On the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday, November 8, worship at Immanuel Lutheran looked a little different. Pastor Chris Ramstad was unexpectedly ill, so DCE Jason Glaskey and the elders led both services. Pastor sent along the sermon he had already written, so we could still hear it. The readings suited a morning like that. They asked what Christians actually believe about the people we love who have died, and about the day Jesus comes back.
If you have never worshiped with us, this was not a typical Sunday, so here is what usually happens. From September through May we gather at 8:00 and 10:30, with Sunday school and Bible classes for every age at 9:15 in between. In the summer there is one service at 9:00. Most weeks Pastor leads the Divine Service and preaches. We receive the Lord’s Supper on the first and third Sundays. The service is sung from the red Lutheran Service Book in the pew racks, with every word also on the screens. The full schedule is here.
This week, with no pastor present, we used the Service of Prayer and Preaching instead. It is a shorter order from the same hymnal, built around Scripture, the Creed and prayer. Laypeople can lead it. It was also a hymn sing, which meant the congregation chose every hymn by calling out numbers from the pews. At 8:00 an elder started us off with Praise the One Who Breaks the Darkness (LSB 849), and the 10:30 service opened with Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing (LSB 686).
The children’s message: an alarm from Jesus
Before the readings, DCE Jason Glaskey asked the children how they wake up in the morning. Some have alarm clocks that blare and some have phones that play a song, while his own watch simply buzzes on his wrist at six o’clock until he is awake. Then he held up a different kind of alarm, a shofar. It is a ram’s horn, hollowed out so that it can be blown like a trumpet, the kind Israel used in the Old Testament to call the people together. He gave it one loud blast, aimed carefully away from the pews.
The Epistle they were about to hear says that on the last day the Lord will come down from heaven “with the sound of the trumpet of God,” and the dead in Christ will rise. Whatever wakes us up each morning, he told them, Jesus has promised to wake his people too, and then we will be with him forever. Children come forward for a short message like this at every service, and our children and families page has more.
The readings: lamps at midnight
After opening verses from the Psalms, we sang the canticle from Isaiah 12, “The Lord God is my strength and my song.” The Old Testament reading was a hard one. In Amos 5, God warns people who were eager for the day of the Lord without being ready for it that it will be darkness and not light, and he asks instead that justice roll down like waters. In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul writes to a young church that is worried about believers who have already died.
The Gospel was Matthew 25, the parable of ten bridesmaids waiting with their lamps for a bridegroom who comes at midnight. Only five of them have brought enough oil, and when the cry goes up, the other five are out trying to buy more. In this order of service the whole congregation then says the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer together. The 8:00 congregation followed that with Amazing Grace (LSB 744), and the 10:30 with What a Friend We Have in Jesus (LSB 770).
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost: “We do not want you to be uninformed”
DCE Glaskey shared the sermon Pastor had written for the day. Before he began, he explained that every word was Pastor’s, sent to him early that morning. The church in Thessalonica, the sermon began, had heard a rumor that the day of resurrection had already come and that they had missed it. Paul answers them with a sentence Pastor kept returning to: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep.” Those who are asleep, he explained, are believers who have died in the faith.
Death is hard to talk about, Pastor admitted, and last week’s sermon about planning our own funerals may have felt uncomfortable. Plenty of people talk about it anyway, and much of what they say is bad theology dressed up as comfort. A eulogy says that God needed another angel, though Scripture never teaches that people become angels. A greeting card suggests that a loved one is looking down on us, or has come back as the cardinal at the feeder. We rarely correct a grieving friend in the middle of their grief, and we shouldn’t. We still need to know better ourselves, because none of those ideas offer any real hope.
Paul starts with Jesus, who really died. His heart stopped and he was laid in a tomb, because that is where we put the dead, and then he rose. Pastor was careful with the next line, where Paul says we do not grieve as others do who have no hope. Paul does not say Christians don’t grieve at all. Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus and lamented over Jerusalem, so we are free to cry too. We simply grieve as people who know how the story ends.
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
1 Thessalonians 4:13–14 (ESV)
Paul’s answer to people afraid of missing the Lord’s return is that nobody will miss it. The Lord will come “with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God.” Pastor’s picture for that came from Martin Luther School across the parking lot. A class can be in the middle of a silent math test when the alarm goes off, and nobody needs it explained, because everybody puts down their pencils and goes. Christ’s return will be like that for the whole world, with the dead in Christ rising first.
“Therefore encourage one another with these words,” Paul writes. Pastor said that is how Christians live while we wait, hearing the promise in the Word and the Sacraments and passing it on to each other, even through ordinary things like serving on a board. Jesus ends the parable of the bridesmaids the same way. “Watch therefore,” he says, “for you know neither the day nor the hour.” One chapter later, in the garden of Gethsemane, his disciples could not stay awake with him for a single hour. Jesus stayed awake for them, already set on the cross ahead of him.
He closed with a story from western Iowa. Gary Thies, whom many Lutherans know simply as Missionary Gary, founded Mission Central on old farmland near Mapleton, and it has grown into one of the largest networks supporting LCMS missionaries around the world. On tours he walks visitors up a hill past a barn full of mission artifacts and points out his own grave, already waiting for him. He calls it his resurrection spot. Whether we are awake or asleep when Jesus comes, Pastor wrote, we will be with him forever.
Prayers and the closing hymns
After the sermon the 8:00 congregation sang I Am Jesus’ Little Lamb (LSB 740) and the 10:30 sang Beautiful Savior (LSB 537). Then we gathered the offering. The prayers in this service are a litany. A leader prays a series of short petitions, and the congregation answers each one with “Lord, have mercy.” We prayed for the LWML, the women’s mission organization of our church body. We also prayed for two nearby congregations waiting for a new pastor, Immanuel in Lockwood and St. Andrew in Stockton.
The prayer for the day picked up the parable again, asking God to send his Son “to lead home his bride, the church,” so that we may enter his eternal wedding feast. We prayed Luther’s Morning Prayer together and received the blessing. The 8:00 service closed with I’m But a Stranger Here (LSB 748), which someone called out from the front pew, and a young worshiper chose Listen, God Is Calling (LSB 833) to end the 10:30.
One Good Thing · God at work among us
The LWML gathers at Immanuel
Each week the announcements open with one good thing, a short look at God at work among us, and this week it was the day before. On Saturday, November 7, the women of our LWML hosted the LWML Fall Gathering for Lutheran women from churches around our area. Nearly 40 of them came to hear God’s Word, worship together and take care of the business of their mission work, under the theme “Joyful Hearts” from Proverbs 17:22. Pastor gave a dramatic sermon, in costume, about Naaman, the Syrian army commander in 2 Kings 5 who was healed of leprosy after washing seven times in the Jordan River.
After the service
Josh Douglas of the LCMS gift planning office led the adult Bible class between services. Leftover treats from the LWML gathering made their way to the coffee table. After the 10:30 service, members stayed for the voters’ meeting. Several positions, including vice president and the finance and property boards, still need someone willing to serve, so please consider it prayerfully.
Three things in the coming week are open to anyone. On Wednesday, November 11, Martin Luther School holds its Veterans Day chapel at 8:15 in the church. Veterans are invited to bring their families, so the students can honor them. On Saturday, November 14, families meet at church at 10:00 for Raking & Relationship to help neighbors with leaves and yard work. The trees are still holding on to their leaves, so flower beds count too.
Our Faith in Action series spent its fifth week on church and school as the light of Christ for every child. It ends next Sunday, November 15, with a Thanksgiving-style dinner at noon in the school gym. It is for the whole congregation and every Martin Luther School family. Scan the code on the bulletin insert or call the church office to say how many are coming. Everything else is on the church calendar.
Coming up at Immanuel
Raking & Relationship · Saturday, November 14
Families of every age help neighbors with leaves and yard work. Meet at church at 10:00.
Faith in Action Celebration · Sunday, November 15
A Thanksgiving-style dinner for everyone at noon in the Martin Luther School gym, after the 10:30 service.
A Sunday without our pastor was never the plan. Still, it was a fair picture of what Paul asked of the Thessalonians: a congregation hearing the promise, singing it back and passing it on to one another. If last week’s sermon left you meaning to write down your own funeral wishes, the All Saints’ Day recap has a planning sheet you can print.
Read it again this week
- Amos 5:18–24 — the day of the Lord, and justice rolling down like waters.
- 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 — the trumpet of God and the hope of the resurrection.
- Matthew 25:1–13 — ten bridesmaids, their lamps, and the midnight cry.
Three questions from the sermon:
- Which of the comforting sayings Pastor mentioned have you heard at a funeral or in a card? What does 1 Thessalonians 4 give a grieving family instead?
- Paul does not tell Christians not to grieve. What is the difference between grieving with hope and grieving without it?
- Missionary Gary calls his grave his resurrection spot. How would it change the way you see a cemetery, or your own death, to think of it like that?
Luther’s Small Catechism is free to read online. For this Sunday, read his explanation of the Second and Third Articles of the Apostles’ Creed, about Christ who “will come to judge the living and the dead” and “the resurrection of the body.”
In the service — Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, November 8, 2026
| Liturgy | Service of Prayer and Preaching, as a hymn sing (no Communion) |
| Canticle | Isaiah 12, “The Lord God is my strength and my song” |
| Old Testament | Amos 5:18–24 |
| Epistle | 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 (the sermon text) |
| Holy Gospel | Matthew 25:1–13 |
| Hymns, 8:00 | LSB 849 Praise the One Who Breaks the Darkness · LSB 744 Amazing Grace · LSB 740 I Am Jesus’ Little Lamb · LSB 748 I’m But a Stranger Here |
| Hymns, 10:30 | LSB 686 Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing · LSB 770 What a Friend We Have in Jesus · LSB 537 Beautiful Savior · LSB 833 Listen, God Is Calling |
| Creed | Apostles’ Creed, with the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer |
| Preacher | DCE Jason Glaskey, sharing the sermon Pastor Chris Ramstad had written |
| Led by | DCE Jason Glaskey and the elders |
| Children’s message | DCE Jason Glaskey |
| Also in the service | Luther’s Morning Prayer · One good thing: nearly 40 women at the LWML Fall Gathering |
Questions people ask
What is the Service of Prayer and Preaching?
It is a short service in the Lutheran Service Book. It centers on Scripture, the Creed and prayer. Laypeople can lead it when no pastor is present. There is no Communion in it. Most Sundays we use the Divine Service, led by our pastor. The LCMS has worship resources for every service and season.
Why are the readings about the end times now?
The church year is a calendar of seasons that walks through the life of Christ. It ends in November. In the last weeks the readings turn to Christ’s return and the resurrection. Then Advent begins, and the church waits for Christmas. Our page What We Believe explains more.
Can visitors receive Communion?
We receive the Lord’s Supper on the first and third Sundays of the month. We believe Christ gives his true body and blood in the bread and wine, for the forgiveness of sins. So we ask visitors to speak with Pastor Ramstad before receiving it. He is glad to talk. You are welcome to come forward for a blessing instead.
Where do I park?
There are three lots. One is off 26th Street, north of the sanctuary. The main lot is off Connecticut Avenue. A smaller one sits near the Youth Center off 27th Street. Signs inside each door point the way, and greeters are there to help. See Where We Meet for a map.
What should I wear?
There is no right way to dress here. On a normal Sunday you will see high heels and wingtips sitting next to sneakers and sandals. Dress the way you would for something that matters. Casual is fine. Dressier is fine.
Should I bring my children into the service?
We hope you will. Children are not just allowed in worship here, they are encouraged in it. Wiggling and noise do not bother anyone. A nursery is available for families who need it, though it is only occasionally staffed. Changing tables are in the nursery and in the family restroom in the narthex (the lobby).
Thinking about visiting?
From September through May we worship at 8:00 and 10:30 on Sunday mornings, with the Christian Education Hour between them at 9:15. From June through August there is one service, at 9:00, with classes after it at 10:15. Holy Communion is on the first and third Sundays.
Park in any of the three lots and come in any door. Signs point the way, and someone will be there to help. Dress however you are comfortable. Bring your children with you.
More at Immanuel Lutheran
- What to Expect — a walk through a Sunday morning here
- Where We Meet — campus map, parking, the buildings
- Who Is Jesus? — the shortest answer we know how to give
- What Is Lutheran Worship? — how our services fit together
- Women’s Ministry — the LWML, Altar Guild and Ladies Lunch, with the national LWML
- Contact us — questions, or a prayer request
About Immanuel Lutheran Church
Immanuel Lutheran Church is a congregation of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod at 2616 S Connecticut Ave, Joplin, MO 64804. We are the home of Martin Luther School, which serves children from age 3 through 8th grade. Jesus brings life. Meet Him here.
More about us: About Us · Staff and Leaders · past services and sermons, including All Saints’ Day, when Pastor preached on the saints in white robes in Revelation 7, and Reformation Sunday, on the angel with an eternal gospel in Revelation 14. Listen to this sermon and others on the Word & Sacrament podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.