Preached on February 27, 2025

I

t is my normal policy when I preach to focus on the lectionary readings. I am going to make an exception today because this is the Feast Day for George Herbert, and I want to say a few things about Herbert. As a theologian, my favorite Anglican authors are from the period in which the Church of England began to settle into its identity following the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement: Richard Hooker and his Laws of Ecclesastical Polity and the period of the Caroline Divines following Hooker: John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Traherne, and, of course, George Herbert. I have more than once used the period of Lent to read through some of John Donne’s sermons or Herbert’s poetry. As Lent begins, I might encourage you to spend some time doing the same.

Who was George Herbert? Herbert was an Anglican priest who was born in 1593 and died of tuberculosis in 1633 at the age of only thirty-nine. He is an example of how to live a meaningful Christian life in the midst of troubled times. Herbert spent his early years trying to pursue a career in politics, and he even served in Parliament for a time. However, with the death of King James, Herbert became disillusioned with politics, and he abandoned the world of public influence to serve in a small village church. Herbert spent the last three years of his life as the rector in the rural parish of St. Andrews, Bemerton, and it is these three years Herbert spent as a priest for which he is remembered four hundred years later. Izaak Walton summarized his life: “Thus he lived and thus he died like a saint, unspotted of the world, full of alms’ deeds, full of humility, and the examples of a virtuous life.”

If I were to summarize the chief characteristic of these Anglican writers known as the Caroline Divines, I would say that they brought together a combination of theology and spirituality. Herbert left us two writings: a guide for priests entitled The Country Parson, and a collection of poems titled The Temple. In a short sermon, I cannot do more than give you a brief introduction to the theology and spirituality of George Herbert, but I will mention what I will call four pillars of the spiritual life according to George Herbert.

The first two pillars are a combination of word and sacrament in contrast to a spirituality that centers only on Scripture – the Word without the sacrament – or only on worship – the sacrament without the Word. One of the characteristics of Anglican spirituality of this period was that it was a way of prayer and worship that was informed by two books – first, the English Bible that appeared as the Great Bible of Henry VIII 1539 and later the Authorized Version of King James translated under the leadership of Lancelot Andrewes published in 1611, and, second, the third Elizabethan edition of the Book of Common Prayer of 1559.

This two-book spirituality is found throughout Herbert’s prose and poetry. First, the Bible. Herbert writes in The Country Parson that the chief source of the pastor’s knowledge is the “book of books, the storehouse and magazine of life and comfort, the Holy Scriptures. There he sucks and lives” (The Country Parson, 4). The lights of Scripture shine not only individually, but form constellations of the one Christian story. In Herbert’s poem, “The Holy Scriptures,” he writes:

Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glory!
Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,
But all their constellations of the story (“The Holy Scriptures II”).

Herbert’s poetry is saturated with the language of and echoes of imagery from Scripture. Herbert’s poetry draws us into the biblical world, to help us to see ourselves in the language of the biblical narrative so that we can be transformed. Comparing Scripture to a mirror, he writes: “Ladies, look here, this is the thankfull glass /That mends the looker’s eye: this is the well /That washes what it shows” (“The H. Scriptures I”).

If the Bible is the first pillar – the first book of Herbert’s two book spirituality – the Prayer Book is the second. Herbert balanced his love of the Scriptures – a classic Reformation theme – with the worship of the church. The titles of his poems refer to the church’s liturgical year (“Good Friday,” “Easter” I & II, “Whitsunday,” “Trinity Sunday,” “Christmas”), the sacraments (“Holy Baptism,” “Holy Communion”), and even the architecture of the Church building (“The Altar,” “Church Lock and Key,” “The Church Floor,” “The Windows”).

Herbert’s spirituality was a corporate theology for the worshiping church, grounded in the Daily Office found in The Book of Common Prayer. According to Isaac Walton, Herbert daily read the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer “at the canonical hours of ten and four” with his wife and three nieces. According to Walton, this “brought most of his parishioners, and many gentlemen in the neighborhood, constantly to make a part of his congregation twice a day.” Even some who worked in the fields “would let their plough rest when Mr. Herbert’s saints’ bell rung to prayers, that they might also offer their devotions to God with him, and would then return back to their plough.”

