Meditating on Proper 12: Protector of All

 

Proper 12    

The Sunday closest to July 27

O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom
nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon
us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so
pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Preface to the Lord's Day

Photo a product of Grok

This collect bothers me. The phrase “protector of all who trust in you” implies that God is One who will not, does not, or is not the protector of “all.” Period. Full stop. I don’t like that. 

The Bible tells us God is no “respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34ff) and does not judge people the way we judge people (1 Samuel 16:7). Jesus warns us not to “judge by appearances but judge by right judgment” (John 7:24). So why do we limit God here, calling God one who is the “protector of all who trust in (the Divine One)?”

I suspect the problem is not with the collect but with the way I’m reading it. Whenever I struggle with matters of faith, I find it’s because I often come at things backwards. For example, I remember hearing Jesus promise Peter that upon “this rock” Jesus would build his church (Matthew 16:18) and “the gates of hell would not prevail against it.” I pictured vandals using a garden gate as a battering ram and thought “how stupid” to myself, before realizing that Jesus was identifying the Church as an army breaking through the gates of hell to bring release to the captives, sight to the blind, etc. My brain simply developed the image in reverse. I’m spiritually dyslexic, and as long as I keep that in mind, I can usually puzzle out what those squiggles on the pages of our faith are actually telling us.

Our prayer here does NOT imply God is only the protector of those who trust, but rather that we who trust are able to see the One who walks beside us on our journey. God is not our protector in the sense of keeping us from all harm, but a protector in the sense of standing with us when we find ourselves under the guns of the world, the flesh, and the devil. When we come to a fork in the road, it is God who guides us toward the right path. The problem is that often we ignore the advice and counsel of the Holy One.

We are sometimes like those who drive into a lake, trusting in a faulty GPS display, rather than believing their own eyes and noting something is amiss; the road does not go where the GPS says it should take us. We mustn’t jettison Scripture, Tradition, and Reason on our journey. God possesses the Wisdom of the ages, and has given us the Church – the Community of Faith – to walk together with Adonai as we move forward. Our sightlines are limited and the future is shrouded in mystery, but we are not alone. It is in that sense God that is our protector.

God walks beside all of creation, but not all of creation sees the Creator. That is their loss. That doesn’t mean God is not their protector because of a divine limitation, but because of a human failure to discern the Divine that surrounds them. As people find themselves yearning for a Higher Power, their eyes and ears are often opened and enabled to see the Holy One who has been beside them all the time.

“Without (God) “nothing is strong, nothing is holy.” What’s brought to mind here is that God is the source of all strength, all holiness. “Holiness” is the only divine attribute that is emphasized in both the Hebrew scriptures (Isaiah 6:3) and Christian scriptures (Revelation 4:8). Nowhere do we read or hear that God is “love, love, love” or “peace, peace, peace,” or “one, one, one.” No. We are reminded that God is holy times three. If the passage was printed on a computer, you might see the authors emphasize the word “holy” by using the Bold, Italic, Underline feature on their word processor (Holy). In their day, however, they produced their emphasis poetically. You can feel it in your soul. Even when just saying the words, there is balance, symmetry, and harmony: Holy, holy, holy … Santo, santo, santo … Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus … Etc.

This prayer lifts us into a whole new dimension, a whole new sphere. The word Holy means “separate,” “other,” or “clean.” We are not holy, clean, or sacred – at least not until God sanctifies us, cleanses us, heals us, and fits us for service. So we pray to God, asking Adonai to walk with us (more accurately, asking our eyes to be opened to see Adonai walking beside us), fitting us for service (to be holy Gate-Crashers), and helping us to hold on to dear life itself – our lives in Christ, with Christ, and through Christ, in the unity of the Spirit – so that we do not lose things eternal. Thanks be to God!

Sometimes I am spiritually dyslexic (art by Grok)