A Collect for the Joy of Salvation

Fitting a book's worth of transformation into a written prayer

Over the past months, I’ve been mentally steeped in preparing for my official confirmation into the Anglican Church (which happened this weekend!) and the book Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’ Death. I’ve found it fascinating that Confirmation and the book converged at this moment; each has helped illuminate the other in ways I’m just beginning to unpack.

My final Confirmation assignment was to write a collect in the style of the Book of Common Prayer. A collect follows the general structure of the Lord’s Prayer: an address of God, acknowledgement of a divine attribute, a petition, the desired result, and a closing Amen. I knew I wanted my collect to capture a particular struggle illuminated by Lamb of the Free: the struggle to realize the joy of salvation. I needed to engage the questions, “Why doesn’t salvation feel joyful? What does the ‘for me’ in ‘Jesus died for me’ mean?” This collect is the result of that wrestling. I’m calling it, for now, a Collect for the Joy of Salvation:

Oh God, the hope of ages past
who delivered the Children of Israel,
grant that we might realize the defeat of death in our own lives.
And being so freed,
may we live and move and breathe in you,
ever assured that freedom is not fabrication,
but fulfillment of ancient hope.
Amen.

Here's a breakdown of the specific words and images:

Oh God, the hope of ages past. In Lamb of the Free, one of the repeated affirmations is that the forgiveness of sins was a hope that Israel always lived with. Our modern understanding of the ancient sacrificial system often gets falsely simplified to the following sequence: sin committed, animal sacrificed, forgiveness granted. That was my operating understanding until I read this book, and I never really could comprehend why it was so revolutionary that Jesus arrived announcing the forgiveness of God. Hadn’t it always been there?

Well, the book says, yes but no. The sacrificial system was a complex purification system, but it wasn’t complete. It could not purify the moral impurity from the land; it didn’t have the power to forgive. Forgiveness was always an act of God, an extension of grace. And the hope of a future, divine forgiveness that would cleanse people’s hearts and land was a definitively-articulated, collectively-held hope that the authors of the Old Testament espouse again and again. They looked forward to the day when God would forgive what the sacrifices could not purify. Forgiveness had to be an act of God. So, I chose the words, “the hope of ages past,” to remind myself that forgiveness had been a hope for a long, long, long time. It was the actual hope of the ages.

Who delivered the children of Israel. The foundational event for the Passover meal, and later the Lord’s Supper, was the Exodus from slavery. Last week I wrote about how meaningful this story was for me as a child learning about the Christian faith. It’s even more meaningful now after reading Lamb of the Free; it all goes back to the Exodus. When God delivered Israel from their Egyptian slaveholders, he established an event of liberation that is pivotal to our understanding of Jesus, the one who frees us from death.

Grant that we might realize the defeat of death in our own lives. This, right here, is my heart’s cry: I want to understand what it means to have been freed from death, to have received salvation. When I said “yes” (roughly 47 times) to Jesus in elementary Sunday School, I kept waiting to feel something. To have some sense of freedom. To know what made salvation good apart from a hazy construct of not ending up in hell. I’m finally starting to grasp what the defeat of death actually means- and it’s deep and wide enough to be worthy of a lifetime of meditation and pursuit. The same rejoicing that took place on the other side of the Red Sea can be ours as well. Jesus has entered death for us to shake the grip that death has on this world. Not as a substitute to appease an angry God, but as the only one powerful enough to enter a place of utter darkness and emerge completely victorious.

And being so freed, may we live and move and breathe in you. The desired result of realizing freedom? A life not weighed down by dissonance, but by an awareness that liberation from death is something that we carry into all remaining places of darkness in the world. I really love that “in him we live and move and have our being” was borrowed by Paul (in Acts 17:28) from Greek/Cretan poets. Being filled with divine wasn’t just a hope unique to the people of the Christian faith; it was a human hope. And the best way to live.

Ever assured that freedom is not fabrication, but fulfillment of ancient hope. This is the other desired result of realizing freedom- knowing that it isn’t made up. It isn’t pretend. It’s not a fabrication of misplaced hope…it’s the actual hope that Israel held onto in the Old Testament, and it’s the actual hope that Jesus inaugurated in the New. It has real implications, tangible results, and deserves a predominant place in our heart’s affections.

Amen. Or, may it be so.

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PS. This is one of the songs I’ve been playing on repeat lately. It’s not new; it’s just a quiet and profound way to wander through a confession of belief in the Risen Christ.