The Third Week of Advent – Year A -Mark Winward
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 212
Advent as a Season of Holy Disruption
One of the most striking prayers in the Anglican tradition begins with a simple but dangerous request: “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us…” It sounds harmless enough. But when you stop to think about it, that’s a bold thing to say to God. When we ask God to stir us up, we’re asking God to disturb what’s grown comfortable, to disrupt what’s settled into routine, and to wake us up to what God’s doing—whether we’re ready for it or not.
Advent is precisely the season when the Church dares to pray like that. Advent isn’t meant to lull us into sentimentality. It’s meant to prepare us—to unsettle us just enough to make room for God. The trouble is: human beings are creatures of habit. We fall into patterns of living and thinking that feel natural simply because they’re familiar. Over time, those patterns can become ruts—paths we walk without thinking because they’re already worn deep.
The Persistence of Long-Established Patterns
There’s a well-known story—whether historical or not—about how modern transportation systems still bear the imprint of very old choices. The legend goes that the standard U.S. railroad gauge—4 feet, 8½ inches—was inherited from England, where many early locomotives were built. British railroads, in turn, used that gauge because it matched earlier tramways, which themselves followed the width of existing wagons. Those wagons were built to fit the ruts already worn into roads—roads that, according to the story, dated back to Roman times. The ruts were supposedly set by Roman war chariots, sized to accommodate the rear ends of two horses. And so, well into the 21st century, much of our overland transportation is said to be constrained by the width of two Roman war horses’ hindquarters—at least if the story’s to be believed! But the point isn’t really the history. It’s that once a practice becomes firmly established, people tend to keep doing it. When something settles into being “the way things are,” we often stop questioning it.
That’s true for spiritually as well. We develop assumptions about God, about ourselves, about how faith’s supposed to work, and we rarely stop to examine them. Advent exists to interrupt that momentum. Advent is a season of examination, but it isn’t the same as Lent. Lent prepares us for a death. Advent prepares us for a birth. Both involve self-reflection, but Advent does so with joy and expectancy rather than sorrow alone. It’s, in a sense, a season of holy disruption—an invitation to look honestly at the paths we’ve been walking and ask whether they’re still leading us toward God.
John the Baptist and Faithful Questioning
That spirit of questioning brings us squarely into today’s Gospel. When we meet John the Baptist in this reading, he’s no longer standing by the Jordan preaching repentance. He’s in prison—waiting, isolated, with nothing but time and questions. This is the same John who proclaimed the coming kingdom of God, who baptized Jesus, and who saw the Spirit descend from heaven. And yet from prison he still sends messengers to Jesus with a startling question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
It’s tempting to see this as a failure of faith. But John’s question sounds profoundly human. John had expected God to act in a certain way. Many people did. Under Roman occupation, they imagined the Messiah would overthrow oppressors and restore order through unmistakable power. Jesus, instead, was healing the sick, restoring the outcast, and proclaiming a kingdom that didn’t look like what anyone expected. When circumstances failed to match expectations, as often happens to us, doubt crept in.
What’s striking is how Jesus responds. He doesn’t scold John. He doesn’t rebuke him for wavering. Instead, he points to what’s happening: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear good news. Jesus quotes Isaiah, not to condemn John, but to remind him that God is indeed at work—just not ccording to familiar patterns.
And then Jesus does something remarkable: he praises John as the greatest of the prophets. Doubt, it seems, wasn’t a disqualifier. Faithful questioning didn’t place John outside of God’s purposes. That matters, because it reshapes how we understand our own faith. When circumstances unfold differently than we expected, we often assume something’s gone wrong— either with God or with us. But Scripture suggests another possibility: perhaps God’s doing something new, something beyond our worn assumptions. That insight shapes how we think about salvation and holiness.
Holiness as Gift, Not Achievement
We live in a culture that often imagines life as a points system—good behavior earns rewards, failure earns penalties. It’s a terrifying way to live, because no one finishes with a perfect score. Scripture offers a far better gospel. Our standing with God doesn’t depend on accumulating spiritual points—it depends on God’s reaching out to us. Holiness, in Scripture, doesn’t mean being perfect – it means being set apart for God’s purposes. When God says, “You shall be holy, for I am holy,” it isn’t merely a demand—it’s a declaration of a relationship. In Christ, holiness isn’t something we achieve, it’s something we receive. We’re holy because we belong to the Holy One and are literally his Holy Family.
That truth also changes how we think about our feelings. Our culture places enormous importance on how we feel. Scripture, however, never suggests that our acceptance by God depends on our emotional state. We’re not called to feel holy; we’re called to be holy. Not called to feel joyful; called to be joyful. Feelings matter, but they aren’t our foundation.
The Advent Hope
Advent reminds us that God’s work in us doesn’t depend on our readiness, our certainty, or our emotional confidence. God stirs us up anyway. And that’s the good news of this season. God doesn’t leave us stuck in old ruts. God comes to wake us up—not to shame us, but to prepare us. To call us beyond what we’ve always been into what we’re becoming in Christ. So once again,
we dare pray that dangerous prayer:
Stir us up, O Lord.
Wake us up.
Prepare us.
Make us ready for the new life you are bringing into the world!
Amen.