United to One Another With Pure Affection

A reflection on the Collect for Proper 9: The Sunday closest to July 6

Today’s Collect of the Day¹ is Proper 9 (The Sunday closest to July 6):

O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This collect reminds us that, for as challenging as it can be sometimes, living as a Christian is blessedly simple: we learn to live in love. That’s really it. We keep all God’s commandments by keeping the one commandment Jesus gave us: love one another (John 13:34). Whoever loves fulfills the Law (Rom 13:8).

We do not have this capacity to love within ourselves naturally, so we ask God for the grace of the Holy Spirit to empower us to “be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection.” Our devotion to God and our unity with one another are not two separate graces, but rather two aspects of one gift—they grow together. To have an abundance of one is to have an abundance of the other. To lack one is to lack the other. We might say that we love God by loving one another. Or, as the Apostle John put it quite starkly, “Those who say, ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars” (1 John 4:20).

One of the challenges of learning to live in this love is that there are people involved. The people we are called to love are not always the people we get along with naturally. We all have pestiferous peccadillos and personality peculiarities that perturb those around us. We’re all a little hard to love and require the pity and forgiveness of those closest to us to make life bearable for each other.

We all carry around a built-in “affinity bias.” We are oriented toward people and experiences that are pleasant for us, that don’t require too much from us. But if we unreflectively follow this impulse, we’ll never really learn to love one another and be “united to one another with pure affection.”

Paul’s affinity affection for the churches

The word “affection” is really standing out to me as I reflect on this collect, and it makes me think about the Apostle Paul’s interactions with the churches he planted. Specifically, I’m struck by the exuberant, overflowing affection he expresses for the diverse, often troubled churches he wrote to.

• “God is my witness that I feel affection for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:8).

• “We were gentle with you like a nursing mother caring for her own children. We were glad to share not only God’s good news with you but also our very lives because we cared for you so much” (1 Thess 2:7-8).

• “My little children, I’m going through labor pains again until Christ is formed in you.” (Gal 4:19).

• “After Paul said these things, he knelt down with all of them to pray. They cried uncontrollably as everyone embraced and kissed Paul. They were especially grieved by his statement that they would never see him again” (Acts 20:36-38).

This breathtaking affection co-exists with the massive problems Paul had to address in these churches. The affection Paul expresses is clearly something stronger and more robust than the mild feelings of enjoyment that come from spending time with people you enjoy. Paul isn’t expressing the easy “hanging out” of affinity, he’s expressing the hard-won affection that only comes from surrendering to the grace of the Holy Spirit who teaches us to love each other.

From convenient affinity to cultivated affection

It would seem that being “devoted to God with our whole heart and united to one another with pure affection” means we’ll need to shift from relying on a convenient affinity with people we like and lean into a cultivated affection for those we find ourselves in community with. To receive “the grace of the Holy Spirit” is to move from what is inherent and natural (affinity) to that which is intentional and nurtured (affection).

Affinity takes our desires as they are, affirms them and makes us feel good about them when we spend time with other people who have the same ones. Affection calls us to cultivate new desires, to have our desires shaped by the desire of God, to be with people we wouldn’t normally want to be with, for the sake of the gospel. It takes intentional cultivation for it to grow. (For an extended study of this dynamic of the Christian life, pick up a copy of Willie James Jennings’ theological commentary on the Book of Acts.)

For consumers, preference is the law. An unalienable right. For the Body of Christ, preference is just preference, which is fine as far is it goes, but eventually it goes on the altar along with everything else as we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to participate ever more fully in the life God shares with us.

The beautiful thing is that, as we burst the narrow, comfortable confines of mere affinity and begin exploring the wide open (and often scary) world of learning affection for those who aren’t like us, we find the grace of the Holy Spirit there to enable us to do what we could not do in our own strength alone: love one another as Christ loves us.

1. 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.”