This was also posted at The Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on March 21, 2015.
“Almighty and everlasting God, you are
always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either
desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those
things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for
which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of
Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
The above is a collect written by
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, whose feast day we celebrate today, more than five
hundred years after his martyrdom. Much of the Book of Common Prayer bears his
imprimatur, even if many Episcopalians and Anglicans are barely acquainted with
him. Because Thomas Cranmer was the
Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the separation of the English Church
from the Roman Church, he ended up shaping the first prayer books in use in the
Anglican Communion even to our own 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Some of the
greatest hits of the prayer book are his: “O God, make speed to save us; O
Lord, make haste to help us.” “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like
lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own
hearts….” “Give unto your servants that peace which the world cannot give….”
The collect above is one of my favorite collects right from the start, since it
touches upon a subject near to my heart: prayer.
“Almighty
God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more
than we either desire or deserve….” How often many of us
feel that we do not know how to pray, or what to say when we pray. Sometimes we
get frustrated with defaulting too soon to what have been called “wish-list”
prayers: God, watch over my mother and my father; help me get through this
coming week; help heal Aunt Jeanne’s cancer, those kinds of things. At other
times we get frustrated that this kind of prayer is all we seem to pray, other
than the Lord’s Prayer. Yet Cranmer put his finger on an important truth: God
is ready to listen no matter how much we stumble over words in our prayers. Yet
perhaps sometimes we should just cut ourselves a break. My United Church of
Christ brothers and sisters like to say that “God is Still Speaking.” We
Episcopalians, people of the Book of Common Prayer, should always try to remember
that God is always listening, lovingly and patiently, even if we feel we cannot
find the right words. If in prayer we are not ready to speak, we can make
ourselves ready to hear. Ironically, Archbishop Cranmer himself has provided us
hundreds of the right words when we seem stuck, in his beautiful collects and
prayers which he either translated or wrote himself.
“Pour
upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our
conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not
worthy to ask ….” Here, Cranmer touches upon the ideas
of mercy and grace. Even during Lent, we Episcopalians do not like to think
very much about sins—unless it is about those sins committed against us. We
also do not think very much about salvation and how that works. Yet one of the
most overwhelming realities we seek to grasp as Christians is God’s unending
love for us. God’s love is one that seeks us out again and again and never
rests when we hold ourselves aloof in our relationships with both God and each
other. Abundant mercy, amazing grace—two different sides of the same coin.
Mercy is shown in not punishing us as justice would demand but instead
forgiving us. Grace is granted in GIVING us the blessing of salvation, right
here and now, which we can never earn. Cranmer helps us ask God to pour out
both grace and mercy over us, forgiveness and blessing, the weft and warp of
our lives seeking God.
“…[E]xcept
through the merits and mediation of
Jesus Christ our savior, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” It is through Jesus
and his incarnation, as God-with-us, that we have an advocate and guide in
living our lives as a holy people, beloved of God. One of the things Christians
do is pray in the name of Christ, our Friend and Companion—literally, “he who
breaks bread with us.” When we gather around the altar at Eucharist, we gather
with each other and with Christ, who feeds us, body and soul, satisfying our
deepest longings for meaning in a world in which all too often we can feel
adrift.
Cranmer’s latest biographer, Diarmid
MacCulloch, notes in his introduction that Archbishop Cranmer was intensely
private, yet his words live on today to touch and shape our most public
expressions of faith through our liturgy. Thomas Cranmer is, in many ways, the
bishop who still teaches us how to pray, and reminds us that God is ready to
hear.
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