The first Sunday in Advent—it’s the same every year. How can you not look at the bulletin and break out in one of those little, knowing smiles? Keep awake. Everyone knows how fitting this is, on a Sunday morning, for a church service. Ha, ha, ha. Trying to stay awake during worship. Don’t fall asleep... during the sermon!

I remember Lon Doll and the hard time he would give me. Hardly a Sunday went by, when Lon was in church, that he wouldn’t say something like, "Pastor? Can you try to keep the sermon short this morning?" He had a lot of different ways of saying it, but the gist of it was typically the same. And so, in the effort to stay in the wise-guy spirit of things, I had to come up with my own arsenal of responses. Once I said, "Lon, I just did a whole series of really short sermons. Oh, that’s right. You weren’t here. It was hunting season." Another time I told Lon that if he took the annual average of all the Sundays he was in church, it would come out to about four minutes a sermon. Can’t beat that! Another time I said, "What? Shorten the sermon? If I did that, Lon, then when would you get your sleep?" That’s the reason my sermons kept going on and on, because I didn’t want to wake Lon up. As his pastor, I was just looking out for him, trying to help him catch up on some much needed rest.

You see? It’s a public service we provide here, totally in keeping with the third commandment. Martin Luther even said as much, what it means for us Christians to remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Sunday, as a day of rest for us Christians, where we’re called to come together and rest in God’s Word. To come in here on a Sunday morning, and crash? Hey, if you can’t crash here, where can you? And the fact is that this is likely the best rest many of you are going to get all week.

And it was at Lon Doll’s funeral just last September, with his casket right up here, the funeral pall pulled up over him like, like a blanket, that I said, "Here he is. Catching a little rest. Sleeping in church, as usual." But—and here’s the important thing—it didn’t end there. For as important as such rest may be, it’s not the last word! As I said in Lon’s funeral sermon, "Then, after that little break, time to get up and get going, because there’s still more to do." That’s what such rest is always about, in life, or in death. Then, after that little break, it’s time for God’s baptized children to get up and get going, because there’s still more to do—still more work to do.

Of course, this all sounds great, at first! Permission from the preacher to snooze during the sermon! Get the rest you so desperately need at Resurrection Lutheran Church—the church that puts you to sleep, on purpose! But then, on second thought, this may turn out to be more of a challenge than we bargained for. Seriously, how tempting is it for us to think of Sunday as a day of work—worship as work to get out of the way, so that, for the remainder of the week, we can put our faith to rest? For how many of us is coming to church a chore? How many of us look on congregational programs and activities, various ministries and committees as jobs to be done? And if that be the case, then what in the world are we to do, when we’re told that all this church stuff is not our work, but our rest? Well, welcome to Advent!

You know, it really screws things up, doesn’t it, especially when we’re trying so hard to get out of work, and then to have someone say that what we thought of as work isn’t work at all! And for those of you willing to risk being publicly recognized as new members of our church family today, I suppose this is as good a time as any to get this stuff out on the table. Like we say here at Resurrection, when it comes to being on a committee at church, death is no excuse. Some people have tried that, dying, so they can get off a committee. But all I can say is sorry, it just doesn’t work that way. Take Virgil Fischer and Joy Peterson, for example. They tried to get off the Building Committee that way, but no go. It didn’t matter that their funerals had taken place a couple of years or so before. They were not finally released until Council officially declared the Building Committee to be dissolved. You see, Jesus has that power.

Now, that’s Advent for you, the start up of the church year, where we begin by looking at the end, where it appears that Jesus is turning everything upside down, when actually, he’s turning everything rightside up! And on this First Sunday in Advent, we have the unveiling of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the book that’s all about righteousness. The first gospel, teaching us what it means to be all right—what it means to be right with God and with others, especially in times that may look like the end of times. And for as much as people have poured over these scriptures throughout the centuries, trying to crack the code as to exactly when the end will be— Matthew’s Gospel says nothing about the second coming of Christ, per se, because if there’s one thing Matthew’s Gospel is about, it’s about the Christ who never leaves! The beginning of being all right with God is to remember that Jesus is always here!

