I first bought my copy of the Book of Common Prayer at the bookshop in Durham Cathedral when I was at university. I think it was Tim Keller, the New York based church planter, who had said something in a blog post I’d read praising the BCP collects as examples of well written public prayers. I found some I liked and some I didn’t really get and used them more or less randomly in my quiet times over the next few years. It was only years later, after a very different article had helped me see that the collects for Advent have an internal logic to them, that they started to play a major role in how I observe the liturgical calendar.

If collects aren’t part of your church background, one church I used to go to often referred to them as ‘the special Church of England prayer of the week’ and for our purposes that’s a good enough definition. The stress, unexpectedly, is on the first syllable (COLL-ect, not coll-ECT like the verb). And honestly, if you want to do just one thing to try out the liturgical calendar for yourself, there’s nothing I recommend more than taking the collects and trying to incorporate them into your devotional life in some way. Drop them into your quiet times and see where it goes.

For more reasons than I can put into a blog post, I think a copy of the BCP is a great buy, but if you just want to check out the collects, they’re available online, along with the readings that historically went with them, here. My wife and I have loads of quirky little traditions, some of which I’ll be sharing with you along the way, but reflecting on the collects and their accompanying readings is the backbone of everything we do to observe the liturgical calendar and if you keep reading this blog you’re going to hear a lot about them.

Advent kicks off with an absolute gem. Loads of the collects are lightly edited from ancient liturgies, but this is one Thomas Cranmer wrote himself for the first English prayer book in 1549.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

Instinctively, I want to set it out as poetry but I haven’t worked out how to reduce the space after paragraph in WordPress. It’s constructed out of an intricate web of contrasts:

• ‘the works of darkness’ and ‘the armour of light’
• ‘now’ and ‘the last day’
• ‘this mortal life’ and ‘the life immortal’
• ‘came’ and ‘shall come again’
• ‘to visit us’ and ‘to judge both the quick (i.e. living) and the dead’
• ‘in great humility’ and ‘in his glorious majesty’

I find all these contrasts mean that every time I use the collect it hits slightly differently, with a different juxtaposition standing out and capturing my imagination.

This collect isn’t just finely crafted, it’s also telling us something important about what it means to prepare for Christ’s return. While there are points of similarity between Israel’s experience of waiting for Jesus’ first coming and our experience of waiting for his second, the two comings are themselves very different. At Christmas we remember a baby, vulnerable, poor. We will marvel at his divine humility. In Advent we remember his glorious majesty, when he returns as judge. The contrast is contained in miniature in the assigned Gospel reading from Matthew 21, in which Jesus humbly enters Jerusalem on a donkey and cleanses the Temple – an indictment on a religious establishment that was very much not ready for their visitation.

This being the case, it is unsurprising that the first thing the Prayer Book collects turn our minds to as we think about preparing for Jesus’ return is repentance. But this is not the panicked preparation of the teenager frantically tidying up the post party debris before their parents get home. This is not ‘Jesus is coming, look busy’. True to his Evangelical convictions, Cranmer grounds our repentance in our Gospel hope.

The image of casting away the works of darkness and putting on the armour of light is drawn from Rom 13:8-14, the other reading allocated for Advent Sunday. It’s a passage that reminds us that ‘salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed’. Literally speaking, it gets darker and darker every day in Advent (at least here in the northern hemisphere). But in terms of God’s work in the world, the light of a new day is dawning – a day we hope and long for, a day we belong to. Soon we will leave behind every work of darkness forever as we are perfectly conformed to Christ’s likeness. When Christ returns, we will not gloomily pine after all the sins we will miss in the New Creation. We will rejoice in finally being free of all sin and temptation forever. So why not, by God’s grace, cast away the works of darkness now?

In 1662, when the Prayer Book was revised, they valued this collect so much that they directed for it to be used every day in Advent, making it the Advent prayer in the Anglican tradition. Through its poetry, its cadence, and most of all its allusion to Scripture, it fills the dark winter weeks with the bright light of hope and repentance.