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The Second Sunday In Lent
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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The Second Sunday In Lent
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Scripture citation(s): Romans 6:3-14
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Romans 6:3-14
✛
A Prayer for Others
Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent
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O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
That collect for today, the second Sunday in Lent, is new to the current (1979) Book of Common Prayer, and that may be a surprise, because it contains a seemingly old-fashioned claim that Christianity has unchangeable truth and that people who have gone astray from God’s ways need to come back and embrace and hold fast that truth, which truth is unabashedly and forthrightly identified as christological, the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son. These are robust claims, and it is bracing to find them put forth to us by our church for us to embrace also. This is not a wishy-washy collect of a church uncertain of what it believes.
This collect may also surprise because it is a prayer for other people, that is to say, it is not a prayer for the sake of the person who is praying it. A lot of lenten prayers are for people that include us as we pray the prayers. Last week’s collect, for instance, asked God to help people who are being tempted—a category that certainly includes anyone praying that prayer, for even Jesus himself was tempted. But anyone who is able to say, with today’s collect, that there is unchangeable truth in Jesus Christ is not a person who has gone astray from that truth; at least, a person praying this prayer has not gone so far astray as to deny that there is such a thing as unchangeable truth in Jesus. Indeed, the prayer embodies the Trinity, with its address to God who is the Father of Jesus Christ thy Son, and who liveth and reigneth with that Son and the Holy Spirit. A person praying this collect places herself or himself within the being of the Trinity, exactly where Saint Paul says prayer occurs. Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans (not the part we read this evening—I’ll get to that) that it is the Holy Spirit within us who cries out to God using Jesus’ words, Abba, Father. To pray a strong collect in the traditional Christian form is to place oneself squarely within the dynamics of God’s own, triune being.
Today’s collect, in other words, is praying for people who cannot pray it. It is not, strictly speaking, praying for all people who do not know Jesus, but for those who did know him, those who were once walking in God’s ways, but have now gone astray and who need to acquire penitent hearts and reacquire steadfast faith. This prayer, in other words, suggests that to wander astray from Christianity is a sin, because it is only with regard to sins that one needs to be penitent. This is a third remarkable thing about the collect. Not only is it a new composition, and not only is it for other people, but it asserts that there are sins of faith, something like intellectual sins, sins of perhaps overly proud minds who willfully turn away from walking in the paths of truth.
Yet I want to say that, implicitly, this collect contains a petition for us, a petition, namely, that we would care about people who have gone astray from God’s ways, people who used to be, but have ceased being, Christians. Here for one Sunday, instead of praying that we would be able to resist temptation, or that we would endure sufferings, or that we would be raised with Jesus, or that we would be strengthened daily by the Holy Ghost, or any of the hundred other things that we often pray about for ourselves, here we pray that we would care about what happens to others, care in particular about what is happening to people who once were close to Jesus, but are now moving away.
These, I think, may be the hardest people to pray for in the world. It is easy for me to pray for myself. It is also easy for us to pray for ourselves. It is, moreover, relatively easy to pray for people who are so unlike us they’ve never been near to Jesus, people who don’t know the first thing about Christianity. But to pray for people who were walking with us, people who were on the road with us but have turned away, that’s hard.
It’s much easier just to let them go.
The implicit prayer is for us to care. But how do we show care for people who have gone astray? The collect gives an implicit answer: that we be in the place we ask God to bring them, a place of penitent hearts that hold fast the unchangeable truth—which is to say, that we long to be ourselves holy and wise.
Holiness is the desire to be close to God, and no one can draw close to God without a penitent heart. If we desire holiness for ourselves, we will be attractive, and God can use us in his mercy to bring back to himself those who have gone astray from him.
The second part of being God’s agent of mercy is truth. The collect says that to return to God is with steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word. God can use us, and we show our care for others, when we are bold ourselves to proclaim this unchangeable truth that is Jesus.
The heart of that unchangeable truth is that Jesus was dead as a doornail on Friday and alive on Sunday. I turn now (as promised) to Romans 6, read this evening, but also (stopping at verse 11) read at the Easter Vigil. This passage combines holiness—turning away from sin, our collect’s penitent hearts—with the core truth about Jesus. When I’ve been the one to read this passage at the Easter Vigil, I have often found myself swept up with excitement, even shouting by the end of it. We were baptized into Jesus’ death, Paul says. We’ve been buried with him. And so our old man has been crucified with him and we do not need to serve sin any more. And then the crescendo comes:
8 Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:
9 Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.
10 For in that he died, he died until sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.
11 Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
May we care enough that others, who have turned away from God, would turn back and in holiness of life embrace that unchangeable truth. Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more!
Let us pray it again: O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
