Thomas J Parlette
“Waiting with Eyes Wide Open”
Matthew 25: 1-13
11/12/23
A number of years ago, someone gave me a copy of a poem about when the world was going to end. I tucked it away in my sermon folders and I dug it out as I thought about this passage for today. It says:
“Absolute knowledge I have none,
But my aunt’s housekeeper’s son
Heard a policeman on his beat
Say to a laborer on the street
That he had a letter just last week
Written in finest classical Greek,
From a mystic in Timbuktu
Who said the farmers in Cuba knew of a man in a Texas town
Who got it straight from a circus clown
That a man in the Klondike heard the news
From a group of American Jews
About somebody in Borneo
Who heard a man claim to know of a miner named Jake,
Whose mother in law will undertake to prove
That her seventh husband’s sister’s niece
Had stated in a printed piece
That she had a son who has a friend
Who knows when the world will end.”
The end of the world and when it will happen has been on people’s minds since the beginning of time itself. In particular, Christians have always been interested in Jesus’ second coming. When will Jesus come back? How will we know, what are the warning signs? Who is Jesus going to take with him and what will happen to those who have already passed away?
In our first reading we heard from Paul as he offered assurances to the church in Thessalonica that those living and those who have died “will be caught up in the clouds together to meet the Lord Jesus in the air.”
Then we heard from Jesus himself as he tells the parable of the Ten bridesmaids. Five were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones didn’t take any extra oil with them, while the wise ones made sure they had extra flasks of oil. The bridegroom was delayed – we don’t know why – and all of them fell asleep. Their lamps went out, and the foolish bridesmaids had to make a quick trip to the store, and while they were away, the bridegroom shows up and everybody goes into the wedding banquet and the doors are shut behind them. The foolish ones return and try to plead their way into the banquet, but the bridegroom isn’t having it – “Sorry, I don’t know you.”
The moral of the story – be prepared. Nobody knows the day or the hour. Christ’s return, the kingdom of heaven will arrive without warning, like a thief in the night. So be ready. Wait with your eyes wide open.
As we move deeper into fall, we in Minnesota are acutely aware of being prepared. Now is the time to start up the snow-blower and make sure it’s running okay. Now is the time to check our tires to make sure we’ve got enough tread for winter driving. Now is the time to dig out the winter coats, the hats, the gloves, the scarves and the boots. We don’t want to get caught off-guard when that first big snow comes.
I like the story about a Christmas parade in North Carolina. Many civic groups and school organizations would make floats on flatbed trucks and drive through town. One year a group of guys from a local fraternity entered a float that confused everyone. On the flatbed were about a dozen guys and a bunch of lumber and they were frantically sawing and hammering. Everyone wondered what kind of float this was. Puzzled expressions were everywhere in the crowd until the float passed by, and then laughter rang out as the crowd could see the sign hung on the back of the flatbed - “We thought the parade was next week!” (1)
Isn’t that always the way. We think there’s lots of time to prepare and get ready – but then all of a sudden the deadline is upon us. Either you’re ready or you’re not.
That’s what happened here to these five foolish bridesmaids – they weren’t prepared when the time came. They had one job to do, and a pretty important one at that in the days before electric lights. It was their job to be the bearers of the light for the wedding banquet – and you need to be prepared with extra oil to do the job.
We are also called to be light bearers. That is our one job. Jesus said as much when he said “You are the light of the World.” Until Jesus comes and the Kingdom of God arrives, we are to bear God’s light in this world – so we better be prepared.
You may have noticed that the anthem the choir sang this morning is “Keep your lamps trimmed and a burnin’, the time is drawing ‘nigh”. It is of course based on this parable. This spiritual originated with enslaved people in the South. For many of us, we focus much of our attention on that rather ominous ending, with the foolish bridesmaids pounding on the locked banquet hall door trying to gain entrance and the bridegroom saying “Sorry - I don’t know you.”
But for enslaved people in the South, this parable must have brought more comfort than concern. In their labor, in their struggle, in their abject poverty, it must have been easy to identify with both the bridesmaids who were ready, patiently waiting for the bridegroom, and with the ones who had been denied access to the party.
Surely God would see their suffering and save them. Surely the true coming of God’s kingdom would be replaced with a world order in which suffering would end and peace and justice would be brought to God’s people. On that day, surely there would be balm for their troubled souls, healing for broken bodies and spirits, comfort in their mourning, and freedom from cruel bondage.(2) Notice the encouraging words of the refrain:
“Sisters, don’t grow weary,
Brothers, don’t grow weary,
Children, don’t grow weary,
For the time is drawing nigh”
Another version of this spiritual changes that last line just a bit to read:
“While the work be done.”
That small shift implies that God is not passive, God is working, even as we wait.
Eugene Peterson is well-known giant in the spiritual world. He’s probably best known as the writer behind the paraphrase of the bible “The Message.” In addition to his celebrity status, he is also one of the slowest talking people I have ever heard. Peterson’s son was a classmate of him at Princeton Seminary, and Peterson used to give lectures every once in awhile when he came for a visit with his son. He points out that nothing ever happens quickly in the church, or in the world, and nothing happens quickly in the Bible either. But there is a kind of “apocalyptic patience” he says, that is a basic characteristic of God’s people. They hang in there. They stick it out. They are the kind of people who are “passionately patient, courageously committed to witness and work in the Kingdom of God no matter how long it takes, or how much it costs.
“They stay at it,” he says, “because they comprehend two basic realities of the spiritual life: Mystery and Mess. Faith deals “with the vast mysteries of God and the intricacies of the messy human condition. This is going to take some time. Neither the mysteries nor the mess is simple. If we are going to learn a life of holiness in the mess of history, we are going to have to prepare for something intergenerational and think in centuries.”
God is dealing with the Mess of the human situation: we are prone to sin, we get addicted to counterfeit gods, we poison our earth. We turn on each other. Those are glimpses of the Mess – and it’s going to take time to undo.” (3)
To wait with our eyes wide open is to be patient, and continue to bring God’s light to the world, while God deals with the mess of the human condition. It was the Jewish mystic Simone Weil who once said, “Waiting in patient expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” (4)
Frederick Buechner, another spiritual giant, put it another way:
“So to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is not just a passive thing, a pious, prayerful, churchy thing. On the contrary, to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is above all else to act in Christ’s stead as fully as we know how. To wait for Christ is as best we can to be Christ to those who need us to be Christ to them most and to bring them the most we have of Christ’s healing and hope because unless we bring it, it may never be brought at all.” (5)
So there is comfort and encouragement to be found in this story of 10 bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom to show up. Comfort because God is still acting in the messiness of life. And encouragement because eventually the bridegroom does arrive – and the wedding feast begins.
In the meantime, we wait with our eyes wide open – making sure we’ve got plenty of oil so we’re ready to do our job as light bearers in an often dark world.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Stephen M. Crotts, “What if the End is Near” Sermons on the Gospel Readings” CSS Publishing, 2004, p385-386.
2. Dorothy Sanders Wells, “The Christian Century”, November 2023, p25.
3. Homileticsonline, retrieved 10/20/23.
4. Ibid…
5. Ibid…
