The Daily Office: More Than Chocolate Chip Pancakes
Preacher: Tim Jenkins
Passage: Psalm 55:13-19
Series: Resources of the Church
Leading up to Ash Wednesday this year, I found myself uncertain what to do for Lent. This is a problem that plagues me annually, and is exacerbated by the fact that I work at a church. I feel the pressure, since I am going to extol others to make meaningful Lent plans, to have meaningful plans myself. Also, I feel quite confident that Father Andrew will say something snarky if my Lent plans are lame, so there’s that too.
Ultimately, what I landed on, among a few other things, was that during the season of Lent I was going to try and do The Daily Office as often as I could. This decision was in many ways inspired both by a biography of Pope Sylvester II that I was reading, which at one point describes the lives of 10th century monks, and a growing fascination with the Book of Common Prayer, our prayer book.
This is why, when it came time to plan out our Resources of the Church series, I was picked to preach about Psalm 55, and The Daily Office, and then a little bit later, Chocolate Chip Pancakes.
So, what is The Daily Office? Well, to answer that, let’s first talk about the history of devotional practice and prayer.
By the time of Jesus, daily worship and prayer was an established part of Jewish religious life. It’s believed that the temple held daily worship and sacrifice at 9 am and 3 pm everyday, and that the Jewish people were expected to practice private prayer in their own homes.
Our psalm today, Psalm 55, which is a psalm attributed to David, helped develop that practice. In verse 18 we read: “In the evening, in the morning, and at noonday, I will complain and lament, and he will hear my voice.” David is talking about praying. And this verse, among others, became part of the foundation for the teaching of daily prayer.
Early Christians, some of them already rooted in the Jewish tradition, but all of them following the example of Jesus’ prayer life, and all of them following the teaching of the apostles, continued the practice of daily devotion and prayer, throughout the day, sometimes together and at other times privately. The shape, frequency, and who was participating in this practice has changed throughout the centuries. Daily devotion and prayer at times was the business of monks, or monks and clergy, or monks and clergy and laity, or all kinds of combinations with caveats about who should pray; and how they should do it; and when they should do it with others or be expected to do it alone. It started with 3 times a day; then at some point 6 times a day became the norm. During the 900s, which is the time period for that biography I mentioned, monks were expected to practice devotion and prayer 8 times a day: a morning prayer service called Lauds, a service at the 3rd hour called Terce, a service at the 6th hour called Sext, a service at the 9th hour called None, evening prayer service called Vespers, midnight service called Matins, and also personal devotion at the first hour called Prime as well as at bedtime called Compline.
Over time this would shrink back down, and services would be merged together or moved to only certain parts of the year. In the Book of Common Prayer today, you can find 4 services called The Daily Office: two services, Morning and Evening prayer, that assume you are probably doing them with others, but you don’t have to, and two services, Noonday prayer and Compline, that kind of assume you are probably doing them alone. This was the form of the thing that I had endeavored to try and inject into my life this past Lent.
This decision ended up being truly impactful and, to be perfectly honest, a lot harder than I thought. But the wild thing is, I had made this plan without any real goal in mind other than the doing of it. I wanted to feel connected to an ancient practice of the church, which is something that is important to me, but I wasn’t really thinking too critically about what the spiritual implications might be, if there would even be any. Which is so naive, when I think about it.
The Daily Office is not in the prayer book as filler. The Office is a powerful spiritual practice, if you’ll let it be. It makes demands of you, and it is a tool for the Holy Spirit to shape you. Part of the reason for this is what is in it.
So, let’s look at one of them. Pull out your prayer book, it’s the red book in the seat in front of you, and turn to page 127. This is where Compline begins, which is a personal favorite of mine, and, I figure, this is the place where someone, if any of you feel so inclined by the end of this, will be most successful if you try this for yourself at home. For the sake of time, we’re not going to walk through the service. You’ll have to explore these more in depth at home. And if you were to do so, you would find that these services contain:
Confession
Selections of psalms
Selections of scripture
The Lord’s Prayer
Collects about God
Prayers for others:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.
Invitations to include your own free intercessions and thanksgivings where you get to freestyle.
the Apostles’ Creed
Suffrages
Ancient hymns
And even the prayer of a Saint.
