Last Minute Thoughts
As you make final preparations for the festivals of Pentecost and/or Holy Trinity, I commend to you the Lutheran-Orthodox Joint Statement on the Filioque: A Study Guide from the ELCA. In addition to history, theology, and a Bible Study, the resource contains suggestions for hymns and language for liturgy.
This year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council, and we are also celebrating the joint statement by the Lutheran World Federation and the Orthodox Church on what we call the Filioque clause (“and the Son”)—a later addition made by the Latin Church in an attempt to resolve yet another dispute — which contributed to division between the Eastern and Western churches for almost a millennium. In our Evangelical Lutheran Worship books, you will see a * next to the Filioque clause whenever the Nicene Creed is printed.
As I began learning about this old addition, reacquainted myself with the original council, read the joint statement and the study guide, and participated in a webinar for ELCA bishops, what I found most helpful was a sentiment expressed by Pastor Dirk Lange, Lutheran World Federation Assistant General Secretary for Ecumenical Relations. Lange said that it may be time to now drop the Filioque clause, but what is far most important about all this is the conversation, the conversation about the Trinity which can in turn inform our conversations about our relationships with God and one another. For me at least, this notion and invitation made the whole topic that much more relevant.
The love, relationality, and symbiosis within the Trinity invites us in. Furthermore, like the Holy Communion table where all can feast, like the font where all can be made new, like a day in natural world with our feet planted on God’s good creation, the Trinity itself gives us a glimpse of God’s future reign which is at once already and not yet, or, as the Creed’s last line puts it, “in the life of the world to come”
And so, please look at the study guide as we approach Pentecost and Holy Trinity Sundays or pick it up as a church council or study group later this summer. Those of us going to ELCA Churchwide Assembly in Phoenix at the end July and early August will be gathering under the theme “For the life of the world,” a theme informed by the Nicene Creed, Bishop Eaton’s articulation of who we are as church, the wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and even the purpose statements in our church constitutions.
Finally, make sure to check out the hymn section in the study guide. And on that note, I’ll leave you with this link to a relatively new Trinity song: Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines (All Creation Sings 1087). To this Gen Xer, this piece by Paul Vasile, who many of us know from his time with Music that Makes Community, feels like what Jay Beech might write today, and I mean that as high praise.
Peace,
Bishop Meggan Manlove