Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen (Book of Common Prayer, 230).
Several characteristics strike me when reading through this collect. First, this prayer begins slightly unusually with a plea to God to allow us in the state of faith and love. Could this be our natural state if we are asking God to keep us in this place? Second, the reason we would like to be steadfast in faith and love is that we would like, through God’s grace, to proclaim God’s truth with boldness and to minister God’s justice with compassion. This is almost always the case with Prayer Book collects, we ask God for one of God’s qualities that we might be more Godly! Finally, what truly hits home about this collect is that it fits so well with our Gospel lesson for Sunday (Luke 7:36-8:3).
Most notably linking with the Gospel the line “minister your justice with compassion” reminds me of how Jesus explains God’s merciful, grace-filled forgiveness. When the Pharisee and the sinful woman lay their sins out next to one another to the human eye it seems as though the woman beats the religious man by a mile in a competition of iniquities. And yet, as a couple of my friends were want to say in college (and beyond), “Fortune favors the bold.” Or, to borrow a line from Martin Luther, “Sin boldly.”
It seems a bit strange to advocate sinning, but I am not as much advocating living in a distorted relationship with God or neighbor as much as I am pointing to the great (and difficult) truth of God’s love: our sins do not matter. As tough as it is for us to understand or comprehend this, God loves the jaywalker as much as God loves the murderer. God loves the overdue library member as much as God loves the two-timing cheater. God does not see us through a lens of sin, but instead God views us through the love of Christ.
When we sin we obscure how we see God, but it does nothing to how God sees us. Should we then attempt to get in as much sin as possible? I find that twisting my relationship with self, others, and God takes more than it gives, but when we sin and even when we sin boldly we know that greater sin only means greater love (as we see from the woman’s story in the Gospel lesson). Martin Luther, of course, wrote more than just “Sin boldly.” He finished that thought by writing, “but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” We start in a state of faith and love, when we mess up God love us enough to see us as he sees Christ, so when we sin boldly believe and rejoice in Christ just as boldly, for fortune favors the bold.
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