The Holy Gospel appointed for this evening speaks of watchfulness. Sometimes New Year's Eve services are referred to as "watch night services" as the faithful gather in the Word of God and prayer to watch for the coming of the new year. New Year's Eve reminds us of the passing of time that we might see the shortness of our days and so apply our hearts to wisdom to paraphrase Psalm 90. New Year's Eve is a time to gather up these past twelve months both in repentance and thanksgiving. New Year's Eve is also an evening to look forward with anticipation and hope to the new year which is about to dawn. Tonight's Holy Gospel sets both our recalling of the past and our anticipation of the future in light of the Lord who bids us wait on Him with vigilance and faithfulness.
In words that echo His parable of the ten virgins, our Lord says "Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning." Then Jesus says "and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately."This is more than a call to be ready to enter the new year; it is the Lord's on call to be ready to receive Him when He comes again in glory. New Year's Eve reminds us that we are temporary, that we are creatures of time and space. New Year's Eve reminds us that our years are not limitless and that we live within the bounds which the Lord God has appointed for us. We live within time, yet God has planted in our hearts the knowledge of eternity. We see our time, our passing years and our fleeting moments in the light of the Lord whose kingdom has no end.
That Lord has already come and He will come again. He came to us in the flesh, born as Mary's Son. He is the Word made flesh. He is the God who took our humanity upon Himself to tabernacle in our flesh and blood. He wraps His glory in human skin and on the 8th day, He is given the name "Jesus for He will save His people from their sin." He comes in time when Caesar Augustus ruled Rome and Quirinius was governor of Syria to establish an eternal kingdom by His dying on the cross and His resurrection from the dead. We now live in that kingdom by faith, but we await and long for the day when faith will give way to sight and we will live in the glorious fullness of that heavenly kingdom. In that heavenly kingdom there will be no calendars or day planners, for it will be an eternal kingdom. Time itself will have passed away.
But we are not there yet. We live in time. We measure minutes, days, weeks, months, and years. How are we to live within time? Our Lord utters a benediction on those whom He will find watching. Jesus says that the master will do something very strange. He does not say that when the master returns, that the master will order his servants to prepare his supper, but that he will put on the apron and have his servants sit down at table to be served by him. In other words, at the end of time, Jesus will do for His faithful people, what He has been doing for them all along in time! He will serve them. Just as He has served us in the Divine Service with the supper of His body and blood, so in His heavenly kingdom, He will be the host and He will extend to us His own hospitality at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
In the meantime, we are to be watchful. Not simply watching the clock tick away the final seconds of the old year, but the watchfulness of faith. What is this watchfulness to which our Lord calls us? It is a watcfulness for Him as He comes to us now in time in His Word and in His Supper. That is why we spend New Year's Eve in church, gathered in the Lord's name around the preaching of His Word and the giving out of His body and blood.
There is no better place to be on New Year's Eve than here in God's House where heaven touches earth and eternity intersects with time as the Lord comes to us to feed us with the food which strengthens and sustains us for heaven. Here we wait and we watch. Here we lift up our heads for our redemption draws near. We wait in the expectancy of the hope which does not disappoint.
Therefore our waiting is not an idle waiting. C.S.Lewis says it well in a little essay entitled "The World's Last Night": "The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were going to get married next month, perhaps you were going to get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of a great scientific discovery; you may be maturing great social and political reforms. Surely no good and wise God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this short? Not now, of all moments! But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We don't know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who are the minor characters. The Author knows. The audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of heaven fill the pit and the stalls) may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the play from the outside, never meeting any of the characters except the tiny minority who are 'on' in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That it has meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over we may be told. We are led to believe that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely" (105-106).
New Year's Eve brings with it the question: "How are you playing the part which the Author has assigned you?" How are you living the vocation wherein you have been called? The Apostle Paul bids us take a sober look at ourselves. He says in II Corinthians 13: "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding the faith." Does this New Year's Eve find you with your waists girded and your lamps burning? That is, are you living in faith toward Christ and in love toward the neighbor? These are questions which drive us to the Gospel for our Lord Jesus Christ. These are questions which can only be answered with confidence from the vantage point of what God has done for us in Christ. The confidence that knows that God is for us. That is the confidence of which St.Paul writes: "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"
With His Son, God freely gives us all things. In His mercy, He blots out the sins of our past. And in His grace, He gives us a new year. But He gives us more than a new calendar marked 1998; He gives us the gift of an eternity to be lived in union with Him and to the praise of His glory. "Now to him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and for ever. Amen."
The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.