{"id":90037,"date":"2025-12-22T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloomministries.org\/faith\/?p=90037"},"modified":"2026-09-20T11:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T18:48:11","slug":"come-to-our-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloomministries.org\/faith\/come-to-our-aid\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Offering: December 22, 2025 | Come to Our Aid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Opening Address<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, December 22, 2025. Today is a feria of the fourth week of Advent, second class, and the vestments are violet. There is no feast, no saint, no commemoration, and not one word in today’s Mass that was not said yesterday. So the whole morning belongs to a single clause the Church hands us for the second time in two days, and that this ministry has never yet stopped on: come to our aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wherever you are, you are welcome here. If you came into this Monday behind on everything, with a list you have carried since the autumn, you are in the right room. The prayer we are about to say does not ask you to catch up. It asks God to come to our aid, and it asks Him to be quick about it. That is the whole of your part in the sentence: to say come to our aid and mean it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Word on Today’s Propers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Today’s Mass is yesterday’s Mass, entire. The Introit, the Collect, the Lesson, the Gradual, the Gospel, the Offertory, the Secret and the Communion are the texts of the fourth Sunday of Advent<\/a>, carried forward without a syllable changed. That is what a ferial day is. The Church does not compose a new Mass for every weekday, and she lets the Sunday go on speaking, exactly as she did on the Monday of last week<\/a> and again on the Thursday<\/a>, and as she did on the Monday after Advent opened<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today goes further than any of those. There is no commemoration to bring a prayer of its own. There is no saint whose name would give the day a different colour. There is nothing here at all that was not here yesterday, which makes this the barest weekday of the season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I am going to print two texts and no more. The entrance chant and the Gradual have been sung twice already this month; the Gospel has been read twice; the Lesson was read in full yesterday. A third printing inside six days would be length pretending to be reverence, and you deserve better than that. The citations stand where the propers would, and then the Collect and the Secret in full, because those are the prayers actually said at this Mass and a day still has to be prayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is what makes this a rich morning rather than a thin one. This Collect has never been preached here. Yesterday’s homily was built on Paul’s ruling about the hour of the verdict, so the prayer at the head of the Mass has been said aloud twice and read closely not once. That is where come to our aid comes from, and this morning the Collect and the Secret are the only things on the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Isa. 45:8; Ps. 18:2.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The entrance chant asking the heavens to drop down dew and the earth to open, sung whole on the Ember Wednesday<\/a> and again yesterday<\/a>. Not printed a third time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Put forth Your power, O Lord, we beseech You, and delay not: and with Your great might come to our aid, so that what is hindered by our sins may be hastened by Your merciful goodness. Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1 Corinthians 4:1-5<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul on ministers and dispensers, on the day he refuses to be tried by, and on the hour when praise finally comes, read in full yesterday<\/a>. Not printed again today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ps. 144:18, 21.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two verses of the hundred and forty-fourth psalm<\/a> sung on the Ember Wednesday<\/a> and again yesterday<\/a>. Not printed a third time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Luke 3:1-6<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dating of the word of God to a particular year and the voice crying in the wilderness, read on the Ember Saturday<\/a> and again yesterday<\/a>. Not printed a third time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The prayer never asks for the road cleared<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Say the Collect again, slowly, and then ask it the question it is not expecting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put forth Your power, O Lord, we beseech You, and delay not: and with Your great might come to our aid, so that what is hindered by our sins may be hastened by Your merciful goodness.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where in that sentence does anybody ask for the obstruction to be taken away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nowhere. It is not there. The hindrance is named, plainly and without softening, and it is still standing at the full stop. What come to our aid asks for is speed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a strange request, and I want to slow down on it, because it is not the request religious people are trained to make. The trained request is: remove this, and then come. Clear the road, straighten me out, and once the way is passable, come to our aid. This Collect does the opposite. It leaves the road exactly as it is and asks for a faster arrival on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the purpose clause once more and count what survives it. What is hindered by our sins may be hastened by Your merciful goodness.<\/em> The hindering is ours. The hastening is His. And the two are set against each other as rival speeds rather than as a fault and its repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the Church is not asking to be made passable. She is asking to be overtaken. Come to our aid is a petition for a rescue that arrives while the mess is still in the road, and it is worth saying out loud that this is what we are praying at every one of these Advent weekdays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to sit on that, because it cuts against the way most of us were taught to pray about ourselves. The instinct is to treat the obstruction as the subject: name it, itemise it, promise to work on it, and postpone the asking until the working has begun. This Collect never gets to that paragraph. It states the obstruction in one subordinate clause and spends the rest of its length on somebody else’s arrival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which tells you where the prayer thinks the difficulty lies. Not in whether we are fit to be helped, but in how long help is taking. Come to our aid is the sentence of a person who has stopped negotiating about their own condition and started asking about the timetable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Come to our aid, and delay not<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Now count the imperatives, because there are three and they are all pointed upward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put forth. Delay not. Come to our aid.