If you were to compare this to food, each of these are a well-rounded meal. Which brings me back to chocolate chip pancakes. You can go ahead and put the prayer book away.
I have three kids, and every parent and grandparent in here will not be surprised to find out that their list of “always acceptable meals” at times feels pretty small: pizza, chicken nuggets, McDonald’s, pasta if it’s the right kind; you get the picture. There was a child I knew once, who was the youngest of a family of 8, and he had an exceptionally minuscule list of acceptable meals, of which the most frequently requested was, can you guess it, chocolate chip pancakes.
Now, this child’s oldest siblings ranged down from college age, and he was around 5ish years old. His parents were, to say the least, a bit tired, and they had long crossed over the threshold of rationalizing their giving in to his limited palette. This child lived my kids’, and your kids’, and your grandkids’, dream; he ate only the meals he liked, and the meal he ate the most was chocolate chip pancakes. He rode that dream all the way to a hospital bed, where his diet was deemed insufficient. As it turns out, this thing that our parents did for us and that we do for our kids, make them not just eat the things they want but also the things they need, is a really good idea. Doctor recommended even.
And this fact that we know about nutrition, and many other aspects of our lives, is also true for our spiritual lives. And that’s one of the reasons why I love The Daily Office, and why for centuries Christians have been taught to do this kind of spiritual practice, because it contains more than just the stuff we want, but also the things we need:
When We pray “Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil;” we are reminded of our interconnectedness, even with strangers who we never meet because their work happens while we sleep.
When we pray “shield the joyous;” we are reminded that God’s presence is not only in our struggles but also in our joys.
Confession reminds us of the need for God’s grace, won through Christ’s death and resurrection,
and in the Lord’s prayer we are reoriented in our relationships with others as we are reminded to forgive like we have been forgiven.
The Office does not let us get away with narrowly defining who God is nor does it leave it up to us to decide how we relate to him, and in doing that God is bigger and the faith is more robust.
Even the discipline of doing it contains the things that we need: to slow down, to not compartmentalize God to your bedside or only for emergencies, to listen for the needs and joys and struggles of others so that you can pray for them.
In my own practice of The Daily Office, I quickly found myself compiling and managing a detailed prayer list, because the list I kept in my head was so inadequate for how frequently I had opportunities to pray for people. If I heard about something going on with someone, or I had a conversation with you where you shared something with me, I would add it to my prayer list. It has greatly expanded the number of people who I pray for by name for specific things. And, it’s not like I didn’t pray for people before, I did, but this habit was far less thorough, far less disciplined than it is now. If you’re surprised I keep asking you how something is going, recovery from surgery, job situation, whatever, it’s probably because it keeps coming up on my prayer list. There are some of you for whom I have been praying for months for things that are still plaguing you. You are not going through them alone.
It is, of course, by design that this spiritual practice would foster such results, but I am still amazed by it.
Now, there is an inherent danger in using a food metaphor, in that you might get the impression that The Daily Office is the vegetables you need to force yourself to eat. That’s not going to make anyone here want to kneel down and do Compline tonight, so please don’t hear that. When I say it’s not just the things you want, but also the things you need, I mean so much more.
If you were paying close attention from before, you noticed that in Psalm 55 David described his prayer by saying, “I will complain and lament, and he will hear my voice.” If you read the rest of the psalm, David’s world was apparently in shambles as he wrote Psalm 55, which is often the moments where we need time with God the most but maybe feel like doing it the least.
We revel in the moments where we approach God, passionate about our faith, and we say, “Lord, I want you.” But one of the best things about the Office is that it is also there for the times when what we have to say to God is “I want… to want to you,” Or, for that matter, the Office is even there when the best you can manage is to say “I want… to want… to want you.”
Sustaining us through those moments might be the most important work of The Daily Office, to keep our hearts from closing up, from growing hard, because the Holy Spirit still moves and God really does hear your voice no matter where you are.
So, my closing today is to ask you to try it for yourself. Take a Book of Common Prayer, turn to page 127 tonight, and do Compline for yourself. Try it for a week. See what happens. I think that you will find it can be truly impactful for you as well.
Amen.
