“Stay Dressed for Action, Keep your Lamps Burning, Wait for your Master to Come”
Luke 12:35-40
12/31/07 - New Years Eve
It’s New Year’s Eve, and at midnight
tonight 2008 will begin. This comes as no surprise to
anyone. Everyone knows exactly when the new year will begin, and
they plan for it accordingly. They get all dressed up for
whatever party they’ll be going to. Then, the closer it
gets to midnight they gather their noise-makers together, grab their
spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend, and get ready to welcome in the new year
with shouts of “Happy New Year” and a kiss or two.
It’s quite the exciting event for those who stay awake to witness
it.
But tonight’s Gospel text foretells an even
more exciting event - the second coming of Christ, and for this we
Christians are told that we must be sure to stay awake and alert.
Jesus tells us to stay dressed for action, to keep our lamps burning,
and to be waiting for our Lord’s return. The greatest
celebration of all is coming, and we’re all invited. But
unlike the new year, which arrives exactly at 12:00 tonight, we
don’t know when this coming of Jesus will occur. And so, we
are to be ready for it at any time.
Since Jesus wants us to be prepared for His second
coming, He tells how to be prepared for it. The first thing He
tells us is to stay dressed for action. Now, the actual wording
here is, “Let your loins be girded.” Well, what does
that mean? If a Jew in those days heard these words, he might be
reminded of what God told the Israelites to do on the night of the
Passover, the night before they were to leave Egypt. At that time
He told them to eat the Passover with their loins girded, their sandals
on their feet, and their staffs in their hands, and that they were to
eat in haste. In other words, the Israelites were to be ready to
go at a moment’s notice. I remember when I was younger our
family used to go on a vacation every summer. I looked forward to
those trips with great anticipation. And we planned and packed
for them weeks in advance, so that on the day we were to leave, we were
all ready to go. All the preparation was done; we just got up,
got dressed, and headed out. When Jesus says, “Let your
loins be girded,” then, He is telling us to be ready at any
moment to go. Just as the Israelites were to be ready to leave
Egypt at a moment’s notice, so we are to be ready to leave this
world whenever our Lord returns.
But by telling us to stay dressed for action and
keep our loins girded Jesus is telling us to do more than just be ready
for His coming at a moment’s notice. In those days, a
person also girded up his loins if he was going to work. You
didn’t want your clothes getting in the way while you were
working in the fields. So, another way in which we prepare for
our Lord’s coming is by working and keeping ourselves busy in the
various vocations God has given us to serve one another. Some
people, if they knew that Jesus were returning tomorrow, would just go
out on the top of some hill and sit there and wait for Him to show
up. Jesus doesn’t want us to do that. He
doesn’t want us to just sit around waiting for Him. He
wants us to stay busy serving one another. He wants husbands and
wives to continue to love and support one another. He wants
fathers to continue to provide for their households, mothers to
continue to nurture their children, and children to continue to honor
and obey their parents. He wants employers to continue to treat
their employees fairly with respect, and He wants employees to do their
work as for the Lord. And in the arena of each of these vocations
we Christians are salt and light, bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ
crucified to those around us, so that they might be prepared for His
second coming as well.
Now, being dressed for action and keeping our loins
girded is not the only way that we prepare for Christ’s
coming. Continuing to serve one another through our various
vocations while being ready to leave this world at a moment’s
notice is only one way to be prepared for Christ’s coming.
Another way Jesus mentions here is by keeping our lamps burning.
In the first place, this is a reference to the witness we give of Jesus
Christ in this world. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls His
disciples the light of the world, and He says, “Let you light
shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give
glory to your Father who is in heaven.” And so one way we
keep our lamps burning is to continue with God’s help to be the
light of the world that He has made us to be in Jesus, delivering Him,
His gifts, and His Word to others by our words and our works.
