“O God,” our Collect begins, “O God, from whom all good doth come.” How much we need to remember this! And not only what is good comes from God: Everything that is good, everything that is true, everything that is beautiful, comes from God, and has its origin in Him. He has given us every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; we shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, God has given every green plant for food. And when God saw everything that He had made, He beheld His creation, He venerated His creation, and He said, “It is very good.” The Greek there could also be translated: “It is very beautiful.” Recognizing that all of creation has been made through the words of Christ in Genesis—Let there be!—is itself part of the joy of the Gospel, part of the joy shared between the Virgin Mother Mary and Saint Elizabeth at the Visitation, and which caused Mary to sing, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.”
We can see that meditating on our Collect, even the first words of it, is a good and holy spiritual practice. All of our Collects are a source of Gospel joy. I encourage you all to take home with your our service bulletin and the propers insert, and to find time during each week, even each day, to set aside a period of prayer to pray with the Collect, along with the Readings, the various prayers, even the small bits of Scripture: all very wholesome. The Collect of the Day is assigned for daily prayer for the whole week long, Sunday through Saturday. These Collects are the same, year after year. They are theological, yet presented in an accessible way that summarizes the Bible, and puts us into a right relationship with God. Being well composed, the Collects remind us of the importance of dignity in our prayer life, of the value of the right words in the right order, indeed such right words in the right order reflecting the beauty of God’s creation.
The world, and all that is in it, from one end of the earth to the other, is beautiful, says God. It is full of the grace of Christ. God makes, loves, and keeps all things, and fills them with His blessing. He loves His creation, He loves all His creatures, and we are invited to do so—invited to participate in His beholding of His creation, and we do so by spiritual listening: listening for how God speaks through His creatures; listening for how God expresses His will and His glory through His creatures and how His creatures praise Him and magnify Him for ever. Through creatures, the goodness, truth, and beauty of the Father is known, and adored. This recognition is part of the joy of the Gospel, shared between Mary and Elisabeth.
The most profound gift Christ the Bridegroom gives us, His Bride the Church, is the relationship with the maker of all that is, visible and invisible: relationship, that is, with the Father Almighty. He is unseen; yet as S. Paul teaches: “Things that are unseen are eternal.” Through the Sacraments (Baptism, Eucharist, Confession, and the rest), and through our meditation with and through Scripture; through our corporate life ordered by the Liturgy, and through our personal devotion rooted in the prayer of our heart and corporal and spiritual acts of mercy toward others—through all of that, we more and more receive the gift of Christ, as revealed by the Holy Spirit: we more and more all the attributes of the Father revealed only in and through the Son.
This is why immediately following the Gospel lesson and the homily, we say together in the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Having been taken up in the Mass again as Christ’s Body, and having been blessed as His Body through the transfiguring word of Scripture, we are able to approach the Father (in the power of the Holy Spirit and through Christ), to behold together the Father, Him Who is incomprehensible, the maker of all; yet He Who is made known through the Son, for His dwells in the Son, and the Son dwells in Him. And they dwell in us and abide in us together as we abide in Christ’s Word. This, again, is the joy of the gospel: the dwelling of God in us.
And so we see the tall order which is the expectation of the Gospel upon us, in order to live an authentic Christian life. And yet our Lord from the beginning was able to show His disciples that examples already existed; examples who showed how to live the Christian life; that is, how to live one’s life so as to be led by the Holy Spirit, to not merely be hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word. When disciples told Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are outside,” Jesus taught his disciples to imitate His Mother Mary and the close disciples (which is what “brothers” means here). They are owed no special recognition merely because of biology (in the case of Mary) or mere proximity to Jesus. Rather, they are examples because they are following the will of God—they are first emergence of the Communion of the Saints. Anyone one who hears and does the will of God imitates Our Lord’s Mother, especially, as well as His brothers, and in some sense can be spoken of being like them, or even being them with respect to imitating their humility and obedience to God.
And so while the Christian life is a tall order (and it certainly has never demanded anything less than total conversion of one’s life), the Christian life is never one reserved only for the spiritual elite. It is a life the entrance to which is open to all who desire God, and through that desire, open oneself to participate in Christ’s sacred humanity. For Christ keeps His Humanity fully open, through its sacrificial state, to the divine infinity (which is the Father), and in the Church He communicates this state to us too as we open ourselves to the horizons in which His humanity was raised: He Who is the eternal Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.