It is not necessary that the Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word. Whosoever, through his private judgment, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and beordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.
Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying. [1]
by the Rev. Benjamin Garren
We will not receive the new service, because it is but like a Christmas game; but we will have our old service of matins, mass, even-song, and procession in Latin, as it was before. And so we the Cornish men, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse this new English.
-‘Rebels’ in Devon complaining to Cranmer[2].
The Archbishop was not amused. That some backwater cleric had the audacity to name his Magnum Opus, the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, to be nothing more than a puerile prank, a Christmas Game. With full expectation of conformity to the new BCP, Thomas Cranmer wrote back “If this be a sufficient cause for Cornwall to refuse the English service, because some of you understand none English, a much greater cause have they, both of Cornwall and Devonshire, to refuse the late service; forasmuch as fewer of them know the Latin tongue than they of Cornwall the English tongue.”[3]
In the various myths Anglicans tell ourselves about our beloved liturgy we leave out the fact that many subjects of Edward VI did not speak English. That for many the transition to the English BCP was a move from a familiar esoteric liturgy to an unfamiliar yet equally esoteric liturgy. The nascent Anglican Church, on the British Isles themselves, did not afford secondary language groups the luxury to worship in their vernacular tongues. All were expected to use the English Liturgy, regardless of their knowledge of English. The horror of this elimination of language, and by extension culture, would only intensify with the expansion of the English Empire, where eventually aboriginal youth would be kidnapped, beaten if they used their native tongues, and forced to demurely pray in the, supposedly, inherently efficacious English tongue.
This is the foretaste and aftertaste of how liturgy would be twisted into a mechanism of enforcing authority that marks the major flaw of the 34thArticle of Religion. Especially the addendum sentence at the end, “every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying,”[4] weds liturgy to worldly power and the creation and maintenance of such. Our prayer life, thusly, becomes mired in mammon when it should be the mechanism of freedom from such in Christ.
That, ultimately, the 1549 BCP was a mechanism by which Cranmer shifted authority from Rome to Canterbury and by extension a mechanism of erasing non-English language and culture from the realms subservient to the English monarch. A trend that would simply grow over time and with prayer book reform. As enslaved African Americans were corralled into balconies to observe their abusers at worship amidst the walls and roofs erected by means of their own black labor, as two-spirit Indigenous Americans were forced to use either the term male or the term female for their gender identity, as persons of color, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals struggled to name and find themselves in a liturgy that expected their subjugation, inferiority, and erasure… the pervasiveness and stench of this mire of mammon grew foul.
This flaw eventually became the principal means by which marginalized groups sought their freedom in Christ Jesus. It became their means to reform the church and thus it perpetuates itself within our current conversations regarding liturgical reform. Various factions of the church fight to control the principal mechanism by which authority in the church is dictated. If we, for instance, have a liturgy for validating a transgender individuals’ existence then we have given a mechanism to the authority of modern medical and mental health science and validated such as worthwhile. [5] The removal of the question “Will you… respect the dignity of every human being?” from the Baptismal Rite is a mechanism of stripping authority from those philosophies that value the inherent dignity of every human being.[6]
Now, for the basic safety of the individuals in the pews, I prefer to have a liturgy that is a mechanism for an authority that seeks to respect the basic dignity of gender expansive and transgender individuals, and other historically oppressed and marginalized groups than one that seeks to adhere to a concept of Christianity that instead takes up historically allowed forms of oppression and marginalization. It would be a much greater witness, however, to Scripture if members of the Body of Christ did not have to struggle for centuries to gain the capacity to readily and freely proclaim Christ Crucified. We should not, as Dr. Jenny Te Paa Daniel asks of us, need to be exploring “the present populist impressions about worship and liturgy with particular reference to the New Zealand Prayer Book and to ask whether or not the supposedly redemptive postcolonial reality formally constitutionally established by the church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia in 1992, is real or illusory.”[7]
The reason being that if we had been fully living into our Christian Identity historically then there would not have been a sinful colonial reality from which we would now be seeking out a redemptive postcolonial reality. If Thomas Cranmer had taken the liturgical concerns of the ‘rebels’ in Devon seriously, instead of using the 1549 BCP as a machination to exert his authority and that of the crown, a very different Anglicanism would have developed. What if Cranmer had valued the idea that those who speak Cornish should pray in Cornish and the same be said for those whose primary tongue was Scots, Welsh, Gaelic, etc.? What if we were to begin to live into this concept of liturgy in the here and now?
To be very clear what I am not suggesting is that this certain parish should be free to maintain that people of color should be restricted to a vertigo-instilling balcony, or that this diocese should be free to only allow individuals assigned male at birth to be priests, or that there be a network of parishes that reject the American Academy of Pediatrics statements regarding what constitutes the abuse of LGBTQ+ children and youth… which is sadly a somewhat apt description of the predicament we currently find ourselves in and which many would rejoice to have. What I am suggesting, instead, is that we stop allowing our liturgy to be a mechanism by which we exert authority, that the various forms of supremacist ideologies that have used liturgy as such a mechanism, sexism, heterosexism, racism, cisism, ableism, classism, etc., must be called out. That our liturgical process be one that casts down the mighty from their thrones and forces each individual to question the ways in which they are mighty.