<\/em> Three commands, given to God, by people who admit in the same sentence that they are the ones holding things up. Come to our aid is the third of them, and it is the one that names what is actually wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing in the grammar treats that as awkward. There is no clause saying that once we have dealt with our end of it, then we may ask. The confession and the demand sit inside one sentence, and the demand is not made conditional on the confession being resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That absence is the whole argument. A prayer that wanted amendment first would have said so, and this one does not say it anywhere. Here the hindered party does the asking, in the imperative, while still hindered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And weigh which of the three commands carries the urgency. Delay not<\/em> is not a request for patience to be granted to us. It is a request that God stop taking so long. Come to our aid, and be quick, is a startling thing to be allowed to say, and the Church says it on an ordinary Monday, in the plainest week of the season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that is the most underrated sentence in Advent. We talk about this season as a school of waiting, and there is something in that, but the season’s own prayer is not a prayer for better waiting. It is a complaint about the wait, made out loud, in public, by the people doing it. Come to our aid, and delay not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it is a corporate complaint before it is a private one. Every word of it is plural. Come to our aid, not mine; our sins, not yours; and the goodness that does the hastening is asked to arrive over the whole building at once. Anyone in the room may join in without first establishing that their own delay is the worst one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That matters for anyone who has been handed their waiting as a personal matter to be borne privately and not discussed. In this prayer there is no private column. The whole body is named as the hindrance and the whole body asks for speed, which means the person most tired of waiting this morning is inside the plural rather than outside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is different from what we said yesterday, and the difference matters. Yesterday’s Lesson<\/a> argued that a verdict held too early is void, that the hour has not come and the bench may not sit before it. That was about a judgment being premature. This is about a rescue being slow. One says do not go early; the other says please do not be late, and running them together would flatten both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What waiting has grown in our own house<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Here is the teaching I want to test against this prayer, and it is ours, inside the church, in every century of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The teaching says that delay is itself a discipline, and that being kept waiting is good for you. It never quite says no. It says not yet, and it says it again next year, and it treats the not-yet as a form of care. Come to our aid goes in as a request and comes back as a process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apply the fruit test, the way we test everything here. Ask what indefinite deferral has actually grown in the places that ran it. It grew discussions that outlived the people they were about. It grew a class of person permanently under consideration and never simply present. It grew rooms where the honest answer, which is no, was never given, because a no can be argued with and a not-yet cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will name who pays most for that teaching, because this morning’s prayer needs it named. Gay, lesbian and bisexual people have been handed deferral as the church’s standing answer, and handed it again whenever the last one ran out. Not a verdict, which could be contested. A wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A conversation that is always ongoing, a decision always being prepared, a welcome always in principle and rarely on a Tuesday. Whole lives have been lived in that waiting room, and some of them ended in it while the discussion was still described as live. Come to our aid is not a phrase that survives being answered with a timetable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set that beside the Collect. The Church, in her own words, at her own altar, treats delay as the thing to be cured. She does not ask her people to bear it better. She asks God to stop it, and she asks Him to come to our aid at once, and she puts that sentence in the mouth of everyone in the building without asking first who has waited longest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That last part is the piece I would keep. There is no separate petition here for the people who have been kept waiting longest, because there does not need to be one. Come to our aid is said by the whole room in the plural, so the person who has been under discussion for thirty years is not petitioning from the corridor. They are inside the sentence with everybody else, asking for the same thing at the same speed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me be exact about the difference from the Sunday this Advent opened with<\/a>, since these are close and only one of them is today’s. That question was whether it is too late to set out. This one is whether the ground you did not cover is a debt. Come to our aid does not tell anyone to start walking faster; it asks for the distance to be closed from the other end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let me close a door before it opens, because this argument can be misheard in two directions. It does not say that waiting never taught anybody anything, and it does not say that people who waited were wasting their lives. It says that the waiting was never the gift, and that anyone who told you the delay was the point was describing their own convenience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A yard at half past five<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