The Daily Office provided day to day structure. However, according to Herbert, Sundays were the pillars “On which heav’ns palace arched lies;” (“Sunday”). Sunday worship includes the priest’s sermons, which, Herbert says are “dangerous things.” None goes out of the Church as he came in.

Herbert’s emphasis on preaching is balanced with a strong emphasis on the sacraments. Herbert’s understanding of the Eucharist is typically Anglican in that he affirms the presence of the risen Christ, but he refuses to speculate about how his gracious Lord is present in the sacrament. He writes:

First I am sure, whether bread stay
Or whether Bread do fly away
Concerneth bread, not me.
But that both thou, and all thy train,
Be there, to thy truth and my gain
Concerneth me and Thee (“The Holy Communion”).

What is important for Herbert is that, in the Holy Communion, the risen Christ is truly present, and present for us.

This brings us to the third pillar in Herbert’s Anglican spirituality, a different understanding of the church. Two alternative understandings of the church competed for attention during Herbert’s time. One the one hand, the Roman Catholic church insisted that the church was a visible institution. The true church was composed of those who were in communion with the pope – the bishop of Rome. In contrast to this, the Puritan opponents of Prayer Book Anglicanism insisted that the true church was invisible because it was composed of the truly regenerate, the elect.

Herbert’s understanding of the church was different from either of these. For Herbert, the church was the local community of Christians gathered in worship around the Word and sacrament. In Herbert’s theology of the Eucharist, what happens to the elements of bread and wine and the question of just “how” Christ becomes present is not the important thing. What is most important is that it is through daily and weekly participation in the worship of the Church that one encounters the present living Christ. If you want to meet Jesus, Herbert would say, worship with the Church on Sundays, take the sacraments, pray the office, read the Scriptures.

As a priest, Herbert seems to have transferred his disappointed hopes to reform England through political service to creating and forming a different community, the church as the Body of Christ. Herbert’s manual The Country Parson provides instructions about how the priest works to form such a community. According to Herbert, “A Pastor is the deputy of Christ for the reducing of man to the obedience of God” (Country Parson, 1). Herbert teaches us that the church exists as a local congregation, a community of spiritual formation and discipleship that meets the risen Christ in worship and is formed to be like him. In the same way that belonging to a community that is centered in the worship of Jesus Christ contrasts to the community that was divided by English politics in Herbert’s day, so today our own identity as Christians can be formed within that community that is gathered around the one Lord we meet in worship on Sunday mornings, and not by the partisan divisions of the culture that surround us in the pretended communities of social media.

This leads to the final pillar of Herbert’s spirituality – the life of personal prayer. For Herbert, prayer is the meeting place between heaven and earth. He writes “Prayer the Church’s banquet . . . . Heaven in ordinary, man well drest” (“Prayer I”). The poems of George Herbert’s The Temple consist in a collection of prayers addressed to God. In a manner similar to Augustine’s Confessions, Herbert’s prayers are a conversation with the triune God who has revealed himself as love in the incarnation – God become human in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the center of Herbert’s spirituality – particularly the Christ of the cross and resurrection. In what little time I have left, I could not begin to introduce you to George Herbert’s poetry. If you are interested, you might turn to the back of your hymnal and look for the hymns whose lyrics are some of those poems put to music. I will conclude with a few lines from a poem entitled the Agony that shows well how Herbert brings together these themes of the Love of God revealed in Christ that we can meet in the sacramental worship of the church.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine (“The Agony”).

Herbert’s poems are full of the themes of grace, sin, forgiveness, struggle with doubt and God’s sometimes apparent absence, and finally, and foremost, themes of God’s love and presence. God has created a good world that is not undone by human sin. At the center of redemption is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the midst of a sinful world, we do not despair because God’s love has been revealed in Jesus Christ, and that love can be experienced even now through the reading of Scripture, through the worship in Word and sacrament, through the community of the church, and when we meet God in ordinary prayer.

For a more complete account of Herbert’s spirituality, see my essay “George Herbert’s Approach to God: The Faith and Spirituality of a Country Priest.“