What Things We Ought To Do

A reflection on the Collect for Proper 10: The Sunday closest to July 13

Today’s Collect of the Day¹ is Proper 10 (The Sunday closest to July 13):

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

A prayer for discernment

That we would know what to do, and have the power to faithfully do it: the Collect of the Day is a simple but profound prayer for discernment.

The Christian life requires wisdom and discernment, because it is a life—full of complex and beautiful and heart-wrenching situations that defy our desire for simplistic answers and obvious paths.

The Christian life requires wisdom and discernment, because the Bible isn’t a list of instructions for everyone everywhere in every age to slavishly comply to. The Bible is God’s word, to be sure, but it comes to us as stories, poems, prophetic rants, songs, and letters written to very different people who lived in very different times. It requires careful, communal interpretation to perceive what the Spirit might be saying to the church today.

The Christian life requires wisdom and discernment, because God is still present and at work in the world and in our lives, speaking fresh words of healing and hope to us through the Holy Spirit in the various relationships and circumstances of our lives. We must learn to pay attention to God’s movement in and around us and stay in step with the Spirit, because the specific actions that were faithful yesterday may not be faithful today. There is no autopilot setting for the Christian life.

Because the Christian life requires wisdom and discernment, we pray today that we would know and understand the things we ought to do, and have the grace and power we need to faithfully accomplish them. Amen.

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.”