An argument stays an argument until somebody’s Tuesday morning is inside it, so I want to give you a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a story sometimes told of a woman in her seventies who has milked the same small herd twice a day for over fifty years, in a parish she was christened in and has never once left. Ask her about her faith and she has nothing dramatic to hand you. No crisis, no turning, no morning when it all came clear. She has been going to the same building at the same hour since before she could read, and she cannot tell you why, and she has never pretended otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One December she came off a gate in the wet and broke her wrist, and she lay awake that night doing the arithmetic of who she could ask and what it would cost her to ask them. She got as far as a list of three names and no further. At half past five the next morning she heard the yard gate go, and the lamp on the barn wall come on, and the herd moving across the concrete, and by six the milking was done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man from two farms along had simply come, in the plain sense the Collect means when it says come to our aid, and without a conversation about it first. He did it the next morning too, and the one after that, and the milk lorry arrived at its usual hour all week as though nothing had happened. There was nothing private about any of it. The whole lane knew by Tuesday, because a lane always does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What she says about it now is not what you would expect. She does not say he was kind, though he was. She says that the help got there before the request did, and that she has never entirely known what to do with that, because she had been raised to believe that you are owed nothing you have not first asked for properly. Come to our aid arrived in her yard as an engine at half past five and a gate she had not opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not going to tell you it changed her. It did not. She never had the conversation she meant to have with him, never thanked him in the way she had planned, and her faith is exactly what it always was, which is a habit she cannot account for. Nothing in this story gets resolved, and I would rather leave it unresolved than tidy it into a lesson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But keep the shape of it, because the shape is the Collect. She did not clear the road. She could not; her wrist was broken and the herd still had to be milked at half past five whatever she managed to arrange, and come to our aid is what the situation was actually asking for. Somebody came to our aid at a speed she had not organised, into a situation she had not sorted out first, and the mess was still there afterwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep the hour, too, because the hour is doing work. Half past five is not a dramatic time. It is the time the herd needed milking, which is to say the help was timed to the need rather than to anybody’s convenience or to a decent interval after the accident. Come to our aid asks for exactly that timing and for no other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you hold none of the theology, the claim survives the translation without losing anything. Most of what has actually rescued you arrived before you had worked out how to ask for it, and usually from somebody who did not wait to be asked properly. The plain version of come to our aid is that help which requires a well-formed request is not much use to people at their worst hour, which is exactly when the request is hardest to form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that turns the practical question round. It is not what you should ask for this week. It is who near you is currently drafting a request they will never send, and whether you could get there first, at whatever unglamorous hour their difficulty actually falls. Come to our aid is a prayer, and it is also a description of a job that is usually done by a neighbour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lost ground is not a debt<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There is one more thing in this prayer I would not want you to miss, and it is the three words the petition ends on. Your merciful goodness.<\/em> Not our repair, not our recovery, not a season of proving it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put the two halves of the purpose clause side by side and hear what is being claimed. Our sins hinder; His goodness hastens. Both are real, both are named, and only one of them is asked to change pace. Come to our aid is a request that the lost ground be made up by somebody other than the person who lost it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a harder thing to accept than it sounds, and I include myself. Most of us would rather owe the distance than be given it. Owing it keeps the accounting in our own hands, and being given it means the ground was never a debt in the first place, which is a stranger and less comfortable kind of good news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hear also what the prayer does not promise. It does not say the road will feel shorter, or that the year will end tidily, or that anybody will wake up further along than they went to bed. Come to our aid is a request about pace and arrival, not about how the waiting feels from inside, and a prayer that made promises about feelings would be a smaller and less honest prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So take the day itself, because the calendar is making the same point in a different medium. The Church had a completely open Monday and wrote nothing new for it. She did not compose a fresh prayer to mark the shortening of the season or manufacture an urgency to match the date. She said yesterday’s words again, unhurried, and asked God to hurry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the difference between the two paces the prayer names, and it is the whole of what I have for you this morning. Our part is to go on doing the ordinary thing at the ordinary hour while we say come to our aid. The speed is the part we hand over, and nothing that had to wait is lost by having waited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you do one thing with this before the day is out, make it small and make it somebody else’s. Do not resolve anything about yourself. Get to one person before they have worked out how to ask you, at whatever ordinary hour you can manage, and let the mess in their road stay exactly where it is while you do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Look with favour, we beseech You, O Lord, upon the offerings here before You, that they may be beneficial for our devotion and for our salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

May God put forth His power on your behalf this Monday and not delay, and may He come to our aid at whatever speed the day actually needs, into the road as it actually is. You are not asked to be passable first. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if that language is not yours, take it plainly. The ground you did not cover this year is not an invoice, and the people who told you otherwise were mostly keeping a schedule of their own. Come to our aid, in plain terms, is a request for somebody to be early. Get to somebody early this week, before they have found the words, and let that be the whole of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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