“Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son…”
Every week in the four Sundays of Advent, our Prayer of the Day in worship begins “Stir up:”
“Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and Come.”
“Stir up our hearts, Lord God.”
“Stir up the wills of all.”
“Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.”
During one of my first Advent seasons as a pastor, my senior pastor told me how ancient these prayers were and that they had apparently remained relatively unchanged for 1000 years or more. I was fascinated as I considered how these prayers were connecting us to people of past times and spaces.
I imagined my prairie ancestors–1880s Scandinavian settlers–in their newly constructed square white clapboard churches, steeple cradling a bell on the North Dakota prairie. Winter wind's personality intruding through closed windows and doors, piling snow at the feet of people with names like Mons and Martha Rasmussen–who prayed "stir up our hearts, O Lord,” as their beloved relatives in Fitar, Norway shared the same words–though they would never share the same pew again.
"Stir up our hearts, O Lord" prayed my missionary grandfather in the Pele language of Liberia in 1946. Praying the words in a mud brick church built only a year before. “Stir up our hearts” they prayed, as they gazed upon a carved mahogany Christ family nativity. Baby Jesus with wooly hair resting in the manger while my two-week old infant mother slept, wrapped in bands of cloth, laying on my grandmother's chest.
"Stir up our hearts, O Lord" spoken today by you and I in mundane suburbs, live-streams taking our words to living rooms of people across town or across the country. Listeners unaware the words they hear hold a millennia of repetition.
Words of prayer that, God willing, will be heard by babies no person alive today will ever live long enough to meet. Babies, who will be baptized centuries from now when the chapters of our lives have been written and we have joined the company of saints… “Stir up our hearts, O Lord.”
May our hearts be stirred by the hope and promise of the coming Emmanuel–Word made flesh. May we be filled with the same Advent joy and hope as the Scandinavian immigrants who longed for the coming Christ child in a new land. May it bring peace as deep as it did to those Liberian babies who rested in their mothers' arms while my grandfather spoke. May it stir in those who hear us speak these words, so they may continue to pass along the faith first given to us.
Let us pray: Stir up our hearts, Lord, so we may share your love with generations yet unborn. Thank you for the saints whose hearts were stirred and made your love known to us. AMEN.
Praying with you,
Pastor Tracy Paschke-Johannes