12 August 2026 • Friday of Trinity 10 (observed) • Luke 21:34–36 · Colossians 1:21–25a
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Watch therefore, and pray always” (Luke 21:36). That’s what Jesus said. There. Now you know what to do. But in the same breath He says we will be sitting — or, as our translation has it, dwelling. Two contradictory things: to be sitting and dwelling, or to be standing before the Son of Man, risen, watching and praying. So why are you still sitting?
You have known this verse for years. You and I have agreed with every sermon on it in principle. Think Advent-tide — this is a portion of the Gospel for the Second Sunday in Advent. And the Day is still coming, and we’re still just sitting (dwelling) in that seat. The question is not what you ought to do. You know that. The question is why knowing you should get up has never once been enough.
He warned us. “But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly” (Luke 21:34). So let us go through the three ways you have tried to “take heed” — and take them in the opposite order from the way He lists them, because that is the order you have lived them.
First, the “cares of this life.” You have tried the budget. You sat at the table with the statements and the calculator and built the spreadsheet, and for days it worked. You have tried the retirement calculator that told you the number and then told you again, louder. You have tried the advisor with the good handshake. You have tried not to look at it or think about it too much, and especially not to pay attention to the news and the markets — which is also a strategy, and it is free.
But the “cares” catch up with you, and they get heavy. You are weighed down. So what’s next? Time for a stiff drink. Nothing new under the sun here in Wisconsin. Maybe you have tried the beer or the whiskey sours. Do not look at me like that. Jesus brought it up first. First “cares,” then “drunkenness” to numb the pain.
And then the “carousing.” Distracted and numb, we turn to entertainment. You have tried the scroll at eleven at night, thumbed while your wife sleeps, because a lit rectangle is quieter than your own head. You’ve tried the bigger black mirror with its endless mind-numbing visuals. You’ve tried the concerts, the events, the trips — I know you went on a day trip — and whatever other “carousing” distracts you from the reality that the Day is coming.
And when the worldly medicine failed you, you upgraded to the religious kind. You have tried the sermon that told you not to worry, that tomorrow has enough worries of its own, which worked the way being told not to think of an elephant works. The devotional with the ribbon. The Bible-reading streak. The men’s group, the ladies’ aid. On Sunday we talked about accountability partners, fasting, bodily preparation, getting up earlier. The resolution, made in this room, that this fall would be different — that you would finally behave differently, finally stand up and watch and pray. Maybe your pastor helped for a bit. He stood up here and said, “Watch harder, pray more, get to church.” Every word of it true. None of it useless. And every word of it turned, one more time, into an attempt to fix ourselves.
Do you hear what we are saying when we tell a man to get a grip, get help, or grow up? Do you see how vain and pointless it is to avoid the reality Christ speaks in His Word by burying it under endless, mind-numbing distraction?
Our attempts to take the weight off end up laying more weight on. Maybe you feel it right now — and it isn’t only the humidity and the heat pressing down on you. A man already stooped is now hunched over, because he cannot carry what he already holds, and then we dare to walk over, set one more thing on him, and tell him to stand up.
So let’s try it ourselves. Take hold of the pew you are sitting on, and lift it. Go ahead. That is the whole program — every book, every plan, every sermon that ends with a list of do this and do that. A man gripping his own chair and pulling, going nowhere, getting tired, and calling it repentance, or at least a try. Weighed down and just dwelling.
Now hear what the Lord says about the Day that is coming. He does not say the trap catches the wicked. “For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth” (Luke 21:35).
Except our translation is too soft there. He does not say dwell. He says sitting. It comes on all those sitting on the face of the whole earth. Sitting still, sitting tired, sitting without being able to stand.
Luther saw what kind of snare it is. He says the day “will come as a snare by which birds and beasts are caught at a time when most concerned about their food and least expecting to be entrapped.” Look what the bird was doing when the net dropped. It was not sinning. It was eating. Doing the one thing a bird is supposed to do, with its whole attention — and that attention is the entire mechanism of the trap. The snare does not need you wicked. It needs you busy with your food.
So what puts you in that seat, stuck, is not your worst hour. It is your most responsible one: the provision, the planning, the getting of enough, the being prepared — finding oil for your own lamp. You cannot comfort yourself with the thought that the Day is coming for somebody with a worse life. It is coming for the diligent and for the lazy. It is coming for all, and it will find them looking down.
