The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6C)
20 July 2025
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion, we beseech thee, upon our infirmities, and those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, mercifully give us for the worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Genesis 18:1-10a (10b-14)
Colossians 1:21-29
Luke 10:38-42
Ever since the reformations of the sixteenth century, the Anglican churches have retained sacramental confession – that is, when a person takes themself “to some ... discrete and learned priest, taught in the law of God, and confess and open his sin and grief secretly, that he may receive such Godly counsel, advise, and comfort, that his conscience may be relieved, and that ... he may ... absolution” (BCP 1549). This is how the Great Exhortation of the First Book of Common Prayer puts it – and not very differently, I may add from the words of our current book, which I read out on the First Sunday in Lent. Indeed, when asked about participation of the faithful in this rite, Queen Elizabeth the First famously is reputed to have said, “all may, none must, some should.” It has been a part of our fabric going back to the pastoral practices of English parish churches for over a thousand years, and people here do come to me or one of my colleagues seeking that absolution and comfort, and, as also has been the case for a thousand years, we maintain as absolute the seal of the confession.
When someone inquires about confession, I always tell them that they must meet with me once beforehand so the penitent can understand the boundaries of the sacrament and what they might expect. I also always discuss the preparation for confession. It is, in fact, almost as important as the ceremony itself. The work of searching our heart, soul, and mind and organising where we have sinned through what we have done and what we have left undone helps us see the patterns in our lives that we can work to changing as we seek to achieve amendment of life and reconciliation with both God and our neighbours.
One of the things I always talk about with the penitent as they consider how to prepare and what to include is that no matter how much we might wish to bury our sins and failings and avoid confronting them, we must always remember that God already knows it all. Nothing we say will be a surprise to God. The courage involved in making our confession lies is in saying whatever it is out loud and that we hear our self say it, admit it, in the presence of another human being, and risk their judgement, or worse. In this way, making ones confession is an act of courage, it is confronting the worst in ourselves, laying it bare, and experience that sense of risking the loss of the love and respect of the confessor, or worse losing the love of God.
The Good News is, however, that the seasoned confessor is listening on behalf of the God who loves us no matter what, who knows us better than we know our self, and incarnates in that moment God’s love, incarnates how proud God is of us that we face the worst in ourselves and seek forgiveness. We will feel that sense of risk, only to experience the love of God.
Now, you may wonder why I am going on and on about Confession. What does that have to do with our lessons for today? And the answer is: not that much. I am doing something I don’t do very often and taking my theme for today from our Collect. The Collects, the prayers appointed in our Prayer Book for specific times and seasons, are a rich body of material, some translations of prayers from the medieval Latin services, other written by Cranmer for the first Prayer Book, and others adapted from other sources and added to the collection at various points along the way. A proper collect, as we call it, sums up our prayers for the day, literally collects all our personal prayers, and offers them up to God.
This morning, in a prayer from the First Prayer book of 1549, originally written to be prayed as the conclusion to ante-communion on days when the Eucharist was not celebrated,(1) we have prayed that God may have “compassion upon our infirmities” and answer our prayers. There is something, however, in the way the prayer talks about what we might wish to pray for that lies at the heart of our experience as human beings living in relationship with our God, and how God knows us better than we know ourselves. As with all collects, the first phrase addresses God and says something about God’s nature: “Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking.” God knows who we are and what we need, and those things we truly need may not be the things we think we want. I talked about this a bit a few weeks ago, about how Jesus may not be the messiah we were expecting, may not be the one we thought we wanted, but he is the saviour we need, the saviour who comes to us not as a warrior, but as one acquainted with grief and sorrow, who knows the worst humans can do one to the other, and who still loves us and offers us a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. In short, the saviour who offers forgiveness for our sins, out of actual experience of our human condition.
Just as with our sins and our weaknesses, God knows our needs, and knows that it is not always easy to discern them, to separate them from those things we may desire but that lead us away from God and God’s love rather than towards them. One of the greatest tasks of the Christian life is the kind of discernment and self-examination that can only happen in relationship with the God who knows us better than we know ourselves, in relationship with a community who seek the same thing – everlasting connection with the love that sits at the heart of everything. Whether it is coming to grips with those things that we have done and that we have left undone so that we may be reconciled with God and our neighbour, or discerning those things we truly need in order to engage the life of ministry to which we are called, we must be honest with ourselves, be brave and face our fears, doubts, and yes, our sins, and have the courage to say out loud what God already knows, so we may see the depth of the love that we are offered.
Today we pray that God may “have compassion ... upon our infirmities,” and may mercifully grant to us “those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask.” We pray for strength and courage to face the complexities of the life of the world, to confront our sins, acknowledge them, seek forgiveness and make amends, so that we can do the hard work of love to which we are called.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
Macrina, 19 July 2025
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume
1. Marion J. Hatchett, A Commentary of the American Prayer Book (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979), 189.