O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.
And so opens our tradition’s daily morning prayer. Every morning, we begin with these words, with the leader starting, ‘O Lord open our lips’, and the gathered people respond ‘And our mouth shall proclaim your praise’. Every day. Today, again I came upon the place in scripture where this opening proclamation originates. Finding these bits of scripture that were cobbled together in the 16th Century is like finding a treasure.
It’s not that I think that our deeply traditional faith would make up things. My tradition is deeply grounded in scripture. Unfortunately, Episcopal churches and other mainline churches have been charged with being not biblically based, or that we don’t know scripture. My tradition is incredibly biblically based. Praying Morning and Evening prayer every day would result in working through the psalms every 70 days, and the majority of the rest of scripture every two years, with the exception of 1&2 Chronicles, and the books in the Apocrypha which many protestant churches don’t read at all.
It was Thomas Cranmer, back in the 16th century who suggested that Anglicans should have a way to pray and read their way through scripture, and the Daily Office was created.
In addition to the bits of Old and New Testaments, and Psalms that are appointed for twice-daily reading, there are bits of scripture taken and prayed daily, including this bit from Psalm 51. These are the treasures I’m finding as I read through the whole Bible, and it grounds my tradition’s Daily Office even more deeply in scripture for me.
O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise. It is God who allows me to open my mouth. It is God that could just as easily shut my mouth. It is God who gives me words to say, thoughts to have, musings to write. It is God who could just as easily not. All that I see and think comes from God. My part of this is pretty big too. I could choose to not speak. I could choose to speak something other than God’s light and love. I could choose not to reflect or write or pray, even when I’m full of God’s light, love and reflections.
What this simple opening proclamation says to me is that it is up to God to give me the opportunities to pray, think, reflect and write. It is up to me to do it. If God gives me the reflections and thoughts, I will use that to proclaim God’s praise. That is up to me; it’s my half of the relationship. True, without God’s inspiration and grace I would have nothing to pray or be faithful about or write about. But without my willingness to go along, I wouldn’t pray, have faith or write. It takes two both of us.
That sounds almost heretical, as if I am on par with God. That’s not what I’m suggesting, but I do think that without my consent, God’s best laid plans would lay fallow. (mixed metaphor?)
This is at the core of a spiritual practice called Centering Prayer. The pray-er prays “I consent to God’s presence and action within me”. This irked some classmates of mine, as they didn’t understand why their consent was necessary. But without our consent, God has a much more difficult time being present on this earth. God certainly doesn’t need my hands and feet, but it sure makes God’s work easier, if I consent. Many hands make light work?
So today, I pray that God will grace me with the abilities and insights as God sees fit, and I pray that I will use that and open my mouth to proclaim God’s praise. And I will be more intentional about that two-part prayer every morning when I utter these words.
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