Lent 2

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 If the first Sunday in Lent is all about temptation, the second is all about the call to faith or the recall to faith. Faith is another one of those words that gets thrown around in George Michael songs but which is actually fairly mysterious in Biblical terms. Is it merely believing in something? Is it some sort of system of dogma? So many people talk about faith as if it is some sort of checklist...as if accepting an idea, like the inerrancy of the Bible or the primacy of the Pope is what defines faith. But a close look at the readings for this week, along with the collect suggest that something different is going on here.

The Old Testament readings for this Sunday all have to do with Abram. The one for this year is particularly pointed...it is a short passage that recounts the Lord telling Abram to take his family and go where the Lord tells him...no clue about where that is...just a blind journey. This is a pretty amazing thing to contemplate. Abram's family wasn't just one of our contemporary nuclear families. Abram's house included servants, extended family and probably many other hangers-on plus livestock and other household goods. It would have been a pretty large undertaking. Migrations of this sort would probably not have happened except under duress of some sort. The Bible mentions no sort of calamity, war or famine. One assumes that this journey was taken in time of plenty. What would make someone uproot everything he knew just on a promise from a God you couldn't even see?



Abram gives us an example of the kind of faith that matters to God I think. It's a faith that is expressed as complete trust in God without question. As Paul makes clear, Abram's virtue lies not in what he does, but why he does it. His depth of faith allows him to set off to an unknown land on the promise that he will father nations, and then wait for a long time until that promise comes true. God's promises to Abram fly in the face of reason and yet Abram chooses to believe them and to act from that belief. This radical trust is what is accounted to Abram as righteousness...not his adherence to the law or to some set of beliefs or dogmas. Abram chooses to believe a set of fairly illogical promises and is rewarded for it.

So if faith has something to do with this radical trust, than what does our collect mean? Well, the first thing we are reminded of is that God is merciful. This is not the "just" God in this collect...not the punishing vengeful God we are praying to. Rather it is the God who deeply desires our return...the God of Hosea rather than the God of Joel. We petition this God to bring those who have lost the way back to the fold. In other words, everyone who has lost that deep abiding sense of trust in God. If I am honest I recognize that this is a petition first and formost for myself. I would like to live in that radical trust. And sometimes I can...for a few moments. But inevitably I start to worry, or make plans...or my deep seated need for safety and security keeps me from acting in the radically trusting way of Abram. I would like to be an artist...but I want to pay the rent so I teach. I would love to live in Europe...but where will my money come? So I live paying lip service to the goodness of God, but I don't trust him enough to live that out in any real way.

The call to repentence is a call to that radical faith...to reorienting your life from the values of the world...the false self values of security, esteem and power which were so beautifully illustrated in Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, to the values of Christ. The basic message of the Gospel is that our security is in God...our real esteem comes from God...and any power we have is the power of trust in God. All other values lead away from the Good News. So repentence, rather than being a solemn breast beating, can actually be a joyful return. Bring our mind and heart truly back to God and that will be accounted to us as righteousness.

 

And we don't do this alone. Notice that the collect suggests that God leads us in this. We are taught that what we recieve in prayer is a Grace from God and not due to our own deserving. It is the same with repentence. God grants us the grace to see where our lives have fallen away from that radical trust which is true faith. And then God gently leads us back. This may not happen all at once...or even one time for all. It may be a long series of mini falls and mini returns. But the good news is that God is with us...fixed, and unchangable. We may flit around Him, but he leads us gently and firmly to that great unknown future. We just have to take a deep breath and step in his direction.

Lent 1

See....already messing up!

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

The Proper Liturgy for this day is on page 264.

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou
hast made and dost forgive the sins of all those who are
penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that
we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our
wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The hardest thing about starting off this project in Lent is that ....well it's Lent. Pentitential seasons can be pretty hard on us post-modern Christians. All that kneeling and bowing, and if we are orthodox, prostrating can seem pretty medieval now. And in our culture repentance is something we are pretty uncomfortable with. Look at the death of the art of simple apology. If public figures can't even offer a simple unequivocal apology when clearly caught out in something wrong, what hope is there for any genuine contrition. It's simply out of fashion.

