“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.
---
For the next
two weeks we will be talking about the end of things, which may be a strange
thing to talk about, but it is certainly a popular thing these days. Think for
a moment about the word “apocalyptic.” What comes to mind? I think it is
instructive that with a very few exceptions, it was not until humanity created
the ability to annihilate itself with nuclear weapons that apocalyptic fiction
rose to prominence as a genre. Think of classics like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or more modern works like Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road. You will
certainly find apocalyptic themes in the Hunger
Games books. And the end of things being a particularly compelling theme,
there are more movies on this topic than I can count. In fact, let me show you
these. You may not be able to see them, but later you can come see them in my
office where they are prominently displayed. They are Bobbleheads of Michonne
and Rick Grimes, two characters from one of my favorite television shows, the
Walking Dead, which is a program centered on the idea of a zombie apocalypse.
You can’t get
away from this kind of thing, and I get it; we live in a strange time
technologically, culturally, religiously. If you’ve been in the church for
decades you’ll note that the nature of the church is changing very quickly,
shrinking in some places, losing much of what it has once been. So it is
natural to gravitate to stories about the end of things, natural to look for
guidance in the Bible about how this will all end. I think that’s a good thing.
I wish people would look to the Bible when they made most of their decisions.
The problem
is this. This focus on being left behind—the version of the end of things you
read about in novels and see in movies—that version is not based in truth. It
takes a few verses in what is a very large book and twists them to fit a system
of belief that doesn’t match up with who Jesus was, who Jesus is. And sometimes
it gets played as harmless entertainment, just a way to spend a couple of
hours, but it is insidious, because it hides behind claims of being fiction while
at the same time claiming to be Biblical. It claims to be Christian. And it
really just isn’t.
For one
thing, if you are newer to the faith, you may be surprised to know that this
idea that people would be plucked up while others would be left behind to face
supernatural forces—this is an idea that has really only existed as an idea for
less than two hundred years. Jesus was around two thousand years ago, and he
didn’t mention it. None of the Biblical writers mentioned it. Martin Luther
never mentioned it. This idea stems from a misunderstanding of the book of
Revelation, the last book in the Bible, and a small handful of verses
throughout the New Testament.
So you should
know that this stuff wasn’t even really an idea until it was dreamed up in the
early eighteenth century by a couple of Puritan ministers named Increase and
Cotton Mather whose other claim to fame
is that they are widely understood to have laid the groundwork that led
to the Salem Witch trials. The word “rapture” simply does not exist in the
Bible. And the book of Revelation, which so many people—including the people
who wrote the popular Left Behind books—have turned into some sort of map of
how the end of times is going to happen, that book isn’t a warning. It isn’t a
map. It’s a love letter. It’s a book of worship. It is like Communion: a
foretaste of the heavenly banquet. It uses symbolism because we worship a God
who is bigger than our literal language. Revelation is a reminder that God is
with us always, that life can be difficult and bad, terrible things can happen,
but that all the suffering, all the evil, all the problems of the world are no
match for God. It’s not about God leaving
us behind. It’s about God being with us always.
Now, I don’t
ascribe to the philosophy that a preacher ought to always show his or her
work—you know, let me throw all these Greek words at you to show you how smart
I am or whatever—but looking at the language this was written in is helpful,
and the word we talk about sometimes in the church is parousia. Parousia. It
means the coming of Christ to save us from all the difficult things in life,
all the pain. And the Greek word parousia is most accurately translated as
“presence.” Here we are focused on being Left Behind and the very word the
Bible uses means Christ’s presence with us. That kind of misunderstanding would
be ridiculously laughable if it weren’t real.
Christ will
be present with us. You know, I may sometimes get to worrying about the state
of things, but we are promised in scripture that this all ends well! One day,
we read in scripture, Jesus will right every wrong, dry every tear, and justice
will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!
So what I want
to do with the rest of my time this morning is talk about the scripture that
Anna read this morning and point out some things we can learn about the end of
things. And then next week, we’ll talk about what God wants us to do while we
wait.
In this morning’s scripture lesson, we find
Jesus, and the authorities are onto him. He doesn’t have much time left, and so
he launches into this long set of stories and teachings about how to be
faithful. You know, in the months before my grandfather passed away, we knew it
wouldn’t be long, so we started to gather more often for meals as an extended
family, at these long tables because there are dozens of us, and we’d put Papaw
at the head of the table and leave the other end open. And after dinner, my
grandfather would sort of pat himself on the belly, and we knew he was done
eating and it was time, so somebody would set up a video camera at the far end
of the table and we’d ask him to remind us about stories we’d heard him
tell—about growing up in coal country in Arkansas, about leaving his family as
a child to find work, about his time in the War. And because he also knew he
was nearing the end of his life, he wanted to share those stories with us, so
that they would become a part of us. They weren’t just warnings, and they
weren’t about how he was mad at us. They were stories he told us because he
loved us, because when we saw him in those stories, and when we carried those
stories with us, a part of who he was would remain with us.
