Strife
Strife
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in
heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of
your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of
your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Book of Common Prayer has marvelous prayers new and old, many of them dating back centuries. According to Hatchett (Commentary on the American Prayer Book, page 171) this prayer for next Sunday dates back through all previous editions of our prayerbook into the pre-Reformation Sarum rite, back to the Gregorian Sacramentary traditionally identified with Pope Gregory, sixth century. Before the current prayerbook, it was the collect for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany and read as Cranmer had it,
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who dost govern all things in heaven and earth; Mercifully hear the supplications of thy people, and grant us thy peace all the days of our life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Hatchett says the current prayerbook restores the original wording of the ancient collect as found in the Gregorian, removing Cranmer's phrase “all the days of our life.”
Depending on how we view the peace of God, we surely might prefer the original version to Cranmer’s, which could be seen as praying for lifelong torment, considering that our theology is that the way of the Cross is the way of life. William Alexander Percy makes this subtly clear in his poem that is number 661 in our hymnal:
They cast their nets in Galilee
Just off the hills of brown
Such happy simple fisherfolk
Before the Lord came down
Contented peaceful fishermen
Before they ever knew
The peace of God That fill'd their hearts
Brimful and broke them too.
Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,
Homeless, in Patmos died.
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
Head-down was crucified.
The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod,
Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing -
The marvelous peace of God.
|
We might want to be careful what we pray for lest we precisely get it. And not only what we pray, but what we sing. Percy’s phrase “strife closed in the sod” may seem romantically poetic when we sing blithely through it on a Sunday morning. But he says that God’s peace is strife, struggle, even anguish; and he says it’s not over until the last spadeful of sod is shoveled onto your grave.
The peace of the Lord be always with you.
TW+