Eight Sunday after Trinity

Almight Lord and everlasting God,
we beseech you to direct, sanctify and govern
both our hearts and bodies
in the ways of your laws
and the works of your commandments;
that through your most mighty protection, both here and ever,
we may be preserved in body and soul;
through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

What gets you out of bed in a morning? What is it, day by day that keeps you going? Or, as a former vicar of mine asked me a long time ago, 'from where do you get your oxygen? I wonder if you've ever given much thought to those sorts of questions? One word that covers those questions is 'motivation'. What is it that motivates you, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year?

I do believe that we are all here for a purpose; a purpose known to God. And we are fortunate if we can tap into that and find the purpose for our own life. I think that the fundamental purpose for all of us is to get to know God; because it's through fulfilling that purpose that we find our natural place in creation. It's through getting to know God that we, as it were, fall into place in the jig-saw of life alongside others. It's how we fit into the great scheme of things.

Another way of thinking about what purpose we have in life is thinking about what our own mission is in life. Our church, St. Andrew's has a mission statement that was put together quite a long time ago now. And I think each one of us as part of St. Andrew's and simply as individual Christians, members of the Body of Christ, each of us has a mission. And if we thought about it long enough each one of us could put together our own mission statement in a sentence or two.

It's all about meaning and purpose in life. But to have meaning and purpose, to have a mission and to make that meaning, purpose and mission real to us and to others, we have to have the motivation. We have to find the 'oxygen' to breathe to move us forward. We have to have a foundation on which to build a meaningful, purposeful life.

I think the Collect today helps us in providing that foundation, and finding the wherewithal that helps us to be what God wants us to be, so that we can do what He wants us to do; to have a meaningful and purposeful life fulfilling our mission and indeed, as I was talking about last week, living up to our primary vocation, our calling to become Christ-like.

So we look first to the Almighty Lord and everlasting God - 'Almighty and everlasting'. God knows no boundaries of power and of time or space. He is a constant and always full, source of all we could ever need. In Him lies our meaning and purpose and our mission; and the wherewithal to see it and do it. And so it's to this God that we call to be built up and to be moved to be what God wants us to be. 'We beseech you to direct, sanctify and govern both our hearts and bodies in the ways of your laws and the works of your commandments'.

We tend to separate heart, body and soul. But it's true to say that early Christian theologians saw them as one thing rather than separate. There's evidence going back to the Bible that early Christians used the terms interchangeably here and there, especially the terms soul and body. I think it's useful to think of them that way but with the subtleties of meaning we attribute to each. It's a fact that, certainly in this life, one is dependent upon the other and so it's good to think of them in unity. So we bring all that we are in this life, all that's contained in this that we call our body and ask God to direct, sanctify and govern it. In other words God is what makes each individual one of us to stand out from the other as unique. We ask Him to be the motivator behind all that we are and the sustainer of all that we are. But we ask Him to direct, sanctify and govern us in a particular direction. None of this is without any particular reason. Right from the outset the goal is in mind, the mission, the meaning and purpose of our life is in mind and in the heart of the prayer and in the mind and heart of God. It's all in the direction of  'the ways of your (God's) laws and the works of your (God's) commandments.

Life only works well as God created it, and our lives are only fulfilled in every respect if we live them in the way that God has created us to live. And that is 'in the ways of His laws and the works of His commandments'. Oh, we try to live in other ways, in the ways that humankind dreams up and what a mess we sometimes make of things when those ways aren't God's ways. Look at what has been happening in towns and cities up and down the country over the last few days. Once we've decided that God's laws can be ignored then we can ignore humankind's laws as well. One thing so often forgotten these days is the very fact that the rules that govern Western democratic societies have been fashioned and forged on the laws of God given to Moses and handed down generation after generation. And why? Because it's the way life, human life and society works the best.

So asking God to provide us with and to be right at the very heart of our living of life we, as it were, come full circle by spelling out the reason for asking - 'that through your most mighty protection, both here and ever, we may be preserved in body and soul'. The reason for asking God to help us live the life He has given us is so that we can go on doing it. It's so that we can come to a full knowledge of Him, and in living His way, find our fulfilment and become all that He means us to become.

What a great prayer this is. What better way to start a service? What better way to start a day, than to ask God that He might help us to become all that He means us to become and do all that He has for us to do.