Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm
46:4-9; James
5:7-20; Matthew
11:2-11
A homily by Fr.
Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church,
Mt.
Vernon, Illinois on Sunday, December 15, 2013.
“STIR UP SUNDAY”
The Rector
of my seminarian parish used to call this Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent,
“Stir up Sunday”.
“Stir up
Sunday”, you may be saying? Are you
referring to something related to riding a horse, you know, that thing a person
puts their foot in when they’re on a horse?
No.
“Stir up Sunday”, as in our Collect for the day, which says:
“Stir
up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are
sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help
and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and glory,
world without end. Amen.”
The collect
asks God to come with mighty power to our aid, recognizing that we are in deep,
deep trouble because of our spiritual condition. The problem is, as the prayer puts it so
well, that we are hindered by our sins.
The collect
gets right to the point. The normal
pattern of most collects begins with some statement about God’s nature. Not this one.
It begins with a prayer that is driven by deep need: “Stir up thy power, and with great might come
among us.”
Perhaps the
greatest problem we face is that we are so set in our ways that we, ourselves,
are in need of some stirring up ourselves.
Like a good soup, we’ve sat for too long, allowing the riches of God to
sink out of sight to the bottoms of our hearts.
The result is that we offer God, and the world,
thin gruel. We need the Lord to find
again the richest and best parts of ourselves, the parts that show God’s presence at work in our
lives. The parts that can sink and
separate from the rest of our being.
No
Christian walk is without the need for constant work and attention. No Christian’s life can be maintained without
effort.
We are in
need of some stirring up, now and again.
This season
of Advent is specifically designed to allow God to do some stirring in our
hearts and minds, to bring into relationship again those best parts of what God
has implanted within us, those things that may have suffered from neglect or
inattention for too long a time.
For the
Lord wants us to be well-integrated Christians, people whose relationship with
the Lord is evident in all areas of life.
Like the richest part of a good soup, it is those God-related parts that
are the best parts, and are the parts that give the mixture a reason for being
in the first place.
So come, O
Lord, among us. Stir us up with your
mighty power. Stir us up in the same
sorts of ways that St. John the Baptist’s message did those many years ago.
AMEN.