That instead of only reacting after centuries of abuse when the screams of the oppressed finally have impact upon our souls—as we have in our slow inclusion of people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals in the formation and practice of liturgy—we become a church that proactively seeks to be transformed by the proclamation of Christ Crucified from members of the Body of Christ that are dynamically different than ourselves. That we move from using liturgy as a mechanism of authority and move towards a liturgical life that values autonomy, and even spontaneity, an idea that is markedly different from valuing chaos and bad art.[8]
To do this we can affirm the majority of the 34thArticle. The first sentence of the article can, generally, stand: “It is not necessary that the Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word”.[9]The only major correction I would make here is to replace ‘countries, times, and men’s manners’ with ‘contexts, times, and culture’. Our liturgical life should be grounded in scripture and be an expression of our devotion to scripture amidst the context, time, and culture of the community gathered. We should expect diversity in tradition and ceremony amidst that. We should expect to find comfort, and be challenged, by that diversity.
The second sentence of the article, and the only one left to consider, is also generally solid. “Whosoever, through his private judgment, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and beordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.”[10] I have emphasized “through his private judgement” as it is, in my mind, the core of the sentence. This is a prohibition against a priest-in-charge unilaterally doing whatever they please outside of relationship with both the greater church and also the community they serve. It is about penalizing a priest for using liturgy as a mechanism to flex their own authority, and generally pander to their ego.
What happens then if we update the 34thArticle with all the above in mind. Noting that liturgy should not be a mechanism of maintaining authority, especially unjust authority, in the world; that liturgy is going to be diverse across contexts, times, and cultures; and that individual priest should not be going about whatever they please to the detriment of both the greater church and the community they serve… my take would be the following:
It is not necessary that the liturgical traditions and ceremonies be in all places one, utterly alike. The liturgy of the church has always been diverse. It changes according to the diversity of contexts, times, and cultures as various communities express their relationship to God’s Word. Whenever a priest, through private judgement, willingly and purposefully breaks the traditions and ceremonies of the church, they should face rebuke. The liturgical tradition and ceremony of a community should be discerned amidst relationship with the greater church, respect the role of the Liturgical Ordinary, and never abuse the marginalized of society.
On a practical level this means that the vast majority of our worship communities are going to use the pre-discerned liturgy approved by our General Conventions, the 1979 BCP et al. It means that priest-in-charge simply doing whatever they desire and subjugating their communities to such should face rebuke and censure. It also means that there is not a one-size-fits-all liturgy that is going to work in all times and in all places and that we, the greater church, need to make space for and assist communities in creating what will work for them.
The last concept above is the one that consistently receives pushback. At the idea of it we all become Cranmer fuming at those ‘rebels’ in Devon who have the audacity to not validate our expectations. We want to name the traditions and ceremonies of the liturgy as we have experienced them to be inherently efficacious and a sure unchanging foundation; we want to rest amidst an unquestionable authority. Instead we need to be entering into the difficult process of building mutual relationships across communities that have the autonomy to discern their calls amidst the greater church, to know that we might enter into an Episcopal Church and have our expectations disrupted, that, almost spontaneously, the Holy Spirit might ask us to deepen our relationship with God by encountering something unexpected.
It takes a bit of faith that there is a core to our liturgical traditions and ceremonies that are worthwhile and will stand the tests that any context, time, or culture can place before them. It takes a bit of trust in our fellow Christians to be truly leading authentic lives in Christ Jesus and in ourselves to be transformed by their witness to a deeper love of self, other, and God. It takes us checking our need to be an authority and the various privileges we use as props for our sense of self… it takes a discipleship to something beyond our control. If we can shift there, however, our capacity to hear each other Proclaim Christ Crucified, value every member of the Body of Christ, and delve into the Love of God, will, in my mind, exponentially increase.
The Rev. Benjamin Garren is the chaplain for Arizona Episcopal Campus Ministries in Tucson.
[1]Episcopal Church. Book of Common Prayer. (1979). Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Hymnal. Page 874.
[2]Cranmer, T., & Cox, J. E. (1846). Miscellaneous writings and letters of Thomas Cranmer. Cambridge: University Press. Page 179
[3]Cranmer, T., & Cox, J. E. (1846). Miscellaneous writings and letters of Thomas Cranmer. Cambridge: University Press. Page 180
[4]Episcopal Church. Book of Common Prayer. (1979). Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church New York: Church Hymnal. Page 874.
[5]The Book of Occasional Services. (2018). New York: Church Hymnal. Page 120
[6]Texts for Common Prayer 2018. (2018). Anglican House Pub. Page 165
[7]P Kwok, P. (2016). Postcolonial practice of ministry: Leadership, liturgy, and interfaith engagement. Lanham: Lexington Books. Page 120.
[8]I am playing here with Gramsci’s theories of discipline: Gramsci, A., Hobsbawm, E. J., & Forgacs, D. (2000). The Gramsci reader: Selected writings 1916-1935. New York: New York University Press. Page 32
[9]Episcopal Church. Book of Common Prayer. (1979). Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Hymnal. Page 874.
[10]Episcopal Church. Book of Common Prayer. (1979). Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Hymnal. Page 874.