increase in us True Religion?

From today's collect: “increase in us True Religion."

Poking fun at the absurdity of human nature, self-certain and dead serious that we and only we have it right and everyone else is going to Hell, in Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon", a little group of half a dozen or so people gather for worship every Sunday morning, at the leader's house, a little circle of dining room chairs set up in the living room. After splitting and splitting and splitting, over one bit of doctrine and scripture after another, schism after schism unto the ridiculous, they are the "The Last Surviving Remnant of the One True Church."

In your bulletin, take another look at The Collect of the Day, on page __ / 3.

Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works - -

It's a lovely and lyrical ancient prayer. The Rev Doctor Marion Hatchett, scholar, author, prayer book framer, late revered professor at Sewanee and other Episcopal seminaries, called this collect “a prayer of the farmer or gardener” - - Graft, Increase, Nourish, and Bring Forth Fruit, so apt for this summer and fall Season after Pentecost, that we call “the long green growing season of the church year”.

But be mindful, cautious, because “increase in us True Religion” is fraught, a dangerous plant, potentially poisonous, even deadly: a seed of the smug, arrogant self-certainty that, throughout human history, has made religious power and authority the source of merciless oppression of innocent people.

No government is more evil, wicked, and brutal than Theocracy: church - religious governing power and authority that forces everyone to conform to the True Religion of the state:

Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan (the Taliban) with cruel oppression of people. Europe, including Protestant England and Catholic Ireland in the centuries of enforced Christendom. People threatened and intimidated with fear of Hell. Catholics burning Protestants at the stake, and vice versa depending on which True Religion was in power. The Christian Crusades. The Catholic Inquisition, people tortured horribly and killed in the name of God for not conforming to church doctrine and dogma.

Our own Book of Common Prayer: all my growing up years, until the church’s late 20th century liturgical reform, in The Prayers of the People, we clung to a traditional prayer of our own True Religion from religious government of 16th century darkness - - listen:

“We beseech thee … so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion, and virtue.”

Whatever were we thinking all those centuries! God in Heaven deliver us from rulers, governments, kings and presidents prescribing and maintaining True Religion. And yet that is our history, our past, our own heritage; hopefully not our destiny.

The United States, founded, we like to say every November at Thanksgiving, on the principle of religious freedom. But the truth is, the Pilgrims, English Puritans who came to Plymouth, Massachusetts on the Mayflower to escape the Church of England’s oppressive True Religion, no sooner landed on North American soil than they established their own True Religion of equally cruel, strict, intolerant Christianity, humiliating and punishing citizens who did not keep the rules; burning and hanging people who disagreed. And several of our original thirteen independent colonies with their own established True Religion.

“Increase in us True Religion” - today we seem to be in a strange new Time of wanting government of strict authority, legislating and enforcing morals: be very careful what you trust government to require of you, because people of religious certainty, when given authority and power, will tolerate no dissent from their brand of “truth”.

“Increase in us True Religion” - - dating from the 700s AD, our Collect for the Day is a medieval Gelasian prayer that comes from the Dark Ages of Western civilization: