Comfort for the comfortless: a sermon for the Sunday after Ascension.

On my bookcase in my study I have a copy of what I think is a wonderful book. It is called the Tutorial Prayer Book. It is, essentially, a commentary on The Book of Common Prayer. Going through the text section by section it shows the differences between the 1662 text and previous versions of the prayer book. However, more interestingly, it shows the more ancient sources for the prayers which Thomas Cranmer both rendered into English, and tweaked theologically to be in sympathy with the reforming agenda of which he was a key advocate.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is in the prayer of preparation, or the Collect for Purity, which we began our service with today. This prayer will be so well known to many of us that we don’t even look at the words. So when the president says:

Almighty God…

we fall almost instinctively into…

…to whom all hearts are open

All desires known, 

And from whom no secrets are hidden.

A dip into the indispensable Tutorial Prayer Book though tells us that this was originally a prayer for the priest's preparation from the medieval Sarum Rite. In that prayer this is a singular not collective prayer, it said in private and not public, and focuses singularly on the purity of the priest before the altar.

As a good reformer Cranmer takes that prayer and turns the focus away from the priest and turns it on  the people gathered in worship. Through its shared language we commit together, despite our own shortcomings, to meet God in and through this act of worship; that we might perfectly love God and worthily magnify God’s holy name. Cranmer takes this private prayer of the medieval church and with the tweak of a verb and a change in emphasis articulates one of the central tenets of his reformed catholic faith.

Another place where we encounter Cranmer’s genius is in the collect set for this Sunday which stands between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Again, a quick dip into the Tutorial Prayer Book shows that this collect was not drawn from a mediaeval collect for this Sunday, but instead from one of the antiphons – one of the short prayer-anthems – used around the recitation of the Magnificat at the service of Vespers. A prayer which was, according to legend, used by the Venerable Bede on his death bed. This antiphon can be translated:

O Lord, King of glory, Lord of virtues, who today didst ascend in triumph above all heavens, do not leave us orphans, but send upon us the promise of the Father, even the Spirit of Truth.

In composing today's collect, Cranmer took this antiphon and made two key changes. The first is a technical one, moving it from a prayer to the Son, to being a prayer directed to God the Father:

O God the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven

The second change is more profound and shows Cranmer’s brilliance. Both the original antiphon and Cranmer’s collect are used in the space we now stand in between the moment of the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In the case of the antiphon being used on the evening of Ascension Day, the collect on the Sunday following.

In that way both the antiphon and the collect speak of the disorientation of this moment.  Jesus who for the disciples, and for the rhythms of our worship, has been front and centre suddenly is removed from our presence. Since Christmas we have walked with the life of Jesus. We have been anchored by the narrative of his life. From his birth, through his teaching, to his death and resurrection. Now as Jesus disappears from eyes we are suddenly unmoored from that certainty.

In this place of disorientation the antiphon prayers plainly: “do not leave us orphans, but send upon us the promise of the Father, even the Spirit of Truth". In place of this direct invocation Cranmer offers us something more subtle but more luminous for it. Rather than use the plainer “orphan” Cranmer draws us unwittingly into a word play on the translations for the Holy Spirit from the original Greek. 

In John’s Gospel the Holy Spirit is referred to in the Greek as, amongst other things, parakletos. This can be interpreted in many ways. Sometimes as guide, in some as an advocate, for some a lawyer for the defence. However, in our translations it is most commonly translated “comforter”. Cranmer then uses that idea of the Holy Spirit in a punning word play with another section from John’s Gospel which is the inspiration for the original antiphon his collect is based on. In that passage of the Gospel Jesus says he will not leave his disciples orphanos – in some translations “orphans” but in others “comfortless”. Cranmer then takes this coincidence of language to create the spirit of this great Collect asks:

We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before.

Cranmer’s collect draws us seamlessly into the disorientation of these days, and uses that sense of disorientation, of comfortlessness, to point us to the gift that will come to inspire and draw us forward. That gift which Cranmer refers to in his translation of the Te Deum elsewhere in the Book of Common Prayer as “The Holy Ghost : the Comforter”.

This is all very well and good and very interesting you might ask, but what does this mean to us here and now in our faith? Well the artistry of this collect comes not in its subtle use of language and clever word play, but in the place is stands in our liturgical year and in our life of faith. 

Today we stand in a place which is more common for many of us than we might like to admit. Today we are in that place where Jesus is suddenly distant and out of sight. We are in that place which many of us find ourselves more often than we care to admit. A place where we seek God, seek the real presence of Jesus, but feel merely an absence. It is that place described most eloquently by the great bard of God’s absence R.S. Thomas when he says:

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply.

If I am honest, very often my prayer life and my experience of faith can feel like this. Looking and seeking God and finding what feels like an absence.  And into that absence, that sense of disorientation, that place of comfortless, we can pray not only today, but all days, Cranmer’s great words of hope and expectation. Where we beseech God to:

leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before.

Amen.