Transforming love

The Collects of the Church of England are beautiful, insightful and often deeply helpful. Many have come from the Book of Common Prayer, and of those some find roots in older liturgies, like the Sarum Missal. Alongside them, we now have a collection of Additional Collects, designed to be suitable for a contemporary setting, speaking clearly and simply into the theme of the day in a way that is accessible to a mixed congregation. Both variants are designed to begin a reflection in prayer on the themes of the lectionary readings or the liturgical season, helping worshippers to see into the readings, and to pray into both readings and the preaching. Sometimes the collect, thoughtfully and prayerfully written, will spark a thought which is as powerful as what emerges from the readings themselves.

The Living Brook benefice is focussing this year on considering our vision for growth and development as a new benefice that includes parishes that have all faced a great deal of change, one of them a new parish created only a year ago. We are looking forward together in our parishes and considering what kind of churches God is calling us to be. We know that Jesus offers us life in all its fullness (John 10:10), and that he looks for us to be conduits of that life: in John 7: 38 he says 'as scripture says, 'out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water' '. In the Living Brook benefice that is description fits our name well, and perhaps also the developing vision. The three parishes have been studying together the 'Church: Right Here, Right Now' course, and two of the parishes have now finished the course, while one has three session still to do. During Lent we'll think more about mission and vision together on our Lent course, and on April 5th as many people from the benefice as possible will consider together what our shared learning has helped us discover, We will write Growth Action Plans for the parishes and for the Benefice, and then go forward to make our vision for growth and an outpouring of God's living water of life in our community a reality.

The additional collect for the third Sunday before Lent is helpful for us as parishes wanting to grow and share the good news of God's love with others.

Eternal God,
whose Son went among the crowds
and brought healing with his touch:
help us to show his love,
in your Church as we gather together,
and by our lives as they are transformed 
into the image of Christ our Lord.

Our worship together (whatever day of the week or time we worship) mattes enormously. Worshipping our God is at the heart of our faith, responding in love to the God who by His grace saves us from sin and brings us to eternal life. We want very much to be able to show God's love fully to each other and to all who have joined us when we worship together. In today's readings we are reminded that Christian communities can easily be distracted from worship by human squabbles. Paul speaks of competitive disputes among Christians who think that their way of doing things, or their preference of leader (Paul or Apollos) is more important than the quality of their relationship with each other. Far from it, Paul reminds them. All the while they are disputing and prioritising their human feelings, they are not only damaging their relationships and the reputation of the church (who wants to join a group who are divided and disputatious?) but also forgetting what and who they are in the church for. It isn't about leaders or who is more important, it is about worshipping God. Meanwhile, Jesus insists that disagreements within the church are such a distraction from real worship and fellowship that they must be settled before those involved in disagreements can come before God in worship. In the Eucharistic liturgy we symbolically deal with disputes by sharing the peace before bringing our offerings to God: this is worse than a wasted gesture if we have real disputes that remain unresolved. We are to show our love for one another in our churches as we gather, and it matters that this love is real. If it isn't, our worship is undermined. So the Collect reminds us to show love to one another in the church - and the readings remind us that sometimes that love must be shown by seeking forgiveness or reconciliation, and by putting God ahead of human ideals.

The Collect goes on to pray that we will also show Jesus's love by our lives and we are transformed into the image of Christ. This is quite an ask!  We don't want to remain frail, squabbling, humans, but to be as like Christ as is possible, a reflection of Him. We want to change. And if we change, and our lives reflect the image of Christ, then others will see Christ in us and turn to him. For Christians, it is not enough to be a people who get together sometimes to worship God in a special building. We must be witnessing to Christ all of them time in all that we do. Being the image of Christ in the supermarket or the workplace, the classroom, or the playground, the home or the leisure centre, it all matters. God has given us something magnificent: life in all its fullness, love so deep that no love touches it. That is not a gift to be kept to ourselves, to be hoarded like the precious ring of the Tolkien novels, but to be shown and shared. God's love, like living water, is so abundant that we can share it and still have more than enough for ourselves. So we should be compelled by our own loving response to live in a way that takes out God's love and offers it to those who have yet to experience real grace, real love, real forgiveness. 

How about making this collect your prayer this week, and taking the risk of letting God really transform you?