On odd-numbered Sundays, our main service is the Eucharist, on even ones it is Morning Prayer. We celebrate the Eucharist in any case each Sunday at half past eight. Christians have marked Sunday, the day of Jesus' resurrection, by breaking bread and giving thanks together since the first weeks after the resurrection itself.
So what is Morning Prayer? Well, it goes back to the Jewish custom of praying regularly - though the Jews did so privately. So, in Acts 10:9 we read about Peter going on to the roof to pray "at midday", and Paul and Silas praying "about midnight" (Acts 16:25). Devout people took the words of Psalm 119:164 literally (Seven times a day I will praise you) - and added an evening prayer time as well. So they made time for prayer every three hours or so. The clergy observed eight prayer times - Mattins (at midnight), Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers (called Evensong in mediaeval England) and Compline. These together were "the Divine Office", or in the words of sixth-century St Benedict, God's work (Opus Dei).
If you have read this far, you will have noticed the journalist's trick in the title of this article! For the original meaning of "office" was service or duty. So the church office is not only the place where Sharon and Helen perform their duties, but also the regular offering of prayer to God.
Benedict helped shape these eight "offices" - they contained readings, prayers, responses. Above all, they contained psalms. A single service might at times involve singing as many as twelve psalms. But in the course of time, the rules that ensured that the whole of the book of Psalms was used, and the whole of the bible was read, decayed. At the time of the Reformation, finding the right page in the service book was "so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out."
Archbishop Cranmer was largely responsible for the first English Prayer Book in 1549. He reduced the eight "offices" to two - Mattins and Evensong (the team responsible for the 1552 Prayer Book renamed them Morning and Evening Prayer, but the older names crept back into the rubrics and lectionary!)
Morning Prayer was a combination of the older offices of Mattins and Prime. Evensong combined Vespers and Compline. Otherwise the two daily services had more or less the same format. They began with a time of preparation and confession. Then psalms (normally introduced at Morning Prayer with Psalm 95 (Venite exultemus Domino - "O come, let us sing out to the Lord")) were so arranged that the whole of the book of Psalms was read through every month.
Two readings followed the psalms - one from the Old, one from the New Testament. After each reading there was a canticle (a psalm-like reading or hymn) or another psalm - either a fourth-century hymn (Te Deum laudamus - "You are God and we praise you"), a song from an early addition to the Book of Daniel (Benedicite, omnia opera - "Bless the Lord, all created things"), Ps.100 (Jubilate Deo - "Sing to the Lord in triumph all the earth") or Zechariah's song from Luke's Gospel rejoicing at the birth of John the Baptist (Benedictus - "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel").
The service ended with the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, prayers in the form of versicles and responses ("Show us your mercy, O Lord" is a versicle, "and grant us your salvation" is the response), other prayers, and the Grace.
Did you spot the omission? No sermon! This was because the main Sunday service was the Eucharist, which included a sermon. Morning Prayer was, in theory at least, just a preparation for the Lord's Supper. Until the 19th century, everybody would have attended all of "the common prayer and preachings", and could well have spent three or four hours in church!
Morning Prayer at St Ursula's still follows Cranmer's basic pattern. When we produced the blue service booklet, we tried to allow a lot of freedom. We provided a basic format, where we could make informal changes or additions. We used the prayers and psalms from the 1980 Alternative Service Book, which used clear modern language but otherwise had few changes in structure from Cranmer's service of 1549.
Today, the Church of England has gone further down this line of development. The Eucharist is the centre of Sunday worship. Other services can have freer formats - it is the job of the church's liturgical specialists to provide resources, but not necessarily to dictate how they are used. So Morning Prayer may well change again in the coming years. And we can all have a hand in these changes - your ideas and thoughts are welcome. Tell us what you think!
HD