This is the manuscript for the sermon I preached at our divinity school's chapel this morning (November 11, 2008). I'm most grateful to all who participated in this service through word and song and prayer.
Amos 5:18-24
Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD! Why do you want the day of the LORD? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake. Is not the day of the LORD darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it? I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
Matthew 25:1-13
“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But 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.’ And 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. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
In The Meantime…
The invitations had gone out months before. Gifts had been bought and wrapped. The food orders filled and delivered. Champaign set on ice. Dresses hemmed and hair painstakingly sculpted into place. The guests were arriving, mingling and taking their seats, and the future Kingdom of heaven was being compared to the experiences of actors in one of the most optimistic, celebratory and life-giving ceremonies that we experience.
It’s like there were these attendants, you see… wise and foolish bridesmaids whose job it was to go meet and provide their lamps for the bridegroom’s procession… Perhaps they could have been flower girls, for whom foolishness would be not taking enough petals to make it all the way down the aisle, and so never manage to arrive at the altar. Perhaps they could have been photographers, whose foolishness would mean not bringing extra film.
Yet, however we may understand them, both the wise and foolish bridesmaids knew their job and had been preparing so that they could fully play their part in the celebration. Like everyone else attending and attending to the wedding, they are not the stars of the show and so they, too, find themselves waiting when the bridegroom and bride are nowhere to be seen.
From our perspective today we can easily grow anxious if we place ourselves alongside the bridesmaids. It’s growing darker, getting cooler and the bridegroom’s promised presence is nowhere to be seen. Has he forgotten? Are we still needed? Wanted?! Will there even be a wedding at all? Will our preparation and our lamps all be for naught? The reasons we have for growing anxious at wedding-day delays may or may not have been common to Jewish culture in Jesus’ time. The parable he speaks gives no account of why there is a delay. Would it have been common? expected? Some say the bridegroom may still have been haggling over the bride-price… while this can be seen by some as a gesture of honoring the value of the bride, it could still be an expression of cold feet, or apathy concerning the ceremony.
Whatever the cause, I imagine the ten waiting bridesmaids all sat, still eagerly wanting to experience the anticipated joy for which they had prepared. The festivities were being held up, after all… “Expectations and promises have been made; let’s live into them, already!,” they must have thought.
Yet from the very beginning the end of the parable has been set up. There are wise bridesmaids, and there are foolish bridesmaids. Some brought extra oil, and some did not. These categories—“wise” and “foolish”—are well known and suggest other promises that will be lived into.
This past summer I worked at a day camp with a relatively small group of other students who, like me had extra time to spare. SOKS camp was its name, S. O. K. S., an acronym for the Swahili words: Sema! Ota! Kua! Soma! which translate as: Speak! Dream! Grow! Read! The apartment complex where we put this on is home to many low-income families, including dozens of (mostly African) families for whom our nation is providing refuge from the persecution they experienced in their home countries.
It was primarily for these refugee children that this camp was conceived: To teach English and about America and fun and acceptance to children who have experienced too little of most of these. Every afternoon those of us running the camp would meet in the community room of the apartment complex which served as our office. There we stored our games and canopies and tarps, and each day before we set up we would wait inside. We waited longer and longer as the summer progressed, protected by a locked door from the chaos, drama and excitement of the hundred or so kids that the camp was all about.
Most of the kids were adorable, funny, friendly, yet some were not always. It was mostly from the latter group that we hid, until it was finally time to set up the tents, set out the crayons and find out if the games and lessons we were using that day would go over. Having little experience teaching children, finding any success at grabbing their attention was a joyous, yet seemingly random accomplishment for me. But it was always nice. Toward the end of the summer I was beginning to learn better what would work and what would not. Scissors, no. Slip ‘n Slides, yes. Markers, no. Pencils, yes. And competition seemed to be very successful.
My last day at camp I decided my station’s primary activity would be Math Bingo. Contained, Competitive, Calm and Communal… this game glimmered with the 4-C’s of day camp activities. And to spice it up even more, I combined the addition and multiplication Bingo games into one big super Bingo extravaganza!
Once the stations of younger kids rotated through —who assured me they were perfectly content with the addition-only version—I recombined the two games. Sitting there toward the end of the afternoon, reading off the various math problems I began to notice that two boys sitting next to me were both very close to two different possible Bingo’s! Soon enough we realized that, in fact, combining the games lead to both of them having the exact same card. Concerned for the integrity of the game I quickly suggested one of them trade cards. When they turned that down I naively asked, “Then how are you going to win?” To which they both eagerly and profoundly answered, “Nobody wins!”
There I had found myself sitting in the meantime. When the bridegroom has not yet come, we can easily find ourselves waiting inside the new expectations generated by the categories “wise” and “foolish”. It was foolish to play a game you cannot win, and it’s wise to not compromise that for which you have prepared by being exposed by the chaos for which you have no answers.
