A Sunday Prayer
There’s a very simple prayer for Sundays in Morning Prayer. It is in fact a prayer known as a “collect,” which has a short, fixed form. First: God is identified by something in particular that he does or has done. Second: A request is made of God. Third: The purpose of the request is stated. The collect ends by making clear that the prayer is made “through” Jesus.
In this particular Sunday collect, God is identified as making us glad, every week, when we remember that Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday, the first day of the week. Every Sunday is a “little Easter,” even the Sundays in Lent or Christmas or whenever. It was on Sunday that Jesus rose from the dead, and the principal meaning of every Sunday is his resurrection. And if we remember that with gladness, it is God himself who is making us glad. I think God does that in two ways. He is the source of the action—he raised his Son from the dead; resurrection is divine power in action! But a person of unsound mind might know about the resurrection without finding it a source of gladness. (The devil, for instance, is not made glad by the resurrection.) So that we are glad is God’s work in us also. God makes us glad by doing the deed and by working in us that we respond with joy to it.
Then we ask God to bless us in our worship on Sunday. The collect assumes, as is right for Christians, that we worship on Sunday. Our prayer to God is that our worship be a blessing to us.
For what purpose, this blessing? “That the days to come may be spent in thy favor.” The blessing is for the Sunday worship to stretch its influence over the entire week, that everything we do is pleasing to God. We want to be blessed so as to live in God’s favor.
I say, it’s a simple collect, a prayer easy to grasp (even memorize, if you’d like to memorize another prayer). Here it is entire: O God, who makest us glad with the weekly remembrance of the glorious resurrection of thy Son our Lord: Grant us this day such blessing through our worship of thee, that the days to come may be spent in thy favor; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
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Out & About. Sunday, July 26, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. On Sunday, August 2, I am to preach at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.
Save the Date: The Dallas Fall Theology Lecture has been set for Sunday, Oct. 4, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. I will speak on “What’s Salvation Have to Do with It? Reflections after the Camino.”
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On the Web. I wrote a short theological reflection, “Robots and Clones and Humans,” to introduce a couple of novels by Kazuo Ishiguro that are worth reading, and thinking with, in our age of uncertainty about being human. (I’ve had seminars on both these books.) In the more recent one, Klara and the Sun (2021), Ishiguro wrote about the interior life of a particularly empathetic robot. In the world of the novel, parents have only one child and a number of negative consequences follow. To help their child mature in this world, the best parents purchase for their child an Artificial Friend; Klara is one such AF. At one point she does a particularly dangerous self-sacrifice of needed fluid to try to help the child whose AF she is. The earlier novel is Never Let Me Go (2005), a story (one gradually learns) about clones in a boarding school. These humans have been created in order to mature and then donate organs, a procedure through which lung cancer, for (unspoken) instance, has been eliminated. The clones’ purpose in life is to become donors; they will die after their third or fourth donation. And yet their dignity persists. To read a bit more, my piece is here: https://humanlifereview.com/robots-and-clones-and-humans/