Who is God?
At the close of the recent report on sexuality for the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, this prayer is printed.
"Guide us, O God, in our continuing consideration of human sexuality to be responsive to and respectful of all persons, their ideas and experience. Convert and empower us to listen penitently and, with humility, to speak honestly with one another. Set our disagreements within the mutual knowledge and love which we experience in you as Holy Trinity. Whenever we experience fear, anger, or mistrust with one another, give us new hope and consolation in your never-failing love for your children. In all things, let us submit our ideas to your thoughts, our desires to your will, and our actions to your purpose. In our diversity as members of the Body of Christ, help us find our way, through Jesus Christ, Our Redeemer. Amen."
The "O God" of the opening line is, as identified later, "you, the Holy Trinity". So this is one of those very rare occasions (Trinity Sunday is one & the Litany is another in the classic BCP tradition) where the Trinity is addressed. But is it really the Trinity (who is revealed in sacred Scripture and declared and affirmed in classic dogma and historic creeds/confessions) that is being addressed? Or is it One God who is known to us in three modes of being and/or by three prominent names (in old times "Father, Son and Holy Ghost", but in new times as "Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier" or their dynamic equivalents)?
Though the prayer seems to end in the classic way of a collect, "through Jesus Christ." yet it does not do so for the "through Jesus Christ." here is part of the petition to "you as Holy Trinity". Thus it is addressed to "O God" and does not make use of the traditional role of the Mediator and High Priest, Jesus Christ who is the Lord, in its ending.
Then one wonders as to how "we experience mutual knowledge and love" in "you the Holy Trinity". Are we here thinking of the ineffable Love which is the Substance of the Godhead? Surely not for we as creatures cannot know this Love! Are we thinking of God's love towards man made known in Jesus the Incarnate Son and experienced by man within the universe and church? Probably so, but the words suggest more than this normal experience of grace and loving kindness in Jesus.
It is an extremely odd prayer. Perhaps the commitment of the ECUSA to inclusivity, and to making women visible as it were, prevents this church from praying to the Father through Jesus Christ the Lord and with the Holy Spirit, and thereby saving us such speculation as we now engage in. Perhaps therefore it gets itself into all kinds of contortions of language because it is fundamentally disobedient to the way of Scripture and the example of the Fathers and Reformers. Preferring not to name "the Father" and "the Lord" because they are supposedly sexist deeply affects not only the possibilities of naming the Holy Trinity aright but also of thinking appropriately of the Three Persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!
The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon
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