As anyone who has spent more than about five minutes at All Saints knows, we use a traditional form of the liturgy with an older form of English. When I first visited this parish, several years before I had even thought of pursuing ordination, I was admittedly hostile to that older English in the liturgy. As a child of the 1980’s and 90’s this simply wasn’t how Church was “supposed” to be done! Won’t people find it confusing? Isn’t this a violation of the principle from Article XXIV on “speaking in the congregation in such a tongue as the people understandeth”? But when I began to take the time to explore more of the depths of traditional Christianity, the beauty of the older English began to woo me. Modern-English liturgies frankly began to sound to me like it was missing something. There was an epic feel to the King James Bible and classical Prayer Book that really spoke to me once I gave them a chance. And I discovered that the older language isn’t really overly difficult for most English speakers; most of the time the traditional English isn’t confusing at all.
Most of the time.
Today’s Collect is one of those potential exceptions. “Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord” (emphasis added). The uninitiated could easily assume that we are speaking of God’s grace as something that limits or stops us, perhaps with respect to our tendency to sin. In fact, I have heard at least one sermon making this very assumption from clergy who should have known better! And a friend of mine whose podcast and blog, “Preventing Grace,” borrowed its title from this Collect regularly gets messages asking why she would want to stop or limit God’s grace!
But the meaning of “prevent” has indeed shifted considerably since the 16th and 17th centuries. In the Prayer Book’s older English, “prevent” means “to go before” or “to precede.” In our Collect, the imagery of “prevent” is used as an inverted parallel with “and follow us.” In essence, we are praying that God’s grace would surround us on our Christian walk. We pray that God’s grace would both blaze the trail and take rearguard on our march of faith.
St. Augustine puts it this way:
Indeed, a person does not even begin to be changed from evil to good by the first stirrings of faith, unless the free and gratuitous mercy of God produces this in him. … So, therefore, we should think of God’s grace as working from the beginning of a person’s changing towards goodness, even to the end of its completion, so that he who glories may glory in the Lord. For just as no-one can bring goodness to perfection without the Lord, so no one can begin it without the Lord.[1]
This brings us to defining grace. Theologically, most Christians do indeed rely on St. Augustine’s definition: “That which is freely given.”[2] This definition is reflected in the well-known passage from Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” In Scripture, the Greek word most commonly translated as grace is charis. With charis, grace is synonymous with “favor,” especially when it’s speaking of the grace that comes from God. The Hebrew word for grace in the Old Testament is often paired with a word translated as “loving-kindness,” also typically speaking of the grace, mercy, and love that come from God himself.
Indeed, one author is so bold as to say that the New Testament, especially St. Paul’s epistles, shows grace as “God acting in accordance with his own character and being.”[3] Or, as we say in the Prayer of Humble Access, “thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.” God’s favor towards us then changes us, leading to our own thanksgiving (another common translation of charis) and leads St. Paul to speak of “the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:7). God shows us favor, he shows us grace. We praise him in his grace. And we render him thanksgiving (i.e. grace). All this is to say that grace is a particular characteristic of how God relates to the Christian.
So how does this grace “prevent” or “go before” us? It begins with God choosing and calling us to be joined to his Son. Consider Ephesians 1:3-6:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless in him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved (emphasis added).
This passage is one strongest of St. Paul’s statements on what we often call his Doctrine of Election. It doesn’t get more “before” than “before the foundation of the world!” This is some serious “preventing grace.” This is a trail that has indeed been blazed for us! Now, we don’t need to get into arguments between Calvinists and Arminians or delve into the deep questions of the relationship between election and human will in order to see that St. Paul’s picture of this doctrine affirms some very comforting truths. That is, God chose us in Christ to be part of his eternal plan. He chose us to be united to Christ and adopted into his family. This results in us becoming holy and blameless. And because of these blessings, we praise God and his grace.
Article XVII says that considering this aspect of God’s “preventing grace” is “full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort” to Christians. God’s grace in choosing us is a demonstration of how much he favors us, how much he loves us. We can be assured of this grace by the means of grace: the Word and Sacrament. That is, if you’ve heard the Gospel read and preached, and if you’ve received the Gospel sign of new birth in Holy Baptism, and you have responded to that grace with thanksgiving towards God, you can be assured that God has indeed chosen and called you. You can be assured of God’s preventing grace. You don’t have to wonder whether or not you have God’s favor. You don’t have to try and earn it. You don’t have to wonder whether he loves you. The fact that he has brought you into his church via Word and Sacrament is proof of God’s favor, proof of God’s grace.
Part of the natural (or, rather supernatural) response to that grace and assurance is a change in your will, a change in your “want-tos.” You want to obey God rather than sin. And when you do sin, you want to be forgiven of those sins. That is, holiness is a change that starts from the inside, not the outside. In Article X, we are told that it is the “grace of God by Christ preventing us” that heals our broken will to make it good. Indeed, the Article says that God’s grace works with us when he gives us a good will so that we can do works that please Christ.
