Unruly Wills and Affections
7 February 2010 Luke 5:1-11
Second Sunday before Lent: Sexagesima
When I preach I don’t usually take for a text one of the collects of the prayer book. The texts appointed for today are good ones and deserve an explication, but it seems to me that we need something slightly different upon which to focus our attention on this Second Sunday before Lent. Specifically we need something to get us started thinking about Lent and its possibilities for us. Why do I say so? It is because Lent requires some planning. We are a long way from ancient days in which the Church issued rules for Lent and everyone as a community went along with them. Lent is a corporate season for us, which has its meanings and duties, but it is also an individual endeavor: we have, each of us, to decide what we are going to do in order to attain the goals of Lent. Our Prayer Book orders two fast days for all of us: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. It also says this about Lent: “The following days are observed by special acts of discipline and self-denial: Ash Wednesday and the other weekdays of Lent and of Holy Week, except the feast of the Annunciation.” But it doesn’t tell us what acts of discipline and self-denial mean. There are traditional customs, of course, having to do with eating less or no meat, giving up things and taking on things—fasting, abstinence, reading a spiritual book, adding a weekday Church service, etc. But what is it all for?
Here is what I will say to you on Ash Wednesday: “Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection, and it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a season of penitence and fasting. This season of Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism. It was also a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith. I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.”
So we see that there are certain objectives associated with Lent: particularly, to prepare for Easter and to reconsider our spiritual life, especially by acknowledging our own sins. The means by which we do these things are self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting and self denial, and reading and meditating on Scripture. If we leave it at that, however, it still seems to me rather random and confusing. What does it mean to prepare for Easter? What is the purpose of self-examination and repentance? How does fasting and self-denial fit in with reading Scripture and prayer? What we need is a principle that can focus our hearts and minds on a single purpose, and so give us an underlying plan for all of our various spiritual disciplines. That brings me back to the collect I was speaking of earlier. Our Prayer Book uses it for the Fifth Sunday of Lent and you may wish to refer to it. Other Anglican Churches use it at different times, particularly for this season before Lent begins. Here it is:
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. . .
The collect begins by discerning our chief problem—note: this is the Christian’s problem, not the non-Christian’s. The Christian already wants to live for Jesus and this is the first step. But even the Christian is still a sinner and sin manifests itself in unruly wills and affections. That is, there are lots of distractions and other things that compete with our desire to serve our Lord. Sometimes our desire to live for Jesus is all jumbled up with desires for success at work, for happiness at home, for enough money to live comfortably, for leisure enough to enjoy what we have, and so on. We know that all these other desires need to be brought into line with our desire to follow Jesus, but life seems to come at us very fast. We find ourselves rushing from one thing to another and go long periods of time when we hardly think of God, let alone order our lives towards Him.
We know, as the collect puts it, “that, among the swift and varied changes of the world,” we need our hearts to be “fixed where true joys are to be found.” But, where is it that we need to have our hearts affixed? Well, to be sure, we would say that we need to set our hearts on God. But how do we do that? Our Gospel lesson for today gives us a lovely image of it: Luke tells us that when the disciples had heard Jesus’ call to them and seen the sign he had given them, “When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.” They left everything, and followed him. There is a sense in which that is what we all need to do. Following Jesus is to be the issue of central importance to us. We must leave everything behind in order to do that. But what does it mean in our context, to leave everything? Jesus is not here physically asking us to come away with him on a mission somewhere. The place we have to follow him is in the midst of the swift and varied changes of the world where we live. Leaving everything to follow him means, then, learning to subordinate everything to him, asking him for directions as we work and spend and play and do the thousand other things that life in our times requires.
But that is easier said than done. How do you subordinate everything to Jesus in your life? How can you fix your heart on Jesus in order to secure for yourself the true joys that are found only in serving him? There are two principles enumerated in the collect: we have to learn to “love what [he] command[s] and desire what [he] promise[s].” These two things, I daresay, take us right into the heart of the Lenten task—indeed, into the heart of the chief task of spiritual discipline. Do we love what the Lord commands? Do we desire what he promises? How would we even define those two principles?
