Let God Speak to You
All Souls’ ECW May 20, 2008

I have to confess I’m a little disappointed.  Because of my teaching schedule, the May ECW meeting is the only one I can attend all year, and I have really enjoyed the speakers the last few years.  They have all had fun and interesting, and practically useful, things to say.  So I’m sorry that I’m speaking and not listening, and I’m sorry that this is not going to be quite as much fun as I would like it to be.

The Humanities class I teach at UCO is a survey class of ancient and medieval western culture, so I regularly talk about a wide variety of subjects, but I couldn’t think how to make either the Epic of Gilgamesh or Oedipus Rex suitable for an ECW luncheon.  So I decided to wait for inspiration.  And I must add that this little talk should really be footnoted all the way through.  I just kept listening to other people, and it came together.

Just a few days after Kelly Krahl asked me to speak at the may meeting of the ECW, Canon Michael Hawkins, the Dean of the Cathedral in Saskatchewan, was visiting the parish, and he said something (I think) at the Sunday morning adult Sunday School that started my train of thought which led to today’s talk.  He was speaking about the current “troubles” in the church, in particular, the very real possibility of schism in the Anglican Communion, as Bishops of other parts of the communion declare themselves out of communion with the TEC and the AC of Canada.  Michael said that a submarine, in times of danger, goes deeper; and he was advocating that as a form of action – going deeper.

But he meant by that was not burying our heads in the sand and pretending that problems don’t exist, but rather going deeper into our personal and communal understanding and experience of our tradition.  So I decided that that is what I would do – to take 30 minutes or so with you to go deeper into our Anglican tradition.

 But I still needed a point of focus. 

The next piece of inspiration I received came a few days later, on Palm Sunday.  Sometimes when we have a special service, like Palm Sunday, and there is a more detailed service form printed up instead of the regular weekly bulletin, there is often a little saying printed on the front cover which goes like this:

Before the service, speak to God.
During the service, let God speak to you.
After the service, speak to one another.

That is where I found my topic: “Let God speak to you”.  I’m going to come back to that.

What all Christians have in common is faith in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, who died to save us from sin, and who opened to us the hope of eternal life, in which we shall know and love God even as we are known and loved.

What differentiates Anglican Christians from other denominations is primarily our approach to worshipping that God.

 There have been a handful of times in the history of western civilization, when there has occurred a great flowering of culture – a flowering that involves the visual arts, literature and poetry, music.  But such cultural flowering does not come out of nowhere.  Rather it is a reflection of or an expression of the prevailing philosophical and theological ideas of the time, ideas about the nature of humanity – what it means to be human.

The greatest cultural periods of our history:

Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. 

Florence, (beginning in the fourteenth century), but coming to fruition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

What is special about these periods is not merely the skill of the artists - Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, or of Shakespeare and John Donne. What is special is the fact that these were eras imbued with a profound understanding of the human soul.  The art is the effect of that. These eras had a grasp of certain timeless truths about humanity – about human aspirations but also about human limitations and failings.  We call the works produced in these times ‘classics’ because they are timeless – they speak to us today just as they did when they were produced.  Read the Apology, Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense speech at his trial, and you will find it speaks to you.  When he addresses the Athenians, Socrates could be speaking to Americans. Gaze on Michelangelo’s Pieta, and it is as moving today as it was in 1499.  Read a Shakespearean play, and you know this was a man who understood humanity, in all its complexity, very well indeed.  But all these things require time.  You need to take the time to look at a work of art to appreciate it.  You need to take the time to read poetry to understand it.  You need to take the time to really listen to a piece of music.

 The Book of Common Prayer (as well as the King James Version of the Bible) emerged out of that great cultural flowering of Reformation England.  It is a great work of art, and it, too, requires time to explore and appreciate – a lifetime.  What finally emerged in 1662, after more than a century of prayer, study, labor and controversy, as the Church of England Book of Common Prayer, was a book that brought together the traditional liturgies of the Christian church, extending back 1500 years, with the reformed idea that the individual – his or her mind and will – must have an active, not a passive, role in that liturgy.  The PB tradition brings together the best of both Catholicism and the Reformation, while rejecting the extremes of both. The basic form of the liturgy was largely unchanged (although the many daily offices were simplified to 2 – morning and evening prayer). What was changed was the spirit of the liturgy.  The liturgy of the Church was made into common prayer.  It is common to all of us who partake.  We pray together, in common.  We also pray as common people – ordinary, everyday people, struggling to know and will the good. This change was accomplished in part by translating the Latin into English – the common language.  But the change was more than that.  The focus of Anglican liturgy is always and unwaveringly the cross.  The Reformers had a very deep sense of both human sin and divine grace – and the cross is the constant reminder and ultimate symbol of both.  Jesus died on the cross because of human sin.  And his death and resurrection were acts of divine grace, of divine love.

