Sunday, November 30, 2025… First Sunday in Advent
“Love Until the Lord Comes”
Psalm 122; Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 21:1-11 or Matthew 24:36-44
A Hymn Service for Advent
Hymns: #349 “Hark the Glad Sound”; #350 “Come, Thou Precious Ransom, Come”; #332 “Savior of the Nations, Come”; #362 “O Sing of Christ”; #338 “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus”; #375 “Come, Your Hearts and Voices Raising”; #348 “The King Shall Come”
Dear Friends in Christ
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jesus says in today’s Gospel that no one knows the day or the hour when He’ll come again. There will be signs of the times for us to read, if we’re paying attention; but if Judgment Day is coming in two years or a hundred years or a thousand years – or tomorrow – who knows? The only safe bet is to be ready for His coming every day, because this day just might be the one! And the way to be ready every day, say our Scriptures today, is to love every day – to love God, and then to love your neighbor as yourself. “Love keeps the commandments,” Jesus says. Love until the Lord comes, and you’ll always be ready.
Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, had been telling His disciples about His second coming and Judgment Day and the end of the world. He told them how He’d come like lightning across the sky, and how He’d come on the clouds with power and glory, and that every eye would see Him. He told them that some people – lots of people - would weep and mourn and cry and try to find a place to hide, while others would “stand up and lift up their heads and welcome His coming,” and how He’d send His mighty angels to gather His people from the ends the earth. But He didn’t tell them when.
I had someone very dear to me tell me once, “It’s been over 2000 years; if Jesus was coming back, He’d have done it by now. Look at the mess the world is in; I don’t believe He’s coming back at all.” The answer I gave her was, “Maybe He’s waiting for you.” “God is patient with you,” St. Peter says, “not wanting anyone to perish, but sinners to come to repentance.”
The picture Jesus paints in our Gospel reading this morning sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? It’s enough to send a shiver up your spine. Jesus says, first of all, "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” The question always comes up in this passage that if God is sovereign and all-knowing, and Jesus Himself is God, how can that be? How can God not know?
The answer is that the Last Day, the day of Jesus’ coming, isn’t a date on the calendar that anyone can point to. People have been trying that for years, and only end up looking foolish. No, the Day of God, as the Scriptures call it, will be the day when God’s work of salvation is finally complete. That is, the day when every soul that can be saved, has been - the day when the last soul to be saved has heard the Good News and come to believe it. God isn’t willing to leave anyone behind. Yes, He knows who will love Him, and who in the end will turn Him away - but He’s patiently waiting for the very last one. Again, maybe He’s waiting for you. How many days or years are left until “it is finished,” I can’t tell you. Until then, as St. Peter again says, all we can do is “look forward to the day of God and help speed its coming.”
To illustrate His point, Jesus refers His disciples back to the story of Noah and the Great Flood. In Noah’s world, the earth was full of people who were paying no attention to God or His Word. They were doing their own thing, going about doing whatever might please them, and not acknowledging their God up in heaven at all. They were eating and drinking, Jesus says - worrying about what’s for breakfast and what’s for dinner, like people have done every day for as long as there’s been a world.
They were planning their weddings and planning their lives, raising their families, living their day-by-days, as the precious time they had passed them by - but never taking time to look up to God to acknowledge Him and thank Him for it all.
The Scriptures say that Noah, in addition to being a boat builder, was “a preacher of righteousness.” He tried his best to warn his neighbors about what was coming, and about the consequences of their sin, and to call them to repent. He spent years building that enormous ark, as a living illustration of what God had in mind to do. That ark was meant to tell them, “One day soon it’s going to rain.” But they laughed at Noah and his preaching and that silly boat he was building on dry land, and they paid no attention to the Word of God “until the flood came and took them all away.”
And that, says Jesus, is still how people and the world will be in the days before He comes. And the fact is, no matter how well we try to plan our lives, or how we picture the way our lives are going to go, random stuff – bad stuff - can happen to us any time at all. “Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left,” Jesus says. “Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
Much as we like the ground to be solid beneath our feet, life comes with a frightening degree of uncertainty. Car accidents, cancer, hearts attacks, a thousand diseases that could do us in; random acts of violence, the devil at loose in the hearts of people. If Jesus doesn’t come back to earth in your lifetime, then sooner or later you owe the world a death, whenever that might be. And then the angels will come for your soul, and you’ll have to stand before Him and give an account for yourself.
“Therefore keep watch,” says Jesus, “because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.” Guard your faith and hold on tightly to it, because that will mean everything for you. It’s so easy to lose track of God’s things, while you’re out “pursuing happiness” and chasing after other things, or while you’re busy just trying to survive.
Time is not our friend. Time is the thief Jesus is talking about in our Gospel, when He says, “If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into.”
That, folks, is why God has blessed us with our Sabbath Days and our blessed Sunday mornings. I had an old, retired guy tell me once, “If it weren’t for church on Sunday mornings, I wouldn’t remember what day it is at all.” Keep God in your days. Let Him mark your days and seasons and years. Keep your nose in God’s Book, and your eyes up to heaven, and your heart opened to what’s going on in the world around you. “You also must be ready,” Jesus says, “because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
And now I want to tell you about the very best way there is to keep your heart ready to meet Jesus. Someone asked Jesus once what the greatest commandment was in God’s Law; and He answered, “The greatest commandment it to love the Lord your God with everything in you; and the second greatest it to get about the business of loving your neighbor.” “Love keeps the commandments,” Jesus said. In other words, if you love God, then show your love for Him by putting Him first in Your life, by honoring and respecting His name, and by keeping His Sabbath day holy. And if you love your neighbor, your fellow men, like you ought to, love will keep you from hating them or stealing from them, or telling lies about them, or sinning against them by breaking any of the other commandments. Love will have us doing it right. Love, to the high degree God calls us to love, will be the “ark” we build in our lives that will show people the love of God.
St. Paul says in our reading in Romans that we have “a continuing debt to love one another.” Love is a debt we owe to God, because to love as best we can is the least we can do to repay Him for the love He’s shown to us. He loved us enough to put His only Son on a cross for us. He loved us enough to die for us. The only way we can even begin to repay a love like that, it to take the love He’s given us and pass it on. Love isn’t optional for us, Church; it’s who we are and what we do and what we’re made of. But ah, what a great way to live!
“Understand the present time,” Paul says. Understand what’s going on in these days we’re living in. “As in the days of Noah,” people have lost sight of the God of love, and forgotten how to love one another as they should. Salvation – the coming of Jesus – is nearer now than it’s ever been. Time is shorter than it’s ever been, our mission more urgent, and the purpose for our being in this world has never been more clear. If the love of God is in us, Church, it’s time for us to wake up and - for God’s sake - let it show. “The night is nearly over,” Paul says. The ‘night’ is the long and sorry and tragic history of this sinful world. God is patient, but His patience won’t go on forever. Jesus is coming, quickly and soon. Now is the time to wrap ourselves in the love of God and the light of His truth - to wrap Jesus around us and let Him surround us - and take the Good News about His love out into the world, beginning with our own neighbors.
Love makes all the difference. God’s love is everything. No, I don’t know when He’s coming; but what I can do is give all the love all I can until He does. Come, O house of Jacob – come, O Christian Church – let us walk in the light of the Lord. Amen, come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly, and come soon. Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com