Peer Control?

Fifth Sunday in Lent

O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant unto thy people that we 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, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Anyone who has taught middle school students doesn’t have to look up the definition of “unruly.” But for one to whom teaching is fun and being around budding (bursting) adolescents is true joy, those years at Holy Nativity Episcopal School were the top of my life. Unruly only in class though, and perhaps only in my classes, perhaps because they could sense that almost everything they did amused and entertained me. But the unruliness could quickly be brought to order because mounted on the wall just inside the door of my classroom was a large ship’s bell. One clang on the bell was so deafening that there would be total silence in the classroom as ears rang in the clang’s long residual ringing hummmm. 

Not that the bell was God, nor the clang the Word of God, nor the students sinners with unruly wills and affections. And the bell was seldom rung, because usually they behaved, were a joy to be with.

Our collect for this coming Sunday is charged with theological assertion: we can’t get ourselves under control, only God can do that. And presumably only if we submit to God, and that through prayer. Which by the collect we are doing, praying Almighty God to make us love and want what God commands and promises; and find true joy there. Because the world around us is tumultuous and fickle, unfaithful and undependable. Perfidious is the word, eh?

The collect for next Sunday rings a bell in my mind this morning about those middle schoolers. Unruly as they may have been in class, in chapel a cloud descended. Or a fog. While on the stage up front the middle school praise band and chorus played and sang and praised joyfully, assembled adolescents stood mute and staring straight ahead lest a peer see them being uncool. Unruly entering, then instantly muted. So if in theological discourse about the collect we assert that only God can control our unruly wills and affections, the question is, how, how does God control? One answer might be that God may control through our peers, through those around us.

Peace.

Tom+