Year A

Matthew 25:1-13

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

Keep On Burning

Okay, perhaps Ferris Bueller is not a biblical prophet, yet the longevity of the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off suggests at the very least that it continues to amuse, entertain, and even educate people all these years later. Certainly, its quotability means some of its best lines have become part of our common wisdom. One of my favorites is: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”  The texts today are written in the context of swiftly moving events, as the future becomes the present.  I am at that point in my life where there is beginning to be a tension between planning for the future and living in the present. There are now a limited amount of years ahead of me to work and I need to be more aware of that limited time and how important it is for me to be more aggressive about getting ready for retirement.

Yet, it is also very important that I live in the present and do the work that God has called me to do right now. This tension between planning for the future and living in the present is much like the tension that is revealed in the parable today of the bridesmaids from Matthew which has to be one of the least liked in the whole Bible. It speaks stern words to those who are not ready for the moment of truth — and it leaves uncomfortably vague just what “being ready” might entail. On the one hand, Jesus is urging his followers in this story to act now, while he speaks of the need to be prepared and to wait well because we never know when events will occur… specifically, the coming of God’s kingdom.

Who among us can wait well? We live in a world that is uncomfortable with waiting. We are encouraged to get going, much like the bridesmaids who could spare no time to fill their lamps, and Jesus also seems to live in a way that encourages wasting no time. When we look back through his ministry, it seems he is always on the move from one place to the next. He comes upon the fishermen Peter and Andrew and he asks them to follow him and they drop their nets and go. He meets people on the road, like the lepers, heals them and continues on his way. In the Sermon on the Mount which we heard last week, he implores people not to worry about tomorrow. And even though he seems to speak about the present, he also seems to be aware of what tomorrow will bring…The Day of the Lord.

The parable today is among his many end-time predictions about waiting. According to the parable, Jesus understands that there is waiting to be done yet there needs to be a purpose and direction in the waiting. We live with that same tension in our world as we live out the being prepared for Christ’s return and the waiting, the serving in the moment and being prepared for the future. Waiting suggests a future outside of our own making for waiting is an act of faith and here Jesus says wait urgently. Be active about your waiting. Rather than being foolish, taking no oil and struggling to stay awake, the parable invites us into an active waiting that is wise.  Being prepared is what distinguishes the wise from the foolish. The wise were ready for the bridegroom and the marriage feast; the foolish were not ready.

The meaning of the parable seems clear enough: the bridegroom is Jesus, who has promised to return. By the time the gospel of Matthew is written the community is getting weary of waiting because Jesus had not returned. The delay of the second coming of Christ and the reign of God has created a problem for Christian theology pretty much from the beginning.  By the year 50 CE, just twenty years after Jesus’ death, many of Paul’s converts are already growing restless because their loved ones are dying and Christ has not returned. There was concern whether the Christian’s who had died before Christ’s return, would also share in the glory of the resurrected Jesus at his coming.

This growing restlessness and tension is part of understanding Paul’s argument in the reading today from 1 Thessalonians. The Thessalonians are anxious for the new world that Christ will bring at his return, and they are confused at the realities of their present life. They imagine their lives as believers should move from glory to glory; instead they find it going from crisis to crisis. They are kept going by faith that God will vindicate God’s people in the end and remedy the losses they have experienced, whether it is hunger, persecution, or the death of their loved ones. So Paul, in this text, not only speaks to the fate of those who died, but also envisions the encounter between the coming Lord and those who are still alive.

We may presume that this text today does not have much relevance for us, since Paul and the early Christians were mistaken that Christ’s second coming was imminent, and since most of us Christians, twenty centuries later, do not root our eternal destiny and salvation with Christ’s return. We are pretty sure, now, that when we die in the Lord we are raised to eternal life. Nevertheless, in these last weeks before we begin Advent, which speaks heavily to the coming of Christ in the birth and second coming, all the texts today invite us to live these next few weeks with this question: What does the “coming of the Lord” mean for us who are alive today and how can we be sure we are waiting wisely?

Being prepared matters spiritually. The five foolish bridesmaids brought no oil with them and had to go buy some when the bridegroom arrived. Because they were unprepared, they missed the wedding banquet. The door was shut while they were gone, and they were left out. The point seems clear regarding the coming of Jesus, “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” Are we prepared? Our God commands that being prepared means we are practicing justice and helping to bring in the kingdom of God with our own hands in prayer and in deed.  It means working out our love of God and neighbor in word and action. Faith cannot be parceled out at the last minute, we must continuously live active in hopeful expectation of the coming of Christ’s kingdom and the new creation.

The new creation Jesus spoke of throughout his ministry, a reality that, if it will be fully realized only at his return, nonetheless begins to take visible shape here and now in the lives of those who follow him: the already-present yet still-to-be-realized kingdom of heaven or reign of God. It is this that Jesus calls us to be part of, even though the world around us hasn’t caught on. “Live tomorrow’s life today.” Fuel yourselves with all that you know and have experienced of the love and the nature of God and of God’s concern for the world; let that oil, drawn into the fibers of your daily existence, flame brightly, bringing God’s light to your world. Get some oil in your lamp and keep on burning!