The 1928 PB of TEC is, in essence, a revision of the English PB, retaining the same spirit, and making only minor alterations.  The 1979 PB, taken as a whole, reflects the beginning of a move away from that profound sense of both human sin and divine grace, although Rite 1, which simply reorders some of the elements of the communion service, remains true to the older tradition.  An argument that it does so in an inferior way, is however, an argument for another time.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons we go to church – we go to hear the scripture read and expounded; we go to pray for ourselves and others, for help and comfort, for healing, for discernment, for forgiveness from sin; we go to offer thanksgiving for the blessings we have received; we go to receive the grace of Christ’s sacrificial body and blood; to sing hymns of praise; and to enjoy the fellowship of other Christians. 

These may all be things that motivate us, but in the end there is only one reason to go to church – and that is to worship God.   All these other things are merely the components of our worship.

But how can we offer worship that is acceptable to God?  How can we love him and praise him as he deserves?  We are weak, feeble, finite, foolish. How do we worship the eternal omnipotent Lord of the universe? The answer is at the very beginning of our communion service.  “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.” 

This is what we call the Collect for Purity.  We begin our worship by praying to God, who already knows everything on our hearts; we ask the Holy Spirit to cleanse our thoughts, in order that we will be made able to love and praise God.  In other words, we are asking God to make us able to worship him. And then, through that worship, we come to know him and love him, and thus worship him more fervently. The beginning and the end are the same: God’s grace.  His wisdom (His Word, written in the Bible and incarnate in Jesus Christ) brings us to the knowledge of all truth.  His love is the cause of our love.  His will moves our wills. 

This is what our Prayer Book constantly reminds us of: our constant need for God’s grace; and His constant assurance of it.  The BCP has been called the Bible put to prayer.  Fully two-thirds of the PB are extracts from scripture.  We are not in church to sit passively by and be entertained – either by preachers or choirs.  Nor are we there to passively and mindlessly receive the sacraments of the church.  We are there to know God and to love him.   And we do that by actively praying and actively listening.

“During the service, let God speak to you”. See, I said I would come back to this.  I bet you thought I forgot.  What is so wonderful about out liturgical service is that it is a God-given gift.  It is the praying of God’s word.

How does God speak to us in the service?  

In the words of scripture.  Listen. God is speaking to you.

In the sacraments, those visible signs of God’s grace. God is speaking to you.

But also in the prayers that we pray as a congregation.  In our intercessory prayers, in our asking for forgiveness, in our hymns.  The depths of the human soul are plumbed – all our needs and desires – which are already known by God.  Listen.  There, too, in the words that we pray, God is speaking to you. 

But we must listen.

Patrick and I had a young man over to our home for dinner recently, who had been a child in the Episcopal Church, but then moved on as a teenager to a more evangelical and immediately accessible style of worship. Now that he is older, he has discovered a richness in the PB that he did not – and could not – appreciate as a child.  His point was maybe that this is not food for children.  Well, to that I say this.  Yes it is true, children do not understand everything that is said.  But neither do children understand why they should not talk with food in their mouths, or why they need to learn algebra.  Bringing children up in our Episcopal or Anglican way is a formation of the soul – a spiritual formation – that is just as important as the education they receive in school, or the manners and habits we teach them at home.  They will grow into it.  It will become a part of them.  It will help to make them the people they should be.  They will learn how to think about God and themselves.  And as they come into greater spiritual maturity they will reflect on and come to understand more deeply the words they have been saying all their lives.  Just as being made to say please and thank all their lives ultimately produces a spirit of gratitude and appreciation.

And for those of us who are adults – we too are still growing into this and being formed by it.  If we listen, we will come to know the God who is speaking to us, and to love him, and to will what he wills for us.  It is a lifelong process.

 The last thing I want to say, is maybe a bit of a tangent, but this is such a beautiful tribute to our Anglican, PB form of worship, that I want to share it with you.  This I am going to footnote and tell you it came from Amber Prather.  I don’t remember her exact words, so I am putting it in my own, and I may not do it justice. During a time of great distress in her life, dealing with a situation to which there seemed to be no possible good outcome, she said the one place she could find consolation was in church, because she knew that there she did not have to anything, she did not have to find words to pray, because the church would do it for her, the church would hold her up.  And the church is, of course, the body of Christ – all the others members of the congregation who were there with her, but also all those who have gone before and left us this legacy of words to pray – of the bible put to prayer.

 So treasure this book.  This is what defines us as Anglicans.  Read it. Pray with it. And listen to the words.

-Rhea Bright