Monday, March 17, 2008
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
Palm Sunday
Almighty and everlasting God, in your tender love for us you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon himself our nature, and to suffer death upon the Cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and come to share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Holy Week
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. For our sins he was lifted high upon the Cross, that he might draw the whole world to himself; and by his suffering and death he became the author of eternal salvation for all who put their trust in him.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Bishop and Apostle to the Irish
Anglican Commemoration
Patrick was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian, carried off as a teenager by Irish raiders, who escaped, returned years later as a missionary bishop, and brought the gospel to his former captors. Two short letters in his own hand survive, somewhat unique among western saints of the period where few primary sources from the actual saints survive. Through them his voice still reaches the church he helped to plant directly. His mission established the Irish church so firmly that within a generation Irish monasticism became one of the most dynamic forces in early-medieval Europe.
Patrick was born around 385 into a Romanized British Christian family — his father was a deacon and his grandfather a priest. At sixteen he was captured by Irish raiders and enslaved for six years, tending sheep in conditions of extreme hardship. During his captivity, he turned to God in prayer with an intensity he had never known in his comfortable youth, praying, as he later wrote, 'a hundred prayers by day and almost as many at night.'
After escaping Ireland and returning to Britain, Patrick experienced a vision in which the people of Ireland called to him: 'We beg you, holy youth, come and walk among us once more.' Despite opposition from British church authorities who questioned his education and fitness, he was ordained and eventually consecrated as bishop for the Irish mission.
Patrick's missionary strategy was remarkably effective. He worked with tribal structures rather than against them, converting chieftains whose people then followed. He established monastic communities as centers of learning and worship, ordained native Irish clergy, and built a church structure adapted to Irish society. His Confession reveals a man acutely conscious of his own limitations — his Latin was rough, his education incomplete — yet absolutely certain of God's call and provision.
The Letter to Coroticus, written to a British warlord who had enslaved newly baptized Irish Christians, shows Patrick's fierce pastoral protectiveness and his conviction that baptized believers were full members of Christ's Body regardless of their ethnicity. Patrick died around 461, having laid foundations that would make Ireland a 'land of saints and scholars' whose influence reached across Europe.
Traditionally, Patrick is credited with single-handedly converting all of Ireland, expelling snakes (symbolic of paganism), establishing the episcopal hierarchy, and performing miraculous feats. The 'Lorica' prayer is attributed to him (likely later composition).