Sunday, November 6, 2011
Ordinary 32A
Text: Matthew 25:1-13
Theme: How normal (or normative) do we make our faith?
“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; 4but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. 8The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9But the wise replied, ‘No! There will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ 10And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ 13Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
A question for us this morning: when I read phrases like “the bridegroom”, “the wedding banquet” and “neither the day nor the hour”, what do we associate that imagery and those phrases with most frequently?
If you answered “the second coming” or “the rapture” or “Jesus’ return”, you wouldn’t be alone. There are plenty of folks who would affirm unequivocally that this passage is a picture of the eschatological event – that is the theological term for the ‘end times’ – the eschaton – in which Jesus will return to and establish his reign on earth.
All the elements are there: Jesus – the bridegroom – the wedding banquet – the celebration – and the reference to ‘neither the day nor the hour’ echoes in our minds with what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in answer to a direct question about that specifically, so therefore, THIS passage MUST ALSO be referring to the second coming, right?
You already know what my answer will be, don’t you?
I would invite us to look at this passage differently, and take into account what both the preceding and the following passages speak to as we look at these verses.
In previous passages, Jesus has gone into a haunting vision of what that time will be like – that unexpected but predicted return – put to music by Larry Norman in his song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”; two men walking up a hill, one disappears and one’s left standing still … I wish we’d all been ready, a man and wife asleep in bed, she hears a noise and turns her head, he’s gone, … you get the picture. The text is slightly different: “40Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. 41Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” It is a description of something that happens suddenly and in the middle of everyday events.
In what has become a relatively recent historical phenomenon that truly only developed since the 1830’s, we have this frenetic, morbid fascination with ‘end of the world’ scenarios. Multimillion-dollar movies have been made about it, hundreds if not thousands of books have been written and sold about the subject. We want to know what comes next.
We have watched as claim after claim of the impending end of the world has come and gone. While there was an expectation of Jesus’ prompt return among those first Christians in the early years of the growth of the movement of followers of Jesus, when time continued to pass and there WAS no triumphant return, no clouds rolling back, no thundering trumpets, people began to understand the true nature of Jesus’ remarks.
Most recently we heard predictions of the rapture to take place this past spring, and the end of the world to have taken place on October 21st. When nothing discernible happened in May, we were told it was not so much a physical rapture as it was a spiritual one … but that the end of the world was inevitably and irrevocably, going to take place right at three weeks ago.
As you can tell, we’re still here. So is the world. Not much has changed.
There were several headlines that ran a few days after the expected date that claimed that the man who made those predictions was sorry, that he was apologizing and repented of his false teaching.
But a closer review of what his statement said reveals that, in the face of such a total negation of what he claimed was revealed to him in scripture, which WAS the exact time and date of the end of the world – rather than take responsibility for shattering peoples’ faith by first building their foundation not on Christ but on this prediction of a date after which there would be no need to worry about ANYTHING – bills to pay, families to feed, and clothes to wear, shelter to protect and a means by which to provide all of that, this man came out to say that, since God is in ultimate control of everything, then it must have been God that led him to come to the wrong conclusions regarding the rapture and the end of the world, and therefore it was not him but God who is to blame, and also to be trusted to not have abandoned us.
I ask you: does a god who would do that appeal to you at all? Does this man’s call to trust a god who would, in essence, mislead his followers in that way and yet expect them to trust him seem like a god worthy of our worship and praise? Our obedience?
So here is Jesus, painting this incredible word picture of all kinds of things happening at the end of the world, the Sun going dark, the moon not shining, wars and rumors of wars, the whole nine yards. And at the end of this, after saying that THESE WILL BE THE SIGNS, BE READY, he includes this, “36“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
It would seem our friend with the multiple failed predictions didn’t pay attention to that part of the Gospel.
Then Jesus begins to tell the stories of people paying attention and people… not. People doing and LIVING the Gospel message and people … not. People thinking they were on the inside but finding out that they were … not.
Here’s the deal: we don’t live our lives – we don’t live the life of CHRIST in distraction mode. We can’t. We are either present for Jesus and are about living a life that brings about reconciliation and forgiveness into the world beginning within the relationships in our own lives right here and right now or we are … not.
If we are not outwardly expressing the experience that we claim to have inwardly, that disconnect is a really big deal. We may then need to reexamine whether or not we actually believe what we say we believe about who Christ was and is, or maybe we need to reconnect with that person we were at that moment when it DID become clear to us that our righteousness is not our own, that it is fully and completely the gift of grace.
If we have somewhere along the line forgotten that and come to believe that we are better than another because of something they have done, or failed to do, or because of a disagreement we may have had, and we have not taken active steps to mend that relationship, we are being as foolish and unprepared as the five bridesmaids who ran out of oil for their lamps.
Our unpreparedness is our own responsibility. We are each accountable. And insofar as we as a community allow unpreparedness to remain, insofar as we don’t reach out in love and forgiveness to each other, we as a community are ALSO accountable.
The passages following this one are the parable of the Talents and the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Familiar images again: a landlord gives his servants different amounts of money to be responsible for while he is away, and two handle their responsibility faithfully. One does not. In the other, people are separated based on how they treated the weakest around them – the ones least able to help them in some way in return.
In a nutshell, Jesus said he himself did not know when he’d be back, that only God does.
In the meantime, we are to be about that business of reconciliation and forgiveness. If that is missing from our lives, then we have entirely missed the point and the message and the LIFE of Jesus.
***
“Why do you do what you do?”
The question comes up periodically as I go through my week, helping people that ask, or helping people whom I am asked TO help.
I’ve not been able to boil the answer down to a concise, simple, memorable phrase or two. Sometimes I simply answer, “It’s what I DO.” Sometimes the answer is ‘because I can.’ Other times I try to go into the explanation – which is more complete, but is also a bit wordy: “I do this (helping) because there are people in the churches who support me who want you to know that they care about you, your family and how you are doing.”
On occasion, I’m ‘on’ enough to be able to answer, ‘I do this because God has shown me so much love through Jesus that this is one way in which I can show what that love feels like.”
Rarely is my answer one that includes the statement: ‘because I want to get into heaven after I die,’ or, ‘because if Jesus comes back, I want him to see me doing this instead of something else.’
I DO, but that’s beside the point. J
The point is this: We live the truth of reconciliation and forgiveness in our lives – that means in our relationships, how we respond, how we react, how we engage with each other and the community around us – because of or out of knowing that to be a reality in our own case in our own relationship with God. Not because we see it as a formula for “If you do A, then B will happen, where A is ‘good things’ and B is ‘you’ll get into heaven’.”
When we pray “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” that starts with us. How else COULD it start, if WE’RE the ones praying?
Think on this fact: God loves you. God is in the process of redeeming you. God cares for you and wants you to be who he created you to be. Fully, completely engaged in living an abundant life that is free from bitterness and resentment and hatred; not free from struggle and hardship, but free to live in a joy that is so profound that it transcends our circumstances and taps into the same source that fires the sun and the billions of stars across the universe, that marks the beats of our hearts, that sets us spinning around each other in this beautiful dance of life that we’ve been given.
Let’s pray.
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