Do you like to be surprised? Some people love surprises. I'm not somebody that's really fond of them because lots of times surprises turn out not to be fun. They're more gacha. Surprise by definition means without warning. And sometimes when people target you with a gacha because they want to get you for whatever reason, sometimes it's out of a desire for their power, their profit, but it catches us unaware. So what's the answer to that? Well, the answer to that is to be ready. Now, most of us, when we think about getting ready, we use what's happened to us in the past in our lives, usually negative experiences to try to get us ready to protect us from the future. Now, most of you would not be surprised if I told you that what happened on at Pearl Harbor was one of those ghosts that overshadows a lot of US military and defense decisions. Because that is how we define being caught being surprised. And so when 9-11 happened, that ghost became a boogieman because it happened again. It happened in a way that we weren't thinking about because we'd been thinking about things from the past and we were misinterpreting the present. Now, some of you know that there are people out there who believe that Jesus Christ will come back next Saturday. I could give you a history of the predictions that he will come back next Saturday and Sunday came. I point that out is because I believe that when we look at the passage that we're going to look at, that even though Jesus says it's going to happen on a date in a time, he says you're not going to know it. And in that way, it's going to be a surprise, but I want you to get ready and here's how I want you to get ready and it's very different than we might think. Now, people put their money in 401k's, they put their money in their homes because that's what the advisors said. But what was happening was people were preparing so that we would not have another great depression but they did not prepare us for a great recession. See, sometimes when we focus so much on the past, we misunderstand what's happening in the present which is going to impact the future. And so we miss and we are surprised where someone's played gotcha with us. Now, I think that's happening in the church in the area of family values which became a watchword in the culture wars where fear and divisiveness became the weapons. We were led, I believe, by self-serving for-profit profits. Now, this was followed by a youth reaction and what some people refer to as the emerging church that became the emerging church that was cut off at the root of the church because of the poisonous fruit in the culture wars. And so the emerging church of our generation is this generation's version of what I was a part of and others were a part of back in the 60s when we talked about Jesus' people. One of the contexts that I wish I could figure out and I'm at the other end of it. When we talk about being ready and about service and I'm going to bring this up again at the end is how do the different generations serve each other? How do we break the, not the culture wars, but the generational divides at marketing and you have to understand it's marketing that divides us and defines us. How do we serve intergenerational? So that the young people grow up thinking we are here to serve as we get older, we say, we are still here to serve. Now, I have defined this with some simple things in terms of our outline of a mission and a context because I think that Jesus gives us both what we are to be doing, how we are to accomplish to get ready, and then he gives us a context in which we are to be aware of where that preparation is going to be a part of. You see, one of the things about this passage is that Jesus tells us that he's coming back and there is going to be judgment. And so when he does return, it shouldn't be a surprise. The date may be a surprise, but that he comes back, we should be ready. And we'll also see, as we saw in the Matthew passages that were read as part of the readings today, that we need to be ready to meet him in more ways than one. So let's listen to the passage from Luke 12. Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning. If you remember nothing from today's sermon, remember that verse 35, be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning. Everything else is Jesus Christ opening up that passage and applying it with different kinds of illustrations and things to keep it in our minds and to drive it into our hearts. But that is the way he is wrapping up chapter 12, for 36, like servants, waiting for their master to return from a wedding. Notice the wedding, same as in Matthew. The wedding back went so that when he comes and knocks, they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants, whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly, I tell you, he will dress himself to serve and will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night or toward daybreak. But understand this, if the owner of the house had known what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready because the son of man will come in an hour when you do not expect him. Peter asked him, Lord, are you telling this parable to us or to everyone? The Lord answered, Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? It will be good for the servant, whom the master finds doing so when he returns. Truly, I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose the servant says to himself, My master is taking a long time in coming, and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him at an hour when he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him to a place with the unbelievers. The servant who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving of punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. I have come to bring fire on the earth and how I wish that it were already kindled. But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is complete. Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No. I tell you, but division, from now on, there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two, two against three. They will be divided, father against son, son against father, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, mother in law against daughter in law, and daughter in law against mother in law. He said to the crowd, when you see a cloud rising the west immediately, you say it's going to rain and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say it's going to be hot, and it is hypocrites. You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don't know how to interpret this present time? Why don't you judge for yourself what is right? As you are going with your adversary to the magistrate try hard to be reconciled on the way and your adversary or your adversary may drag you to the judge and the judge may turn you over to the officer and the officer, throw you into prison. I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny. Be dressed ready for service. Keep your lamps burning. We are raised in a culture that raises us to be consumers not servants. We are raised to evaluate ourselves of what we can possess, gather around us, all the, oh, what's the term, the way you decorate yourself, those little side things that you buy, those cute things that you buy, accessories, that's the word. We want to accessorize our lives. We want the bling. But Jesus, even before he gets to himself, says that we are to be dressed ready for service and to keep your lamps burning. You know, when people magazine was started back in the early 80s and it began for many people, not everyone, but many people to define our culture. These were some of the rules, and I'm not making these up. These are some of the rules in terms of the front cover. Younger is better. Beauty reads skinny and fit is better. Famous is better. Rich is always better. But you know, that may be changing because celebrity people are identifying themselves with charities and charities that are identifying themselves with celebrities. Brad Pitt is always in New Orleans, building homes. Vano is in Africa. I mean, after all, that's where William proposed to Kate on a charity mission. Sandra Bullock is the spokesperson for kitchen stoves for the poor. Now, all of those are worthwhile charities. But yet, we need to make sure that we don't do charitable things and we get noticed that we are willing to be servants, that we are to be dressed ready for service. Now, I'm going to give you an extreme example of being dressed and ready for service. Before I went to Iraq, I went to a training desert place, and I was in charge because I was the senior chaplain and about eight of us that were working together. And we were at a time when we were in the middle of the desert but we were wearing full chem gear, and I mean full chem gear. And it came time to go to bed. This young captain starts pulling off his boots. I said, wait a minute. You have got to sleep with everything. I said, I can't sleep with my boots on. I can't go to sleep. How can you do this? I said, you're going to learn. We're going to teach you how to sleep with your boots on. I said, because I know from experience that something's going to happen tonight. And so I said, what you need to do is you sleep with your helmet on and your gas mask and your hand. Because we could have one attack where they could come around, they shot a light, and if you don't have your helmet on, you're dead because you're supposed to have your helmet on. Because when you're asleep, your helmet's going to protect you. Now you're going to have your gas mask and your hand, and you're going to be ready because if that happens, you need to be able to put it on your face and remember all the things you're supposed to do. You don't breathe in, you breathe out. And so, sure enough, two o'clock in the morning, we are all dead asleep because we've been, you know, 18-hour days, and we're dead tired. They throw two tear gas canisters into our tent. So it's not being outdoors with your gas. It's being in a contained area. I hear it thump before it starts to hiss. Comes on, blow out, pop the helmet, do all my things. She's supposed to do it in 12 seconds, ready to rock and roll. That's the test. That's all they care about. Now, unfortunately, the young captain's puking in his helmet because that's what you normally do. Don't you normally, you know, but we have to train you to blow out instead of the suck-in. Part of what Christ wants you to do in being dressed ready is to be counter-culture, to be trained to think differently once around you to be ready. And when you look at this illustration, he says, keep the lamps burning. I thought about that. Service oftentimes is inconvenience. It's not on your schedule. I mean, look at the illustration that he gives us here, you know, this wedding. You know, the servicing get to go to the party, do they? So I've got to come be ready for some guy that's gone to a party and had a good time. And it doesn't matter what time he comes back, but I have to be ready to serve him to give him a little, you know, appetizers after he comes home. So I've got to be ready to do that. That's the job of the servant. I mean, it's not overtime pay. You're not going to get comp time for it. You think about all the things that we expect to get back when we give in our culture. And that's why I say, is we look at all of this and we watch Jesus open up this passage when you hear him say, be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning. Because sometimes we want to go on vacation. Sometimes we want to let the light go