Visitation of the Sick (1928 BCP)

Visitation of the Sick (1928 BCP) is the pastoral office in the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer for ministering to a sick person with prayer, psalmody, repentance, forgiveness, comfort, and, when desired, anointing or laying on of hands. It treats sickness as a real bodily affliction, but also as an occasion for faith, repentance, charity, and confidence in Christ.

The rite belongs to the Occasional Offices (1928 BCP), between the office for the Thanksgiving of Women after Child-birth and the Communion of the Sick. It carries the Prayer Book's public theology into the sickroom: the minister comes not as a private religious visitor only, but as a pastor of the Church bringing Scripture, common prayer, absolution, blessing, and sacramental preparation to one who suffers.

Prayer Book Placement

The office opens with a broad pastoral rubric. The whole rite, or any part of it, may be used at the minister's discretion. This makes the form stable without making it mechanically rigid. The sick person's condition, strength, conscience, household, and nearness to death all shape how much of the office is used.

The next rubric gives the parish a duty before the minister arrives: notice is to be given when a person is sick. The office therefore assumes a parish discipline of pastoral care rather than an isolated emergency rite.

PEACE be to this house, and to all that dwell in it.

The opening salutation echoes Christ's instructions to his disciples and frames the sickroom as a place under the peace of the kingdom. Illness is not treated as spiritually neutral space; it is visited by the Church's prayer and by the peace of Christ.

Penitential Psalmody

After the salutation, the minister says an antiphon and then, according to discretion, one of the Penitential Psalms. The first words are corporate and historical rather than merely individual:

Remember not, Lord, our iniquities; Nor the iniquities of our forefathers.

This is not a claim that every sickness is a direct punishment for a particular sin. The rite places illness within a world marked by sin, mortality, and inherited weakness, and then answers that condition with mercy. The Penitential Psalms give the sick person words of dependence when pain, fear, or weakness may make private prayer difficult.

The suffrages that follow ask for help, defence, and protection from the enemy. Their language is drawn from the Psalter and from the Church's older ministry to the sick.

O Lord, save thy servant;
Who putteth his trust in thee.

The sick person is named as one who trusts in God. The office does not reduce pastoral care to encouragement or medicine alone, though it does not despise bodily recovery. It teaches trust by putting trust into the Church's spoken prayer.

Comfort and Sure Confidence

The first collect asks God to look upon the sick person with mercy, give comfort, defend in danger, and keep the sufferer in peace.

O LORD, look down from heaven, behold, visit, and relieve this thy servant. Look upon him with the eyes of thy mercy, give him comfort and sure confidence in thee, defend him in all danger, and keep him in perpetual peace and safety.

The sequence is important: God visits, relieves, looks with mercy, comforts, defends, and keeps. The minister's visitation is a sign of God's visitation. Anglican pastoral care here is not only psychological reassurance; it asks that confidence be grounded in God's mercy through Jesus Christ.

Psalms for Sickness

The office provides selected psalms with antiphons and collects, including Psalms 3, 43, 77, 138, and 103, with other psalms allowed at the minister's discretion. This makes the Psalter the chief school of prayer in sickness.

Psalm 43 asks for divine light and truth when the soul is heavy:

O send out thy light and thy truth, that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy dwelling.

Psalm 77 gives language for sleeplessness, weakness, and spiritual desolation:

Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so feeble that I cannot speak.

Psalm 103 joins forgiveness and healing:

Who forgiveth all thy sin, and healeth all thine infirmities; Who saveth thy life from destruction, and crowneth thee with mercy and loving-kindness.

The office therefore refuses a shallow account of suffering. It can pray for recovery, speak of sin and forgiveness, acknowledge fear, and still confess the Lord's mercy. This is one reason the rite is more than a set of sickroom prayers; it is a condensed pastoral theology of affliction.

Cross and Redemption

After the psalms, the office turns explicitly to the cross:

O SAVIOUR of the world, who by thy Cross and precious Blood hast redeemed us; Save us, and help us, we humbly beseech thee, O Lord.

This prayer ties healing and help to redemption rather than to optimism. The sick person is addressed as one for whom Christ died. The office's theology of sickness is therefore cruciform: bodily weakness is met by the saving work of Christ, not by a promise that all suffering will immediately cease.

Repentance and Forgiveness

The minister is directed, as occasion demands, to address the sick person on the meaning and use of the time of sickness and the opportunity it affords for spiritual profit. The following rubrics direct inquiry into Christian faith, repentance, charity with all the world, forgiveness of offenders, asking forgiveness from those offended, and making amends where wrong has been done.