Hearing today’s parable, as the delay progresses we each wait for the hammer to drop on the foolish bridesmaids. We await the point at which they will be exposed in all their foolishness, unprepared and unable to achieve that for which they so long. We wait inside the story with them, secretly hoping that their failure will not reveal our own vulnerabilities. Or perhaps, on the contrary, we wait hoping that our strengths will be affirmed as enough by the actions and fate of the wise.
But when we attempt to justify ourselves—to see if we are more like the wise than the foolish, or to deny and repress our foolishness—we place ourselves in the bridegroom’s shoes. We have faith that we are prepared now, but for us to claim that we know for sure what it takes to be prepared and how much oil it will take to wait out the bridegroom, we are gambling that we know more than we could ever know.
Yes, we all must seek to understand for ourselves the rules and demands of faithfulness and what it means to be wise to the Kingdom. Even as we stammer at guiding others in this process we are forced to make stands on what is right and good, what the roles are that each of us are expected to fill so that as a church we can go out to meet the presence of God. At the end of the very discourse where we find today’s parable we find some instructions we love to hold up; indeed, they are instructions we need to hold up. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned are all demanded of our ministry if it’s to resemble Jesus’. Yet even this clear-cut call to action must not be allowed to limit our waiting—the life we live in the meantime.
Allegorizing the oil can be useful, but can never exhaust what it takes to be fully prepared. Just as neither sheep nor goat fully knew their true sheepishness until their final sorting, the judgment of “wise” and “foolish” is not ours to make. Not about ourselves and not about others. While we await and prepare for the presence of God we cannot know for sure what it ultimately takes to be wise. This is the tragedy of the parable. None of us can sustain a readiness that is open to God at every moment. None of us make it through life without our faith, hope, willingness or energy landing on empty from time to time. We are all acquainted with foolishness and confronted by our own foolishness in the presence of the Lord. When we attempt to think that we’re not, when here, in the meantime, we seek to justify our own efforts to earn the label “Wise,” we find ourselves in the Bridegroom’s shoes, locking the door and flat out denying our own foolishness.
But outside of the categories of “wise” and “foolish” that we encounter in the parable, is there another way to wait for God in the meantime? Is there a way that we can work toward a more whole community, striving, reaching beyond the tragedy that appears so unavoidable for so many? Perhaps another way is held up by the Community of Taize.
The Brothers of Taize place a great deal of emphasis on prayer and liturgical worship. Their songs (one of which we will be singing this morning) are particularly emphasized in their worship as a witness to their faith and devotion to God. Among their rules, the Brothers stress that they are not to take offense on account of any of them having trouble singing in unison. Instead, the aim of these songs is to embody the rhythm of a genuine will to pray. When they come together in worship, singing prayers for the presence of God, their rule is:
“The surrender of ourselves to a life hidden in Christ means neither laziness nor habit; it can be nothing other than the participation of our whole being in the work of God through our intelligence and our lips.” In other words, as much as they are not to be foolish and neglect their prayers and worship, they are not to become obsessed with preparing to the point of perfection and slip into mere habit.
The passage from Amos we heard earlier reacts strongly against the empty habits of worship. The hope for joy and promise of salvation that the Israelites expected in the Day of the Lord is said to be false hope. Darkness and judgment should be expected as the Lord rejects their empty offerings and songs. Darkness and judgment, because the Day of the Lord reveals us in our foolishness and in the brokenness of our communities. Instead, Amos calls for justice and righteousness. Many worship experiences we endeavor are lamentable under these expectations help up by Amos. Yet I think that, so too, the hungry can be fed, the naked clothed, and the sick and imprisoned can be visited in equally empty and lamentable ways.
While Amos flat out rejects the festivities of worship and sacrifice because of their empty habits, I think that we can and we must continually find ways, here in the meantime, to fully and meaningfully experience worship. And I think that doing that is the only thing that can lead to the justice and righteousness for which the prophet calls.
As we await the bridegroom we journey through life with our oil constantly being diminished. With a genuine will to pray and worship together, we find that we are able to embody a certain rhythm that is powerful enough to bring us into to community no matter how foolish or wise we may be at any given time. In such a worship setting our entire selves are surrendered into contact with the history and movement of God in the world and in each of us. Through song and sacrament, word and prayer, we are able to share our oil while we wait. And with the grace of the Holy Spirit, our faith is that there is more than enough oil to go around, after all.
With faith in the Spirit of God we can find the courage to risk being foolish. And somehow we may even find that we begin to embody the love and hope and joy that brings about justice and righteousness. Together through faith we can give of ourselves fully, and enter into the sweeping grace of the Spirit that is able to break the bonds of the expectations for what the outcome of so many of our stories are supposed to be. Through faith in the Holy Spirit we just may find the ability to celebrate that “nobody wins!”
(Benediction, from the culmination of The Travel, by Rumi:)
Go now and journey forth from your own self to God's Self-voyage without end.
