Sunday Next before Advent, 2011

Text: The Collect

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“Stir Up Sunday”

Well, here we are at the last Sunday of the Christian year, the Sunday next before Advent. In England they call it “Stir Up Sunday,” because it’s traditional on this day that everyone in the family would take a turn stirring the Christmas pudding while making a wish. Actually the pudding is prepared on the Saturday before, traditionally using thirteen ingredients to represent Christ and his disciples. Then on “Stir Up Sunday” families return home from church to give the pudding its lucky stir, stirring east to west in honor of the three wise men. Often a coin is added to the ingredients, which is supposed to bring wealth and happiness to whomever finds it on their plate when the pudding is served. Other traditional additions to the mix include a ring, which is supposed to foretell a marriage, and a thimble for a lucky life. After all the mixing and stirring the pudding is steamed and put away to age. Then finally on Christmas day, the pudding is brought out and brandy or rum is added and set ablaze, and the flaming pudding is brought to the dinner table to be served as soon as the flame burns out. It’s quite an elaborate, fun holiday tradition.

Of course the idea for “Stir Up Sunday” came from the collect for today in which we prayed:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

You see, originally, like many of our holiday traditions, there was a spiritual meaning to the stirring-up of the Christmas pudding. It was to symbolize that our hearts must be stirred up in preparation for Christ's coming. It was to reflect the fact that today we look ahead to our Advent journey to Christ's birth and to his return. And so the Church today “collects” together in its prayer the themes of preparation for our journey, faithfulness along the way, and a blessed arrival at our journey’s end.

Three things we pray for in our Collect today: we pray for quickened wills, for greater fruitfulness, and for final reward.

First, for quickened wills: “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.”

One of the great spiritual diseases that afflicts the Church, and that so easily besets us as individual Christians, is the disease of lethargy. We tend to think that falling back on our Christian walk means to actively go the other direction, to rebel against our Christian duty and to walk opposite the Lord’s calling on our lives. But as the Book of Hebrews says, “We must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away.” Lest we drift away. And drifting doesn’t require a great deal of effort. Drifting really can happen just by doing nothing.

Archbishop Venables at our last General Council, illustrated to point by it by telling us how as a boy growing up on the south coast of England he spent a lot of time in boats. And one day had taken his little row boat somewhere off the Kent coast, and laid down in the boat and closed his eyes for what seemed like just a few moments. And when he opened them, he found himself adrift at sea beyond sight of land. It’s that easy to find yourself adrift in the Christian life as well. All you have to do is nothing. It is a great truth of the Christian faith, as it is in most of life, that to go nowhere is to go backwards.

There are so many reasons why we stall out in our Christian walk. Most of the time it’s simply because we’re content with where we are on the highway to holiness. We don’t need to keep taking those laborious steps. Or there is always tomorrow, we tell ourselves. “Tomorrow, I’ll get back to praying and reading the Bible; tomorrow, I’ll get back to exercising myself in the spiritual disciplines; tomorrow, or next week, I’ll really put my heart into worship; tomorrow, I’ll reach out to my neighbor with the love of Christ and with the gospel. Today, I need to rest and relax…in preparation for tomorrow, of course.”

As Peter Toon puts it, “As pilgrims heading for the celestial city we are tempted to take too many rests on the way and thus do not seek to conquer more of the terrain & path in front of us.” The Scriptural call is for us “to press on towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:13-14). [But] we are often deaf and stationary and do not pay heed to that call. We need to be awakened, stirred up and energized to make headway!”

So the major petition of our Collect today is that God the Father will cause the Holy Spirit “to stir up our lazy and inactive wills and to rouse us from the slumber of complacency.”

That’s what happened when God sent his prophet Haggai to the Jews after they stalled out in rebuilding the temple. See for them the reason for stalling out was fear – fear of persecution, fear of the unknown, fear of being stretched beyond their comfort zone. And so God sent his prophet Haggai to tell them that they’d better get off their derrieres and get on with the work, because what they - and we - should really fear is not the world’s response to our faithfulness, but the Lord’s response to our unfaithfulness.

