Receive and Follow

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

I have thought on paper about this prayer before. This little Collect captivates me. It poses the double impact of Jesus upon us. One is a benefit that we could never bring about for ourselves, no matter the effort we exerted. The other is a benefit that takes all the effort we can find to give. The prayer comes up in the middle of this long learning season of the Church year, the span of Sundays after Pentecost. I say it is long: it starts late in the spring just seven weeks after Easter and takes us all the way to the first Sunday of Advent in the fall. This prayer comes up on the Sunday closest to August 17th.

The prayer addresses God as the Almighty through whom the Son of God is given. The Son is the gift that takes away our sin and provides us all an example. By grace, the unmerited favor and power of God, we get what we need. Receiving this gift provides the remedy for sin; it also moves us to follow in the steps of the Son, Jesus. I suppose nobody knows definitively how the sacrifice for sin works in Christ. How wonderful that it does! Every follower is called day by day to determine what it means to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life.  It is different for each because each person is different. The situations of our lives are unique.

The concept of imitating Christ is key from the earliest days in the life of the church. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, sometimes uses a phrase with a similar meaning, “life in Christ.” In the Western Church, a fifteenth-century Augustinian cannon in Holland, Thomas à Kempis, produced the important devotional work, Imitatio Christi, The Imitation of Christ. It is considered a spiritual classic, and through the following centuries had a broad influence on important spiritual leaders: Thomas More, Ignatius, Erasmus, Francis de Sales, and John Wesley, to name a few.

The concept is developed in many works in writing and teaching through the ages. In the modern work, The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen posits that, for one thing, imitating Christ is tied to living authentically. It has to do with living one’s life as authentically as Jesus lived his. The ways we follow are particular to who we are, therefore Christians are not identical to one another. Obviously, we are not called to wear the clothes that Jesus wore or eat the foods that Jesus ate: we don’t even know these things. We are called to have courage in what we face, to choose love and forgiveness even when this seems impossible, and to seek communion with God in prayer. In these and similar ways, moment by moment, we are imitating Christ, following the example of Christ.

Praying this collect focuses us solidly on the two-part blessing from God. We thankfully note that the Savior has removed from us the barrier between ourselves and God: by grace our sin is dissolved. We also receive help to follow Christ, seeking to imitate his example.