And yet there's something about Lent. I look forward to it every year. All the self-denial and discipline stuff appeals to me in some way. Rather than think of it as penance...or even self-denial...I like to think of it as slowing down my life to make room for something deeper. Eat less...because my uncontrolled weight is interferring with all of the good things I would like to do in my life for myself and for others. Stop watching frivolous TV....because since becoming addicted to reality TV I've read far less than usual and can often use an episode of Survivor as an excuse not to pray. Looked at this way, at least for me, it's not about depriving myself but actually about really nourishing myself spiritually...taking time to live out the values I profess to have.

At first glance the Ash Wednesday Collect can be pretty intimidating. I chose the old traditional language version because...why not actually. The contemporary version is no more friendly than this one...all of the language of "wrechedness" and "lamenting our sins" is found in both versions. But if you read it more carefully this Collect, together with the readings for the Ash Wednesday service, provide a beautiful tutorial on what pentitence really is. 

First look at the salutation and it's attribution - Almighty and everlasting God who hatest nothing that thou hast made. Despite what we might feel...our inner guilt and doubt...we are immediately reminded that it is impossible for God to hate what God has made. And we are made in the image of God, and God pronounced us good from the beginning...before the fall...before Cain killed Abel...God saw us as his own creation, loved us and pronounced us good. We may have strayed far from that original blessing, but God continues to love us and will forever. Therefore, messages of God's hate are far from us...at least in my church. We may disagree about, say, the sinfulness of gay people amoung ourselves, but we can NEVER hold a sign that says "God Hates Fags"...because God hates nothing that he has made.

Having assured us of God's love and his willing forgiveness, the collect continues by asking nothing less than that God completely remake our hearts. This is a request for radical change and not to be taken lightly. The implications of the request are actually kind of terrifying when you think of it seriously. More often than not I think I end up following that famous prayer of Augustine's "Lord make me good, but not just yet." I want to repent...but just to keep this "little" sin in my back pocket. That's not what we are asking God in this collect...we are asking for new and contrite hearts, not our current hearts which are puffed up with pride, arrogance, sloth, laziness, and so many other petty and not so petty sins.

Then the fruits of this request are even more difficult and run even more counter to the currents in our time. We hope that we will worthily lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness and thus obtain forgivness. Wow does that run counter to our culture. Think about it. When was the last time you really lamented your sinfullness? When was the last time you really felt your own wretchedness? It's not a particularly joyful or popular thing to do. It can feel demeaning. It afflicts our egos, and we live in a time where false self-esteem is almost deified. The whole idea of this can be very off putting. But I think of it this way.

We live in the light of the love of God. It can be hard sometimes to remember that, but God's love is so great that it surrounds the very atoms of our being. It is so great that is it infinitely higher than any human love we can imagine. When we stand in the perfection of that love, in prayer and contemplation, we become aware of all the things in our lives that don't reflect that precious gift. We see all the ways in which we shut out that love...or repay that love with petulance. So all sin is actually a failure to live up to the wonderful gift of love that God is giving us moment by moment. We are imperfect and will never be able to live up to that standard. But when we are able to stand before God and really see ourselves as we are and not as we'd like to be...see every little blemish...something marvelous can happen. That love can enter us. It can heal us, which is really what remission of sins is...it's healing the disease of sin which we all have inherited either through the original rebellion of our first parents (the traditional reading) or through the consequences of our upbringing (the psychological reading which I believe is actually what original sin means....sin passed down through generations by upbringing.) That beautiful gift of forgiveness...the remission of sins...all of that is  possible, but only if we let it be possible. Without repentence we don't know we are sick.

So ultimately, this collect is calling us to a thorough examination of our lives. We must bring it all to God, who knows it anyway. Acknowledging our inability to change without the love and mercy of God is the first step in real transformation. And the first step in the beautiful journey of this Holy Season.

Have a blessed and Holy Lent everyone.

Welcome to A Year with the Collects

Welcome to my new blog. I've been thinking for a long while about doing a weekly spiritual discipline based on the Church Year and have recently found a lot of meaning in the weekly collects of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. With today as the start of Lent it seemed to make sense to add this to my observance this year. So this is one Episcopal layperson's attempt to meditate and wrestle with these beautiful legacies of Anglican heritage.

The Collects are traditional prayers used in Anglican worship since the time of Thomas Cranmer. Along with the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare they are glories of high Tudor English. The collects most traditionally have three or four distinct moments in them.
1. The salutation to god, often followed by a listing of a particular divine attribute.
2. A particular petition to God.
3. The benefit hoped to be derived from the granting of the petition.
4. A closing formula which includes one or more members of the Trinity.

