A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week
128
A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week
128eBook
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Overview
A rigorous devotional for the 40 days of Lent.
For centuries Lent has been a time when Christians stop and take stock of their lives. It is a time for revisiting the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. It is a time of focusing on our sinfulness and the need to repent, as well as a season in which we focus on putting aside our luxuries and making sure that others have what they need. All of these themes, and more, are explored in this collection of Anglican readings that begin with Ash Wednesday and end on the Saturday of Easter Week.
These readings are arranged in a regular sequence through each week of Lent. Sunday readings focus on God’s love, Mondays on the need for discipline, Tuesdays on fasting, Wednesdays on prayer, Thursdays on sin, Fridays on the cross, and Saturdays on baptism.
A Time to Turn draws on the best sermons, books, poems, and hymns of Anglican writers throughout the centuries, with a reading for each day, followed by the brief suggestion for focusing the reader's meditations. Writers include Christina Rossetti, John Donne, Philips Brooks, John Keble, Thomas Traherne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others. Brief biographies are included, along with a bibliography for those who would like to read more from a given writer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819225924 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2004 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 814 KB |
About the Author
Christopher L. Webber, a graduate of Princeton University and the General Theological Seminary in New York, is an Episcopal priest who has led urban, rural, and overseas parishes. He is the author of several books, including Welcome to Christian Faith,Beyond Beowulf, and A Year with American Saints, co-authored with Lutheran Pastor G. Scott Cady. Webber grew up in Cuba, New York, and lives in San Francisco.
Read an Excerpt
A Time to Turn
Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week
By CHRISTOPHER L. WEBBER
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2004Christopher WebberAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2592-4
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1Ash Wednesday
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A reading from a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes preached before King James I on Ash Wednesday, 1619, on the text: "Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God" (Joel 2:12–13).
For this time the Church has chosen this text. This is the time in which, however we have dispensed with it all the rest of the year, she would have us seriously to intend and make it our time of turning to the Lord; for she holds it unsafe to leave us wholly to ourselves, to take any time, it matters not when, lest we take none at all.
And the reason is that once a year all things turn. And that once is now, at this time, for now at this time is the turning of the year. In heaven the sun is at the equinox; the zodiac and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to their first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtledove, the crane and the stork, know their seasons and make their just return at this time every year. Everything now turning, we also should make it our time in which to turn to God.
Then, because this day is known as the first day of Lent, it fits well as a welcome into this time, a time lent us, as it were, by God, set us by the Church, in which to make our turning.
Repentance itself is nothing else but a kind of circling: to turn to the One by repentance from whom, by sin, we have turned away.
First, then, there is a turn in which we look forward to God and with our whole heart resolve to turn to God. Then there is a turn again in which we look backward to our sins in which we have turned from God; and with beholding them our very heart must break. There is one turn resolving to amend that which is to come; another reflecting and sorrowing for that which is past; one turn declining from evil to be done hereafter, another sentencing itself for evil done before.
To turn is a counsel given to those who are out of the right way, for going on still and turning are opposite motions, both of them with reference to a way. If the way is good, we are to hold on; if otherwise, to turn and take another.
From God then, as from the journey's end of our life, our way, we are never to turn our steps or our eyes, but still to walk with God all our life long.
When any danger of death is near, indeed if we but sadly think about it, a certain chilliness takes us and we cannot with any comfort think of our journey's end. We hear a voice crying behind us, "That is not the way; this that you have lost is your way: walk in it." That voice, if we hear it not, is a result of the noise around us. If we would sometimes go aside into some retired place, or in the still of the night listen to it, we might by some chance hear it.
To be turned, I call, when by some cross of body or mind (as it were with a ring in our nose), we are brought around, whether we will it or not, to see how we have gone astray.
To be turned, I call, when the world ministers to us no cause of heaviness; yet even then, the grace of God moving us, we set ourselves around and holding those former conversions before us we work it out, having no heavy impulse from outside to force us to it. The one who is under no arrest, with no bridle in the jaw, who shall in the time of peace resolve on a time for turning and take it: that person has great cause to rejoice, and to rejoice before God.