And Article XIII goes on to say that without that saving grace of Christ, no matter how good our works seem to other people, our works cannot please God. That is, our works don’t earn God’s grace, but rather deserve God’s wrath, unless we have already received God’s grace. Why? Because, as St. Paul said, we need God’s grace in order to be united to Christ and thus truly become holy. Without that grace from God, we might look good on the outside, but as Romans 3:10 & 23 says, “it is written, ‘None is righteous, no, not one’ … all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Should anyone here have not received that saving grace, the fact that you’re here means that God is offering his grace to you. You have heard his word proclaimed and preached. You have heard of what Christ has done for you, and you are now invited to put your faith, your trust in Christ, to repent of your sins and be formally joined to Christ in the Sacrament of Baptism.
When we have been united to Christ by God’s grace through faith, as signified in our baptism, we can indeed be “given to all good works.” The diocese recently began an online school to train lay ministers and potential postulants. As part of that class, about half a dozen All Saints folks just finished reading Michael Horton’s book, Introduction to Covenant Theology. In the final chapter, discussing good works in the covenant of grace, Horton says, “Forgiveness is great, but obedience is greater. A guilt offering is necessary for the remission of sins, but a thank offering is something that God treasures above all else.” Both forgiveness and obedience are only possible by God’s grace.
This highlights the second aspect of grace in our Collect, when we prayed that God’s grace would follow us. God’s grace not only goes before us in our faith, but it follows and keeps us in the faith. As it does so, God’s grace oftentimes actually limits or keeps us from sinning. Ironically, this is where the misunderstood definition of “preventing” comes into play. As God’s grace heals our will, we begin to want the things of God and to despise our sins. Even when there are sins that we find enjoyable in our flesh, there’s a deeper part of our soul that hates and is ashamed of those sins, and leads us to ask forgiveness when we sin. The Holy Spirit speaks to our spirits, nudging us to love what God loves and hate what God hates. He speaks through the Word and the Sacrament as an aspect of how God’s grace follows us to make us holy.
The fact of God’s free grace and forgiveness of sins should never make us comfortable with our sins. Indeed, to be comfortable with your sin is a warning that you need to repent, lest that comfort prove to be the first step toward rejecting God’s grace in apostasy. St. Paul puts it this way in Romans 6: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue to sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein.” He then goes on to point us back to our baptisms as the sign that we are no longer slaves to sin, we are no longer our old selves, but we are rather servants of Christ whose old selves have been crucified with him. We are now in “newness of life.”
One of the ironies of this “newness of life,” is that concern for our sin is actually a sign that we are not rejecting God’s grace, that we are not on the road to apostasy. Those heading towards making “shipwreck of their faith” (as St. Paul puts it in 1 Timothy 1:19) or towards “trampl[ing] underfoot the Son of God” (as Hebrews 10:29 says) – folks on the path towards rejecting grace don’t worry about it. They’re unconcerned that the soil of their heart is thorny or stoney. That’s why St. Paul uses the metaphor of a seared conscience in 1 Timothy 4:2. Such an active rejecting grace makes a person numb towards the things of God. In short, they’re comfortable with their sin and have closed their ears to the call of the Holy Spirit to repent.
In 2 Corinthians 7:10, St. Paul contrasts the “godly grief” which “produces a repentance that leads to salvation” with “worldly grief” which “produces death.” If your sin grieves you, that’s a good thing. Let that grief drive you to the throne of grace to receive forgiveness. Don’t wallow in that grief. That’s why we have confession of sin twice a day in the Offices and again on Sundays and Holy Days in Communion: we want to keep short accounts with God. Admit your sin before God, ask for forgiveness, and then move, on resolving by God’s grace and with his help to get better. And if you find yourself wallowing or if you just need to talk to a minister of the Gospel about your struggles, come talk to me. We priests are in the grace business.
The thing is: you can trust God to keep you. That’s part of what it means for God’s grace to follow you. In Hebrews 12:2, the Apostle speaks of this when he calls Jesus “the founder and perfector of our faith.” The King James Version says, “author and finisher of our faith.” My friend the Rev. Dr. Chris Richardson in his doctoral dissertation on Hebrews notes that the Greek tells us it’s not just about our personal faith, but it’s about faith period. He translates the clause as “Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of faith.”
You see, our salvation is not just how we start our faith. Rather, salvation is the whole process. You may have heard it put this way, “I have been saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved.” If we were going to be more precise (but less quotable), we might say “I have been justified, I am being sanctified, I will be glorified.” The thing we often forget is that all of salvation is by God’s grace. Grace is not just about our justification; we are also sanctified by grace and glorified by grace. And while that middle part, sanctification, does include a good amount of cooperation with our will, the Christian will is one that God has healed by his grace! You can no more make yourself sanctified or holy by your human willpower than you can justify or glorify yourself by human willpower. It is indeed all by God’s grace. And he is indeed both gracious and just. As Psalm 25:7 in our Prayer Book says, “Gracious and righteous is the LORD; therefore will he teach sinners in the way.” We redeemed, repentant, and baptized sinners have been surrounded by God’s grace, and thus are partakers of and participants in his very righteousness. We have been taught by his Holy Spirit, in his way, both prevented, and followed by his grace.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
[1] Quoted in “Augustine on Free Grace” from www.monergism.com
[2] Ibid.
[3] Fisher, quoted in “Grace” from the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, IVP, 1993, 372.
