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In the name of Jesus, Amen. Dear Saints of God, and especially you Comfort Mans, William and Sarah and George and Rick and Alex and Trevor, grace and peace from our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.
What does it mean to be confirmed? I wonder how we can think about this. There’s a lot of different ways to consider it. I think one of the ways that we want to think about it is this: when we are invited into the Lord’s church, we are invited into something much bigger than ourselves. We’re invited into a confession, or we can think of it this way; we’re invited into a story. The Lord is writing. The Lord’s working. And we become part of that. In fact, that’s what I think it means to be bound up to the Lord’s altar. He says, this way of doing things, this way of me being in the world, now you are part of it.
And I think it’s nice for us to contrast the Lord’s story with all of the other stories that we’re told, and maybe even especially in this way: that all of us are, remember, living in a story. It’s got four chapters. There’s a start, and then there’s a breaking, a fixing, and a finish. And the world has this, and today, it’s the last day of the church year; that’s a finished thing we’ve got to talk about.
The world has a way of talking about how everything started with an explosion, how it’s broken because of whatever your political cause is, how it’s fixed because of your activity, and how it’s all going to end in this explosion—in the sun exploding, I suppose, or some other way, nuclear war or whatever. The world has a story of the ending. We have something totally different. This altar is a place where a totally different story is told of God, the creator of the universe, who spoke… And all things existed, and there was light and dark, and there was sky and sea, and there was land and creatures and sun and moon and stars and fish and birds and everything that creeps on the land and Adam and Eve, and it was good. It was very good.
The Bible tells us what went wrong when Adam and Eve reached out and grabbed a hold of that forbidden fruit, disobeying God and bringing death and corruption into the entire world. And the Bible tells us, most importantly, page after page, the solution, which is not our work but God’s, who is the Savior of sinners, your Savior, who took upon Himself all that we have done wrong to redeem us and rescue us and deliver us and to forgive all of our sins. That’s what happens here over and over, week after week. In fact, there’s a great line in Luther’s large catechism when he says, why does the church exist? And he says, the church exists so that here we can receive nothing but the daily, unending forgiveness of all of our sins.
Yes. That’s for you and for me. That’s why we’re here, because we are sinners in desperate need of the Lord’s mercy, but the Lord has an abundance of that mercy. And to each and every one of us, he comes with kindness and mercy and love, his shed blood, his atoning work, his peace, his open heaven. He says to you, I love you, I forgive you, I welcome you, I call you my own; I have adopted you as my children. I’ve put my name on you, and I’m feeding you now my own body and blood for the promise of the forgiveness of sins.
For some of you being confirmed for the first time today, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good and merciful and kind even to sinners. That’s the solution. That’s the great story of the gospel. But there’s still a last chapter. That’s the end. That’s the end. And the Bible tells us that the world, that the cosmos, will come to an end not because of a nuclear Armageddon or a star explosion or the universe will reach some sort of heat death. No, the Lord says that the world will end when, on the appointed last and great day, the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, will return for us. To rescue us, to deliver us, to bring to completion the work begun in the garden and the cross and the tomb and welcome us into the new heaven and the new earth where the righteous will dwell.
So we’re waiting for that great last day, which is the Lord’s day. We’re waiting for that with great expectation. Now, there is a temptation that while we wait, we sleep. Remember, Jesus tells the parable of the ten virgins, five wise and five foolish. All of them fell asleep. Five were not ready for that day because they had no oil, and they weren’t ready for the long wait.
So for us, between chapter 3 and chapter 4, living between the Lord’s solution and the Lord’s return, we have to hear this encouragement from our Lord Jesus to remain awake and alert and to be ready. And I think that’s what we want to really consider now. I was reading, in fact, I was reading this morning a letter from St. Augustine to another bishop, whose name I wrote down but I still, I told the morning Bible, the morning service, I don’t know how to pronounce it. I still don’t know. No one helped me between services, so I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Hesikivas? Anyway, something like that. He wrote a letter to St. Augustine, and he said that he wrote to St. Augustine and he says, I think the Lord’s return is sooner rather than later.
And he writes a letter about why he thinks it’s sooner rather than later, all the signs that he’s seeing in the heavens and on the earth and why he thinks that it’s going to be sooner rather than later. And Augustine writes him back, and he has a lot to say; it’s a long letter. But at the end of the letter, he says, you know, we really have three ways of thinking about the Lord’s return. We can, on the one hand, think that it’s sooner rather than later. And Augustine says that while this is good because it gives us great zeal, it’s bad because we lose patience and we’re not good at waiting.
Or, he says, we can think that it’s later rather than sooner. Right? That the Lord’s return is far off. That it’s away from us. That we’ll probably die first. And so we’re preparing for death, but not for the Lord’s coming in glory. And Augustine says that has some advantages too because it means we’re thinking about the generations to come. We’re building and we’re working and we’re doing all sorts of things. So that both of these ways of thinking have their advantages. But that also has a disadvantage, right? That we are not zealous for the things of the Lord, that we’re not motivated to speak the Lord’s kindness and mercy to one another.
And Augustine says this: he says rather than thinking it’s sooner rather than later, or thinking it’s later rather than sooner, we should think, who knows? We don’t know. And in fact, that is what St. Augustine says is the precise wisdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. He says normally when you think of someone as being a teacher, that means they’re telling you something that you don’t know. But here Jesus is our teacher in this sense, in that he takes away something that we think we know. He gives us an ignorance of the last day and the last hour and he says that it is holy, in fact, so holy that he himself doesn’t know the day or the hour of his own return, only the Father, so that you are not supposed to know.
St. Augustine, rightly preaching about this, and it’s so wonderful to us, says that this avoids both of the dangers: the danger of having great zeal but not being ready for the wait, or the danger of being ready for the long haul but not being ready for it right now. No, we do not know if it could be now, today, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year, or the next century, or the next millennium. We just don’t know. It could be any time and so, we’re ready to go. We are ready to wait.
We must confess our ignorance of the last day, and in that ignorance, we then stay awake and ready. And that readiness is marked, because this is really the thing that we need to be able to—the question that we need to be able to answer when we leave here today. What does it mean to stay awake? That readiness and that awakeness is marked by faith and by love and by prayer. In fact, I think that the first two verses of the epistle lesson couldn’t give us a better outline of what it means to be awake and ready.
Jude writes, “But you, beloved, build yourself up in your most holy faith, pray in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.” So we abide in faith, trusting the Lord and His promises. We abide in love, rejoicing in His love for us and loving and serving our neighbor. And we keep praying in the Spirit, bringing all of our needs and the needs of all of the world before the Lord and His throne, knowing that one day, the last day, we’ll be here. And we will see the Lord in His glory. He will be now our rescuer and our redeemer forever, our Savior who brings us into the joys of eternal life.
So may God grant us to treasure this holy ignorance of the last day. To not know when it’s coming. And so when the Lord does return, he will find us joyously awake. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
