Sermon - 23rd Sunday After Pentecost (11/8/2020)
Amos 5:18-24; Ps. 70; 1 Thess. 4:13-18; Mt. 25:1-13
“The kingdom of heaven will be like this.” And then Jesus tells another of his strange and difficult stories. This story is about another wedding banquet. The bridegroom arrives late, and when he comes five of the bridesmaids are ready with oil for their lamps, and five are not ready. Those who are ready go, with their oil-filled lamps, into the wedding feast, and those who are not ready are left out.
Usually, the lesson that’s taken from this parable is a simple one. When Jesus finally returns to begin the great heavenly wedding banquet of the New Jerusalem, you want to be one of the wise ones who is ready and who gets to go in. And you definitely don’t want to be one of the foolish ones who is not ready, because then it will be too late and you’ll be left outside forever.
That lesson is good news – perhaps – for those who have done their part and made themselves ready, but it’s bad news for those who have not done their part and get what they deserve. It’s a simple lesson, and even though it sounds a lot like salvation by works – you’ll be rewarded for doing the wise thing and punished for doing the foolish thing – I suspect there will be many sermons preached today along those lines. I may have even preached one or two of them myself over the years.
But the parables of Jesus are never that simplistic. And the more I have reflected on this parable over the years, the more I see hints all over the place that tell us not to draw that simple lesson from it.
For one thing, according to the custom of Jesus’s day, these bridesmaids were really young girls, maybe 10 or 12 years old. Children, really. Is it really their fault if they didn’t make plans for an unexpected delay in the time of the wedding? Don’t their parents have some responsibility?
Here’s another one. The cry is heard that the groom has finally arrived, and five bridesmaids discover to their horror that their oil is running out. It’s like one of those nightmares about the final exam that you didn’t study for, right? So in a panic, they ask the other five to share some of their oil, and these five say no. Well, that’s not very Christian of them is it? Yet on the usual simple interpretation, the mean girls are the heroes of the story, the ones who get it right. That doesn’t sound like Jesus to me.
One more. If it was your wedding, and you had 10 young girls, 10 or 12 years old, in your wedding party to hold oil lamps, and something went wrong – which would you prefer: To have 5 girls with perfect lamps included in the ceremony and throwing the other 5 not only out of the wedding party but disinviting them to the whole wedding itself, or to find a way to have all 10 girls participate even if the lamps were not so bright or flickering a bit? Of course you would include everyone. So why would anyone think that God is any less worried about each and every one of us whom God created precisely for the wedding feast of the kingdom of heaven? Don’t you think that God is at least as nice and caring as you are? The bridegroom in this story just doesn’t sound like Jesus.
But this is the clincher for me. When the mean girls are asked to share their oil, what do they say? “There won’t be enough, you’d better go to town and buy some for yourself.” Doesn’t that sound familiar? Where have we heard that line before? We read it back in the summer, do you remember it?
Matthew, chapter 14, beginning with verse 15: “When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’”
There isn’t enough for everyone, so send them to the store to buy something for themselves. I’m wise, I’ve got enough for myself, it’s not my fault these fools didn’t think to pack a lunch, I don’t have enough for them and me, so Jesus, send them away to buy something for themselves. That’s what the disciples said to Jesus before he fed the five thousand. And I imagine that when Jesus tells this parable about the ten bridesmaids, as he delivers this line – “There won’t be enough, you’d better go to town and buy some for yourself” – he’s looking right at whoever said the exact same thing back when five thousand hungry people were waiting. And I don’t think they would have missed Jesus’s point: The mean girls are not the heroes.
In the parable of Jesus, the mean girls don’t share. The other five go off to find more oil. It’s the first century and it’s the middle of the night, so I don’t know exactly where they’re supposed to go. There’s not exactly an all-night 7-11 around the corner. But when they get back, the wedding has already begun. They knock on the door and the bridegroom comes and says: Go away, I don’t know you. From a man who didn’t even have the courtesy to show up to his own wedding on time, to a bunch of stressed out kids. Go away, I don’t know you.
And I’d like to think that at least one of those girls had the courage to say: That’s fine. Because we don’t know you either. You are obviously not the bridegroom we were waiting for.
The kingdom of heaven is like this, Jesus told his disciples. It’s like a wedding where some of the bridesmaids were so confident of their wisdom, so sure they had done everything right, and they were so happy that they were found deserving to enter the wedding feast, and they had no compassion whatsoever on their fellow bridesmaids, they were perfectly happy to see their neighbors cast out into the darkness as long as they made it in. Except they went to the wrong party. They thought they were entering the kingdom of heaven, but in their selfishness and lack of concern for their neighbors in need, they wound up somewhere else.
If you want a religion that tells you it’s OK as long as you got yours, so you don’t have to worry about your neighbor or care whether they have what they need to participate – you can sleep soundly at night in your spiritual gated community, don’t worry – then the simple interpretation of this parable is for you. But it’s not the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I think way too much of what passes for American Christianity falls into exactly this trap: we are told God wants us to think about ourselves and making sure we’ve done what we need to do to ensure our own salvation, and to hell with those people over there who don’t do what we’ve done, they deserve what they get.
But the Bible has always said precisely the opposite. That’s what Amos said in our first reading: Woe to you who are looking forward to God’s judgment because you think it’s going to go great for you and bad for them. Well, you’re in for a surprise, Amos says, and you’re not going to like it. Because God isn’t actually even interested in the things you think you’ve done to make yourself worthy of passing muster on the day of judgment: rather, God wants justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And that’s the thing you actually lack.
It is so easy for us to imagine that Jesus must be telling us to be like the wise bridesmaids in the parable. It’s unfortunately all too easy for us to imagine that God will reward those who display hard-headed perfection rather than compassion for those who, but for the grace of God, have less than we do – and so hard for us to imagine that the kingdom of heaven works in exactly the opposite way. It is easy for us to imagine that the kingdom of heaven is inside the wedding feast where only the wise and deserving are welcome. But perhaps we need to learn how to imagine how the kingdom of heaven is found outside, in the dark, in the outsiders, in the community of the foolish people who didn’t fall for the mirage that the supposedly wise could not perceive.
Now, you may say, can it really be that God doesn’t want us to be wise, but God wants us to be foolish? Isn’t it always better to be wise rather than foolish? Well, Paul for one didn’t think so. Remember what he wrote in First Corinthians, chapter 1, starting with verse 20: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
And so I pray today that we learn to stop imagining this gathering of ours this morning as the online version of the wedding feast in the parable of Jesus – we are not the ones who are wise and did everything right, so that we can congratulate ourselves for making it in while others are less fortunate and are stuck outside. Instead, I pray that we will have the grace to imagine ourselves as foolish people gathered together in the darkness, where oil is shared freely, singing songs and keeping each other company as we wait for Jesus, the real bridegroom, to arrive. Looking for that kingdom where we won’t need any lamps because it’s the kingdom of the God who is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. Looking for the city of God promised in the book of Revelation where there is no need for oil or lamp because the night and the day are both alike, because the Lamb who once was slain is now its light forever.
(Followed by ELW 815 - “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light”)