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‘New Ways of Imagining God’

The Rev. Ruth Meyers of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific speaks with diaconal postulant Dani Gabriel in Sojourners about liturgical revision:

Gabriel: Can you say a little more about how this work fits in with larger movements for social justice?

Meyers: Some of the movements for social justice are rooted in Christian faith. If you go back to Mary’s song in Luke, that song is a song of justice. It’s about God who cast down the mighty, raises up the lonely, and satisfies the hungry. That echoes Hannah’s song in Samuel after she’s given birth to a child. The language of our prayer, however perfectly or imperfectly, can capture that image of God. Having a language of our prayer that more fully captures that liberating sense of God is an important piece of it.

Gabriel: Can you say a little bit about same sex marriage and prayer book revision and why it’s important?

Meyers: So, bottom line, when the prayer book was revised in 1979, the world understood marriage as between a man and a woman. The 1979 prayer book says that marriage is covenant between a man and a woman. As long as that’s in the prayer book, then we don’t have full marriage equality.

… Gabriel: What is your vision? What do you think a revised prayer book could do?

Meyers: A revised prayer book could give us new ways of imagining God and understanding ourselves as children of God. It could be a real force for proclamation of the gospel to people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as Christian. I think it can give us a much deeper understanding and appreciation of creation and our role in caring for creation. We have some of that in the prayer book now, but in a time when the world is literally on fire and we are at a huge ecological crisis, it could, because of the power of language, subtly reshape our understanding and relationship to the world in which we live in a way that might enable us to take better care of it.

Read the rest.

Matthew Townsend is the former news editor of The Living Church and former editor of the Anglican Journal. He lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

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