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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Every Church service, there is at least one Collect, a short prayer that, as it were, collects the thoughts that the Church wishes to bring to God for a particular occasion or need. The Collect’s collected thoughts are expressed in a very specific form: usually the prayer addresses a person of the Trinity, offers a reason for the request, makes a specific petition, and names a benefit from God’s granting the petition. (Confer Neidigk, 39.) Some collects have longer and more notable histories than others. The Collects for the four Sundays of Advent, used in each year of our three-year cycle of Readings and such, go back to before the time of the Reformation, so Lutherans have been using them all along. Sometimes the Collects go by us so quickly in the Services, both Sunday’s Divine Service and Wednesday’s Vespers service, that this Advent I thought we would be blessed to take a closer look at the Collects. If you pull out your half-page service outline, printed on its front, you will find the Collect for the First Sunday in Advent (and the week following). Let us read it together right now.
Stir up Your power, O Lord, and come,
that by Your protection
we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sin
and saved by Your mighty deliverance;
for You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
One of the first things you might notice is that this Collect for Advent I, as arguably the other three Collects for Advent, refer to the Lord Jesus’s coming. The cry “Come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:20) typifies our solemn Advent season of anticipation and of spiritual and penitential preparation and purification—preparation and purification not so much for the celebration of our Lord Jesus’s coming some 2000 years ago in the flesh but more preparation and purification for the comings that that coming guarantees: namely, our Lord Jesus’s graciously coming to us now in His Word and Sacraments and His final coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. (Confer Reed, 466; Lindemann, I:29-32, 34-36.) In connection with the comings of the Lord Jesus, this Collect for Advent I, as two of the other three Collects for Advent, straightforwardly (almost bluntly) asks the Lord to stir up something, in this case His “power” (or “might”).
The man who several years ago posted the picture we used on the front of the service outline wrote with it, “I could certainly use some of that stir-up power.” Who could not use some of God’s stirred-up power? I would expect that each of us could imagine things we might do if we were all-powerful! Some of us may recall the 2003 movie “Bruce Almighty”, starring Jim Carrey as a down-on-his-luck TV reporter, who complained about the job God was doing and then got to be God for one week. At least initially, “Bruce Almighty” used his powers for personal gain. We all are so self-centered by nature apart from faith in Christ. Like “Bruce Almighty”, we might also think of people on whom we would like to bring down vengeance, as Jesus’s disciples James and John once wanted to tell fire to come down from heaven to consume a Samaritan village (Luke 9:51-56). To be sure, we have our enemies, as did the psalmist whose words we sang earlier (Psalm 143), but the enemies we ought to be most concerned about are sin, death, and the power of the devil. And so, the Collect for Advent I rightly names the benefits to our Lord’s stirring-up His power and coming: our rescue from the threatening perils of our sin by His protection and our salvation by His mighty deliverance.
At least in part, this Collect for Advent I seems to be based on Psalm 80:1-2, where the “stirring up” of God’s “might” (or power) and His “coming to save us” are apparently parallel in the Hebrew poetry. Our forgiveness of sins or salvation is the very reason why the Lord comes! As we heard in the First Reading, the Righteous Branch saves Judah, and so Jerusalem dwells securely (Jeremiah 33;14-18); the greatest descendant of David sits on the throne, and our Great High Priest has sacrificed Himself once and for all. All of tonight’s hymns express the connection between the Lord Jesus’s coming and our being saved. We sang in the Opening Hymn: “As banner of God’s love unfurled, / Christ came to suffer loss, / That by His death a dying world / Would rally to the cross” (Lutheran Service Book 342:3). The Office Hymn put it this way: “Thou cam’st the Bridegroom of the bride, / As drew the world to eventide, / The spotless Victim all divine / Proceeding from a virgin shrine” (Lutheran Service Book 351:3). And, we will sing in the Closing Hymn: “He comes, for you procuring / The peace of sin forgiv’n, / His children thus securing / Eternal life in heav’n” (Lutheran Service Book 334:6).
In tonight’s Second Reading we heard the prophecy of the birth of John the Baptizer, who, the angel said, would turn many to the Lord their God (Luke 1:1-25). Indeed, John preached repentance, more specifically, turning in sorrow from sin and trusting God to forgive sin for Jesus’s sake. As we so repent, God forgives us all our sin, whatever our sin might be. God forgives us not because we repent, but because of His mercy and grace. We wait, hope, and trust in Him, and we are not disappointed. As we did in tonight’s Psalm, we plea to Him for mercy, not judgment, and, for His Name’s sake, He preserves our lives, He delivers us from our enemies.
When we think of our Lord stirring up His power and coming, we might think of Him doing so dramatically, in some spectacular fashion. Was there a greater deliverance than God’s rescue of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt? Could that deliverance and rescue have been more dramatic and spectacular than with its ten plagues and crossing of the Red Sea? How dramatic and spectacular is our deliverance and rescue? A seemingly failed teacher hangs dead on a cross. Three handfuls of water and a few spoken words supposedly rescue a newborn baby from sin, death, and the devil. A thin wafer and a sip of wine supposedly strengthen and nourish bodies and souls to life everlasting. If we go by what our human eyes see and what our reason understands, we reject it all. If we go by what God’s Word reveals and so what our faith perceives, we receive it all, realizing that His stirring up His power and coming in these ways arguably is all the more dramatic and spectacular because of its weakness. And, the final time our Lord Jesus comes, as we heard two Sundays ago, on the Last Sunday of the Church Year, He will come with great power and glory (Mark 13:26). Until then, as we sang in the Psalm, He teaches us to do His will, and His good Spirit leads us on level ground.
On the Last Sunday of the Church Year in the Anglican Church they reportedly use a “stir-up” Collect so famous that they call the day “Stir-Up Sunday”, and, in a tradition said to have begun with Prince Albert, they rush home after church to start “stirring up” Christmas pudding and other holiday treats (Neidigk, 39). Tonight as we reflected on the first of the Advent Collects in the Lutheran tradition, we have realized that our Lord Jesus stirred up His power and came once, that He stirs up His power and comes now, and that He will stir up His power and come a final time. May we always be rescued from the threatening perils of our sin by His protection and be saved by His mighty deliverance.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +