Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the Holy Gospel reading which has already been read.

Dearfriends in Christ, there are thousands of types of traps in the world, from P-traps to mousetraps to booby traps, but they all have one thing in common: to catch something and not let it go. My uncle used to trap raccoons, and my favorite trapping story from him was the time a skunk wandered into one of his traps and got stuck. He warned his daughter, my first cousin, not to go near it, but she didn't listen and sure enough, she got sprayed by Pepé Le Pew. My grandma had to give her a series of tomato juice baths to deodorize her, but it still took a long time for the smell to wear off completely.

Recently an armadillo was doing a number on my parents' yard but was only showing himself at night, and my dad tried for weeks to get rid of it using, let's say, conventional methods of armadillo removal, but that approach failed repeatedly, so out of desperation he set a cage trap, and wouldn't you know it, he caught that armadillo. This is surprising because it's notoriously difficult to trap armadillos, since they don't care for the kind of bait you can put in a trap, but rather they prefer things like ants and termites. My uncle who used to be a trapper couldn't believe that it had worked.

It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that biblical history is basically one story after another of humans falling into traps and God rescuing them, only to see them fall into other traps. Just look at God's chosen people, Israel, and their tendency to get trapped by foreign idolatrous religions. There is something about our sinful human nature that is always discontent and looking for satisfaction outside God's will, and so the devil swoops in, sets a trap with sinfully satisfying bait, and eagerly awaits his prey. What's humbling is that in the very beginning of biblical history, even sinless Adam and Eve were no match for Satan's traps. They were even harder to trap than an armadillo because they were without the disadvantage of the covetousness that cripples all of us sinners. But still they fell into sin, or even more appropriately, they plunged in.

Now this wasn't God's fault. He had given them more than they ever could have asked for. He gave the man and the woman life, He gave them each other, He gave them His Word and promises about being fruitful and multiplying, He gave them the whole earth to exercise dominion over, and He gave them all the trees of the Garden to pick delightful fruit from, even the Tree of Life. The only thing He withheld from them was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of God and Evil. God gave them His Word that if they ate of it, they would die; on the positive side, they could show their love and trust in God by refraining from eating of that tree.

But Satan from the beginning has been not only a liar and a murderer but also a trapper, so he slithered into the creation and turned the forbidden fruit of that Tree into bait: he gave Adam and Eve his word that if they ate of it, they would not die, but rather they would be wise like God. And who doesn't want to be like God, right? All wise, all knowing, all powerful: it sounds too good to be true. And it is. That is not what God made them or us for. He is God, and we aren't. He is the Creator, we are creatures. He is the Giver, we are given to. But since Adam and Eve believed Satan's promises rather than God's, they took the bait and plunged right into the trap and sinned against God; and by that sin, they and we were trapped in a dying world with all of sin's dread consequences: guilt, shame, fear of God's punishment, doubt of God's Word, conflict with each other, hatred, lust, theft, slander, and the inclination toward jealousy and discontent.

But even on that day when Man trapped himself in original sin, God showed His enduring love and mercy by promising to send an Offspring of the woman to crush the head of the serpent, to smash the trapper who had snared us in sin. So while much of biblical history does involve sinful humans falling into one trap after another, the greatest and most important aspect of that history is that God would eventually send a Savior to rescue His people. But what's truly wonderful is that God wouldn't just send some sort of angel superhero to save us, but He sent His only-begotten Son as a Man named Jesus. In the Incarnation, God the Son trapped Himself in our flesh for good, for our good.

And it had to be this way, since God's Law had trapped all of us under disobedience and judgment; therefore, only God Himself could liberate us from this captivity; only God could make a sufficient sacrifice to pay for our sins. Yet the Law that we had broken also had to be fulfilled perfectly, and God Himself is above the Law, so our Redeemer also had to be a true man, born under the Law. And so God sent Jesus to free us from the trap of sin, death, and the Law, as St. Paul explains: "As one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous" (Romans 5:18-19). And elsewhere Paul writes: "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons" (Galatians 4:4-5).

And that's what Jesus did. By His perfect life of obedience, He has fulfilled God's Law in your place. By His death for your sin, He answered for your guilt and liberated you from the condemnation of God's Law. By His resurrection He has justified you, declaring you righteous and holy in God's sight for the sake of His own righteousness. By His ascension into heaven to sit at God's right hand, Jesus has gone to prepare a place for you and has shown you your future exaltation in heaven. And in Holy Baptism, Jesus has given you adoption as sons of God, making you free members of His eternal household so that you can live as His godly children forever. He has set you free from sin and death so that for the rest of your earthly lives, you can live no longer for yourselves, trapped in self-love, but rather you can live freely under His grace and lovingly in service to others.

But it is a strange phenomenon among humans that sometimes prisoners who have been locked up for a long time are terrified of being set free; and in fact, given the choice, they will remain trapped in captivity. It is as if they have made peace with their captors, even if their captors have been abusive towards them. And this is the vicious thing about sin and the devil's use of it: even though we have been set free from it by the blood of Jesus Christ, Satan makes our former slavery to sin seem preferable to the freedom we have in Jesus. Even though God is a loving and kind Father and Satan is a cruel taskmaster, he manages to make service to him more appealing than the blessedness of serving the Living God. As Christians we should know better—we have the Holy Scriptures telling us how badly things go when we forsake our Lord—but it's remarkable that Satan again and again gets us to focus on the bait, the false promises of happiness that sin offers, only to find ourselves ensnared again by sin and its consequences, guilt and God's judgment.

