hoo boy
Proper 7 The Sunday closest to June 22
O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving-kindness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen
This collect for next Sunday dates to the oldest Latin liturgies of the Catholic Church. Cranmer has it in his first prayerbook, and our Anglican liturgy has never been without it. It’s talking about both “fear” and “love” for God, with “fear” being modernized as “reverence.” In his Commentary on the American Prayer Book, Marion Hatchett says the Latin contains the word “pariter” that he points out was lost in translation to English, but that carries the thought “fear, and no less, love” of God. Which suggests to me that fear as we understand it was in truth what the church had in mind, and we have softened it to “reverence” to make it less scary a-la Achen at Ai perhaps.
Tucked away in a corner is a memory of discussing fear of God in the boy’s Sunday School class at East Hill Baptist Church in Pensacola. An Episcopalian visiting with my cousin Bill, it was quite clear that “fear” was exactly and precisely what they meant. As in don’t be scared, or the KJV phrase “fear not.”
The collect is fine, I like it fine; but I expect that if anyone were paying attention to the liturgical words they would wonder what the collect had to do with the rest of the worship service. Fortunately, or perhaps not so fortunate as Maugrim the wolf said to Edmund as he led him in to see Jadis the White Witch, most of us buzz through the liturgy without a thought.
All of which, on my rambling Monday, brings to mind Tom Sawyer’s anguish when the preacher started his long pastoral prayer. Poor Tom winced when even one name or petition was added to the rambling prayer of which the preacher was so proud, because it meant that it would be just that much longer.
Which was my frame of mind as a boy upon coming into our Episcopal parish Sunday morning and seeing the Litany Desk in the center of the aisle facing the Altar. "Oh God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth, ... ... ... ... ..."
O Lordy. Hoo boy.
TW+
O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving-kindness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen
Tucked away in a corner is a memory of discussing fear of God in the boy’s Sunday School class at East Hill Baptist Church in Pensacola. An Episcopalian visiting with my cousin Bill, it was quite clear that “fear” was exactly and precisely what they meant. As in don’t be scared, or the KJV phrase “fear not.”
TW+