Tuesday in ...




Members of our adult Sunday School class are accustomed to our habit of treating written prayers as exercises in theological discourse. That is, dissecting them to discern what they say we believe about God. 

A principle of Anglican theology is the Latin phrase lex orandi lex credendi, "the law of praying is the law of believing", which is to say that if you want to know our theology, all you need to do is look at what we do and say and sing and pray when we gather for worship. That reveals our theology as a praying institution [our real theology of course is what we do in daily life, how and whether we work at living out our Baptismal Covenant, in particular our promise to Strive for Justice and Peace among All People, and to Respect the Dignity of Every Human Being].

Our class sessions begin with the Collect for the Day, and we often pause to examine the prayer and work out its theology, what it says we believe about God. The prayer's petition can be revealing, but particularly telling is the prayer's introduction, its address to God. And doing this little exercise, which takes just a minute or so of our class hour, is not limited to our short weekly Collects for each Sunday, we can do it with any prayer. Thus, this morning I am taken with the Prayer for Community in Fr Richard Rohr's morning meditation, which today is captioned "Simplicity" and lays out the very foundation of life for a Franciscan. Here's the prayer:

O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.

With several petitions (May, Help, Listen) the prayer is more than our Collects that generally have a single petition that, at least originally was meant to collect everyone's attention on the focus of worship for the day. [Sometimes that's discernibly, even clearly, the case, though more often what is clear is that our liturgists and lectionary framers have satisfied their obsession with preserving an ancient prayer. Regardless of that, we can still do our thing of examining the theological assertion in the opening address to God]. What does this prayer say?

"O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us".

What's the theological assertion? That God lives and loves in us and through us. This strikes me as the core of my own theology. My faith is fairly well expressed in the meditation that a Youth Group I knew as a teenager, said together every Sunday evening to close their meeting and inspire themselves for the week ahead:

Christ has no hands but our hands to do His work today

He has no feet but our feet to lead men in the way

He has no tongue but our tongue to tell men how He died

He has no help but our help to bring them to His side.

It's part of a poem (yes, from another age of political insight) that has a lovely story** that may or may not be "true fact" but the message is solid theology for me. That God works through us, and if we do not do God's Work, God's work does not get done. I do not believe that God moves about, "appears here and there, now and then, to this one and that one" as He will, a wise but mischievous Being, selecting whose prayer to answer and whose to ignore. Indeed, Fr Rohr's prayer this morning nails it. God is where we bring God present. I'll add Matthew 18:20, Where two or three gather in my Name, there am I in the midst of them. 

God is wherever we bring God present. And if we do not, there's a vacuum that evil is ready, willing and able, even eager, to fill.

T+ 

Picture from 7H sidewalk, looking north. Most days several American flags can be seen in the breeze. This morning, only one.