Advent 1A 2022-- Wake Up!

And yet that doesn't stop us from doing it, from being content to be spiritually asleep, as good as dead to the world. You are occupied with things like luxury and honor. Things that will quickly be forgotten. You’re occupied with dreams; with empty fantasies; with entertaining illusions as if they meant something. You obsess yourselves with things that will be consumed on the last day and destroyed by fire, never to be remembered. Things that have as much to do with eternal life and joy as dream images have to do with flesh-and-blood creatures”

Your schedules are ruled by our children's sports schedules but you don't have time to pray with them or read God's Word.

You fiddle around with politics, as if the Kingdom of God could be ushered in by a 2/3rds majority; as if you could be declared not guilty of breaking God’s Law if the right justices are appointed to the Supreme Court; you act as if the government could relieve us of our obligation to care for the poor, the sick, the homeless, the refugees.

You get up in arms over the latest movie release and all of the depravity they could stuff into it as if it were Hollywood’s job to preach the Gospel.

When you do get around to warning people about our Lord’s return, its with the tone of a frustrated mother scolding her child: “You just wait until your father gets home!”

In his farewell letter to his dear friend Timothy, Paul cautioned him, “Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels” (2 Timothy 2:23). He also cautioned him with a couple of analogies: “3 Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. 5 An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. 6 It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops” (2 Timothy 2:3-6). Our Lord assured us that the fields are ripe for the harvest.

Are you as faithful with that kind of farming (2 Tim. 2:3-6) as you are with corn and beans and sugar beets? What battles are you choosing to fight? Are you fighting for the mission that Christ has given you or are you quarreling over foolish, ignorant controversies (2 Tim. 2:23)?

Are you giving any thought to the mission that our Lord has sent us out with—to make disciples of every nation by baptizing and by teaching God’s Word?

How many of the comforts you gave thanks for this past Thursday were purchased with wealth that God gave you to use to care for the poor, the sick the homeless, the refugees?

How many of your purchases on Black Friday were made with wealth that He gave you to use to support the preaching of the Gospel to the world?

Worse yet, you and I actually show ourselves to be children of darkness. John wrote in his gospel: “…the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). That’s not just a judgment for his time. That’s still the response to Jesus’ coming.

Are you ready for your all of your actions, all of your thoughts, all of your words to be brought into the light(John 3:19)? Or would you really prefer that they remain hidden in darkness?

If you had all the time in the world then, maybe, you could afford to be occupied with dreams, with fruitless political battles, or with your own comfort.

If you had all the time in the world then, perhaps, you could spend it playing around with your pet sins. But we don't. He's coming.

The hour has come to wake up!

God Is Awake

God is not sleeping. He has not lost track of time.

In fact, help me out—you know the verse:

When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

Wake up, because it is your salvation that is drawing near!

The whole point of Advent is to remind yourself that, millennia ago, God’s people waited. And waited. And waited. While they waited— often preoccupied with other things— God was keenly aware of the time. At exactly the proper time, God Himself came near you by taking on your flesh and blood, being born every bit as human as you and I. There was no question, no misunderstanding in his mind about the time.

He came, the first time, to redeem you—not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious, blood, and with His innocent suffering and death. He was not asleep when He allowed Himself to be arrested and wrongly convicted.

He was not asleep when He allowed Himself to be beaten and nailed to a cross. He allowed it to happen in order to bring to light the full guilt of your sin, the full shame of your spiritual sleepiness, and to pay for it, in full, on your behalf.

Plundering and Awakenings

One of the things I love about this passage of scripture is the verse right after our text. Jesus says, “43 But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into” (Matthew 24:43). The thief is Jesus! The ‘master of the house’ is the devil, the prince of this world.

On that first Christmas, Jesus came to bind the devil and to plunder his house. He did both on the cross (Matthew 24:43).

God is most certainly not sleeping today. He continues to plunder Satan’s house (Matthew 24:43).

When you were ready, He came to you in the waters of baptism, taking you from being under Satan’s power and gathering you into His Kingdom.

He still comes near to you in the humble forms of bread and wine. Christ comes to you, personally and individually, to forgive your sins and renew your identity as sons and daughters of God.

Wake up and see Him coming to you, week after week.

Right here in our worship, He is hard at work while you’re settled into your comfortable sermon positions.

The experiences that are all around you, that seem so real, that feel so important: they are the dream. They’re passing away. These unseen things, that come to you hidden beneath water, beneath bread and wine, they are the things that anchor you to eternal life.

Wake up, knowing that you will see Him soon at His final coming.

Advent calls you to wake. It calls you to repent of your works of darkness and believe that Christ has exposed them on the cross, once and for all. It calls you to watch and pray as you anticipate your Lord’s return.

Christ is hard at work, every moment of every day, throughout the world. And He’s using you— whether you realize it or not— to carry out His plan of salvation.

While the world spends its weeks before Christmas shopping for new ways to gratify the desires of the flesh, you have been clothed with the armor of light and live not in love of yourself but in faith toward God and love for one another.

As God’s children, I hope we are doing what we can to make sure that Jesus Christ is not pushed out of the public square, either literally or figuratively. But it’s even more important that He gets a prominent place in the center of your homes; that you’re making sure your children and grandchildren know all that the Bible tells us about God’s plan to bring Him into this world; and that you don’t let anything distract you from the work of living as sons and daughters of God: living holy lives and caring for those around us.

So I hope I haven’t put you to sleep this morning (or any morning, for that matter). As one song puts it, “The vision of a dying world is vast before our eyes, we feel the heartbeat of its need, we hear its feeble cries. Lord Jesus Christ, revive Thy church, in this, her crucial hour! Lord Jesus Christ, awake Thy church with Spirit-given power.”[2] “11 The hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Rom. 13:11). May God grant it for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

[1] Based on “Morning People,” by Rev. Nolan D. Astley, pastor, Holy Cross Evangelical Lutheran Church, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

[2]“The Vision of a Dying World,” stz. 1. Hymns You Like to Sing, hymn #2.

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