Sunday, November 9, 2014
First
Congregational United Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
There’s been a lot of name calling
happening lately. We don’t have a TV, so I’ve been spared the nasty ads leading
up to the election, but I have heard from lots of you that they’ve just been
terrible. My assessment is that 99% of the adults in this room voted in the
election this past week and I know things did not turn out as many of you had
hoped. This is, of course, the case in any election. There are always winners
and losers….and there are always some who are elated by the results and others
who are crushed. It’s never fun to be on the side of the losers.
We seem to be in a particular moment
in time where the divide between people who fall on different parts of our
political spectrum is massive. We seem to have an incredibly difficult time
even understanding how “those people” could vote for “that other candidate.”
After the election results were posted this week, I had at least one Facebook
friend who said, “If you voted for Brownback, just go ahead and remove yourself
from my friends. I don’t want to know you any more.” And I had another friend
who said, “If you voted from Brownback, please, can you just tell me why? I
want to understand. I promise not to argue with you.” A lot of people
replied…but my friend wasn’t able to find one person who voted for the
Governor. Interesting, right? We are so neatly divided that sometimes we can’t
even find someone to talk to about our differences.
This week, our Scriptures speak to us
of wisdom and foolishness. Seems pretty timely, given the amount of head
shaking I’ve seen this past week. “I just don’t get it. How could anybody be
that stupid to vote for so-and-so?”
The problem, though, is that I’m not
so sure I agree with the author of Matthew about who is foolish and who is
wise. This is a bizarre little passage, to be sure, and we’ve got to wade
through a lot of strangeness to grapple with it.
For starters, there are some very
real historical obstacles. The folks back in Jesus’s day didn’t do weddings
quite the same way we did. From what I have gathered, it typically went
something like this. The Groom and his family would get together at the Groom’s
family’s house. They Bride and her friends and family would get together at her
house. Hence, the bridesmaids in our story. They are the friends of the Bride
waiting with her. When the Groom came over, he and the Bride would consummate
the marriage while the friends and family waited outside. Hey, I said it was
kind of different from how we do things now. After the couple finished, they
would have a big party. The party might last for days. No one wanted to miss
the party.
So….here we have ten of the Bride’s
friends, waiting for Groom to show up and get the party started. They all show
up to wait. They all bring their lamps, just in case they have to wait into the
evening hours. But the wait is long. They fall asleep. And the Groom doesn’t
show up until after midnight. They jump up and get themselves ready, but half
of the Bridesmaids – the “foolish” ones – find they are out of oil for their
lamps. So they ask the “wise” ones to share. But the wise Bridesmaids say no
and the foolish ones are out of luck.
Who is really foolish and who is
really wise? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable to expect the Groom to show up
before midnight? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable to expect those who had
plenty to share a little with those who didn’t have enough? And, perhaps most
troubling of all, wouldn’t it have been reasonable to expect the Groom to be
gracious….to let the foolish Bridesmaids into the party even though they were
late?
Well, these folks apparently don’t live in a
reasonable world. And we who live in Kansas can certainly appreciate that,
right? We don’t live in a reasonable world, either.
We live in a world that expects those who start
out with nothing to fend for themselves and claw their way to self-sufficiency.
We live in a world that rarely asks those who have more than enough to share
what they have. After all, why should I share when I was smart enough to pack
extra? It’s not my fault that those stupid people didn’t think ahead.
We live in a world where two adult earners
making minimum wage stand no chance of paying their bills each month. We live
in a world that is more concerned about the right to bear arms than our
children’s right to safety in their schools and homes. We live in a world with
very few safety nets. A world where a job loss, car breakdown, or bad diagnosis
is often all that stands between the haves and the have nots. A world where we
spend more money on prisons than schools. A world that sends our young women
and men into the hell of warfare and then fails to support them when they come
back home.
I could go on. But perhaps I’ll stop.
After all, you don’t need me to tell you that
we live in a world that seems fairly unreasonable much of the time. Suffice to
say that I feel a little cranky about us putting all the blame on the five foolish
Bridesmaids. Maybe I’m defensive because I would have likely been one of them.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m cranky because I really would have expected the wise
women to share.
More than anything, though, I think this
parable really gets under my skin because of Jesus. What the heck are you doing
here, friend? Really? Just because the five women are a few minutes late you’re
going to shut them out completely? That doesn’t sound like you to me. Not one
bit. I would have expected better from you, Jesus. Tell me this isn’t really
what the kingdom of God looks like. A commenter on a blog post about this
passage said something like, “I know Jesus and I know he would be sticking his
foot in that door to hold it open for me just a bit.” I agree. The Jesus I know
doesn’t shut people out because they are late or under-prepared.
It’s interesting, of course, that this parable
falls right in the middle of several Matthean parables about the End Times.
That is another thing that makes it hard for us to understand.
