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. Amen. [BCP p. 212]
Sins. Last week and this we are reminded of our sins. What a distasteful little word. Many preachers have abandoned it, preferring to speak of shortcomings, weaknesses, foibles, errors, or other such nonsense. I can’t blame them. I often do the same. I prefer God as Therapist – One who seeks to fix my stinkin’ thinkin’. No one wants to come to church and be told they are a miserable little lot of good-for-nothing worms.
We do love to sanitize life, though, don’t we. Rather than admit that my first goal is now and ever has been to meet my own filthy lusts and have all things “my way” (with a nod to Frank Sinatra), I’d rather talk about my shortcomings. It makes it sound like I’m at least trying. I like talking about errors or mistakes, for we all make them, don’t we? There’s nothing wrong with that; we’re only human. For most of this stuff, it’s a matter of No harm; no foul.
Euphemisms have their place, certainly. The Church has done such a fine job of making people feel guilty for being human that any talk of sin falls on deaf ears, because we simply don’t want to hear it. Puritanism arose partly out of the idea that anything and everything we do has sin at its root, so we try to root out everything we think or do lest it rip us away from God’s very presence. The greatest fear of the puritan heart is that somewhere, somehow, someone may be having a good time – those wicked sinners!
So it’s important that we find other words to help convey the truth that, yes, we sometimes say, think, or do bad things. The standard word for that is sin, but sometimes those things are better described as slips, faults, or character defects. The point is, we have them, and this Collect invites us to acknowledge that, and to realize we are often blind to the harm such does to ourselves and to others, and perhaps to God as well.
We think God is omnipotent (all powerful), and yet it seems to me that God seeing us enslaved by sin is terrified, for God has seen what sin has done to people in all times and places: sloth, lust, anger, pride, envy, gluttony, and greed. I prefer to call those vices sin (with a lower case S), and the state of being that draws us toward those sins as Sin (upper case, Sin personified). Sin blinds us to the harm those vices do, and I think it scares the perdition out of God. We are hindered, not just by being entangled in sin, but because in our blindness we don’t know where we’re going, or what we’re doing.
So we pray on this third Sunday of Advent for God to jump up the way a parent jumps up when they see their toddler wander toward the street. Parents don’t jump up to chastise their child; they jump up to save their child! We’re begging God to help us as we stumble about like drunken sailors on a short pier, or children who’ve lost their ball, unbeknownst to them, in the middle of a mine field in an active war zone. We light the third candle; God, jump up (stir up your power) and help us, we pray! We praise you for your grace!
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