The collect for today may give us a hint of what this is all about. "Stir up your power, O Lord". Besides being known as the third Sunday of Advent, or "Gaudette Sunday", meaning "Rejoicing Sunday" (which is why we use a rose candle instead of blue. It's supposed to reflect the joy better than blue.) But, for generations, this has been known as "stirrup Sunday". Doesn't have anything to do with horses or doctors' offices. It comes, of course, from the collect asking God to stir up his power.

Maybe reading about all this rejoicing and then to get slammed with the darkness of John the Baptizer's warning is God's way of stirring things up. Lull us into a sense of comfort and then Bam, he calls us a bunch of snakes. John was good at stirring things up.. In fact, I think that was his main purpose in life.

He joins a long list of professional pot-stirrers. Amos who compared the women of Bethel to the cows of Bashan. Naaman who said to David, "that man is you". Daniel who predicted the judgment of God. Not really popular people, but they saw, through the eyes of God, a stagnant, putrefying swamp in the souls of God's people. And they warned them, and us, of the danger of playing in stagnant water.

We in Florida know all about that. Still water is a prime environment for mosquitoes and other nasty things to grow. If the water gets churned up, now and again, the nastiness doesn't have as good a chance to breed and grow.

That's true with our lives as well. If we allow any aspect of our lives to just go dormant evil will find a way to breed and grow. Complacency, apathy, and pure old fashioned laziness are the tools of the devil. Evil likes a still pond.

Edmund Burke is quoted as saying, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" . Martin Neimoller, a German clergyman, said, "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

Complacency and apathy on both an individual and systemic level are prime contributors to some of the worst evil to ever infect God's creation. The Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the ongoing trade in human beings. A still pond is an incubator for evil.

John the baptizer was tough on the people. He knew what God told him to say and he said it. Could it have been said in a more politic way? Probably. Maybe John was the bad cop to Jesus' good cop. But even Jesus could put on his Amos mask and kick butt. Just ask the money changers.

I know that it's easy to ask, "why stir up anything. I'm happy as things are right now." This is particularly true with our spiritual lives. "I love God and God loves me. I believe I will go to heaven when I die, so why change?" Good questions. You don't have to. I don't have to. But I should.

There is so much about God and God's will that I don't know and certainly don't understand. There are huge areas of my soul that are underdeveloped. There are things I don't understand about people who are different than me. Too many times do I trample on the spirit of others simply out of ignorance or apathy.

Now, I don't think we're always talking about major changes in our behavior or way of thinking. People asked John, even after he had insulted them, what they needed to do to be prepared for the coming of Jesus. Basically he told people to practice justice and compassion. Do your job in a way that honors others and you will honor God.

I honestly believe that when we stop growing, we begin dying. In Genesis, we're told that all of creation came out of chaos. The waters were agitated, stirred up. And from that came all of creation.

The current struggles in the Episcopal Church have hurt so many people. Lives have been turned upside down. We seem to be part of an organization that is twisting and contracting in preparation for a huge eruption.

You know when you cook a pot of spaghetti sauce, when it starts to boil bubbles appear and then explode with a spray of red sauce, usually onto your shirt? Well, that's how I picture the church right now. It's painful to watch and painful to talk about.

I think we've gotten complacent, refusing to address issues when they first come up and instead pay lip service to dialogue until a huge bubble pops and soils us all. O how the devil must be laughing.

But maybe that laughter is premature. Yah, we're getting stirred up. There is some chaos and disorder. But, if God can make trees and roses and puppies, let alone us, out of the chaos, don't you think he can make a church out of the chaos of our own making?

We can use this chaos to hold us back, yearning for the good old days, whatever that means. (Maybe before women could be on the vestry, or blacks had to sit in the balcony?) Or we can use the chaos as a catalyst for growth. Use it as an opportunity to be challenged. To have our preconceptions called into question. To hear the heartfelt cry of those who feel left out of the status quo. The opposite is true as well. The stirring of the pot, or perhaps we could say, the agitation of the Holy Spirit challenges people regardless of their views, theology or politics.

That's what spiritual formation is all about - the challenge of what we know or think we know so that we become even more aware of our relationship with Jesus and our interrelationship with all of God's people.

Part of our maturation in our spiritual life is to test what we know. We in the Episcopal Church are blest with a tradition to cherishes theological discourse from the most biblical literal to the most rationalist. I think we find ourselves growing best when there is a tension in what we read and discuss. I think it would be good for a strict creationist to read Stephen Hawkins "A brief history of time". I think it would be good for atheistic evolutionist to read Genesis and other ancient texts.

We need to let ourselves be challenged. We need that tension between certainty and randomness.

There is a story in the bible of a man that sat next to a healing pool for years. It was said that if you sat in the pool while the waters were troubled by the Holy Spirit, you would be healed. Every time the water would start to churn, he would try to get to the water, but never made it in time. He need the pot stirred in order for their to be healing. Of course, he is healed by the greatest pot stirrer of all time, Jesus the Son of God.

The last will be first, the first last. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the world. If a man strikes you on the face, turn the other cheek to him as well.

Jesus never talked about keeping things the same. He knew that it would only be when society saw its comfortable ways challenged that men and women would begin to grow into his likeness.

That explains why Christianity is growing the fastest in areas where it is being repressed. You can't be complacent about your Christianity if that same Christianity could get you killed. It's just too easy to sit back and be comfortable and do nothing as evil exploits our apathy and spreads to the ends of the earth.

Stir up your power O God, and stir us up that we may bubble and burst spreading the message of your saving grace through out this broken and troubled world.