"Ready"
Rev. Matthew Miller
Some 43 years ago, an ecumenical gathering North American leaders from across the spectrum of Christian denominations created something called the Common Lectionary. The point was to create a three-year cycle of Sunday readings that would be shared across Christian traditions. Over the course of the last two decades of ministry, I’ve had occasion to welcome the occasional Catholic visitor to worship. They invariably have already been to mass that Sunday and will sometimes marvel that they heard the same reading at their Catholic parish that we hear in our service. That’s the Common Lectionary- which underwent revision in 1992- so, it’s now the Revised Common Lectionary. I’m giving you this background because I find myself wondering if the folks who put these readings together anticipated where we are today.
Earlier this week I shared a satirical meme on social media that read: The War on Christmas will not end until Christmas stops its illegal occupation of November. While the masses were still recovering from the Halloween candy sugar crash, the radio stations broke out the Christmas music. Truth be told they’ve been selling artificial Christmas trees at Costco since August. For now, in the church at least, we’re refraining from jumping on that bandwagon. At the end of the month, we’ll enter a new church year with the season of Advent, which is also not Christmas, or even pre-Christmas. Every year it’s hard holding that line and we’re only slightly successful. Which brings me back to the lectionary. Because the parable we have before us is straight up a parable of judgment. Perhaps one of the reasons people don’t like celebrating Advent as Advent, is that it is a season that invokes judgment. And nobody likes that. It sounds so, well, judgy. Instead, the lectionary pulled a fast one on us and snuck three successive parables about judgment into the calendar before we could dodge our way around them for the sake of candy canes. The problem with avoiding judgment as it’s presented by Jesus, however, it that it also avoids the gift of mercy. It also denies us the opportunity to grow and change as a result. An illness without a diagnosis, which is simply a form of judgment, leaves us sick with no discernible path toward healing. A life without the judgment of God that reorients us to the realm of God’s grace, mercy and love leaves us stuck where we are and wondering just which way to go.
The parable Jesus tells about the Kingdom being like ten young women who took their lamps to meet a bridegroom begins in a space we talked about last week. While we’re told that five were wise and five were foolish, all ten had been selected for the honor of leading a bridegroom to his wedding party. Being wise or being foolish wasn’t a consideration when they were selected for this honor. For reasons we’re not told, these are the ones who have been chosen. They already belong to the wedding celebration and head out to perform their role. Only the bridegroom is delayed. Again, we’re not told why. But it creates precisely the crisis that will reveal the wisdom and folly of these young women.
My friend and colleague Harry Eberts recently retired as the pastor of First Presbyterian Church up in Santa Fe. On his retirement he self-published a book of collected messages to that congregation that he began writing during COVID. In one of them, he remembers the years his family spent living in Pasadena, California during the turbulent years 1967 to 1971. The war in Vietnam was at its worst. The work of the civil rights movement was devastated by the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Robert Kennedy had been assassinated practically in their backyard at the Ambassador Hotel. Efforts to integrate schools was met by white flight from the center of Pasadena to the suburbs and thick smog frequently filled the San Gabriel valley. Harry remembered in those turbulent years that when he and his brothers went to bed, their parents would sit at the kitchen table and ask each other, “What was the crisis today.” Certainly, in challenging times it can feel like everyday is a crisis. But even in the best of times, life rarely goes according to plan, and we are all at some point faced with a moment of truth; usually more than one. To Jesus’ point, we may seek to dictate to God our plans, our expectations for how things should work in the world, who should be rewarded and who should not, but that will not stop the crisis from coming; that God will be delayed. When God is delayed and we face our moment of truth, the parable raises the question of whether we will we be ready to meet the moment, or will we be caught flat-footed because we fell asleep telling ourselves everything would be fine only to wake up and discover that it is not. That it is dark and we are without the light we need to be who we were called to be in the first place.
The difference between the foolish and the wise young women in this parable has less to do with a resource like oil, and more to do with what motivates the five who do and the five who do not bring an extra flask of oil with them. Under ordinary circumstances, bringing those flasks would have been considered the foolish choice. It’s the middle of the day, by the time it’s dark everyone will be at the feast celebrating together. Where are they supposed to store those flasks anyway? Do their dresses have pockets in them? It’s just hugely inconvenient. And beside all that, it just sounds like the kind of worrying that Jesus spent the Sermon on the Mount discouraging, along with storing up stockpiles of earthly goods. But Jesus is sharing a parable not a stewardship sermon. My guess is that they bring extra, not because they’re worrywarts, but because they’ve seen enough to know that there is no such thing as ordinary circumstances. If anything, delays, disruptions, even disasters are just as ordinary. What’s the crisis today?
Four years ago, my family went on sabbatical with me. It was a time of rest and learning about theatrical arts in service to the gospel. Like parables. Anyway, we were in Paris, and our next stop was Avignon in the south of France for a theater festival there. We were booked on the high-speed train and I had tickets for a play that night. Only we showed up at the wrong train station. We realized our error and rushed to the right station only to watch as our train left without us. The next open seats for that destination weren’t for three days. It broke me. I stood in the middle of that station paralyzed and defeated. I was not ready for what happened. Thankfully, I was traveling with people who were, who had a little more imagination than me. I may have missed the play I had planned to see. Instead, I have a video on my phone of me singing Glee songs with my kids in the rental we drove for an eight-hour road trip to Avignon.
It’s a question of faith, not resources. It would be foolish to move through the world thinking that the moment of truth will never come. It always comes. One way, or another. Wisdom isn’t about stockpiling oil, it’s about taking with us what will sustain us in the dark when that moment of truth arrives. Jesus doesn’t say where the flasks of oil come from that the wise bring with them. My guess is that, like faith, it was given to them- by a parent, or a relative, or even the host of the wedding feast itself. It was given to them and five chose to bring it mindful that life can be unpredictable, and five thought it would only get in the way.
Now I know it’s presumptuous of anyone to offer editorial advice to Jesus about one of his parables, but I as I read and re-read this parable, I find myself wondering something. When the foolish say to the wise give us some of your oil, I understand why they’re told no. Faith isn’t a commodity to be bought, sold, or traded. It isn’t that it’s scarce, it’s that you and I cannot trust God for someone else. We cannot give someone that sense that God can be trusted. We can nurture. We can encourage. We can share our own sense of trust. But ultimately, faith is a gift that is given by God. That said. Jesus did say, “you are the light of the world… People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.” So, why send these foolish young women away to dealers who may, or may not even be open for business after midnight? Why not, instead, light their lamps and allow their light to shine in such a way that none need to find themselves on the other side of that closed door? It’s less about scarcity of resources and more about who can be brought into the feast when we’re ready to use those resources not just to meet the bridegroom upon his arrival, but to shine our light in such a way that no one is left in the dark. Because faith is never just about the individual benefit we derive from believing that God can be trusted to save us in our moments of truth. Faith is about trusting that what we have been given by the giver of all good gifts is meant to be shared for the benefit of all, and not just some. So that when the feast begins, all may enter in to taste and see just how good God is.
