River Views and News
for
St James Garlickhythe
January 2008
[Web site edition]

Please note, in future this newsletter section will contain news and views, as may also be found in copies of the newsletter available in the church, together with some special announcements. Please also check the noticeboard section of this website for other events and service times.

Thank you to all our past and current visitors to this web site to whom we also wish a peaceful New Year.

For the Church of England the Nativity of Saint John Baptist has a particular significance. It was on this day in 1559 that the English Book of Common Prayer came into use in ‘this Realm of England, Wales and the Marches of the same’. This was the fourth change of liturgy forced on the people of England in the short space of 10 years, so we have no cause to complain about liturgical changes in our day. But 1559 was definitive. It marked the establishment of what we call the Elizabethan settlement of religion, the fixing of the main lines of Anglicanism, its liturgy and organisation, in the form that endured, not for 10 years, but ever since. What happened on St John Baptist’s Day 1559 has inspired the faith and moulded the lives of generations of English people and of Anglicans elsewhere, in the centuries that have followed.

 No doubt it was largely administrative convenience that dictated the choice of St John Baptist’s Day for the great new beginning. For the day is also, of course, midsummer day, one of those fundamental days in the calendar of which our ancestors tried to make sense in our unpredictable climate by producing a rather pessimistic saying, born of bitter experience, ‘before St John’s Day we pray for rain, after that we get it anyhow.’ Organisers of the Glastonbury Festival, take note!

 Midsummer Day was a day which, in the agricultural society of 1559, was firmly fixed in everybody’s mind. Yet there is also an accidental, or, if you like, providential, fitness in the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer Liturgy at St John Baptist’s Day. For the preaching of the gospel began with the preaching of St John the Baptist. St Mark’s gospel begins not with Jesus, but with John the Baptist. It was John who appeared, in the fulfilment of the prophet Isaiah’s words ‘Here is my herald whom I send on ahead of you, and he will prepare your way.’ John the Baptist was the prophet or spokesperson of the Most High, whose job was to prepare men’s hearts to receive Christ himself, to tell them the message of salvation and to assure them of the possibility of the forgiveness of all their sins.

 It was just these same things which those who framed the 1559 Prayer Book and indeed our more recent service books saw as the purpose of the church, and not least its forms of worship. In the eyes of our Elizabethan forbears the church and its liturgy needed reformation because they were failing in their essential task. They saw that task as being ‘that people might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God and be more inflamed with love of his true religion! That was the point of divine service. In other words the chief aims of our service books, 1559, 1662, 1980, 2000 is always the same: it is to revive the prophetic and evangelistic office of the church, to make it the divine instrument by which men and women could be brought to accept the only source of their true peace and happiness.

 This too was the vocation of St john the Baptist and there could be no more fitting patron for the Book of Common Prayer.

 In our day we are only too aware that many people in England, an ever increasing number, remain almost wholly untouched by the Christian gospel, and that much has still to be done to present it to them. It’s almost as if the church of our day has lost it’s voice and its power to persuade. The anxious  counting of the number of adherents by the church only reveals the church’s loss of nerve and confidence. And the ordinary man in the street is perfectly aware of this weakness. It is no bad thing that there should be those, while they have a sincere and genuine, though sometimes ill-informed, reverence for the Jesus of the gospels, nevertheless fear the visible church as an earthly institution and are repelled by it. In the last resort we cannot, of course, and do not, agree with them: but they are a salutary reminder for us that ultimately our kingdom, like that of Jesus, is not of this world.

 Now the one thing that stands out clearly in the life of John the Baptist is his realisation that his sole mission was to call people to someone greater than himself. ‘After me comes one who is mightier than I. I am not fit to unfasten his shoes’. ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’. John’s disciples were not be satisfied with just following him, but they were always to be looking for another. Though there has never been a prophet greater than John the Baptist the gospel tells us that the least of those who have found the One to whom John pointed and thereby entered the kingdom of heaven are far greater than John was. Here is the model for the church. The best members of the church – and how few they are – simply point away from themselves to Jesus, saying in the words of John, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’

Alan Griffin

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7th October at 10.30am at St James Garlickhythe

Our gifts will be given, as usual, to the Holy Cross Centre at Cromer Street.

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It may interest visitors to our web site to know that our sister parish of

St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe with St. Ann Blackfriars

QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, LONDON, EC4

is recommencing the 'St Andrew's Lectures' on

The Atlantic World Gallery at Greenwich Maritime Museum

Sung Eucharist followed by a Lecture on

‘My Year as

Lord Mayor of London’