Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
So much of God’s kingdom is the opposite of what we humans often expect. Truth seems like riddles, making faith sometimes seem a bit like Alice in Wonderland. The poor become rich, the weak are made strong, even death is the way to life. What we often see around us, the reality that we swim in as humans in a broken creation, fights against these eternal truths that are revealed as unvarnished reality, as the true kingdom, the unadulterated light.
Today’s collect, the prayer that is the theme for today, is one that plays with these reverse truths, saying, “Almighty God … have compassion on our weakness.” I’ve always assumed this was referring to our frailty as human beings; the way that we are so easily swayed by our desires, by our pathologies, by our biases. As if we’re praying, “God, save us from ourselves.”
I’ve assumed the root of this is our pride. And that may be. But I wonder, too, if having compassion on our weakness is less about overlooking our limitations in the face of God’s power, and more about our struggle to admit our weakness, to see and acknowledge the ways that we think strength comes from relentlessness, from stagnation.
That, too, is pride, isn’t it? If we consider it weak to stop. If we consider it cowardly to change our minds. If we consider it feeble to grieve.
We see in the Scripture readings today the necessity in stopping, the wisdom in changing our minds.
As the disciples are racing about, doing things, accomplishing for the glory of God, Jesus calls them together to rest in a deserted place. We can be, as our Lord says elsewhere, busy about many things, and we miss the one needful thing. The last year of the pandemic has been a practice in pulling back — in finding a fallow, resting cycle with our fellowship and our gathering, with our outreach. But of course at the same time, it’s been a moment of greater activity in other ways, always driving ahead to find different ways to learn together, worship together, to serve our neighbors, and to love one another well.
God in Jesus calls us to rest. It is not a weakness to lay down our armor or to sit still on the field, but I’ve found the real challenge, the thing that takes real strength, the place where I face my greatest weakness, is in staying still long enough for God’s strength to take over.
That’s the point of Sabbath, isn’t it? It’s the day to have to trust God’s ultimate orchestration. We let go of the reins long enough to require God’s care, and therefore, to recognize, we hope, our need for God every hour, every breath.
I find I’m most tempted to take the reins back, to get up off my cushion, to keep up the busyness, exactly at that super tense moment when something’s about to fall, when I can sense disaster is about to break, when I’m most afraid or most sad or most exhausted and just can’t stop myself. “Almighty God, have compassion on our weakness.” Our weakness is to refuse to see God’s hand holding us, God’s breath filling every lungful of air, God’s loom weaving our very lives together.
Come away to a deserted place and rest awhile, God says. May God have compassion on our weakness.
And earlier, back in 2 Samuel, God redirects the prophet Nathan. I’ve preached before this summer on the way that even the great prophet Samuel’s faithfulness doesn’t shield him from making choices outside of God’s direction, and how Samuel follows God’s direction despite the misgivings he sometimes has, like how he continued to grieve over Saul even as he anointed David. Today we see Samuel’s apprentice, Nathan, following in those footsteps, giving King David the wisest direction he can, and then finding later that God had something else in mind.
While changing one’s mind, or adjusting one’s convictions, or moving to see things a different way is sometimes called weakness in our world, while such a shift is sometimes seen as cowardly, I wonder if in God’s kingdom being responsive to the Holy Spirit might be a sign of strength. Perhaps holding one’s preferences lightly, continually seeking God’s face, as Samuel and Nathan do, is an admission of one’s shortcomings, a surrender to the ultimate wisdom and truth of God. It seems there might be a deadening sort of pride in plowing ahead with one’s convictions and reasoning, not seeking and heeding God’s direction at each turn. We see how David seeks Nathan’s wisdom in God, and how God responds to Nathan and David, guiding their good instincts in an altered direction.
When we come away to a deserted place and rest awhile, as God says, we may very well, as Jacob and Abraham and Moses all did, see God face to face. May God have compassion on our weakness.
And finally, I wonder, too, if there might be a strength in grieving. This moves beyond what’s explicitly said in our readings today, but I’ve found in my life that grief is the thing I want to avoid feeling most of all. It’s the thing that keeps me moving like Martha, the feeling that keeps me running from the stillness of prayer, the thing that gives me strength to avoid looking God in the face. What can we see when we sit below the cross, except a bit of grief — perhaps mingled with love and glory and hope and despair, but for us as fallen humans who suffer change, grief is always there too.
Just a few weeks before the pandemic, I ordered a new curriculum for our parish. I can’t really recall why I chose it; one parishioner was going through a messy divorce, another had just lost a spouse of many decades, I knew another had lost a child years ago. The curriculum was called Grief Share, and I wasn’t sure how I’d launch it, but I was starting to see how much the sadness and fear and heaviness of broken lives was bearing down on my precious flock.
Brothers and Sisters, Brothers and Sisters! Even more now, amen? We are carrying immense sadness, fear, anger, indignation, terror, and brokenness. These are burdens too heavy for our shoulders. “Almighty God, have compassion on our weakness,” we cry; help us, Lord, to lay down those griefs at the foot of the cross; give us the freedom and relief that we don’t even know that we need so desperately. “Give us those things which for our blindness we cannot ask.”
May we have the courage to admit that we are blind. May we have the humility to admit that we are weak. Only in accepting these truths, this unvarnished reality, are we able to enjoy God as he hopes for us to know him.
Come away to a deserted place and rest awhile, God says. May God have compassion on our weakness. Amen.
Emily R. Hylden is an Episcopal priest & yoga teacher. Currently, she resides in Southern Louisiana with her scholar-priest husband and three little boys.
The Rev. Emily R. Hylden lives with her husband, the Rev. Jordan Hylden, and three sons in Houston, Texas, serves as Upper School Chaplain at St. Francis Episcopal School, and is host of the podcast Emily Rose Meditations.