Well, the message was a convicting one. Haggai didn’t mince any words, which means he probably wouldn’t get invited to preach at many churches today. But the message was the Lord’s, and it accomplished His purpose, because as we read, “So the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel…[the] governor…and the spirit of Joshua… the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people, and they came and worked on the house of the Lord of hosts their God.”

You see, the Lord stirred up the spirits and hearts of his people, and they did the work he commanded them to do. And that’s just what we pray the Lord will do in our hearts today: that would stir us up, that we might do the things He’s called us to do.

And so the second petition of the Collect is a petition for greater fruitfulness: “Stir up the wills of thy faithful people, that they [may] plenteously bring forth the fruits of good works.”

The truth is our wills are naturally weak and in need of divine inspiration and energizing in order to be able to glorify God in good works. But we are the ones who are called to do the works. The idea of “letting go and letting God,” when it comes to living out the Christian life, may sound very pious, but it is an unbiblical idea. Certainly God is the one who inspires us and empowers us to work for his glory; all our working depends on his working in us, and we must rely on his power. But God does not do the works for us. We are called to work in concurrence with His working in us. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” the Scripture says, “for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13). You are the one who is willing and doing, while it is God who is inspiring your willing and doing. “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit,” it says in Galatians 5:25 (NIV).

So again as Peter Toon says, “there must be both stirring up from heaven and wholehearted cooperation by ourselves to the motions of the Spirit in our souls.” We’re not talking about our justification here – how we’re made right with God - which is entirely of the Lord’s working without any cooperation on our part. As a matter of fact, as my old theology professor used to say, the only thing we contribute to our justification is our sin – our need – otherwise it is all of God. But we’re talking about out sanctification, our growth in holiness. And our sanctification, our growth in holiness, is something we must exercise our renewed wills toward, by our cooperation with the Spirit’s motions in our souls.

How do we cooperate with the Spirit’s Well, as I always say, the Holy Spirit works through means. In the case of the Jews building the temple, the Spirit stirred up his people by the preaching of Haggai. The Spirit stirs through the means of grace: through the preaching and reading of the Word, through the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, through the laying on of hands in Confirmation, through our public and private prayer, and also through the fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters. That’s why it says in the book of Hebrews, “Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb. 10:24-25).

The point is, isn’t it, that if we are going to have any success cooperating with the Spirit work in our hearts to produce good fruit in our lives, we must be diligent in the use of the means of grace, not assuming that we are strong enough go it on our own; accepting that we will not be able to produce the fruits of good works if we take ourselves out of the sphere of the Spirit’s working. Jesus said, “He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.” We can’t produce any good fruit in our lives unless we have Christ abiding in our hearts, and unless we are abiding in Him, and it is the Spirit who brings us together. So it is essential for us to be attentive to the means the Holy Spirit uses to strengthen our bond with Christ. Doesn’t that make sense?

It is God working in us both to will and to work according to his good pleasure, but, you know what, in the Scriptures the fruits are nevertheless counted as of our own doing. For God, in His amazing grace, desires to reward us according to our works. It’s written in Galatians 6:9, “Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not”

In the third petition of the collect, we unabashedly pray that God would grant us our rewards: “that [we], plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded.”

It is amazing grace, that God, who works in us to do the works, rewards us according to those works. The idea of rewards may sound like a kind of mercenary motivation for doing good deeds, but it is not if that’s what God has designed to do. I like the way C.S. Lewis puts it. He says in his essay entitled The Weight of Glory,

“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desire, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

We are far too easily pleased. Far too often we’re willing to settle for rewards the world has to offer, rather than holding out for the rewards God desires to pour out upon us for faithfulness to Him. Isn’t that true? And so St. Paul admonishes us in I Corinthians 15: “Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the works of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” Your good works in the Lord will be rewarded in this world and the next.

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded.” For in the end we know that the will, the fruit, and the reward are all “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”