaging with his people.

There’s a story told that when a nightclub opened, the only church in town organized an all-night prayer meeting. The members asked God to burn down the club and within an hour, lightning had struck the club, and it burned to the ground.

The owner sued the church, which vigorously denied any responsibility. After hearing both sides, the judge said: “It seems that wherever guilt may lie, the nightclub owner believes in prayer, while the church doesn’t”.

As the numbers were added to the Church it was soon evident that it’s integrity had to be protected and the truth of the Gospel guarded with discipline and wisdom.

Part of that discipline was the ordering of its public worship. Dean Victor Griffen has said: “It is the age old wisdom of the Church that the discipline and support of common worship and sacrament are necessary to prevent unbalanced, exotic and false ideas of God.”

So in the third and fourth centuries the records show the Church publishing manuals of direction in Christian faith and practice for converts and local congregations. There are documents styled “Church Orders” with explicit injunctions from bishops on the conduct of Common Prayer, for daily assemblies, for instruction and for reading the scriptures.

The Apostolic Tradition document of this period led to a liturgical system of daily public prayer. And in 375 AD the Apostolic Constitutions establish Morning and Evening Prayer. By the end of the century a cycle of daily offices is complete and the observance of the liturgical year is taking shape.

In the following centuries there was much change and revision and additions and corruptions in the liturgical life of the Church, not to mention theological complications and schism.

By the time Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549 sits down to give us his inspirational Common Prayer in English, he is faced with a blizzard of liturgical forms.

But he was up for the task and in the British Museum there is a manuscript in the good Archbishop’s handwriting that reduces the Anglican liturgies to two – Mattins and Evensong with the Eucharist the focal point of both. His notes also set out a way of reading the Bible once over each year and there are hymns and psalms and a shape to “Common Prayer” – preparation, Ministry of the Word and the prayers.

It sounds familiar. It is indeed a rich and lasting Anglican contribution to Common Prayer. It represents a beautiful and precious tradition of worship.

In describing the Anglican Way of Common Prayer, Dean Griffen said: “The Book of Common Prayer keeps a sense of proportion, a balance between what we might describe as ‘Holiness’ and ‘Homeliness’, between the majesty or mystery of God and the homely love of God.”

He added: “The sense of proportion which finds expression in the Prayer Book has for generations stamped itself on the character of Anglicanism, a character which rejects intolerant extremes and fanaticism of every kind and commends instead the moderation and humility of the gospel.”

Common Prayer then gives us a structure and a form of words that help us share the gospel in fellowship and in faith.

In Common Prayer we embrace the discipline of worship, of praise and thanksgiving, of confession and restoration.

In Common Prayer we learn to “feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving” and to find encouragement in running the race of faith together as a community – a community that reaches up to God and reaches out to neighbour.

In Common Prayer we are spurred on, fitted for duty and mission in the world with integrity, linking ‘believing’ and ‘behaving’.

In Common Prayer, in doing what has been instituted by Christ, in word and sacrament, in fellowship and practice, we see the light that leads us beyond ourselves to things eternal.

In Common Prayer – the sum of all our private prayers – we come to God and God comes to us in Christ.

Psalm 139 is one of the most profound private prayers in our liturgy. It has become a universal prayer and ‘common’ to us all as we pray, “Lord, thou art acquainted with all my ways, thou hast laid thy hands upon me”. We might well add, “You know my name!”

Amen