Song in the Key of Glory
Further Reflections on the theological meanings of Continuity and Change

Following my earlier Advent sermons on Change, I received this email from one parishioner: “Yes, God is change. It’s what we pray for… change us, transform us, ‘create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me.’ That’s change... I scribbled something in my BCP (Book of Common Prayer) a few years ago and I don’t know where it came from—‘Not just forgive us but change us’ … it may have been one of your sermons or Father Doubleday or Reverend Brewster. I thought it was worth writing in my book and I read it every week. Change us. But (in your sermon) you did say ‘God is changing; God always will’ and I guess I still don’t really understand… if God is always changing, I’m confused… (However) I like the last line of your sermon… ‘Pray that you are open to the change that is God’… I’m writing that in my book.”
So, does God change; and, if God does, why might we find that confusing or disorienting? Think about it. Not very long ago, we were adamant that God is Male. Today, we are more circumspect, recognizing the extent to which we attribute human qualities to God as a way of expressing things we are trying to say about our experience of God-ness—Our God like a Father, but who we realize is beyond and more than our concept of maleness, or femaleness for that matter. Still, we do mean ‘hallowed be God’s Name’. Here’s another example: little more than 30 years ago, if you suggested that God suffered, you’d be branded a heretic. Yet, today, we readily accept that God feels the pain of suffering, the plight of those in extremis. It took the horrific suffering wrought by the Holocaust and the Hydrogen bomb to give 20th Century theologians pause for considering how the Western philosophical tradition had unintentionally impoverished the concept of God. Centuries of applying the Platonic Ideal Form had cast the God of The Bible as an Unmoved Mover, Perfect, Impermeable—the God that suffers not, unmoved by human suffering. However, a callous monarch is not our God. Again and again, the biblical text presents the God who hears the people crying, who knows their pain, and who is moved to do something about it.
Perhaps, yes, you could argue from these two examples, it is not God who changes but, rather, our perceptions of God that shift. True enough. Yet, scripture does say that prayer moves the heart of God. Thus, does our openness to God in communication have an effect on God? Do our prayers somehow change God?
You know, don’t you, that in some ways I am playing with you? Yet, I am playing about something serious. We need to have a certain amount of openness to the idea of a changing God precisely because we are so heavily invested in God’s not changing. Where we left God yesterday is where we want to find God when we come back next time. That’s why faith communities spend so much time defining the God that we also admit is beyond definition. We start out in time and space constructing shrines to celebrate that we have had an experience of God. However, over time, we declare that shrine space as the sacred experience of God itself. You know what I mean—classic idol worship. Yet, we need to consider how some of these idols take hold. We can get to the crux of the matter by asking ourselves, what do we pray?
Let’s begin using a timely example. Haven’t we all heard with our ears, read with our eyes, and even composed within our own hearts, prayers that the next four years bring “better” things than we are presently experiencing? Yet, what does ‘better’ mean; and for whom? Who is the God to whom we pray such prayers? What might God mean by “better”; and would God allow things to get better for some but not for others? Well, then, if God is for the good of all, then things getting better certainly will not mean that things change back to the way they were, for there were ways in which our better times were at the expense of others. This raises uncertainty about what better will mean, doesn’t it.
Now let’s try a less political example: the individual body and prayers for healing. Usually, when we pray, we ask God for the alleviation of pain, the applied gifts of skilled physicians, the loving presence of family and friends, the end of illness; in short, our prayers for healing ask God for a cure. Yet, knowing what we do about the exigencies of life and death, wouldn’t it be a faithful prayer, more open to change if, from the start, we prayed for a tranquil spirit of thankfulness even in times of pain or foretastes of death?
Let us consider prayers for the Church. These days, given the seismic controversies and schismatic shocks reverberating through our wider church, we have been praying for unity, for all of us to be able to get along in the Name of Christ. But is just ‘getting along’ worthy of the Name of Christ? And what does getting along mean—Managing to hold the institution together? Managing is not mission.
Likewise, take the church on the local level. In a day of shrinking favorable demographics and available dollars, we might hope and pray for pews full and budget balanced. However, that is stasis, not church. Being church is about going out. Going out and meeting change, rather than staying in and hoping the changes won’t change the way things have been in here.
Yes, change is happening. So how do we pray about that and who is the God to whom we pray? We begin right here—from where we are; but we do not, or should not, be praying for things to stay, change into or get back to being a certain prescribed something. Yes, it is all uncertain; however, life is uncertain. And instead of staying put, holding on or digging in, prayer is about going out, going beyond and being open to life’s change—sensing its advent/arrival and responding: “Here I am, Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” Provisioning your life with prayer is the continuity that bears change.
In Luke’s telling of it, when Mary is confronted by the changes that were coming her way, she did not lament “What shall I do?” Rather, she sings; that’s her way of facing change. Song is her expression of spirituality, her prayer. Singing is her openness to God and her zest for life. She sings in the key of Glory, extolling an amazing God. But if she had a chorus, we might also hear counter tones suggesting not just an amazing God but a crazy one too. After all, why does the God who Jews have enshrined as the Almighty, who puts the proud and conceited in their place while unseating mighty rulers from theirs, bother to pull off to this backwater of a stop and startle such a sweet teenage girl? Just what kind of God bothers to do that? And how does creating an embarrassing scandal naming the Holy Spirit as progenitor help a servant Israel whose dreams and people have been scattered all over? Does such paternity suit the situation?
The point is, there’s no need debating the changes that have come. They’re here and Mary doesn’t shy away or close down or demand or plead to know what God is doing. She knows she cannot know, exactly or for sure, how things will turn out. Yet, she does not shrink in fear. No, she evolves, she grows up, she changes. Her soul doth magnify the Lord. Her song amplifies God. She sings in the Key of Glory. That is, her song gives expression—lyric and melody—to the Presence of God. Mary does not know what God is doing. Mary cannot know how it will turn out. All Mary knows is that she will trust this God, this change. Mary has been touched by change and is changing. She is conceived as an agent of change who will not keep it within herself but go out and touch others, bringing more change.
In order to survive in this world, you have to change. Will God be with us? Yes, but that doesn’t make it easy. People who are drowning often resist their rescuer. And it is not enough to survive. A survivor struggles to withstand changes and in so doing will construct a defensive life with the illusion of protective walls. Even a survivor who instead adapts to change is not enough, as important as adaptive flexibility is, for the survivor is always on the alert against the intrusions of change, and those others who are morphed into representing the threat of change. No, our call is not to survive against all odds but to thrive by improving the odds for others. To do so, like Mary, we must embody change. To incorporate change we need to learn and do along the way, trusting that the God we have heard about keeping promises with our forefathers and mothers—Abraham and Mary—will do great things for me and you.
Yet, what is the great thing God did for Mary? God offered her an audition. Mary sang her soul out, and would continue to ponder in her heart what all these changes might mean. It became her life’s mission, this bearing of Christ life.
Ours too.
AMEN.
©Thomas F. Reese December 21, 2008

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