I’m going to hazard a guess that most of us in
the room right now don’t wake up and wondering if Jesus is coming back in the
clouds today, or next week, or even next year. But the people Matthew was
writing for? They did think about that. Many of the people who wrote and heard
the Scriptures from the Second Testament absolutely lived in anticipation of
Christ coming again during their lifetimes. And so, we can kind of understand
the urgency, right? Be prepared. Be alert. I want to be ready….I want to be ready….
It makes me think, though, about the places we
do seek Jesus. How often do I remember to take the time to see Christ in my
neighbor? How often do I open my heart and set aside my prejudices and truly
allow myself to encounter Christ in an unexpected person or place? Not as often
as I’d like. I’m pretty foolish when it comes to seeking Christ, actually,
which is why I am so dependent on Christ’s community – the Church. I need to be
reminded – regularly – that Christ is here and now. Christ isn’t likely to come
back in a flash of light, I don’t think. But Christ is present wherever we
foolish humans work to bring God’s Reign of Justice and Lovingkindness to our
Earth. Christ is present in those places where the world is flipped upside-down
– where the last are first and the least are most. Christ is present in all of
those places where the people with power get together and protectively,
selfishly say there isn’t enough to go around….Christ is right there saying,
“Wake up, friends. There is enough. Take a risk. Do unto the least of these as
you would do unto me, remember?”
Even though this passage is pretty out-dated
and hard to access….even though I find this version of Jesus to be incredibly
off-putting….even though I’m not certain I agree that the wise were wise and
the foolish were foolish….I just can’t leave this passage alone. I keep turning
it over and over in my mind, hoping there is a Word here for the Church today.
Despite the millennia between the passage and
us, there does seem to be at least one theme in this passage that translates
easily to humans throughout the ages: waiting. We all know about waiting. It
doesn’t matter if you’re 2 months old or 102 years old. You know about waiting.
A tiny baby waits to be nursed or waits for kind and loving hands to gently
pick her up when she feels alone and discombobulated. A young child waits for a
new toy to arrive in the mail or for summer camp to begin. A teenager waits for
a text or a glance from a love interest. College students wait anxiously for
those grades to be posted at the end of the semester or to see if the envelope
from the grad school of their choice is thick or thin. As we become adults, we
are still no stranger to waiting….we wait for our paychecks at the end of the
month, we wait for our kids to come home at midnight, we wait for a phone call
from the doctor, we wait for our elderly parent who lives alone to answer the
phone on the fourth ring, we wait for our tax returns, retirement, that
glorious vacation we’ve always dreamed of….the next election.
We all know about waiting. It’s a life skill
that is good to have.
And we all know about needing Christ in the
midst of that waiting. Waiting, whether it’s for something good or uncertain,
provokes anxiety. It’s hard to wait. It’s easier if we remember we are not
alone.
And I think that’s where I come back to the
incarnational reality of Christ in our midst. Jesus Christ is not some far-off
spirit in a cloud somewhere. Jesus did not die and go away forever, nor do I
believe he is stuck in Heaven, completely inaccessible to us in the here at
now. Jesus is here with us. Waiting. Like any good friend, Christ waits with
us….for the good stuff and the uncertain stuff. One of my favorite contemporary
thinkers, the Rev. Dr. David Lose, hit it on the head this week when he
reminded us that in the book of Matthew this passage falls during Jesus’s own
“in-between time.” It falls during his own time of waiting…during that time
after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his crucifixion. Jesus knows what
it’s like to wait.
This is good news. We are not alone! Thanks be
to God.
And with this good news comes a responsibility,
too, I think. The responsibility to remember that we are, all of us, called to
be the very body of Christ in this hurting, uncertain, unreasonable, waiting
world. This is difficult work and it’s incredibly challenging to
sustain…especially when you feel like you’ve been spending hours and hours of
your precious time and energy working for justice, only to discover that
there’s no quick fix or that the system is so messed up it all seems completely
hopeless. Doing the work of Christ in our world is not easy and it certainly
resembles a marathon more than a sprint. I have this vision of us all lugging
around giant fuel-tanker-sized containers for our oil. The night may be awfully
long and we may be waiting a very long time.
Our work, I think, is to wait with each other.
And to try and do a better job than the ten Bridesmaids in this story.
Can we make a deal? Can we try to be a little
more kind and generous than the supposedly-wise Bridesmaids in this story? For
better or for worse, it is our work to wait with each other….no matter how wise
or foolish the other people seem. Our task is to show up.
In the words of Dr. Lose, “We are those who sit
vigil for each other at times of pain, loss, or bereavement. We are those who
celebrate achievements and console after disappointment. We are those who give
hope when hope is scarce, comfort when it is needed, and courage when we are
afraid. We are, in short, those who help each other to wait, prepare, and keep
the faith. In all these ways, we encourage each other with the promises of
Christ. That’s what it means to be Christ’s followers, then and now. And that’s
why we come together each Sunday, to hear and share the hope-creating promises
of our Lord.”
Thanks be to God for those who wait with us –
foolish and wise. It’s just good to know we’re not alone while we wait.
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