“Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids”

Good morning.  It’s really lovely to be back here at Lake Jospeh Community Church and thank you again for the kind invitation to preach.

This has been the summer of wedding waiting and wedding planning in the Andison household, as our oldest daughter, Emma, got married to Jamie last weekend down at St. Paul’s Bloor Street – with our other two daughters being the beautiful bridesmaids.   So, when thinking of what passage of Scripture I wanted to preach on today, it was a pretty easy choice – despite it being a deeply uncomfortable passage from the Bible – with weddings on the brain – it had to be the parable Jesus tells of the wise and foolish bridesmaids – a story about waiting and planning!

C.S Lewis, that great children’s author and academic, famously said, “If you are looking for a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids is one of the most uncomfortable passages of Scripture. What are we to make of it?  Standing on the threshold of a fresh September, I think this startling story that Jesus shares about WAITING and planning, can shape our daily lives—where bills need to be paid, children need to be raised, and chemo endured—in hopeful and life-giving ways.

While some people do like to plan, for most us, waiting, is frustrating and you may have noticed that when you’re waiting for something important, your brain has a way of phasing everything else out.  For example – you’re waiting for a certain car to pull into your driveway, it’s midnight, and your sixteen-year-old daughter is not yet home. You are not going to pay a whole lot of attention to the clang of the heating pipes in the basement or the sound of raccoons in the neighbour’s garbage. Your ears are tuned to one frequency alone, namely the hum of the Honda Civic swooshing into the driveway. Waiting is hard – whether its for condo prices to come down, your brother to finally give you a call, or the MCAT results to come in.

And while all of us are waiting and planning for something, I will make the educated guess that few of us are straining our ears for the first whisper of the Second Coming. And yet, as summer begins to fade into the rear-view mirror, the parable that Jesus gives us this morning, draws our eyes above the horizon to that incredible day when we are promised that the Lord Jesus Christ will return to earth. Christians have been waiting for the Second Coming for a really long time—almost two thousand years. Jesus has been coming back for so long that plenty of people have given up. Before he died, Jesus told his followers he would be coming back at the end of time to take them into eternity with him.  And so none of those first disciples made any long-range plans, or adjustments to their retirement portfolios. Then a decade passed, then another, and another. The people who had actually known Jesus began to die off, and the only reason we have the historical record of the gospels at all is because someone finally worked up the nerve to say, You know what, there aren’t all that many eyewitnesses left and he hasn’t returned yet. We really should get this stuff down on paper. So, how do we keep waiting, painfully aware that God is not concerned with our calendars or even our linear concept of time? How do we wait and live our daily lives in hopeful ways?

Jesus gives us a picture of two different ways of waiting and, this is where we begin to squirm. People are being excluded, and some doors seem to close for good. Jesus could have told a story about friends who were going to a concert at the Rogers Centre together. Some of the friends had a little too much to drink before dinner, and so while waiting in line to get into the sold-out concert, they nipped into the washroom. While they were gone, the doors opened and the rest of the friends, who had paced themselves through dinner, went right on in and took their seats. When the others arrived back late from the bathroom, they found themselves locked out. But Jesus didn’t tell THAT story because obviously it wouldn’t have made any sense to his original audience. Instead, he told a story about a wedding. Jewish weddings two thousand years ago were not only full of fun, wine and dancing, they were also protracted affairs. The couple would not go away on a honeymoon – no trips to Hawaii or Quebec City for them – but rather, they would stay at home and welcome visitors. There was no set time when the bridegroom would come to the house of the bride to eat the wedding feast. The bridesmaids waited to escort the bridegroom into the house of the bride and once he arrived, the door would be shut with no possibility of late access. To those who first heard the story, it would have been a stark warning to not miss Jesus (clearly the bridegroom of the tale), when he did come back.

But does this passage mean the same thing for us, some two thousand years later, when the promise of the second coming has lost much of its vitality and edge? How can this story of waiting and exclusion be life-giving? Well, this is a parable about planning WHILE waiting – it’s about choices – choices that human beings, then and now, need to make every day. We have a choice, as people who live in the in-between times between the first coming of Jesus (which we celebrate at Christmas) and his eventual return – which could happen tonite, or in 100 years! We have choices as people in the in-between times. How will we wait for his return? Will we plan or will we be caught in the line-up in the concert hall bathroom?

Now I think its interesting to note that the bridesmaids who had planned for when the bridegroom finally did arrive were initially in the same boat as the foolish bridesmaids. They all fell asleep (it’s hard to wait) and they ALL had their lamps. On the outside, the bridesmaids all looked the same. But the foolish bridesmaids had not brought any EXTRA oil with them. In fact, a careful reading of the original Greek text will tell you that the foolish bridesmaids hadn’t brought ANY oil with them in the first place. The wicks of all ten bridesmaids must have been damp with oil from the previous night and burned out in a few seconds, which explains why their lamps all burnt out at the same time. It’s not that the foolish bridesmaids had given up on the bridegroom. When they realized they needed oil they dashed off to the corner store to buy more. But it was simply too late.