And so we must always be on the watch for Satan's traps, because in our Gospel reading, Jesus warns that Judgment Day is coming soon, and it will come like a trap upon those who are unprepared to meet the Lord. Jesus wants us to be prepared, so He says, "Watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap."

The first two traps Jesus lists are dissipation and drunkenness. The Greek word that we translate as "dissipation" means staggering, dizziness, muddle-headedness, and in Greek literature it is usually associated with wild partying, heavy drinking, and the end result: hangovers. The second term Jesus uses, "drunkenness," in Greek is the regular word for drunken intoxication, but it also can be understood in a metaphorical sense: that is, we can become intoxicated with any forbidden pleasure. Perhaps it's an obsession with the lewd promises made on the cover of Cosmo, or with the smut that you pull up on your computer screen or television. Examine your own life to see what sinful pleasures intoxicate you. Abusing drugs and alcohol aren't the only ways of trapping our hearts and minds in a stupor; any sort of obsessive lust can take control of us and drive the Holy Spirit out. What's remarkable is that these ensnaring sins all work together to trap us in their web: heavy drinking and wild partying leads to all sorts of other debauchery. Isn't it appropriate that our Lord warns us against these things at the beginning of a season when the world around us is encouraging us to drink, eat, and party as much as we can?

Now I know that many of you aren't inclined to be trapped by partying, and perhaps you are smugly thinking that Jesus has no warnings for you as the Last Day approaches. But think again. Look at the traps that Jesus lists right alongside of dissipation and drunkenness: "the cares of this life," that is, "the worries and anxieties of this life." The Greek word translated as "life" here refers to mundane things, day-to-day cares and worries. How will I make ends meet this month? How will I get all my Christmas shopping done? When will I make some good friends? How will I straighten out my kid's discipline problem? How can I find a good spouse? Is this life-threatening illness going to go away? When will I find a good job? Jesus says that these sorts of worries that consume our minds can trap us just as easily as dissipation and drunkenness can. Not only sinful pleasures but also sinful worries can trap us because they drag our hearts away from confidence in our Lord and watchfulness of His return to judge the living and the dead.

And so today we must repent and turn away from all of our sins, including excessive revelry and faithless anxiety, because Jesus promises something much better: He promises to those who trust in His mercy an eternity of pleasures in heaven, and He says that we need not be anxious in this life because He will take care of us, He is on our side. He also calls us to repent through the warning He gives when He says that for those caught up in sins that weigh them down, the Last Day will come upon them like a trap. For those who make peace with their sins and refuse to repent, for those who prefer captivity to sin rather than freedom in Christ, their lot is described in our Old Testament reading: "Behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch."

If we combine the images from Jesus and Malachi, on Judgment Day, for the unbelieving and impenitent, caught up in their drunkenness and lust and intoxication with pleasure, or weighed down by the worries of this life, or with hearts filled with arrogance and hands busy doing evil, on that day they will be trapped in a prison house of their own making with no way to escape, and then the warning will go out: a fire is coming! Evacuate! But there will be no way out, for it will be too late, and the fire will never go out because Jesus says that on the Last Day all the unrighteous will be thrown "into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt 13:42). And elsewhere Jesus says that in hell, "Their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:47-48).

But that threat of hell can lead to one final trap for faithful Christians, and in fact, it is Satan's favorite snare he sets for us: He wants to trap us in fear and despair, in terror of God's condemnation and loss of hope of God's mercy. He wants to convince us that because the sins of our past are so great, then we cannot be forgiven, that God could never love us and want to take us back.

But for protection against this snare, listen to the Gospel, which reveals that Jesus is your Savior from the snares of the devil today and from the trap of hell forever, because God sent Jesus to be trapped under the weight of your sins, trapped by soldiers, trapped on the cross, and finally plunged into the trapdoors of death with all your guilt on His shoulders. But death could not hold your Lord down and He broke free from the tomb on the third day and has granted you liberty from all bonds, snares, and traps by your Baptism into Him. He frees you from sin, death, and the devil with His Words of Absolution to you: "I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." And He gives you a sure and certain pledge of life eternal when He feeds you with His true body and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins, as His Word promises.

And these Words of Jesus do not pass away, just like all His other Words. In our Gospel reading Jesus leaves these Words for those who trust in His forgiveness: when we see signs of the Last Day coming—and the signs are there that it is coming soon—we are not to fear or despair, but instead He promises that we "will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory…when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." That is the picture Jesus wants you to have of Him; not as an angry judge coming to condemn you, but as your loving Savior coming with power and glory to redeem you from this dying world and take you to the eternal joys and glories of heaven.

And if you are still in doubt of His great love, forgiveness, and desire to save you, just remember that you've already been "trapped" by Jesus in His hands by Holy Baptism, where He claimed you as His own, and trapped in Jesus' hands is the safest place in all creation to be. For He gives this promise to His sheep, Words that will not pass away even when heaven and earth crumble: Jesus says, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one" (John 10:27-30). In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.