Prevent and Follow Us
The Rev. Canon Michael D. Vinson
The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity + September 27, 2026
Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Before any of us could pray, someone prayed for us. And before we knew the words, someone taught them to us. Perhaps you remember it: a mother kneeling beside a small bed, taking a child's restless hands and folding them together, her own hands wrapped around his. The child does not yet know what prayer is. He cannot explain the Our Father or define grace. But his hands are held and the words are spoken over him, and slowly, night after night, the words become his own. Her hands came before his, and her hands stayed with his.
That is what we ask of God in this morning's Collect: "that thy grace may always prevent and follow us." Prevent in the old Prayer Book sense does not mean to hinder. It means to come before. Follow means to stay with us and behind us. We ask our Father to do for his children what every faithful mother does for hers: to go before us, to remain with us, and to fold our hands into good works.
And this is what Mother Church has always done through the Book of Common Prayer. "Lord, teach us to pray," the disciples asked, and the Church provides the answer. She takes our restless hands and folds them into prayers rooted in Scripture and grounded in apostolic orthodoxy. She gives us the liturgies of the church, words before we fully understand them, so that by praying them we learn the faith we profess. Liturgy guards our common worship from error, and trains us into theologians, not by lecture but by prayer. Liturgy teaches us to pray rightly.
Now, some of you may be thinking, "Why would Fr. Michael classify prayer as either right or wrong? Lordy, Vicar, that seems slightly pharisaical. Is God grading my prayers? Am I capable of praying wrongly? Aren't my authentic and heartfelt words acceptable? Goodness, do I have to take a class in professional prayer?"
These are fair questions, and a reasonable reaction to the thought of "praying rightly." They arise, however, when we see prayer, worship, and the whole Christian life through the lens of I rather than we. And here this morning's Collect is our teacher. Listen to how it prays. Not "prevent and follow me," but "prevent and follow us." Not "make me given to good works," but "make us." The Church does not teach her children to ask for a private sanctification. She teaches us to pray in the first-person plural, because we have been called together.
Was anyone here not born into a relationship? At the risk of treading on thin ice in our present climate, I presume we all had a mother. Even before our first breath, each of us was tied to her, literally, in the womb. From the beginning, human existence has meant community.
And this was God's plan from eternity, that humanity would enjoy communion instead of autonomy and loneliness. Consider Adam, whose first conscious thought was that he was alone. And God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." Because God loved Adam and desired him to be whole and happy, he gave him a fit and indispensable companion, the woman: a creature like him yet distinctly different, who supplied all that was lacking in the man. Together, constituting the image of God, humanity was complete, fulfilled through the gift of the other, the man and the woman in perfect union with each other and with their God.
Man is made in the image of a God who is himself a communion of love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so,communion is not something we do; it is what we are. To be a person at all is to be with another. But that communion was shattered by our fall. Sin ruptured union: between the man and the woman, between man and the creation, and finally between man and his God. We are sons and daughters of Adam, dwelling like our first parents outside the Garden, hiding in the shrubs and bushes, a law unto ourselves. St. Paul puts it plainly to the Ephesians: "you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world... and were by nature children of wrath" (Eph. 2:1–3). Not walking toward God but running as fast as we can in the opposite direction, heeding the call of the world.
And yet God calls. He was within his rights to destroy Adam and Eve in their transgression, as he would be just to do with every one of us. But he does not. The Lord comes walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the first word spoken to fallen man is not a sentence of death but a summons: "the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?" The sinner hides; God seeks. This is the grace that prevents, the old Prayer Book word for the grace that comes before. And it comes before not only our obedience but our very desire to obey.
The Tenth Article of Religion is plain: fallen man "cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God," and so we have no power to please God "without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will." Grace does not wait for us to come to it; it comes to us and makes us able to come. We did not seek God; God sought us. We did not call upon him; he called us, and gave us the will to answer.
Look at this morning's Gospel. In the house of a chief Pharisee sits a man swollen with the dropsy. He makes no request. He offers no argument. And our Lord "took him, and healed him, and let him go" (Luke 14:4). Before the asking, grace. That is the shape of every Christian life. This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
But grace does not merely open the door and leave us standing on the threshold. The Collect prays that grace would prevent and follow us. St. Augustine, whose voice echoes all through our Collects, put it this way: "He goes before us that we may be healed; he follows us that, being healed, we may grow strong. He goes before us that we may be called; he follows us that we may be glorified." The Tenth Article, having confessed the grace that prevents us, finishes the thought: that same grace goes on "working with us, when we have that good will." The God who gave us the will to answer does not leave us to carry it out alone.
