So Who's Asking?

And if you're not, why?

PEACE by the late Mark Fry, Church of the Resurrection, Sioux Falls, SD

O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Collect for the Sunday between September 11 and September 17, Book of Common Prayer 2019)

This week’s Collect leads the Church to pray as Jesus taught. To make the Holy Spirit the object of our prayer is what Jesus encouraged when he likened prayer to asking, seeking and knocking,

And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:9-13)

The Collect comes up early in the liturgy, sometimes in that wiggly time when people are still coming in from the parking lot. There might not have been much congregational awareness when the celebrant, on the people’s behalf, asked the Father to give them the Holy Spirit — a prayer to which Jesus promised the Father’s response.

It’s not that liturgical churches don’t believe in asking the Father to send the Holy Spirit. We believe that the Father hears our prayer to send the Spirit upon our gifts of bread and wine, which become for us God’s gift of the Body and Blood of Christ:

So now, O merciful Father, in your great goodness, we ask you to bless and sanctify, with your Word and Holy Spirit, these gifts of bread and wine, that we, receiving them according to your Son our Savior Jesus Christ’s holy institution, in remembrance of his death and passion, may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood.

We believe asking the Father to give the Holy Spirit to Candidates for Holy Baptism, so that they can pass from death to eternal life:

Almighty and everlasting Father, in your great mercy you saved Noah and his family in the Ark from the destruction of the flood, prefiguring the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Look mercifully upon these your servants. Wash and sanctify them through your Holy Spirit, that they may be delivered from destruction and received into the Ark of Christ’s Church; and being steadfast in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in love, they may pass through the turbulent floods of this troublesome world and come into the land of everlasting life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We give our hearty AMEN to these prayers offered by our Bishops and Priests, and rightly so, given the great works God is doing in our midst.

But the Collect had me wondering what God might manifest in groups of Christians asking the Father for what is sought in the Collect — that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.

Could there be spreading fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, replacing works of the flesh, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these? (Galatians 5)

Could there be increased responsiveness to Jesus’ teachings, as promised in John 14:26, when the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name…will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you?

We believe in the Holy Spirit. We stand to gain from asking, seeking and knocking, that the Father may give us more of the Spirit’s fruit, direction and authority in our lives.