Hear the words of the Collect for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity:

O God, forasmuch as without Thee we are not able to please Thee; mercifully grant that Thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.

May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. We pray in the name of The Father, and of The Son, and of The Holy Ghost. Amen.

Have you ever tried to please someone else without knowing or asking what they really want or like? Have you ever tried to help someone without asking if they would like your help? Have you ever tried to talk to someone when they don’t want to talk to you? Have you ever tried to fix something when you had absolutely no clue how to do the repair?

Well if you are like me than at some time or another you have tried to do all these things. We look at a situation and we believe that we have the solution to the problem they are having. We are so well intentioned that we forget to see the other person and the state of mind they are in, or even the fact that they do not welcome the help we are offering. We blindly trudge ahead with our insistence that we will help them even if it kills them and us in the process! Well maybe not that far, but you get the idea.

The world is suffering from a whole lot of well-intentioned, and misguided people trying to help others these days. Here is a prime example. Peter Singer is a moral philosopher who taught at Princeton University and Oxford University, among others, has written many books which approach ethical issues from a non-religious and utilitarian point of view.

He is considered to be one of the founding influences for the organization called “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”

Mr. Singer seems intent on reducing the amount of suffering in the world, and most of us would agree with this goal is a good one on humanitarian grounds alone. We could also agree, although not so readily maybe, with some of his views on the suffering of animals and animal experimentation, but he sounds like a nice guy.

Yet in his book called Animal Liberation, which was the impetus for the founding of the above organization, “he argues that the life of a person is not necessarily more valuable than that of an animal.” It is but a small step from there to his next position, that severely deformed babies, up to a month old could be killed because, “It would reduce the amount of suffering in the world.” He has said there and elsewhere that, “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” “If people read this as part of a broader context,” he said, “they understand that I’m trying to alleviate the amount of unnecessary suffering in the world.”

If this does not sound wrong to you then please remember that this is just the way the Nazi Party started in 1932. They legalized abortion on demand, and then euthanasia. From there the state stepped in to make the decisions as to who will live and who will die, and to decide who has a good quality of life. Of course this was with them making all the decisions as to what was good and what was not.

Mr. Singer has good intentions, yet he has missed the point of being grounded in the life of God.

The Collect for today is a prayer to keep us focused in the will and mind of God. If we do not do so, we wind up like Mr. Singer, advocating things that seem good to the mind of man, but are clearly outside of the will of God. We pray “that Thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts,” for it is only in that manner that we can remain in God’s Will.

Our so called “good intentions” are merely our thoughts on what we think is good, rather than from what God tells us is good. Saint Paul tells us about people who think this way in Ephesians 4:18:

Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.

Their hearts bleed for the wrong things and their conventional wisdom is godly ignorance. As Saint Paul tells us they are “alienated from the life of God.” This is possible because they do not know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. They know a man called Jesus, but to them He was only a good man, or maybe a prophet, and that He said He spoke the words of God, but He died a long time ago.

They do not know the reality of Christ in their daily lives, there is no renewal of the person, no putting off of the old man, and therefore the new man cannot be created in righteousness and holiness. These are things that God gives us. Our holiness and righteousness comes from The Father, through our faith in Jesus Christ, and acts in the power of The Holy Ghost. It is that reality which renews and strengthens us for the battles we must fight every day.

Is suffering wrong? Is pain bad?

Mr. Singer has come to the conclusion that the answer to these questions is absolutely yes. I submit that answer is at best ambiguous and in many cases is not correct. For example, if anyone has ever exercised then we understand that working underutilized muscles causes us pain and suffering. Yet, it is just this pain and suffering that works to our health and a better life.

Has anyone here ever had to deal with anger? How did we learn to control it? We learned by several methods. First, we gave in to the anger and had a fair number of fights, both verbally and physically. Eventually we determined that this wasn’t a really good method of dealing with anger, because it caused too much unnecessary pain and suffering on our part. Secondly we tried to suppress it so no one could see it and had it eat up our insides for years. In due time we learned that we were the ones suffering and the object of our anger went blissfully along, seemingly with no problems at all, and our anger solved nothing.

Finally we learn that anger is an emotion, that it is neither good nor bad. It is what we do with it that makes the difference. If we act within the previous options we are the worse for wear. Yet, if we deal with the anger and in most cases just forgive and forget we are true winners over the world and those who harmed us. Saint Paul tells us this in Ephesians 4:31and 32:

Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.

In other words, if we follow the world, we lose. If we follow Jesus Christ and are grounded in His will and forgive those who have harmed us and we will actually be doing what God wants us to do.

Amen,

The Rev. Canon John Jacobs