The Divine call is answered by faith and by coming to the waters of baptism, where we are born again of water and the Spirit. There God sends us another Comforter, a fit companion to supply what we lack, as he did for Adam. The Spirit takes away the heart of stone and gives a heart of flesh, and he follows us all our days, making us wholly human again.
Think again of that first marriage. Adam did not find his bride. He did not court her, or earn her, or even see her made. "The LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam," and while he slept God took from his side the one who would complete him, and "brought her unto the man." Adam awoke to a gift. Here is prevenient grace written into the first chapter of human love. And the Fathers saw further still. As St. Augustine teaches, the second Adam fell asleep upon the cross, and from his pierced side flowed the water and the blood from which his Bride, the Church, was formed. We did not find our way to Christ. He laid down his life and awoke on the third day to find us as his own.
This is why the Prayer Book says that marriage signifies "the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church." And it is why the priest declares, "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." Notice who does the joining. The couple do not make the marriage; they receive it, and then they spend their lives keeping their vows. So it is with every Christian, who spends his life keeping the vows of his baptism. So it is, too, with the unity of the Spirit. We did not make it, and we cannot make it. It is God's joining. But we can keep it, or we can tear at it.
And so St. Paul says, "endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit." Nor is this a private affair, with each of us struggling to be first with God. Christ does not have many brides, each with her own claim on him. He has one Church, and to be joined to him is to be joined to all whom he has joined to himself.
And this is why God gives his Church a common Liturgy: what he has joined together, he intends to keep together. In common prayer we lift up our hearts together, confess one faith together, confess our sins together, and receive one absolution together, one Bride before her one Lord.
A peculiar and diverse people we are, and yet "there is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all" (Eph. 4:4–6). He is the faithful Bridegroom who will not abandon his Bride.
The Collect makes one more petition: that grace would "make us continually to be given to all good works." Mark the words: make us. We ask God to make us a people given over to them, and to do so continually. And in Ephesians 4 the good works grace produces are not private achievements. They are the virtues of a common life.
On this Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, St. Paul beseeches us to "walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called." And what is that vocation? It was given to us at the font. There the Church asked on our behalf, "Wilt thou obediently keep God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life?" And the answer came, "I will, by God's help." To walk worthy of our calling is to walk in our baptism: to live as who we already are, a people washed, named, and joined to Christ. And mark the answer: by God's help. That is this morning's Collect. Grace went before us at the font, and grace follows us in the walk. We keep what God has joined, and we keep it by his help.
How then are we to walk in accordance with our calling? With all lowliness. The lowly man walks in virtue because he reflects on the unwarranted salvation he has received from God's gracious hand, and knowing that all is of grace, he humbles himself. Our Lord paints his portrait in today's Gospel. Bidden to a wedding, he takes the lowest room, until the host comes and says, "Friend, go up higher" (Luke 14:10). He sits low because he knows he was invited. And the grace that found him first follows him and raises him up.
The lowly man is also meek, gentle with friend and foe alike, and longsuffering, forbearing others in love. When patience runs thin, as it does, he restrains himself, bearing with imperfect people as God bears with his. These are the good works the Collect asks for: not private feats of piety, but the patience of a people bound together.
As St. John Chrysostom says in his ninth homily on this Epistle, the bond of peace is a glorious bond, one by which we are bound both to one another and to God. It does not bruise the wrist nor cramp the hands; it leaves them free. The bond of peace frees us to love one another as Christ loves. If the strong be bound to the weak, let him bear him up and not suffer him to perish. If the joyful be tied to the sorrowful, let him lift him from the ashes. So are brothers and sisters in Christ bound in peace, to stay the course together, that all may walk worthy of the calling we have received.
Beloved, from first to last it is grace. Grace went before us when we were running from God. Grace called us by name, washed us in the font, and gave us a Companion who will never leave us. Grace follows us still, into this Liturgy and out into the week. And grace will make us, continually, a people given to all good works: lowly, meek, longsuffering, forbearing one another in love. He loved us before we ever loved him, and his love will not let us walk alone.
Therefore, beloved, I "beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." Remember, "those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." And let us pray, not I, but we:
“…that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
