Fourth Sunday after Trinity

O God, the protector of all who trust in you,
without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy:
increase and multiply upon us your mercy;
that with you as our ruler and guide
we may so pass through things temporal
that we lose not our hold on things eternal;
grant this, heavenly Father,
for our Lord Jesus Christ's sake,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

I'm doing a commentary on the Collects each Sunday during Ordinary Time. That's because I think that these very profound and, some of them, very ancient prayers can be so easily forgotten as we pass on in the eucharist to the Liturgy of the Word. And they contain so much of value to us which helps us to live our Faith day by day. They do contain, as does all our prayer in the Church of England, statements of what we believe about the Faith and so it's important for us to dwell upon what they say.

I'd like to pick up on two themes here in this Collect of the Fourth Sunday after Trinity. First of all the opening couple of lines: 'O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy'. This is a statement of what we believe about God. When it says that he is our protector it sums up all we believe about our life in Christ; not so much that we are protected against the things that life brings upon us, that comes about through the merely living out of our life in a fallen world; nobody escapes those. But the notion of God as our 'protector', is the logical consequence of a life of faith, that in the end, as St. Paul says, 'all things work together for good for those who love God'. We have faith IN God, that being our creator and created in and out of love, God has our good at heart and will, like a human parent seek the greatest good for his or her child, whatever befalls the child. And we'll put this in context when we look at the fourth and fifth sentences of the Collect in a moment which will be the second theme.

But first, we pray more about this notion of God being our protector by acknowledging our further dependence upon Him. We affirm that outside of Him there is nothing that has any significance in our life; 'nothing is strong, nothing is holy', we pray. But maybe we can turn that around and look at it in a different way. And by that I mean that we can say that outside God there is nothing; life is nothing outside of God, and yet, that nothing can be very attractive; we can reverence life outside of God. That's what happens with our fallen nature. Everything outside of God becomes important to us and has a huge influence on our life. And that seems to be the way of the world ever more so these days, as the world forgets God.

And this leads us nicely into the next few sentences which make up our second theme or the second point I'd like to make. We ask God to be with us, to be merciful to us. And by that we are asking God to send upon us all goodness and blessing. All of that reminds us of God's presence in our lives or to put it the right way round, His mercy reminds us of our life in Him. And acknowledging that presence as THE reference point of our life and following God's will and commandments we can say He is our 'ruler and guide'. And as we live our whole life in Him, we want to do that so that not only do we live our life in the best way possible now, in the present, but that we will always recall where our life comes from i.e. the eternal God and that our lives have that eternal element about them. It's our Christian belief that we live our lives not simply for the present but that how we live our lives now has consequences for our continuing life after our physical death. And the Collect puts it this way '(that) we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not our hold on things eternal'.

I think that if there's anything missing from our lives today in this Western world, certainly in the last 30 years or so, it's a sense that there is more to life than this present moment and what we can get out of it. Yes, there is a sense that the only time you know you have is now, this present moment. And it's right that we should remember it's sacredness, it's sanctity and be thankful for each moment of this life that we have. But we live with faith in the hereafter and with a belief that what we do, think and say now has consequences for us and for all humankind both now and for ever, in this world and the next.

I'm convinced that most of the crises we've witnessed in public life and most of the crises that have happened in other arenas of life in recent decades have been precipitated by the loss of a sense of the eternal, that even the smallest of our actions has huge consequences for all people for all time. We only remember that as we remember God.

So this Collect is a timely reminder that our life without God is as nothing, which in itself may feel a good and attractive life well spent; but at the end of the day is nothing without God. And our life has consequences beyong this present moment we find ourself in. Without a sense of the eternal, we lose a sense of the reality and importance of the present. And we see every day, the awful consequences of that all around us.