Today we continue our walk through the Sunday liturgy with the Collect of the Day.
The ancient salutation of “The Lord be with you” marks this as a beginning of a new section of the liturgy with a shift in emphasis. We move from a time of gathering and praise into a time focused on a biblical theme. This theme is brought out by the Collect of the Day and the scriptures prescribed by the lectionary.
Just like the Collect for Purity the Collect of the Day sums up the prayers of the community and follows a four fold pattern.
- Invocation: God is addressed
- Meditation: Some attribute or activity of God is described
- Petition: Grace or blessing is asked for
- Doxology: A sentence of praise to The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit
The Collect of the Day offers worshipers a guide post for where our worship is heading. It orients us to where we are in the Church Calendar. It reminds us that we journey with Jesus even in the way that we think about time. Each prayer is carefully worded to bring to mind pertinent seasonal themes.
The Collect of the Day is also connected to our Sunday Lessons. The prayer finds a theme that runs through these readings as a way to connect our prayer life to what it is we hear from the Bible. The lessons from the Bible inform how we pray in our collect. On days of special observance such as saints days or feast days The Collect of the Day introduces the theme of the day. One scholar described the Collect of the Day as the red dot that says “you are here” on the map of a vast shopping mall. We can find our way through the lessons that are read that day by listening carefully to the Collect of the Day.
The Collects of the Day begin on p.598 in the BCP
