Sunday of the Fulfillment
November 25, 2012
It’s a difficult position our Lord puts us into today. Directing us to
stand guard. To keep watch. To stay awake and alert. There’s nothing here about
what we’re to do, how we’re to go about it, how to occupy the time our Lord
gives us on this earth. It would be much easier if He were to lay it all out,
as in some other passages of Scripture where it’s clearly defined of actions we
are take, ways we are to think, things we are to do for one another.
But here today it’s a simple, “Don’t fall asleep.” Picture the security
guard working the night shift. Picture soldier stationed on a remote island
with no sound or movement around him.
There’s but one duty here: stay awake and remain alert. Dozing off
could get someone killed. Not paying attention could invite treachery. And
Jesus in today’s Gospel reading is not talking about some matter of keeping
these things about the Last Day in mind. He’s talking about being vigilant.
Always on guard. Always awake. Always alert.
He gives no indication about how you are to make use of your time and
what things to do with your time. You are to keep watch.
That might make for a very short sermon, in that, what else is there to
say about it? Jesus pretty much leaves it at that. So what are we to do with
it? Just sit around and wait? From a purely practical and physical standpoint
it’s impossible to stay awake. We need sleep. We can’t go, go, go. We have to
rest and need to recuperate on a regular basis. The guard and the solider
themselves take shifts in their guard duty.
Jesus is waking us up. The fact that we have to ask how to do this shows
that we are asleep at the wheel. We are not alert, we are focused on getting by
day to day. We are spiritually asleep, concerned more with our problems and
being unsatisfied with things in our lives. There’s no time for Jesus to lay
out what we should do, He’s gotta wake us up! He is rousing us from our drowsiness.
He is shaking us so that we don’t sleep through and be unprepared for when the
Hour comes.
Judgment Day is not on our radar. It needs to be. If you’re not prepared,
you will stand under the Judgment. You will be judged. Only He knows when He is
returning in glory. And only He knows when your life will come to an end on
this earth. When you die, if Christ has not yet returned in glory, you will
face your Judgment Day. You need to be prepared now. If you’re asleep, wake up!
If you’re thinking it’s not a big deal, you need to be alert. It is an eternal
deal.
So how do you be ready? What do you do to stay awake and remain alert?
As it happens, it’s not just that our Lord says, “stand there like a guy who’s the doorkeeper and keep watch.”
It’s true that what He gives us to do is compared to the doorkeeper keeping
watch. This is the way Jesus says it in the Gospel reading:
It is
like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in
charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake.
Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will
come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the
morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say
to all: Stay awake.
But a careful hearing of what He’s saying is not that we’re just to
stand around and make sure we stay awake. He’s saying we need to be vigilant;
just as a security guard would, just as a soldier stationed at his post would,
just as the doorkeeper Jesus spoke of would. The way they keep watch is by
standing there guarding what they have been given to guard.
What we are to keep watch of is our very lives. We need to stay awake
and alert in the life God has given us here on earth to live. The only way you
can do that is by being focused, the same way a guard is. Concentrating on the task
at hand, which is to keep watch, to stay awake, and remain alert. What Jesus is
not saying to us in His warning and exhortation on the coming of the Last Day
is to consume our thoughts with it every waking hour. The Bible gives us the
calling of actually living out our lives in service to one another, so we can’t
take our Lord’s words here and conclude that we need to think of nothing else
than when He’s coming back again in glory.
At the same time, we need to take our Lord’s words here to heart and
not just go about our everyday lives without realizing the earnestness of this
for our daily lives. We can’t become complacent, apathetic, unaware of the
urgency—Judgment Day could come at any moment and our death could come at any
moment.
But how do you be awake and alert for it if you are not to constantly think
about it? The first thing is to listen to Jesus in today’s Gospel reading. It
is a sobering and compelling description of what will happen. It is also a
warning that it could happen any time. We don’t know when it will happen. We
need to be vigilant. It would do us well to go back and read the words again on
our own slowly and consider them as something we should not forget.
The second thing, as already stated, is not to take this for granted.
Don’t fall into apathy, stay alert!
The third thing, and this is where you get into what our Lord has given
us to do in this life, is be in the things that He has given us to be in where
He is the one who wakes us up and sustains us so that we don’t fall asleep spiritually.
