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 …

The Collect-Prayer for the 3rd Sunday of Advent is one of the most exciting petitions in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. I mean that literally, because the Latin term translated as “stir up” is excita—from which we get our English word excite. 

The Latin verb ciere means to cause something or someone to move. This was then given the prefix ex-, which means “out of.” The resulting verb, excitare, means to call or summon something out of its existing dormant state into more energetic mode of being, or to provoke or agitate someone to do something which might otherwise not happen—in other words, to rouse or stir them to action.

In English, the most common sense of excite is to arouse interest or strong emotion—to “stir up.” This can be a good thing, as when we are excited by a stimulating idea, a dramatic movie, or even a stirring sermon; or it can be a bad thing, as when an angry mob—or a weak heart—gets overexcited. 

“Excite” has additional, more specific meanings. In biology and medicine, living matter can be excited to produce an increase of activity, as when a defibrillator shocks the heart back into action. In electrical engineering, an “exciter” produces an energizing current to start up a generator or motor. In physics, electrons can be excited into a higher energy state, and in the late Middle English of the 14^th and 15^th centuries, excite could mean to rouse from sleep or even awaken the dead. 

All these different shades of meaning resonate with Advent’s urgent cry to “wake up!” Wake up to the reality of a broken, troubled and violent world. Wake up to our own participation and complicity in a human history that is radically out of sync with divine intention. Wake up to our inability to fix things without God’s help.

But also, wake up to the dawn of salvation. Wake up to the voice that cries in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord who is coming.” Wake up to God’s gift of new possibility. 

In the old Latin mass, on 4 of the 5 Sundays before Christmas, the Collect began with the same word: Excita! Stir up.

On the Last Sunday after Pentecost, just before Advent, the people prayed: Excita!—Stir up, we beg you, the wills of your faithful people, that they more readily seek the fruit of divine work …

On the First Sunday of Advent, the people prayed: Excita! Stir up your power, Lord, we implore you, and come, that by your protection we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sins, and by your deliverance be saved …

On the Second Sunday of Advent, the people prayed: Excita! Stir up our hearts, Lord, to make ready the way of your only-begotten Son, that we may be worthy to serve you with purified minds …

On the Third Sunday of Advent, there was a different opening: Aurem tuam, quaesumus, Domine (Incline your ear to our prayers, O Lord). 

But on the Fourth and final Sunday of Advent, it was back to Excita!: Stir up your power, we implore you, Lord, and come. With great power assist us, that by the help of your grace, whatever has been impeded by our sins may be sped forward by your merciful kindness. 

In the revision process which produced the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the Fourth Sunday collect migrated to the Third Sunday, and non-Excita collects were adapted or composed for the other Sundays of Advent. The American Episcopal Prayer Book of 1979 did some further tinkering. 

I do love our Episcopal Advent collects, which I have been praying for a very long time. But I also find something very compelling about the old sequence of the Excita collects. I love their sense of urgency and their imploring passion. They beg God for what we so desperately need. 

There are a couple of things to notice about these collects. Most of the collects of the Christian year are addressed to God, or God the “Father,” but two of the four Excita collects are addressed to Christ, the God who comes. Veni, they say to Christ. Come, Lord. Come now, as you did back then. Come here, as you did at Bethlehem. Come into our world. Come into your Church. Come into our hearts. Maranatha! Lord come! Veni, veni, veni!

Another thing to notice is that Advent is not a spectator sport. We ourselves are participants in the coming of God’s future. Two of the Excita collects pray that God’s power and might be stirred into action. But the other two pray that our wills and our hearts be stirred as well, excited into a higher energy state. It’s spiritual physics, isn’t it? The energies of God trigger an excited state within us and among us. Would that it be so!

There’s a story about a fancy Episcopal church in New York City where a visitor sitting in one of the front pews started crying out “Praise the Lord!” at various points in the liturgy. This made the regular congregation a little nervous, and before long one of the ushers made his way discreetly up the aisle to slip into her pew. The next time she repeated her acclamation, “Praise the Lord!,” the usher whispered, “Not in the Episcopal Church, madam.”

Not everyone wants to be excited to a higher energy state. Not everyone wants to wake up. A dormant state seems a lot easier, at least until a repressed reality comes calling with a vengeance. 

Look how scared some people get about the word “woke.” Sleepers, don’t wake! That’s what the broken world tries to tell us. Keep things the way they are. Don’t risk anything so new and challenging as the Kingdom of God. 

But Advent people are not sleepers.
Advent people want to be stirred up by a God who is eternally woke.
It’s a risky business, of course. 

Who shall abide the day of God’s coming?
And who shall remain standing when God appears?   (Malachi 3:2)

We all have some stake in the status quo.
We are all mired in the inertia of history.
We all have things to answer for.
We are all apprehensive about what we might lose.

But like Mary before the angel of Annunciation,
we are the people who say Yes! to God’s coming.
Come what may. 

Of course, as Annie Dillard warns us, “When we go to church we should be issued crash helmets, and be lashed to our pews, for the sleeping God may wake.” Neil Young said the same thing in his own vivid way. He was speaking to an earthly lover, but he could just as well have been talking to the God who always stirs up: 

You are like a hurricane: there’s calm in your eye
And I’m getting blown away …
I want to love you, but I’m getting blown away.

Do we find this a little scary? God’s hurricane?
Sure we do!. But that’s what makes it fun. 
At least that’s what the saints and mystics tell us. 
Risking life in God is, in the end, a rapturous destiny.

All you have to do is say yes.