Matthew’s gospel, where we hear in the beginning that Jesus, the new born son of Joseph, is none other than Emmanuel, the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, a name which means "God is with us." And at the very end of Matthew’s gospel, the very last words of the risen Jesus, when he says to his disciples, "And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." And for we who have been baptized into this Son of God who is forever with us—in life and in death—our call when it comes to work and rest is to live in such a way that whenever Christ Jesus comes again, we get that puzzled look on our face and say, "I didn’t know you left!"

Our Lutheran vocational grasp of these apocalyptic texts—it’s perfectly biblical. Think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who, even though in prison, continued to urge fellow believers to resist Nazi tyranny. A group of Christians, convinced that Hitler was the Antichrist, asked Bonhoeffer, "Why do you expose yourself to all this danger? Jesus will return any day, and all your work and suffering will be for nothing." But Bonhoeffer replied, "If Jesus returns tomorrow, then tomorrow I’ll rest. But today I have work to do and must continue the struggle until it’s finished."

And so here’s Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, giving the people of his church something to go on, in what will undoubtedly be rough days for them in the aftermath of his death and resurrection. Final judgments and sudden appearances of Jesus, they may happen in ways you never imagined. The end may come sooner than you think! So be ready. Keep alert. For as to that day and hour, no one knows! And in light of what is perfectly in keeping with the theme of this gospel, consider what Barbara Rossing has to say. Barbara is a New Testament professor of mine from seminary, and she recently published a best selling book called, "The Rapture Exposed," in which she takes to task the whole Left Behind franchise, and all such popular and profitable end-of-the-world second coming fulfillment prophecies.

And as Professor Rossing points out from these very verses of Matthew’s gospel—the two men working in the wheat field, and one is taken and one is left; the two women grinding grain together, and one is taken and one is left—the ones that are left behind are the good ones, the righteous ones, the ones whom God calls to carry on and keep doing that good, daily work they were created to do. Just as all those so-called bad, drunken, licentious people in the days of Noah were suddenly taken away by the flood, and it was Noah, his family, and all those animals who were left behind to work it out in the ark and stay afloat in a chaotic world—so it is with us.

If the world looks like it’s coming to an end around us, and it often does this time of year, then that’s just the beginning, Jesus says. And thus, we’re not called as the people of God’s church to give up. Our job isn’t to call others to save themselves and join us so we can all get out while there’s still time! If in the course of earth-shaking, chaotic events there are those who happen to get swept away, then those of us who are left behind—those of us Christians who find that we’re still here in these tumultuous times—we’re the ones called to work it out and to stay afloat, by remembering our baptism and resting in the assurance that Jesus is still with us.

In the remembering of our baptism, where we can see that it’s people just like us, who God calls daily to get out there, no matter how chaotic it may seem, and live the faith, by showing and sharing God’s love with others, in the daily work that we do in service to others. Our daily work, as any good Lutheran would say it, that is our mission, for the sake of a world that so desperately needs good, working people like us. Our daily jobs, our daily chores, doing the best work that we possibly can, in the effort to make such a chaotic world a better place. That’s how we spread the reassuring word of God’s constant loving presence, first and foremost, in our service of love to others through the good work God has gifted us and empowered each and every one of us to do, every day.

And in light of such work, we can see why getting our rest is so important. In order to keep on doing the good work God created and baptized us to do, out there in that apocalyptic world, God knows we need something to sustain us, renew us, and strengthen us for such faithful work. And so here we are, back where we started, our life and worship together as Christ’s church, the rest we so deeply need, especially when we gather as the communion of saints around our Lord’s table—our reassurance, that our loving, forgiving, healing God is with us, no matter what. Now here is something worth waking up to.

Tim Leaf, Pastor

soli deo gloria