That is why He named the cares of this life in the same breath as the drink and the making merry. Not because providing for your household is a sin — it is the Fourth Petition and the honest work God gave you — but because it is heavy, and a man carrying it can only sit, stuck, weighed down, and the Day comes on the seated.
But Jesus does not want you left in that seat. So what do you need? Not another program. You have run them all, and they didn’t work. You ran the whole progression, cares to drunkenness to carousing, and it works until the next morning, and then the hangover. What you need is what He Himself prescribed: somebody to stand you up. Watch what He tells you to pray for. “Pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke 21:36).
You are not told to stand. The verb is passive. To be made to stand. You are told to beg that somebody would do it to you. There it is — the last thing you wanted. You cannot even get up on your own, and Jesus says don’t bother trying. By whom, then?
The Epistle says His name and uses the same word. “You, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works” (Colossians 1:21). Not a man who slipped. A man on the other side of a war. An enemy in the mind — the part of you that never stops talking. “Yet now Christ has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight” (Colossians 1:22).
To present. To stand you beside Him. The standing word again, and this time not passive, because now we are told who is doing it. In the Gospel you beg to be stood up. In the Epistle Christ stands you up.
And not someday, when the load lightens. Holy, blameless, above reproach — already now, not improved, not lightened, not better postured. He went underneath the whole weight and carried it out of the city and up a hill in daylight where anybody could watch, and He was not carrying it sitting down. He carried it to His death, put it down, and it stayed down.
Then comes the next clause, and your head starts doing the math. “If indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast” (Colossians 1:23). If. I talked about this in Bible class on Sunday. Anytime we hear that word, where do we go? Straight back inside our own skulls, running the numbers — have I done enough, will I do enough, will I hold out — the one place no promise has ever reached you.
So I will say here what I said Sunday: stop it. You don’t need to. You just heard what Christ has done for you; the “if” has already been answered. You are talking to yourself again, and that disease has never once healed on its own. Do not read the “if” as a threat. We credit the beginning, the middle, and the end to faith alone in Christ — not to your works keeping what faith received, which is what many Christians unfortunately teach: first Christ does this for you, now you do this in response. No. The “if” is not another weight laid on you. It is a description of what faith does. Translate it this way, if it helps: when indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast. And faith was never your equipment either. It was given, and the One who gave it is holding it, and He is not asking your opinion. He will accomplish it in you.
Which is why God will not leave you sitting there alone with your own voice, trying to work out how to stand. He sends a man with a mouth. Look what Paul became: “of which I became a minister” (Colossians 1:25) — and before that, “I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24).
That should strike you as odd. Nothing is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. Paul had just written that God reconciled all things by the blood of His cross, and that work needs no help from Paul and none from you. What is lacking is not in the dying. It is in the delivering. The Gospel has been purchased and won, but it must be preached, or the people stay seated. Somebody has to carry a finished thing to Colossae and say it out loud to the people sitting there. That costs a man something — when Paul writes this letter he is in prison. There is the suffering in his flesh.
So look what standing up made of him. Enemy in his mind, alienated. Christ stood him up, and the first thing the man does on his feet is pick up a load that was never his own weight and rejoice over it, because now he gets to be the mouth of God. That is why you have one too, a flesh-and-blood preacher to lift you up. It is part of our why statement, isn’t it. You cannot preach to yourself. You cannot lift yourself up. You have tried that too — if I could just feel a little better about it. Good luck.
So hear it from outside you. To you, sitting there with the account and the crop and your mother’s house and the letters written in your own flesh — to you Christ has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death. To you: holy, blameless, above reproach, in the sight of the Father, today, before you have improved by one ounce, before you have even crept to the edge of the seat.
Therefore, in the Name of Jesus, I forgive you all your sins. There. That is the word that stands you up. And in a moment He says it again, this time attached to the body that was carried up the hill, and puts it into your mouth, so that you will have it in you and not merely think about it.
So over and over Christ comes, and He speaks. He lifts you up out of your distress and stands you up, that you may watch and pray for that Day, the Day of the Son of Man. Thanks be to Jesus, in His holy + Name. AMEN.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin