Today is the last day of Lent, so, while I’ll be continuing to explore prayers during Holy Week, today marks the last official post in this series. So I thought it would be more than appropriate to look at the doxology (’word of praise’) that concludes many contemporary Anglican Eucharistic rite as its final hoorah. The text itself is a slight paraphrase from Ephesians 3.20-21:
Glory to God,
whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more
than we can ask or imagine.
Glory to God from generation to generation,
in the Church and in Christ Jesus,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
This is a remarkable prayer based on a remarkable piece of Scripture. (See the preceding link for a longer discussion of it.) We’ve spent much of this series praising God for what God has done: God’s Wisdom of creation, God’s faithfulness in salvation history, God’s presence for us in the sacraments. Here we praise God for what God had has done, is doing, and can and will do in and through us.
It’s the perfect prayer, then, with which to end the Eucharist service, and this Lenten season too. There’s not a sense that we’re done, that we’ve done our duty and gone to Church on Sunday morning (or whenever) and can now forget it all until next week. It reminds us that the real work of being a Christian starts when we leave our worship services and reenter the world. We’ve done our necessary business with God (praise, thanksgiving, confession), reoriented our hearts and minds (recalling salvation history, spending time in community, hearing the Scriptures read and explained, confessing the words of the Creed), and been empowered through the sacrament. Now we go out into the world and try once again to live as we are called to live, being as Christ to everyone around us. This is that “infinitely more than wen can ask or imagine” that “God’s power working in us” “can do.”
Glory to God indeed!
Glory to God,
whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more
than we can ask or imagine.
Glory to God from generation to generation,
in the Church and in Christ Jesus,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
Matthew Root 