A few weeks ago a group of people in the parish studied Dallas Willard’s new book, Knowing Jesus Today. He made it very clear to us that one of the chief problems of contemporary Christians is that they don’t think very clearly about the nature of reality as Jesus has taught us about it. Since we don’t think clearly, the “swift and varied changes of the world” tend to confuse us and distract us. Willard outlines four world-view questions, questions which he says orient one fundamentally towards reality, and then he provides Jesus’ answers to them. The first question is: What is real? What is reality? Jesus’ answer is: God and His Kingdom. The second question is: Who is really well-off? Jesus’ answer is: anyone who is alive in the kingdom of God. That is to say, anyone who lives in that interactive life of fellowship with God which Jesus came to manifest to us and secure for us. This is the person who is really well-off, and not necessarily the CEO of Goldman Sachs with his multimillion dollar bonus. Merely having wealth does not position you correctly towards what is real. The third question is this: Who is a really good person? Jesus teaches us and shows us the answer: the person who is pervaded by the same love that sent the Son into the world, that rules in the Kingdom of God. The good person is filled with love for God and then that love overflows into a love of neighbor. And finally, the last of the basic world view questions: How do you become a really good person? And Jesus responds that we are to place our confidence in him and become his apprentice in Kingdom living. That is, we place our faith or trust in him and learn to love according to his example.
A slightly different approach to the same questions comes from a wonderful book on the mysteries of the Rosary by Neville Ward. At one point he says: “All depends on what we think life in this world is for. Can anyone seriously think it is for happiness—in the sense of mere satisfaction of one want after another? It certainly does not look like that. It looks as if for the greatest number of people it is the worst of all possible worlds for that. The Christian view is that life in this world is for the learning and practicing of faith and love and that it represents only a fraction of the opportunity for this that God intends us to have. The rest will be given us in a further range of life beyond this world, and it will culminate in an infinity of faith and love which will make all our tears now look like misunderstandings. For this reason the Christian assumes and looks for a special meaning, deeper than mere happiness yet consistent with life’s purpose, in every human life, however joyful, however wretched. It is always related to the blessedness of knowing and loving God in people and things, in the good and the bad.” [59/60]
So now we see that the “true joys” of which our collect speaks are not the feelings of mere happiness, but are experiences related to the fact that we can live at the level of reality, we can live lives that are completely in accord with the very purposes for which God made us, that we might learn to live by faith and in love. We can do this because we know that God and His Kingdom are the reality that lies behind all visible and invisible things. We know that our blessedness, our true joy, is found as we live in personal relationship with this God who loves us and sent His Son to reclaim us from the mess into which we had gotten ourselves. Out of that knowledge we learn to love what he commands, which is nothing else than that we should live according to the love which we have come to know in Christ, and desire what he has promised us, that is, life in the Kingdom, which we have already begun to know here and will enter into completely in the age to come.
As we think and pray about these things: that God has promised us the Kingdom and has already made us members of it here and now; that we can know his love for us and that our only obligation in this life, really, is to live now according to the love that he makes known to us; that our true joy is to live in accordance with what is real and true and which we know and experience in Jesus—then we shall find our unruly wills and affections being changed and reordered. It may take a while—we are still only apprentices to Jesus—not masters yet. But there will be a difference.
And that is what Lent is for: to find the time to think about these things. What will make you more able to love what our Lord commands? To desire what he promises? Some things have proved themselves over the centuries of the Church’s existence as the very means by which we can allow God to rule our wills and affections, sinners though we are. Prayer in one of them. How is your prayer going these days? Fasting and self-denial. You may be led to particular kinds of fasting and abstinence, but I still think Martin Thornton is correct: fasting is whatever physical discipline you need to undertake to support your prayer. It is the way you find the time and the place, the conditions and the heart for it. Reading. Both the Bible and the writings of those who have become masters under the one Master, our Lord Jesus.
Only you know what you need but if you have a hard time trying to figure it out and would profit by a conversation, please let me know. I would be glad to help. Lent comes to us each year as an opportunity to reconsider our position in relation to the Reality which is God and His Kingdom. We all are in this together, which should make it easier to think about it and even speak of it to each other. May God help us in this undertaking!