Those Things that are Right
A reflection on the Collect for Proper 14: The Sunday closest to August 10
Today’s Collect of the Day1 is Proper 14 (The Sunday closest to August 10):
Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This prayer asks God would enable us to think and do “those things that are right” and “live according to [God’s] will,” which reminds me of a significant paradigm shift in my faith about how God’s will relates to that which is right and good.
Is God’s will arbitrary?
I used to assume that things were “good and right” simply because God says they are. In this view, there really is no standard of goodness besides “whatever God says,” even if it seems arbitrary or even downright evil. There isn’t really any such thing as “goodness” in this view, in fact, because there is only God’s (supposed) will. “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” as the saying goes.
So if God commands something that seems abhorrent to me, my abhorrence is the problem, because it’s impeding my ability to rejoice in God’s will (which is the only thing that determines whether something is good or bad).
But this view creates all kinds of moral problems. It stunts our theological and ethical reasoning, because it doesn’t give us any basis on which to question our inherited interpretations of scripture. For example, we may never feel permission to question a teaching like the eternal conscious torment of those who don’t trust Jesus before they die, because if God (supposedly) wills it, it must be “good,” and to question it is to question God, and now you’re on a slippery slope to hell.
God wills what’s good and right because it’s good and right
But now I take a different approach. Now I think that things are good and right in themselves, and we can tell what is good and right because it will always lead humanity and creation toward greater holistic flourishing. Furthermore, then, God wills what God wills because God knows it to be good and right. Ultimately this means we can rest in the fact that God’s intent is for human flourishing, and God’s commands are thus unto human flourishing.
This seems to be inherent in the New Testament teaching that love summarizes and fulfills the entire law (Gal 5:14, Rom 13:8-10), and that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). In other words, there is a deep underlying principle to God’s commands (they aren’t expressions of an arbitrary will), and that principle is summed up in the goodness of love (Matt 22:34-40).
This also means that we can discern when a previous interpretation and application of God’s commands may no longer meet God’s intent (human flourishing). For example, it was good and right for the ancient Israelites to offer well-being sacrifices, because it helped them trust that God was near. But today, those kinds of sacrifices no longer do that kind of work for us, psychologically or sociologically, and thus woodenly “obeying” that command no longer serves God’s will.
God is good, then
So we can trust that there is such a thing as goodness and truth and beauty, and that if God is love, then God will only ever command that which is good and truthful and beautiful. Jesus invites this kind of thinking when he says, for example, “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (Matt 7:11). In other words, God is at least as good as the best person you know.
This gives us a basis on which to wrestle with troublesome texts, where God appears to command that which is evil (like genocide and murder). Rather than blithely accept genocide as “good” sometimes because “God willed it”, we can reason backward from what Jesus reveals: that God is love, and love does no harm to a neighbor (Rom 13:10), so there must be something else happening in the text that we don’t yet understand.
So as we pray that we would have a spirit to think and do “those things that are right” and “live according to God’s will”, we can have confidence that God’s will is that we would be filled with love, and learn to give and receive love in the Body of Christ and with our neighbors. It isn’t about some kind of self-righteous piety that prides itself on its flawless performance. It’s about learning to love one another in the nitty gritty of our complicated lives.
Thinking and doing
One final reflection on this collect. We ask for a spirit to both “think and do” those things that are right. The connection between thinking and doing is important. Both must be exercised together for deep transformation of our character to take place. To merely focus on doing right leads to harsh moralism, and to merely focus on thinking right leads to hypocritical intellectualism.
Notice the connection Paul makes between thinking and doing in Philippians 4:8-9:
From now on, brothers and sisters, if anything is excellent and if anything is admirable, focus your thoughts on these things: all that is true, all that is holy, all that is just, all that is pure, all that is lovely, and all that is worthy of praise. Practice these things: whatever you learned, received, heard, or saw in us. The God of peace will be with you.
We focus our thoughts on that which is true and holy and just and pure and lovely, and we also focus on practicing those things. Thinking and doing work together to create a virtuous cycle (or a vicious one, if we focus our thoughts and actions in the wrong place), mutually feeding and strengthening one another as we practice focusing our thoughts and practicing that which is good.
Every Sunday I reflect on the “Collect of the Day” from the Book of Common Prayer. A collect is a simple form of prayer designed to “collect” the longings of God’s people and distill them into a succinct, theologically robust request. The Book of Common Prayer has a wide variety of collects for all kinds of circumstances and needs, and assigns a specific collect to be prayed on each Sunday of the liturgical year, and then at Morning and Evening Prayer throughout the following week—the “Collect of the Day.”