But in order to be light in this world, we have to
be ignited in the first place, and we have to stay ignited in the
second place. When you light a fire in your fireplaces this time
of the year, you probably use a match or a lighter. The fire
burns off of either gas and/or the paper and wood you’ve placed
in the fireplace. When the fire burns low, you have to put more
stuff to burn in, or the fire will go out. In our lives as
Christians the fire represents faith. The Holy Spirit ignited
this fire in the first place with the Gospel about Jesus Christ.
When we came to trust in our crucified and risen Savior for the
forgiveness of our sins, our cold, dark, dead hearts were enlightened
and filled with the warmth of God’s love for us. But in
order for this flame of faith to continue to burn, it needs something
for fuel. That fuel is the Word of God along with the Sacraments
of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In the parable of the
wise and foolish virgins, Jesus talks about the five wise virgins as
having brought enough oil to keep their lamps burning until the
bridegroom returned. The five foolish virgins, on the other hand,
were foolish because they didn’t bring enough oil, and as a
result, their lamps eventually went out. The oil in this parable
is a reference to the Word of God, the fuel that the Holy Spirit uses
to keep our faith alive and burning. It is through this Word,
proclaimed to us and given us through the Sacraments of Baptism and the
Lord’s Supper, that Jesus and the benefits He won for us on the
cross are given to our faith to feed on. If that fuel becomes
low, if we aren’t continually taking in that Word, then the flame
of faith in us will eventually go out, our hearts will grow cold and
dark again, and we won’t be ready when our Lord returns for
us. By telling us to keep our lamps burning, then, Jesus is
telling us not only to be the light of the world that He has made us to
be by shining the light of the Gospel on those around us, but also to
remain ignited ourselves, keeping the flame of faith burning within us
as we keep stoking that fire with the fuel of the Spirit - God’s
Word and His Sacraments.
Finally, our Lord tells us how to be prepared for
His coming by telling us to wait for His coming like men who are
waiting for their master to come home from a wedding feast.
Looking back on how I used to anticipate Christmas, I remember how
excited I was as I counted down the weeks, the days, and the hours
until that day. That’s the kind of waiting Jesus encourages
us to have here. It’s an eager anticipation of, a longing
for, a looking forward with great expectation to our Lord’s
coming, even in the face of a long wait and the attempts made by many
to discourage us and get us to doubt our Lord’s promise.
Recently, I saw the movie Enchanted. It’s about a
Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty/Snow White type princess named Jazelle who
is cast into the real world by the wicked step-mother of her beloved
prince, in order to keep her from interfering with the
step-mother’s reign in the fairy-tale kingdom. Though
Jazelle continues to trust that her prince will come to her rescue some
day, the fellow that she meets in New York tries to discourage her by
telling her that her prince is not coming for her. But Jazelle
doesn’t give up hope, and eventually the prince does show
up. (And I won’t ruin the rest of the story for you;
you’ll have to see it for yourself.) In the same way, the
Bride of Christ, the Church, is to wait for her Bridegroom to return,
always keeping the promise of His coming in her heart, even when it
seems that He may never return, even when the world and the devil try
to get us to doubt and disbelieve His Word. He will not abandon
us whom He has purchased with His blood. And even though we may
fall asleep in death, our Prince will come and awaken us and take us to
be with Him in His kingdom, where we’ll live happily ever after.
The celebration will begin with a feast, a party,
where as Jesus says here, He our Lord will dress Himself for service
and have us recline at table, and He will come and serve us. The
Apostle John calls this feast the “marriage supper of the
Lamb” in the book of Revelation, and he writes, “Blessed
are those who are invited to [it].” Those who are invited
are those who remain prepared for their Lord’s coming by staying
dressed for action, by keeping their lamps burning, and by waiting for
their Lord to return. When we do this by the power of the Holy
Spirit, who works this readiness in us by His Word, giving us a
foretaste of that feast to come in the Lord’s Supper here and
now, then we will be prepared to receive our Lord when He comes to us,
no matter at what time. Get ready to celebrate the new
year? Yes. But even better, get ready to celebrate the new
age to come, when God’s kingdom comes at the coming of our Lord,
Jesus Christ. He’s coming just as He promised. Stay
awake and alert. Amen.