The 'Propers,' that is, the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for each of the Sundays in Easter Season give us more difficulty perhaps than did the more narrative readings before Easter. There is a good reason for the change, though. The reason is, that the Church is now at pains to help us to understand what the events of Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday mean. Furthermore the Church is at pains to show the newly-baptised and confirmed Christians how to lead their new life (remember that in the early Church most of those coming into the Church were adults and they came in at the Easter Vigil) - and each of us, no matter how long we have been leading the Christian life, need to be reminded to live that life more fully, especially in the face of the unremitting pressure of the secular world around us to forget it all and do what we please.

           God feeds us with spiritual nourishment in these texts, and it is important that we chew them carefully, as the cow chews her cud, so as to extract all the nourishment we can from the apparently tough and indigestible fodder that the Church puts before us . As best I can, this morning I would like to ‘preach about God’ through the Collect.

           My wife has said she finds the Collects very difficult, and maybe you do too. I would prefer to say, not that they are difficult, but that they are very compressed - great riches in little room. You might think of a Collect as a sort of spiritual boullion cube - its true flavour only emerges as you dissolve it! Today's Collect is a case in point. If you please, would you turn to p. 194 and read the Collect with me:

           O ALMIGHTY GOD, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found;through Jesus Christ our Lord.

           Parts of this Collect: In red, the address to God; in pink, His attribute, the quality which we need to be reminded of; in green, our petition, what we ask; in blue, the reason for asking; and in orange the means by which we ask.

           Pause for a moment on that phrase in pink: `unruly wills and affections.' What exactly is being said there? First there are our unruly wills, and I think we know well enough what those are.

           What about affections though? We think we know what affections are, and we think that someone who is affectionate is a good person. But if affections are a good thing, why are they linked with our unruly wills? Remember St Paul's remark: (Gal. 5:24) "And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts." The root meaning of the word has nothing to do with good feelings but rather with "Desire as opposed to reason; passion, lust."

           So the first part of the Collect contains a contrast: order on the one hand - order which only God, the Almighty God, can give, and disorder—unruliness and disordered desires on the other.

           Turning to the centre of the Collect, the petition, which begins on line three, 'Grant unto thy people ...' notice for whom this petition is asked: it is asked for 'thy (i.e., God's) people. The prayers of the Church are prayers to God and for the faithful, they are not generalised expressions of good will for every Tom, Dick, and Harriet. And we need to remind ourselves of that fact, we need to be sure we are not only in Church, physically, but are part of the Church in our hearts.

           In the next part of this Collect, His people ask Him for two things: to love what God commands and to desire what He promises. Love and ordered desire: the two great motives of obedience, are here set in right order. We begin with the spiritual- the love of God's commandments for their own sake, and only then, subsidiary to the spiritual, what is "of the Law"-the desire of His promised reward.1

           In the first part of the Collect we were thinking of God's power to redeem what the Consecration prayer calls, 'the sins of the whole world.' Then, in the petition, we ask for two gifts we cannot achieve on our own—we with our undisciplined wills and our passions.

           Following along now to the end of the Collect, we find that we are thinking of 'thy people' not merely as part of that 'whole world,' but rather specifically as Christians, as those identified in the Consecration Prayer as 'we, thy humble servants, with all thy holy Church.' Furthermore, we are making a contrast now between the 'sundry and manifold changes of this world,' and the fixity of the heart which dwells in God.

           The Collect asks that "our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found." Like 'unruly,' the word 'surely' is wonderfully apt here. We are used to using 'surely' as an interjection, equivalent to 'indeed,' as in 'Surely you're joking?'-sometimes even equivalent to 'maybe,' as in 'Surely this time I'll win the lottery.' But the Prayer Book uses this word (as it uses all words) reverently. At the Burial of the Dead, the Priest commits the body to the ground, 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.' 'Sure' and 'surely' descend from a Latin word which means, 'safe, secure,' and although we may often forget their original meaning the Church does not. So we commit the body of the departed to the ground in the secure and certain hope of the Resurrection from the dead. Here in today's Collect we ask not casually that our hearts 'indeed' be fixed where true joys are to be found. Rather, we ask a much bolder thing: that God will safely, securely - certainly! fix our hearts there.

