Upon the collect for the day

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This is the collect for the week (The Second Sunday in Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer. As with most of the prayers in this volume this collect has a simple elegance that I find in few other places.  If you compare the BCP to most of the liturgical and prayer resources of The United Methodist Church the UMC material hides its face in shame.  One of my mentors in commenting on Methodism’s rituals told me, “Some day our church will employ a poet as part of the liturgy production process, and we’ll be far better off than we are now.”

Truer words.

But, as I consider the work at hand, one term strikes me.  It is the word “unchangeable.”   It comes in the phrase “to hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son.”  I hear this with the ears of someone who has endured the blather of the United Methodist Church’s special called General Conference of three years ago.  I heard this word and similar ones bandied about by people who seemed to have no idea what their language meant.

Because there is a difference between “unchangeable” and “unchanging.”  Unchangeable is a word that we reserve for God and Christ and the Holy Spirit.  It speaks of Truth with a capital “T.”  Unchanging is a more stubborn word and folks seem to use it to defy the reality that things of the faith and understanding and revelation are fluid in their natures.  The list of things about which the church (or much of the church) has altered the literal language of the Bible is endless.  The role of women, slavery, treatment of children, polygamy, capital punishment and a host of dietary laws do not begin to complete the list of practices that modern-day Christians have modified beyond the letter of the law in Scripture. 

Anyone who says that faith and commandment and law are static terms in the practice of the Christian religion is either naïve or spends their entire life with their head in the sand.  God is unchangeable.  Revelation is ever-changing.  That we are not bound by a rigid set of laws under penalty of damnation is affirmed in the first line of today’s collect: O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy…  If it is God’s nature to put mercy first, it seems only fitting that those who would identify themselves as children of God should do the same.