As an example, every Sunday Eucharist in the Episcopal Church begins with the Collect for Purity, a beautiful and haunting prayer which illustrates a perfect four part structure:
1. Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:
2. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit,
3. that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name;
4. through Christ our Lord. Amen

This simple succinct structure is repeated in almost all prayer in the Anglican church, to surprising variety and often quite beautiful poetry. Though there are certainly longer prayer forms such as litanies and the beautiful and complicated Eucharistic Prayers, the vast majority of prayer in Sunday services and the Daily Office is created in the form of Collects.

Though there can be collects for any petition, and indeed there is nothing stopping any individual from composing original collects for particular needs, there is a special set of collects which are dear to the hearts of many worshipers and these are the Collects for the Church Year. Each Sunday a different collect is prayed, and usually is read for the entire Daily Office of the next week. Together with the Lectionary Readings, these collects announce the theme of each Sunday. Thus each of the four collects of Advent shine with the increasing excitement the anticipation of Christmas, as well as the second Advent which Christians proclaim and which is one of the major themes of the season. The collects of Epiphany are filled with divine light, as it shines in the season through the Star of Bethlehem, the Baptism of Christ and the final Sunday of the season with it's commemoration of the Tranfiguration. The Lenten collects are a veritable treatise on repentance, climaxing with the Solemn collects of Good Friday. Each collect of the Sundays after Easter commemorate the appearances of Jesus after his Resurrection, culminating in the gift of the Holy Spirit in Pentacoast. And the long season of Ordinary Time explores all the facets of our common Christian life, week by week, culminating in the beautiful meditations on our earthly death and Christ's eternal Kingship which round out the Church year.

A little bit about me. I've had a long and pretty circuitous spiritual journey. My dad was a minister in the United Church of Christ (often lovingly teased as Unitarians Considering Christ). Church was a very important part of my young life and I was lucky to have parents who were sensitive to my spiritual development and allowed me a lot of freedom to explore. So for much of my life I tried a lot of spiritual paths and religions: Sufism, nine years in the Gurdjieff work, a short lived flirtation with Wicca, a longer flirtation with Buddhism, both Zen and Tibetan. I love and honor all the paths I tried because I know I learned valuable things from each of them. But I read a quote from the Dalai Lama that got me thinking. He said something to this effect: that if you could go back to your earliest religious tradition, if you weren't too scarred by it, that you should because it would speak to you more deeply. I thought about it and realized that I had no damage from my brand of Christianity, and even more, that I was still deeply attached to it.

Soon after that I discovered the Centering Prayer group at a small Episcopal Church in Washington DC. Contemplative prayer, along with meditative reading of scripture and the beauties of the Eucharist nourished my spirit in very deep ways and I was received into the Episcopal Church. I have been a pretty regular church goer for the last twelve years, with some lapses here and there due to my own petulance...(I had a pretty ridiculous fight with God for a few years...luckily He was patient with me.) For me, the trappings of Anglicanism are both deeply moving and often kind of funny. Mostly I thank God every day that I've been able to find something that nourishes my soul so deeply and provides me with what I've pretty much spent my life looking for.

I claim no great liturgical or Christian knowledge in this blog. Undoubtedly many people will disagree with things I write here. I pray that people can disagree in the spirit of Christian Love and Charity...or even better...just plain Human Love and Charity. I don't have all the answers...not by half. But these are my best attempts at making sense of my continuing journey in the faith and if they spark thought or lively debate in anyone then I am happy I did this.

A note on the texts:

I will probably use more of the Contemporary Collects from the 1979 BCP, though if the traditional language of a collect is particularly beautiful I may use those at times too. I love both forms, the old collects for their poetry and the new ones for their comprehensibility. To me all Prayer Books are beautiful. I can be moved by some of the most High Churchy prayers from the 1928 book and by some of the most poetic passages from the New Zealand Prayer Book. Nor do I think the Anglican Church has a corner on the prayer market. All traditions have their riches. But this is my blog and I reserve the right to respond to the texts as they move me. Others may feel differently, but I do urge people to remember, beautiful as it all is...it's only language and worship style. (Ok Ok...that's the UCC in me coming out.)