Then shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any matter; after which confession, on evidence of his repentance, the Minister shall assure him of God's mercy and forgiveness.

The language is pastorally careful. Special confession is not imposed in every case, but a troubled conscience is not ignored. The minister's assurance of mercy is tied to repentance, and the office connects forgiveness before God with charity toward neighbor. This keeps confession from becoming merely inward and keeps reconciliation from becoming merely social.

The ensuing prayer asks God to remember the sins of the penitent no more, renew what has decayed, preserve the sick member in the unity of the Church, assuage pain as God sees best, and strengthen the sufferer by the Holy Spirit.

Name, Health, and Salvation

The blessing that follows centers all pastoral confidence in Christ:

The Almighty Lord, who is a most strong tower to all those who put their trust in him, to whom all things in heaven, in earth, and under the earth, do bow and obey; Be now and evermore thy defence.

It continues by asking that the sick person may know and feel that there is no other Name through whom health and salvation are received but the Name of Jesus Christ. The word "health" is not merely physical. In the older Prayer Book register it is bound to wholeness, salvation, and restoration in Christ.

Prayers for Recovery and Death

The additional prayers may be used with the foregoing service or any part of it. They cover recovery, healing, thanksgiving for the beginning of recovery, small hope of recovery, despondency, those present at the visitation, and commendation at the point of departure.

O FATHER of mercies, and God of all comfort, our only help in time of need; We fly unto thee for succour in behalf of this thy servant, here lying in great weakness of body.

The prayer for one with little hope of recovery asks that, as the outward man decays, God would strengthen the inner man by grace and the Holy Spirit. The office is thus prepared both for healing and for death. It prays earnestly for recovery where appropriate, but it also teaches the Church how to commend a dying Christian to God's mercy.

The commendatory prayer near death uses sacrificial and baptismal language:

Wash it, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb, that was slain to take away the sins of the world.

Here the dying person is not left with vague consolation. The hope of the office is Christ's atoning death and the presentation of the soul before God through his merits.

Litany for the Dying

The Litany for the Dying continues the office's Christological focus. It invokes the Holy Trinity, asks deliverance by Christ's incarnation, cross, passion, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and the coming of the Holy Ghost, and petitions for pardon, refreshment, and joy in the kingdom.

Its absolution is concise:

The Almighty and merciful Lord grant thee pardon and remission of all thy sins, and the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit.

The Commendation then speaks directly to the Christian soul in Trinitarian form:

Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world, In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created thee. In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed thee. In the Name of the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth thee.

This is one of the clearest Trinitarian moments in the pastoral offices. Creation, redemption, and sanctification are not abstract doctrines; they become the Church's final words over a departing Christian.

Unction of the Sick

The 1928 office includes a form for unction or laying on of hands when a sick person in humble faith desires the ministry of healing. This is significant for Anglican pastoral practice because it gives an authorized healing rite without making unction a dominical sacrament in the sense of Baptism (1928 BCP) or Holy Communion (1928 BCP).

I ANOINT thee with oil (or I lay my hand upon thee), In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; beseeching the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all thy pain and sickness of body being put to flight, the blessing of health may be restored unto thee.

The form is both sacramental in gesture and evangelical in dependence. It uses outward ministry, oil or hands, but beseeches mercy from Christ. The rite is best read alongside James 5, the Prayer Book's doctrine of prayer, and Article XXV's distinction between the two sacraments ordained by Christ and other states or rites commonly called sacraments.

Pastoral and Theological Use

The office should be taught as a complete Anglican pattern for ministry in sickness: notice to the parish minister, peace in the household, psalmody, confession where conscience is troubled, assurance of forgiveness, prayers for recovery, preparation for death, Trinitarian commendation, and healing ministry by anointing or laying on of hands.

It also belongs with Communion of the Sick (1928 BCP). The Visitation office can prepare the sick person through repentance, forgiveness, comfort, and blessing; the Communion office then brings the sacramental fellowship of Christ's Body and Blood when the sick person desires and is able to receive.

See Also

• Book of Common Prayer (1928)
• Occasional Offices (1928 BCP)
• Communion of the Sick (1928 BCP)
• Absolution of the Sick (1928 BCP)
• Anointing of the Sick and Anglican Tradition
• Psalm 103 (1928 BCP)

External Links

• The Visitation of the Sick in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer
• The 1928 Book of Common Prayer