Drawing on biblical imagery in prayer is powerful. It mirrors back to God his inspired Word and demonstrates how Scripture soaks into our imagination and shapes the language we use to speak to God. There are many shining examples of scripturally saturated prayers in the Anglican tradition. Among the greatest is the Collect for Ash Wednesday, in which we ask God to “create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This sums up the spirit and purpose of the Lenten season by blending David’s penitential plea (Ps. 51:10) with Ezekiel’s prophesy of the new covenant and new creation (36:26). Such biblically informed prayers serve God’s people well.
Yet there is a collect in use in the Anglican Church of Canada that draws on Scripture in a troubling way. While it is difficult to frame this observation without seeming inflammatory, the most objective reading of the prayer suggests that it is addressed to the one responsible for the actions it describes—actions that are spoken of in a favorable light. In this case, that one would be Satan.
Collect II for the Sunday between July 24 and 30 in Year A may be found in Alternative Collects for the Years A, B, and C in the Revised Common Lectionary (p. 37):
Scandalous God, you sow weeds among the crop,
raise bread with impure yeast,
offer treasure without price
and cast a net that catches good and bad:
throw down our idols of purity and possession,
so that you might reveal in us your wide-branching love;
through Jesus Christ, the stumbling block. Amen.
The second line of this collect is a clear reference to Matthew 13:24-30, Christ’s parable of the weeds. There is no ambiguity in that parable. Jesus speaks of one sowing good seed and another, “an enemy,” who comes and sows weeds among the wheat. For good measure, Jesus even explains the parable and explicitly identifies both the weeds and their sower: “the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.”
Next the collect makes another biblical allusion: “bread with impure yeast.” But here again, this is imagery Jesus uses to warn against the Pharisees and Sadducees, the impure yeast symbolizing the corrupting influence of religious leaders who mislead people (Matt. 16:6, 11-12; Mark 8:15; Luke 12:1). Some may object to this inference, pointing out that Jesus elsewhere uses leaven to describe the growth of his kingdom (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:21), but if these are the passages to which the prayer is alluding, why emphasize that the leaven is “impure”? The reference is unambiguous—and equally unambiguous is Jesus’ meaning.
Yet another biblical reference is made to the dragnet that catches fish of every kind (Matt. 13:47-50). Strangely implying that the net was cast directly by God, not human fishermen, no mention is made of the bad fish being sorted and thrown away. Christ explains, again without ambiguity, that the bad fish are the “wicked” who, at the end of the age, will be taken out from among the righteous and cast into a “blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The Petition and the Purpose
Even if one accepts the suggestion that these actions in Christ’s parables—(1) the sowing of weeds, (2) the raising of impure yeast, (3) the catch of bad fish—are all directly willed by God (which a simple examination of the biblical text contradicts), it raises the question of why? What is the point here? Is the point of these references to remind us that the Church is a mixed community of sinners and saints, elect and reprobate, true disciples of Jesus and wicked imitators? Let’s tease that out.
In his controversy with the Donatists, the heretical group that insisted that only the morally pure are the true Church, Augustine drew richly on Christ’s teaching that the visible Church is a mixed community. Grounded in Scripture, Augustine and many theologians after him have asserted that the Church will have imperfections until the return of Christ at the end of the age.
But Augustine did not see this rejection of Donatism as implying that the Church is beyond discipline, bereft of accountability, incapable of clear teaching, or exempt from seeking holiness of life. In other words, God does not plant the weeds (that’s clearly the devil); God does not raise up the impure yeast (that’s the Pharisees and Sadducees); and God does not send the bad fish (they’re caught by the fishermen and thrown out later).
The petition to which all these references build, the request that God would “throw down our idols of purity,” is founded not on strong rock, but sand (to borrow from another parable). For this prayer does not merely recognize the mixed state of the Church and acknowledge God’s sovereign judgment on the last day while we go about our mission here and now to seek the least, the last, and the lost for Jesus’ sake. No. This prayer, in effect, asks for God to increase our confusion, approve our lack of clarity in teaching, and resign ourselves to our muddled divisions.
To think otherwise, the prayer continues, is to worship “our idols of purity.” This curious collect implies that if one pulls back from the confusion and divisions that its words seem to endorse, one is nothing more than a Puritan idolator rejecting Christ himself, who is the stumbling block (an allusion from Isaiah, Matthew, John, and 1 Corinthians).
A Prayer Answered?
It is staggering how much Scripture this prayer draws upon and, at every turn, inverts. But could it be that this prayer is being answered?
This summer’s meeting of General Synod will consider a report, Creating Pathways, that proposes structural changes to a denomination that has seen “precipitous decline in participation in parishes and congregations across Canada” (p. 3). These are conversations that need to occur, and I believe that major institutional reform is needed. Consider Dr. Cole Hartin’s Covenant essay evaluating the proposals.
But unless this collect is revoked, it is hard for me to see how any reshuffling will revive a church that, on face value, offers a prayer to Satan. Christ teaches in John 8 and John 10 that the devil was a “murderer from the beginning” and that his children come only to “steal, kill, and destroy” the flock of Christ. We simply cannot continue to have a sanctioned prayer that distorts Scripture to offer praise to this enemy who is sworn to our destruction. If we believe this prayer means anything, we should recognize that to continue down this road will bring only what the devil desires: dissolution, decay, and (without hyperbole) death.
Let’s Remove this Prayer
It is my hope that the General Synod will move to revoke this collect from our common life and witness, if not at its meeting this summer (June 23-29), then during the next triennium.
Although the presence of such a prayer in our authorized liturgies is certainly troubling, Anglicans in Canada should not despair. Consider the letters to the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation (2:8-11; 3:7-13). These were also written to identify the influences of the enemy in the churches. But notice that the tone of these letters is affirming, and their purpose is to encourage Christians not to “fear,” to endure “tribulation,” to keep “the word of [Christ’s] perseverance,” and to “overcome.”
It’s also wise to remember that our Anglican formularies anticipate strange developments and departures from the faith. Article XXI states that “General Councils” and synods of the Church “may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God” because they are an assembly of fallible humans, “whereof all be not governed with the Spirit and Word of God.”
Finally, although this prayer was authorized by General Synod in 2019, the 1962 Book of Common Prayer remains our standard of doctrine and worship, and it contains over 60 references to the devil that warn against him and pray for his downfall. For example, in the Great Litany we pray that God would work “to strengthen such as do stand; to encourage the faint-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet.”
I pray that Satan will be beaten down through an effort to remove this deeply problematic collect. But if this does not happen shortly, there is comfort in the very parables to which it alludes. The consistent message of these passages is that God is sovereign, and the matter will be sorted “at the end of the age” (Matt. 13:40). Even so, may that time come “quickly” (Rev. 22:20).
The Rev. Christopher Dow is Chaplain of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto where he oversees worship life, pastoral care, and field education for the seminary community. Previous appointments include rector of St. Jude's Cathedral, Iqaluit and Dean of the Diocese of the Arctic, and parishes in Toronto and Saskatchewan.
