Lent 5: Ordered in Will and Purpose

Lent 5 (2012)
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

Almighty God,

you alone can bring into order the unruly wills
and affections of sinners:

Grant your people grace to love what you command
and desire what you promise;

that, among the swift and varied changes of the world,

our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When it comes to the human condition, what exactly are unruly wills, dis-ordered affections? The collect assumes our human wills and affections – that is, our emotions – to be in fact unmanageable; indeed that it is these unmanageable wills and affections which cast us as sinners. I don’t need to tell you that none of this has much truck among “modern, forward-thinking” people, many of them Episcopalians who have fled to the Episcopal Church from other more censorious denominations. Like the proverbial “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” many of us have come to the Episcopal Church in order to rid ourselves of deprecating theology that labels human wills and affections unruly, identifies us as sinners off the bat. And then we come across a collect like this one. What are we to do? Well, as Anglicans have always done, we look at our hsitory, we examine the tradition.

Like most of the collects we have been looking at during Lent, this one has a long history, coming to us from the Gelasian Sacramentary to the Sarum Missal, from which it was translated by Archbishop Cranmer for the very first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. At the 1552 revision of the Prayer Book it continued to be included as the collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter, as it had been in the Sarum Usage and in the 1549 BCP. It remained in that place in subsequent Prayer Books, and only in our 1979 revision was it moved to the fifth Sunday in Lent. However, it didn’t make it unchanged down through the centuries, and the preamble we know today – “Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners” – is not the original from the ancient sources, neither is it that which Cranmer translated and included in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, or that which appeared in the revisions of 1559 or 1604. In all of these the prayer’s opening read, “Almighty God, which dost make the minds of all faithful men to be of one will.” The words were revised in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer – the one book that has never known a revision in the Church of England. The reason for the change to what seem much harsher words is unclear. However, the context of that last revision – the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the eventual restoration of the monarchy in the person of King Charles II – may have gone some way in shaping the revisers’ work to mention specifically the “unruly wills and affections of sinful men.”

All this being said, the collects’ particular preambles need not be understood as opposed to each other. In fact, both express in their own way the reality that it is only through God’s action in our lives that we human beings find order and unity. Now, the word order may have some pretty uncomfortable connotations for us living in the post-modern world. It may have militaristic connotations, or conjure up images of repressive regimes, dogmatic institutions. But, it is not helpful here to understand it in this way. Order as used in the collect is about the proper balance of things, about a situation “in which everything is in its correct or appropriate place”. Order is what God observed in creation when he declared “it was very good”. In God’s order everything and everyone has its place, and hence all things are one in will and purpose. What order hints at in the collect, and in religious thought generally, is the unity of all things according to God’s plan for creation.

It is on account of the brokenness of creation – best exemplified, perhaps, in the “unruly wills and affections” of a sinful humanity – that perfect order has been disrupted and undermined; and we sometimes forget that the entire Judeao-Christian enterprise, the one over-riding narrative arch of Scripture is the story of a return to that order, that balance, that unity of will and purpose among the Creator and the created – from the calling of Abraham to the Book of Revelation – chronicling the process of God’s revealing the divine will to make all things new (cf. Revelation 21:5), while the whole time knowing that as human beings we cannot do this by or for ourselves. In the face of people’s broken covenants and disloyalty, we see how God still takes the initiative to fix their hearts “where true joys are to be found” by putting his law within them, writing it on their hearts and re-establishing order when he says “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” In Jesus, in his life and teaching and death, among “the swift and varied changes of the world”, God enacts his will for unity and order as Jesus proclaims “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:33) But it is in the resurrection of Jesus that is definitively inaugurated God’s renewal of all things, in which God’s desire is vindicated and a new creation established. Yes, the resurrection is nothing less than that, the beginning of God’s re-creation, and in baptism we are joined to this new creation, we are made part it, we are caught up in God’s will and purpose to make all things new.

However, we may be gettng ahead of ourselves. Easter is – seasonally at least – two still weeks away. We are now only in Lent, and we know that for something new to arise, something old must die. It’s usually that part of it we don’t like, or are unwilling to face. You see, you can have the old order, the present order, or you can have the new one, but you can’t have both; and only by dying to the old one can we enter into or allow ourselves to be born into the new: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) We die to the old by first accepting our brokeness, coming to terms with the truth that our wills and affections are indeed often unruly. Yet, this does not require of us breast-beating or self-loathing, but rather acceptance of the reality into which we have been baptized, that even in our brokeness God has begun a new creation in us and daily, daily through his grace and love God is completing what his work has begun. We are daily gifted with his grace so that we might be able love what he commands – peace, justice, compassion – and desire what he promises – our re-creation and renewal into God’s image and likeness, that we may be joined in will and purpose with him and with all creation, that we may find our place in God’s vision and God’s order. This week’s collect – far from being simply a bit of antiquated theology or a deprecating assessment of humanity – strikes at the heart of Christian faith, pointing to its central mystery, the Resurrection as sign of God’s desire to create us anew, indeed to make all things new. The collect draws us back to the purposes for which we were created: to take our appropriate place in God’s sacred order of creation and to there be fixed where true joys”, true happiness, “are to be found”.