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Rooted in History
Tuesday marked the 467th anniversary of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s death in Oxford, England. Physically pulled from the pulpit of the University Church after he refused to recant his rejection of the pope and Church in Rome, he was dragged to the stake and burned by order of Queen Mary I. With his execution, Cranmer’s reforms of the Church in England ended as Mary’s Roman Catholicism resumed authority, until her sister, Elizabeth I, ascended the throne in 1558. As Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, Cranmer’s short, twenty-two-year episcopacy charted the course of Anglicanism that survives and thrives to this day, the unique tradition in which we participate at The Falls Church.
This Sunday, the fifth Sunday in Lent, we begin our service at 11:15 with Cranmer’s Great Litany, ending Lent as we began it in February. Cranmer composed the Great Litany in 1544, at the request of Henry VIII, by modifying a fifth-century Roman text. His first rite written in the English language after Henry’s break from the Church in Rome in 1534, the Litany expresses prayers for the human condition, citing “inordinate and sinful affections,” “heresy,” “lightning and tempest,” and “dying suddenly and unprepared,” wonderful language of another time that yet transcends time and still bears our brokenness and need for God’s aid. Included in the very first Book of Common Prayer published in 1549 and included in every English and American prayer book since, the Litany is one of the earliest parts of our identity as Anglicans and an especially appropriate component of our liturgy during Lent.
And because the children in this community are amazing, they have rewritten (and shrunk!) the Litany and created banners to guide us in worship during the 9:00 service this Sunday, so both services begin with this particularly Anglican expression of the human condition and request for God’s mercy.
Remembering Archbishop Cranmer, martyr, especially this week, join us on Sunday, as we say the words of the Great Litany and draw Lent to its close, looking ahead toward Palm Sunday and Holy Week right around the corner.
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