           There is of course a problem with the word "fixed." These days, any mention of fixity in the Church starts all the hounds of change baying. The hounds are in full cry now with the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

           But the new Pope, thank God, is clear. The Church, if it is to bend to the passions of the times, will cease to be the Church. In his homily to the Cardinals assembled before the conclave to elect the new Pope, he warned against "relativism, which is letting oneself be 'carried about with every wind of doctrine.' [It] looks like the only attitude [acceptable] to today's standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism [he said], which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

           We need to remind ourselves, over and over again, that following the Way, the Truth, and the Life---seeking the Alpha in order that we may come to the Omega---is to recognise, in the words of the Second Collect in Morning Prayer, that our eternal life stands (is fixed) in the knowledge of God and that only in God's service will we find perfect freedom. And "Though we ask for the blessing of temporal peace, we recognize the fact that our higher life, consisting as it does in the knowledge of God, is lifted up above all temporal accidents ; and that in the loving service of God, we enjoy a liberty which no human enemies can take away from us."2

           One of the glories of this Collect is in its form, its beauty of expression and economy of means - not one word too many-or too few! Furthermore, the words that are there are so arranged that they mirror forth that perfect order which is one of the glories of the heavenly kingdom---a glory which we can find even here in this world of tears and sorrow, a glory which should lead us to desire, ever more strongly, the glory promised in the world to come. Remember that our Gospel for today comes from Jesus' Farewell Discourse after the Last Supper. We are there, at the Last Supper. Jesus has just given the sop to Judas, who has left to betray Him. It is night. Put yourselves there in the upper room. Be there. It seems a long way from the elegant world of our Collect, doesn’t it? But is it? Look again at the Collect.

           The term "chiasmus" is a word drawn from the world of ancient learning. It comes from a Greek verb meaning 'to mark with a chi, the Greek letter which looks like our "x".' Originally it was used to designate a way of arranging the parts of a sentence so that the order of the parts in the first half of the sentence is reversed in the second half.

             For example, in Luke 16:3, the unjust steward, when called to account, asks himself what he should do now that his lord is going to take away his stewardship from him. What he says is a good example of chiasmus:

           If you think of the order of the words in "I cannot . . . dig" you will see that the second half of the sentence crosses over, or reverses that order: "to beg . . . I am ashamed."

           Now our Collect today is built on a chiasmus, a chiasmus of great importance for us as we struggle to lead the Christian life. The first two lines give the first part of our pattern. Line one speaks of God, cries out to him, "O Almighty God," and says of him that he is the one "who alone canst order...." That is, He only can `set in order, put in order'---something.

           Line two tells us what it is God alone can put in order, namely, "the unruly wills and affections of sinful men."

           So our Collect starts us off by thinking of God---God who is Almighty---God whose almightiness is shown, so to speak, in the fact that he can even put in order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men—like us. That surely is something only the God who is truly All-mighty could do! At the beginning we think first of order, then of disorder, unruliness. But when we come to the end of the Collect we think first of dis-order ('the sundry and manifold changes of the world') and then of stability, order ('our hearts may there be fixed where true joys are to be found.)

           The pattern is reversed: order, disorder in the beginning leads to disorder, order in the end. The pattern is, in fact, a chiasmus, a crossing over. Remember now where you are in spirit—in the Upper Room, about to go to dark Gethsemene, only a few hours from the Crucifixion. And woven into the very order of the words in the Collect, then—hidden there until discovered (did you get it?), is the Cross.

           This Collect is almost a diagram of the whole history of the world in its relation to God. Like creation the Collect begins in God and his order, and moves from there to the disorder of sin, only to reverse that movement at the end where we go from the chaos of a world disordered by sin to the unchanging centre where true joys are to be found.

           And how do we get from the one state to the other? Even in the form of the words, we get there through the Cross.

           One last thing. Think now of the centre on this Collect, think of the petition: "Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise." Right there is where it is clear that we must take up our cross and follow Christ. It is, in a real sense, the turning point for us. And the latter part of the Collect describes the result of our obedience—that in all the changes of life "our hearts may there be fixed, where true joys are to be found," that is, fixed on the Communion with God, given in earnest now, promised in perfection hereafter.3

           A Collect is not just a bunch of nice words interestingly, even stunningly beautifully, arranged. Every Collect has a hook. God can indeed order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men - even yours and mine, even though some sins have become almost second nature to us. But we must make the effort, we must take up our cross.

           And with God's help we can--that is why we pray. Through His Church and our whole-hearted participation in it we are led even to the unimaginable point where we will not only obey His commandments like slaves, but come to love them with our whole heart like free men, and to look forward, with all our heart and with pure desire, all unruliness and disordered desire being cast away - look forward to that which God has promised to those who keep the faith, those who will, at the end of their labours, receive 'the crown of glory that fadeth not away.’4

           And we ask THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD. AMEN!