Round collects. . .

A few months ago, my friend Pastor Will Weedon had a lament for a collect that was not simply edited for the Lutheran Service Book but replaced with something rounder.  Yes, that was his term.  Rounder.  After thinking about it, I can see what he means.  Rounder, of course, in the sense that the unpleasant hard edges of our plight and God's merciful condescension had been written out of the collect entirely.  Now, as he said, the replacement was a decent prayer in its own right but it was not quite a fair swap for the original.  You can check his words on the Gottesdienst website.  What I am focused on is the term for what comes rather natural to us nowadays.  We take the hard things of our sinful situation and God's undeserved mercy and try to rework them so that we are less marred by sin and somehow more worthy of God's investment of grace.  It is what we do, along with sin, but it does not do well either for us or for God to round off the edges.

That is, after all, the nature of sin.  It minimizes the sin and makes the sinner less of a lost cause.  It is not simply that we are prone to sin if given the choice but that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.  It is not simply that we did not want to repair what sin had broken but that we could not.  Both of these are rather unpopular judgments and, if given the chance, we will surely abandon them in favor of ones more pleasant and appealing.  Those judgments will make us look better and, in the process, will end up diminishing the magnitude of God's mercy in saving us while we were yet sinners and His enemies.

The reality is that we see a lot of things as around that God sees squarely.  Just look around us at the cancel culture, gender choice, abortion, and entitlement views so much in fashion.  We refuse to believe that our feelings might be suspect or our desires might be corrupt or our judgments false.  It is always God's problem.  We don't need to change -- we are perfectly lovely and lovable as we are.  God is the one who needs to do the changing.  If He only saw things from our earthly point of view or walked as we walk in our flesh, He might think differently.  Oh, wait, He did.  He did not to experience the perfectly grand state of our lives but to embrace every tidbit of our fallen natures and carry on His shoulders the full burden of that weight so that we might be set free from the prison of our feelings, desires, and judgments.  We are always rounding out what has sharp edges.  In the end, however, we are blind to see what rounding things does.

Rounding off the sharp edges of sins seems innocent enough but it makes the suffering and sacrifice of Christ to be well intended but unnecessary and ultimately renders the cross to be a sham or a joke..  When we recognize the sharp edges, we also recognize the immensity of the love that saved us.  Only God could love a creation He knew would rebel against Him and bring upon the whole that God had made sin and death.  Only God could proceed with this creation knowing all along the cost of redeeming His lost creation and restoring their broken state.  Let the sharp edges be.  They may seem to slight us but they honor God for doing what only God could and did do.  What we need to do is tinker less with the remodeling of those sharp edges and rejoice with the Amen that delights in God's merciful goodness.