The first way is, as they say, preaching to the choir. You need to be
here. You need to be in this House, the House of God, hearing the Gospel,
receiving the Lord’s Supper, being filled up with all the blessings your Lord
gives you. You can’t stay awake and alert if you are not receiving what He
gives you to spiritually enliven you and sustain you.
This is the blessing of what God gives us to do. It’s stuff to do but
it’s really not stuff we do. We’re in this House of God; we’re hearing what is
proclaimed; we’re eating and drinking the very body and blood of Christ; but we’re
not the ones doing the things that are being done to awaken us and keep us
awake and alert. The Holy Spirit is. He’s the one doing the work. He is always
vigilant in His work of creating and sustaining faith in you. He is also on
guard to forgive you of your sins in the Gospel that is proclaimed and applied
to you in your Baptism, and in the Absolution, and in the Lord’s Supper.
The second way is similar in that each day you need to be in this same
way of living in which you are receiving. Beginning each day in prayer. Closing
each day in prayer. Making some time each day to be in the Word of God. Here
again, in these things you are doing things, but really you are receiving. God
is the one who is active when you are in His Word and when you are remembering
that you are a Baptized child of His.
The third way seems the one most about what you do and not what God
does. It is called various things, such as serving, doing good works, vocation,
sanctification. Whatever people might like to call it, it is active, and
dynamic, and anything but standing around waiting. It is God’s people in
service to others. It is His children loving others, caring for others, and
submitting to others. It may seem the opposite of standing there at the door
keeping watch, being the doorkeeper. But it is the same thing. When you
serve—carrying out your vocation, your calling—you are staying awake, remaining
alert.
You are not just standing around. You are not idle. You are living in
the way your Lord has called you to live. If you live to yourself you will fall
into spiritual sleep and apathy. You will not be awake and alert. You will
forget about the urgency of Christ’s Return in glory even as you will forget about
the calling and the opportunity to serve others. You will forget and even begin
to disdain the Gospel, that it is your very life and sustenance.
Part of being awake and alert is being awakened by the Law. God’s Law
comes in like a freight train and wakes you up. If you’re near train tracks and
a train comes rushing by you are startled and you have to catch yourself at the
force of the wind. The Law of God wakes you up to the realization that you have
sinned against your Lord in thought, word, and deed. The Ten Commandments shine
more brightly as a mirror the more you peer into them and see that you have
fallen short of the glory of God. You have fallen asleep at the wheel, not
trusting in your Lord and His good gifts to you but rather seeking out your own
pleasure and glory.
Wake up now before it’s too late and your own death comes or your Lord
returns in glory at any moment! Be alert and repent.
But the other part of being awake and alert is being awakened to new
life by the Gospel. The Law wakes you up to the reality of your spiritual death
but the Gospel wakes you up to new life. The Gospel actually spiritually
awakens you. Think about the warning, or rather, the prophecy given that Christ
would go to the cross. He was alert as ever, refusing any sort of alcoholic
mixture on the cross to deaden the pain. He was wide awake to the reality that
He was taking on Himself the sin of the world. He was aware that His Heavenly
Father was bringing upon Him the judgment of holiness against sinners, all on
His shoulders; His very life being claimed.
It is in this suffering and death that sinners are brought to life. In
your Baptism you are awakened to this life. When you receive the body and blood
of Christ in the Lord’s Supper—the very body and blood that were given and shed
at the cross—you are sustained in that new life, awake to the eternal life your
Lord secured for you and will bring you to the glory of when He returns on the
Last Day.
These are the things it means to be awake and alert. These are the
things your Lord gives to you in order to be awake and alert. As you see this
world go by with all its end-time devolution you remain awake and alert. As you
see yourself daily slipping back into the ways of your sinful flesh, wake up;
be alert. As you become more and more aware of the devil hitting you hard each
day with temptation, be awake; stay alert.
Your Lord is the one who is coming again in glory. This is what you
know because He has told you. You have His promise. Your Lord is the one who
sustains you in the life He has given you and called you to. Your Lord is the
one who forgives you and never forgets you. He is always awake, always alert,
always with you, both now when you fall asleep and forever when He comes again
in glory to take you home to heaven. Amen.
SDG
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