And this is
how I think it was with Jesus. The stories he tells can sound harsh—perhaps you
have heard the one about cursing the poor old fig tree. But they aren’t about
being upset with us any more than the end of things is about God leaving us
once and for all, which of course it isn’t. They’re about love, about sharing a
piece of himself with the disciples, and through scripture, with us. And so he
tells the disciple a story.
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 extra flasks of oil with them. As the
bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and fell asleep. But in the
middle of the night, there was a shout, “Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come to
meet him!” And so they all got up and got their lamps ready, but the five that
didn’t have extra oil saw their lamps going out. Those five had to go to the
store—in the middle of the night, as if Walmart was around back then—and while
they were gone, the bridegroom came. The half that were ready went to the
wedding banquet. The half that weren’t missed the boat.
And he ends
the story this way: keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
I mean, it
does sound a little ominous. I get why people think of this stuff as harsh.
Keep awake. If you aren’t paying attention, you may miss the coming of Jesus.
And, to be clear, it’s one of those mysteries of faith that we don’t
understand, but we do believe we worship a God who will wipe every tear, to
right every wrong. When we talk about the end of things, this is what we are
talking about.
What gets me,
though, is that there is this whole industry of religious broadcasting and
Christian novels that either take the events of the day and try to hammer them
into something that looks like the symbolism we see in the book of Revelation
or they create a story out of symbols and make it sound like it is Christian
theology, when the whole point of
this story is that you can’t anticipate when Christ will break through! You
can’t look to the stars or whatever. You can’t count the number of times a word
appears in the Bible and figure it out. There’s no use looking for some sort of
Bible code. Christ comes in unexpected ways and in unexpected times. When Jesus
says you know neither the day nor the hour, he doesn’t mean that it’s going to
be some time in September. He means that the business of trying to game the
system is completely unscriptural. It’s wrong. It keeps you from faithfully
following Jesus, from faithfully showing love all the time, not just in front
of the judge or whatever.
There is this
episode of the Simpsons I love—I wonder when the last time you had a pastor who
quoted the Walking Dead and the Simpsons in the same sermon—but it is an
episode called Homer the Heretic, in which Homer Simspon gets tired of being
bored every week in church, which I know is something none of you struggle
with. And so he creates his own religion based on his own personal tastes. And
his daughter Lisa sees him walking in the back yard dressed like a monk, and
she says, “Dad, why are you dedicating your life to blasphemy?” And Home looks
at her reassuringly and says, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. If I’m wrong, I’ll
recant on my deathbed.”
It is silly,
but how many people act like that, in one manner or another? How many people
use Christian faith as a sort of last-ditch life-insurance policy, instead of
actually living it? It takes the pressure off of us, for sure; it turns
religion into something you can kind of just think in your mind, rather than doing
the things that Jesus tells us to do: healing the sick, feeding the hungry,
giving shelter to the homeless, welcoming the stranger, sharing the good news
of Jesus Christ. Yes, we believe that one day, there will be no more sickness,
no more hunger, for Christ will break through and, in the words of Julian of Norwich, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things
shall be well. Yes, in the Communion liturgy, the congregation acknowledges
that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” that this is
the great mystery of faith, but this isn’t a threat; it’s a promise! It is a
promise of hope, and love. It is the promise of presence.
And, sure, it
can be difficult to wait. It can be difficult to say, here I have lived my
whole life trying to be faithful and it hasn’t cured my sadness, hasn’t cured my
pain, hasn’t cured the fact that I keep losing people I love. But the Christian
faith is not about doing good so that you can be rewarded. If it were, Mother
Teresa wouldn’t have experienced so much doubt. Martin Luther King wouldn’t
have been martyred. Jesus wouldn’t have been crucified.
The Christian
faith isn’t about avoiding pain. It is about hope, about Resurrection, about
acknowledging that the worst thing is never the last thing, which means there
is something greater and more powerful than pain. And, yes, following Christ is
about waiting patiently, not idly, but patiently, and productively, for the
promises of God to continue to born.
When you look
at it that way, this business about being ready because you do not know the day
or the hour—that’s not a threat. It’s a promise. Being ready isn’t about
crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s in case Jesus shows up to check your
papers. It’s about sharing love in the meantime. It’s about the meantime. For
if you love, you will have love in abundance, enough to fill your flask and
your lamp and maybe even enough to share. You won’t run out, because if you
love, you will have love.
Now, next
week, we’ll talk more about what that means, about how we wait. But, you know,
in the meantime, keep sharing love. In the meantime, let us be the presence of Christ for others.
Let us keep our lamps burning, for thanks be to God, this isn’t a story about
scaring anybody into belief, but about shining light while we wait. In the name
of the Creator, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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