PRAYING HEAVEN’S ANTHEM TODAY
Dear Friends,
I was raised in a church that was somewhere on the fundamentalist-evangelical spectrum. I fell in love with the counter-culture and new left politics and became a Christian through the ministry of charismatics. I attended house churches and a Baptist church and then attended a Salvation Army citadel. Because God has a sense of humor, I stumbled into an Anglican church and worshipped with the Book of Common Prayer and realized with a shock that God was calling me to become an Anglican. I regularly struggled with the rampant unbelief and heterodoxy around me – and the peculiar wisdom of the English reformation. Over time I came to realize that many Canadian Anglicans knew Anglicanism in a sociological sense, but were ignorant of historic (and worldwide) Anglicanism. Given how Anglicanism is seen today, who would have thought that the English reformers wanted the following as our anthem, the anthem of heaven? “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen” If you follow the ancient practice of Morning and Evening Prayer then you pray that prayer 5-8 times every morning every morning and 5-8 times every evening. Yes, to the religious, unbelieving heart it can be mere rote words. But surely it is a good thing to try and teach people such a prayer in the hope that it becomes their prayer, the prayer of their heart that they delight to pray day by day, especially in the context of listening to, and responding to the Bible, God’s word written. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.” A couple of points.
First, praying this prayer as your own reminds you that you do not worship the God of Canadians, you worship the Triune God. Much of contemporary worship and prayer is not Trinitarian. It is somehow natural for us to focus on God, or the Father, or Jesus, all good and important, but have worship amnesia about the profound truth that the true and living God is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three persons, one God. We drift in and out of the monism of our culture. This weakens our heart and our witness. The singular god’s of the world’s religions and spiritualities cannot account for our human longings for love, goodness, community, and being known. Only the Triune God who has created and sustains all things makes sense of such yearnings.
Second, this prayer reminds you of what is truly true today. Angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven sing this song right now. The wind and waves, mountains and forest, birds and beasts, all sing this song today. When I pray this prayer I am praying the true anthem of both the old and the new creation. I live amidst the noise of the “city of man” I need to know the true anthem of eternity at deeper levels of who I am to live well day by day.
Third, this prayer reminds me of my chief end, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I am saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Religion does not save me, only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me. He saves me from the hellish ends enjoined upon me by the world the flesh and the devil. Jesus saves me into the blessing of entry into my true end. The end the Triune God created me for. To glorify and enjoy him forever. To bow my mind and will, my heart and soul, in proclaiming the glory of the Triune God is to begin to be unbent and whole. My own words are weak and inadequate. It is a blessing to learn words to pray as my own day by day. Words I can pray with others. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.”
George+