out. Because we either are over busy or we are, don't have any energy left. Because sometimes all we see is the service. But what we really need to remember and to be ready for is the son of man. Jesus reminds us that he's going to come back that that's part of the context in which we live in. The expectation. And what we need to also know is we think about Jesus Christ coming back and not knowing the hour of the day is remember the passage that we read in our second reading from the gospel from Matthew about the virgins who some of them didn't have the oil. When you read on in that passage, you read about the separation of the judgment of the sheep and the goats and what's the illustration Jesus used in Matthew. Said when you gave someone a cup of cold water when you visited someone in prison when you gave them clothing. Well, when do we say you? Well, when you did it to the poor. When you did it to the least of these, my brother. So when you think about this passage, you cannot think just as catalogically. It's pushing us that way. We know that that's part of the context. That we need to be ready for the son of man to come back. That there is a real arc to our history. There is a real goal to it. But Jesus says when that comes, make sure you don't miss me when you give that cup of cold water to the poor when you visit someone in prison. So when you think about our service, can you look through the service event that individual and see the son of man? Are you ready for him? Are you ready to be surprised that all of a sudden you had an opportunity to serve Jesus Christ? The next thing he wants us to be ready for is reconciliation. You know, because I have said it again and again, that oftentimes reconciliation is one of the hardest applications of the atonement that there is because it is so personal because we know that we have been reconciled to God through the death of Jesus Christ through His sacrifice. And we are called to have a ministry of reconciliation. We are told in the passage to work hard on reconciliation. So often we want justice. We want what's fair. The place of justice was on the cross for the Christian. When we think about reconciliation and working hard towards it and notice what the context here, he speaks about the adversary. Not your friend, not your neighbor, but your adversary. You're supposed to seek reconciliation to work hard at it. That's part of being a servant. The willingness to give up your rights and your justice, your self-image, your pride because of your relationship with Jesus Christ. And so we are to be agents of reconciliation. We are to work hard with that. But there's a roadblock to readiness. And that's hypocrisy. He said to the crowd, and that's one of the things to notice is that, you know, there's Peter's question and then now, but now he's talking to the crowd. He's talking to all of us. When you see a cloud rising in the west immediately, you say, it's going to rain and it does. When the south wind blows, you say it's going to be hot and it is. Hypocrisy says, you know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it you don't know how to interpret this present time? See, we live in an age where hypocrisy giving an image out that is not authentic. He's almost a default setting of our culture, where you create an artificial image, where you create something that you're selling in terms of who you are, where you brand yourself, so that people know your brand not who you are. What we need to remember about hypocrisy is hypocrisy is basically selling a lie. It's breaking the ninth commandment. It's not being real because for the Christian, our reality should be in our relationship with Jesus Christ. That's where our identity is. That's where our identity and all of our relationship should be in that relationship with Him. We shouldn't be posters. People who have learned the conformity of Christianity. One of the things that we see sometimes that as hard as is the battle over how real to be in church, I will tell you one of the times that oftentimes that I feel the most free in my preaching to address real problems, particularly that men have, is when I'm deployed and I'm just with adults, and I understand the difference between preaching to families, where we've got multiple generations, and sometimes speaking to some real issues that are in people's hearts. In a congregation like this, when we talk about hypocrisy, I hope that is something that is around the kitchen table or the dinner table so that you and all of us can talk to our spouses and to our children about what it means to be real in Jesus Christ, not to be playing a character, not to be posing, but to be real. See, they say they have an understanding of the world. You can look out and say, oh, it's going to rain or oh, it's going to be hot, but he calls them hypocrites. Hypocrisy is an expression of narcissism that elusive self-adveration and self-centeredness. One of the things about hypocrisy in the church is that hypocrisy is a choice that takes a lot of energy to carry off a fake personality, to pretend to be something you're not, is a choice and you have to stay in rule. It's like being a double agent or a triple agent or depending upon how you want to look at it. It's pretending to be something you're not, but yet oftentimes Christianity is interpreted as conformity rather than reality, and we have to make sure that our children understand it's about being real. It's about watching mom and dad forgive each other as we challenge our children on their sins and as we forgive them and as we recognize we sin against them to make sure that the generations are real with each other and not just say if I conform because how many young people learn that if I conform, I stay out of the radar, I stay out of trouble, and that's their