God’s is the strength, God is destination – Adv I collect

Preaching on the Advent I Collect for Old College.

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,

The resolve to run forth to meet your Christ

With righteous deeds at his coming,

So that, gathered at his right hand,

They may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

One God, for ever and ever.

Advent is for waiting – if people know one thing about Advent, it’s probably that.  We’re waiting for Christmas, which isn’t very long to wait (and seems even quicker given the decorations we have up in Old College!) and we’re waiting for Christ’s second coming, without knowing how long that will be.  Regardless, we’re waiting.  So why does this collect talk about running?  No matter what the pastor of St. Joe parish might tell you, it’s not a shout out to the St. Nick Six, but a characterization of what Christian waiting looks like.

For those of us who have run a distance further than we thought we could run, climbed a mountain higher than we thought we could climb, or walked coast to coast across a country wider than we thought we could walk, we’ve probably come to a point where it’s become very clear to us that the strength to do these things is not our own.  It’s hard not to pray in a situation like that.  And that’s why we pray here for the resolve, for the strength to run.  Our Constitutions tells us that “The mission is the Lord’s, and so is the strength for it.” 

What might our lives look like if lived in total awareness that our strength was God’s, that it came through the weakness of the cross, and that it has a purpose!  “Grant us the resolve, the strength to run forth to meet our Christ.”  Encounter with Christ is the heart of Christianity and the destination of our journey.  We run with hope towards life eternal where we will live in that face to face encounter.  But that encounter is not something altogether distant, something we can’t glimpse now.  We live in dawn’s first light and we long for fullness of day.

That’s why the collect continues, “Grant us the strength to run forth to meet our Christ with righteous deeds.”  Now, that could be misread, as if meeting Christ and righteous deeds were two separate things, as if we accrued enough righteous deeds to put on our cv and presented that as evidence we were entitled to meet Christ.  We’re not saved by our cv; we’re saved by Jesus.

No, the righteous deeds don’t cause the meeting; they’re the foretaste of the meeting.  In serving our neighbor in need, in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, educating the unknowning, we encounter the face of Christ.  This Advent, let’s run and in our righteous deeds, meet Christ.