The Prayer of Humble Access

 I have known this prayer by heart since my childhood. For some in the contemporary church, the Prayer of Humble Access has fallen out of favor.  We are taught to approach Communion with joy and assurance.  The Prayer of Humble Access, however, reminds us to also approach the Lord’s Table with a realistic sense of humility and unworthiness (that is, unworthiness aside from the worthiness that God himself imputes upon us). 

The Prayer of Humble Access echoes Isaiah 6:
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple.  …   ⁵And I said: ‘Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’  ⁶Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding  a live coal that had  been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.  ⁷The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’

We can hear the same posture of humility and total dependence expressed in Isaiah 6 expressed in The Prayer of Humble Access. Here is the prayer from the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.  We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.  But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.

Father Rob