It is worth pointing out here that much of the story hinges on your understanding of what the oil represents. Different theories have been put forth by scholars, but my money is on the oil representing the Holy Spirit. Both the Old and New Testaments connect anointing with oil and the Spirit of God descending on people. And if the oil does represent the Spirit of Christ, then it makes sense of one of the most troubling parts of the parable: the apparent selfishness of the five WISE bridesmaids who, in their seemingly moralistic and rather prim superiority, won’t share their oil with their foolish, but fellow bridesmaids.

A relationship with God in Christ, which the Holy Spirit secures, is something you need to choose and claim for yourself. God has no grandchildren. Each generation afresh needs to seek after meaning and purpose, for truth and hope, and in each generation, there will be those who find that purpose, hope and truth in Jesus Christ, but no one else can claim it for them. It has to be our own personal response to God reaching out to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This parable is a wonderful reminder that while all the bridesmaids were DOING the same thing—keeping watch, sleeping— only five of the bridesmaids had oil in their lamps. Five of the bridesmaids had reached out for God’s Holy Spirit and had responded to God’s gracious invitation to us in Christ. This response is open and available to all, whether you are here for your first time and spiritually searching or if your weathered hands will be reaching out for the hymn book for the thousandeth time.

We all have choices: a choice to respond to God’s love and mercy extended to us in Jesus (to put oil into our lamps now) or a choice to be DOING by all means – even doing and being busy in the Church, but to have not PERSONALLY responded to the coming bridegroom. We have no more or less time than Jeff Bezos has or Elijah Harper did, so how can these choices be hopeful and life-giving as we wait in the concert hall line up? Thomas Long, a professor at Princeton, puts it like this:

If there is no God-shaped future at hand, if nothing, nothing really is about to happen, then there is only one more day to be endured in an endless string of days, a bottomless pit of human need, and a ceaseless line of the poor, who are always with us. All there is left for the church to be is another well-meaning institution, and all there is left for the church to do is to whistle its services in the dark, collect its weekly donations and keep the photocopiers humming. Because nothing is about to happen.

But if we think something IS about to happen, that there is a God-shaped future breaking in RIGHT NOW – then – fueled by the oil of the Holy Spirit, we dare to reach out to those in great need and freely pour out our resources to the poor. That same Holy Spirit strengthens us to make sacrifices of time, comfort and money to make a tangible difference in others people’s lives, because we believe that God has got the end game.   The more you realise that you already possess the most precious thing in the world, the presence of the Living God in your life – the Holy Spirit – the more you will be willing to sacrifice in your daily life as you wait for Jesus to return – which could be tomorrow – sacrifice!  If we trust the God of the Pleiades and Orion, of Mozart and of mathematics, if we trust that God will care for us (both now and for eternity) and that the feasting table IS being set, then we become people of great confidence in the future and of humble service in the present.

Waiting for Jesus to return, filled with the Holy Spirit and not just DOING, gives our lives that winsome combination of confidence and humility – a combination that can shape how we navigate conflict in our friendships and marriages. We will be much more willing to forgive, knowing how much we have been forgiven by the Bridegroom (after all, the wise bridesmaids fell asleep JUST like the foolish – Christians don’t divide the world into good people and bad – all have fallen short of the glory of God, ALL have been forgiven much) – as our Emma walked down the aisle – it wasn’t into the arms of a man, Jamie, who thought she was perfect – NO – it was into the arms of a man who knew she WASN’T perfect, and yet still wanted union with her – Jesus, knows everything about us and still desires union with us – its incredible, really  – and because of this face we will have an urgency about healing broken relationships – there is no time to lose, the bridegroom could come in the middle of the night and welcome us into the great feast –  making it much easier as parents to ask our children for forgiveness for our many failings – the oil of the Holy Spirit in your lamp shapes you into the kind of person who doesn’t need the last word in every argument – ignoring the offence, swallowing the insult – into a person who seeks reconciliation as a top priority in our relationships.  We are also motivated to engage as Christians in the political and economic sphere here in Ontario with great hope and purposefulness, because we know how the story ends and so work for justice now – as a downpayment on the future, as the oil from our lamp overflows. This eternal perspective is a marvelous way to have our daily lives shaped in life-giving and hopeful ways – curbing anxiety and putting a time stamp on all suffering – whatever shape it takes in our lives – because Jesus IS returning, the bridegroom will come to take us to the great feast.

For most of us, life kicks into high gear this week.  But for all of us, Jesus could return tomorrow.  And we have a choice – a choice to wait, wait prepared – with our lamps of the Holy Spirit – a Spirit that will shape our hearts to be confident and humble.  Let’s take this parable super literally and take a moment now – to pour oil into lamps.  Just where you are seated – invite you to take a physical posture of openness to God – bow your head, sit with your hands open in your lap, shut your eyes and slow your breath.  And let me pray on our behalf.

Come, Holy Spirit – Spirit of the risen Jesus, fill our hearts afresh today – give us new hope in the future so we can be confident you are with us.  Remind us of how much you have forgiven us, that we would be humble in our places of work and in our relationships.   Come, Holy Spirit, Come – into our lives – and prepare us for the great wedding feast of the Lamb. Amen.