goal is to stay out of trouble. We want people to be real because we know what reconciliation is because we have been reconciled that we were separated from God by our sin. Now I want you to look at the context. Now James is just the way the words came out and maybe you'll remember a little bit of it, but the J is for judgment. See Jesus warns us about the judgment so there's no surprise. If you have a teacher who's giving you a test, you're going to get all the answers in the classroom. You just have to remember them and organize them to give them back in a way that happens in the test. John in Luke chapter 3 tells us that his winning fork is in his hand to clear the threshing horde and gather the weed into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. Fire is mentioned both in the John and rather the Luke 3 passage in in our text today. Judgment is serious business but in God's grace, what does he do? He says it's going to happen. He's not going to be a surprise. He's not far in play, gotcha. He's given us that simple little recipe to be dressed ready to serve with your lamp spring. The A is for accountability. In 48, you know, from everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. Everything that we have, everything has come from our creator, Redeemer God. Everything we have and we are accountable for that. Now accountability is the word that sometimes it's used well and sometimes it's kind of used as a brand. Oh, you want to have accountability groups? Why go to accountability groups? But does it change your life? Does it have an impact or is just a word and a brand? Because, you know, I am here to tell you that the church is really good at branding and using words as slogans that don't touch people's lives. And they have biblical root and meaning. Now ultimately isn't that a form of hypocrisy just to brand something without having it be real? Yeah, I know how to put the Christian uniform on. See, that's why I think this next point, the master's servants is important. When you look at this passage about the faithful and the wise master manager, who's master put him in charge to give them the food allowance at the proper time. You see, it's not about power and position. It's about servants, it's about taking care of other people. Because the master through the steward wants them to be fed, wants them to be strong so that they can work and be part of the team. But see, what can happen is that people say, oh, he's not coming back. There's not going to be an accountability. There's not going to be any judgment. And what's he do? He starts beating up on people, eating and getting drunk. Because he thinks it's about him and about his pleasure and about his position and about his power. See, if we start making the mission of the church about us, see then we're slipping into that consumer mentality of what can I get out of doing this instead of what can I give. But think about this when you think about leadership responsibility. We are to serve others. We're not to profit from ourselves. The last, the S is stewardship. Just remember that you're a steward. That everything you have has been entrusted to you. Everything. Marriage is children, jobs, health, property. Everything we have. You are a steward. It's been given to you. You will have to someday give an account to the son of man for that. Now, some of you follow me on Facebook and I put up several covers of Bob Dylan Song. Got to serve somebody from his 1979. Yes, I know that's an old album. Slow train coming that he won a Grammy award for is the best rock vocal by a male in 1970. And I want to read the first two verses as I wrap up the sermon. You may be an ambassador to England or France. You may be like to gamble. You might like to dance. You may be the heavyweight champion of the world. You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls. But you've got to have, but you're going to have to serve somebody. Yes, indeed, you're going to have to serve somebody. It might be the devil or maybe the Lord, but you're going to have to serve somebody. See, that's what this is all about. Who are you serving? Others? Or the Son of Man? Are you ready to serve? And what I want to challenge our congregation to think about is a pastor. Is how do we serve within the generations? Not just serve our generation, but the generation in front of us and the generation behind us. No matter what generation you are, whether you're a teenager or you're somebody like me, you know, with this kind of hair. But how do we do that? See, we never get to the place in the church where we can look back and say, hey, everybody's here to serve me. That never happens. If we get that mentality, then it's like, okay, you know, he's not coming back and it's all about me. No. How do we, how do you look around and see people who are different ages, different stages, and say, how can I serve them? See, he doesn't say, hey, figure out how to make the system work for you. No. He gives you a simple directive. Be dressed. Lamplet. Let's pray. Father, we pray that you would indeed be the light of our lamps, that you would give us oil that would never run out, that when we serve, we would see you, that we would not think that it's inconvenient, but we're too tired. Give us the strength. Help us to serve together. Father, help us to love within the generations, to look at the differences, and to love those differences, to love the uniqueness of each person in this congregation. Help us do your reconcilers. But Jesus, thank you. Thank you that you don't want to play gotcha with us. That you don't want to surprise us. I said, yes, you'll be surprised on that day, but yes, we will be ready, because we will have been dressed, and our lamps will have been lit. We pray this Jesus in your most holy name. Amen. Amen.