The Collect for the third Sunday of Advent begins with the words “Stir up,” and calls us to move past our sins which only slow us down. We ask that God deliver us from these sins so that we might move more freely and with purpose to do the work we need to do in the Kingdom. Christ, whose coming we anticipate in this season, calls us to that work, so we must be able to tend to it without anything slowing us down. The full Collect reads: “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever.” You can tell there is a sense of urgency here, that we might be delivered from our sins quickly. Stir up…or, as the Latin says, Excita! I preached a sermon on this very topic a couple years ago during Advent. Here’s an excerpt from that sermon:

“Excita! (ex-cite-ah) Excita! This word, Latin for stir up, opens three of the four Collects for Advent, dating back to sometime in the 6th century when the season of Advent was set at a month. These Latin Collects stood for centuries until various parts of the Church began to rewrite them, adapting them to their own order and language of worship, the Anglican Church in particular with Cranmer’s introduction of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. 

Three of the four Collects begin by calling for action…

Stir up, O Lord, your power and come…

Stir up, O Lord, our hearts…

Interestingly, the one Collect that doesn’t begin this way is the one for the third Sunday of Advent, and yet, for us, it is the only one of the four that uses this expression.  “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us…”

Stir up … move us, or, better, move within us … cause something to happen. It is Advent, we are moving closer to Christ’s coming again … move us as well to do something. It is what we hear in our other readings today, isn’t it, movement. That’s the job of a prophet, to move us, to get us to do God’s calling. We can’t just sit back and do nothing, we are called to do something … called to action. Stir up in us …”

This Sunday, 3 Advent, we are called, once again, to movement. Isaiah calls us to movement. Mary’s words in her Magnificat indicate the power of God stirring, literally, in her. Paul calls us to movement. Mark, in his story of John the Baptist being mistaken for the Messiah, calls us, like John, to be the voice in the wilderness doing the will of the Lord. May we be stirred, may God work in us, may Christ continue to call us to movement as we await his coming again.

Please continue to pray for one another, for our Cathedral family, our nation, and the world.

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