Walk with God all our life long.
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
* * *
A reading on sin from a sermon by John Donne on the text, "For my iniquities overwhelm me; like a heavy burden they are too much for me to bear" (Psalm 38:4).
I cannot excuse my sins because of the example of my father, nor can I excuse them because of the times, or because of the ill disposition that rules society now, and do ill because everybody else does so. To say there is a rot, therefore the sheep must perish, corruptions in religion have crept in and work in every corner, and therefore God's sheep, simple souls, must be content to admit the infection of this rot; that there is a murrain, and therefore cattle must die; superstition practiced in many places, and therefore the strong servants of God must come to sacrifice their obedience to it, or their blood for it. There is no such rot, no such murrain, no such corruption of the times as can lay a necessity, or can afford an excuse to those who are corrupted with the times. It is not such a peace as takes away honor that secures a nation, not such a peace as takes away zeal that secures a conscience, so neither is it an observation of what others do or are inclined to do but what truth and integrity you decline from that needs to be considered.
It is not the sin of your father, not the sin of the times, not the sin of your own years, that you should say in your old age, in excuse of your covetousness, I have lived temperately, continently, all my life and therefore may be allowed one sin for my ease in my old age. Or that you should say in your youth, I will retire in my old age and live contentedly then with a little, but now, how vain it would be to attempt to keep out the tide or quench the heat and impetuous violence of youth. For if you think it enough to say, I have only lived as others have lived, you will find some examples to die by also, and die as other old men and women, old in years and old in sins, have died also: negligently or fearfully, without any sense at all, or all their sense turned into fearful apprehension and desperation.
They are not such sins as those of that age need to commit, nor such sins as those of your calling or your profession cannot avoid; so that you should say, I shall not be believed to understand my profession, as well as others, if I do not live by it as well as others do. Is there no way to be a carpenter, except that after he has been made warm by the chips, and baked, and roasted by it, it is necessary to make an idol of the wood, and worship? Is there no way to be a silversmith, without needing to make shrines for Diana of the Ephesians as Demetrius did? No way to be a lawyer without serving the passion of the client? No way to be a preacher without sowing pillows under great men's elbows? It is not the sin of your calling that oppresses you. God has instituted callings for the conservation of order in general, not for the justification of disorders in any particular. For those who justify their faults by their calling, have not yet received that calling from above, which is where they must be justified and sanctified on the way and glorified in the end. There is no lawful calling in which you may not be honest.
You cannot excuse yourself by the unjust command of your superior; nor the ill example of your pastor, whose life counter-preaches his doctrine, for that shall aggravate his, but not excuse your sin; nor the influence of stars, or such a working of a necessary and inevitable and unconditioned decree of God as may obstruct a religious walking in this life, or a happy resting in the life to come. It is none of these, not the sin of your Father, not the sin of the present times, not the sin of your years and age nor of your calling, nor of the magistrate, nor of your pastor, nor of destiny, nor of decrees, but it is your sin, your own sin.
It is your sin.
Friday after Ash Wednesday
* * *
A reading on sin from a sermon by Jeremy Taylor on "The Christian Conquest over the B
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Time to Turn by CHRISTOPHER L. WEBBER. Copyright © 2004 by Christopher Webber. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
Ash Wednesday
The First Week of Lent
The Second Week of Lent
The Third Week of Lent
The Fourth Week of Lent
The Fifth Week of Lent
The Sixth Week of Lent—Holy Week
Easter Week
About the Authors
Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
"A Time to Turn lives up to Webber's reputation by being readable, thoughtful and useful…The readings are uniformly well-chosen…With its rich history, its range of topics - discipline, fasting, the cross, charity- and its variety of theologies and written styles…this little book is a treasure box for small groups, youth ministers, retreat leaders and individuals looking for a Lenten reflections that will fuel conversation and prayer."
—The Rev. Lisa B. Hamilton