[The Rev. Canon John Bedingfield will be leading Holy Eucharist each Sunday at 10 am at Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph.
For those not attending services in-person, Father Garrett Boyte, Church of the Holy Cross, Shreveport, offers Morning Prayer on Facebook each Sunday at 11am. Father Garrett also offers daily Evening Prayer services on Facebook at 6pm each day. https://www.facebook.com/holycrossdowntown/]
There is a dream that I’ve had multiple times since my ordination. Every time the details are slightly different than they were in previous versions (I’m in a different place, there are different people around), but it is always a very vivid dream and I always wake up with a feeling of anxiety after I have it.
Generally speaking, in the dream there is a major church service scheduled. Sometimes I am at a church that I recognize, other times it is someplace that I’ve never seen in real life. But regardless, this major service is about to start and the Bishop is there — in fact, in some dreams there are a lot of bishops there. My role in the service is always the same, I am the one in charge of making sure that the liturgy is well planned, and goes smoothly. At the climax of the dreams, everyone is ready to process into the church. The Bishops are in formal vestments, lined up and ready to start. I look down and discover that, while I am wearing my white alb, I do not have a stole on. So I start hunting frantically for a stole — any stole — because the stole is the symbol of priestly office. As I am madly looking for my stole, I notice that I don’t have my prayer book either. I decide that I can do without that, I’ll go from memory. But then I see that I am also barefoot. As the Bishops started to process into the church (oblivious to my predicament) I wake up.
I generally have a dream like this before Holy Week, Easter, Christmas, or Diocesan Convention; those times when there are lots of details to attend to and subconsciously I’m concerned that one or more will be overlooked. Psychologically, this is not an uncommon dream and its source is pretty obvious – it has to do with getting anxious about the possibility of being ill prepared for a coming event. That’s what today’s Gospel is all about.
The parable of the bridesmaids is a story about preparedness. In the Israel of Jesus’ time, weddings were a really big deal. If you think that the phenomenon of throwing huge, never-ending wedding celebrations is a new one, you’d be wrong. In 1st Century Israel and Palestine, a wedding was a time when friends and relatives from far and wide would come to share in the joy of the festivities. And because people had so far to travel, and travel itself was so difficult, the wedding celebration went on for days, with people coming, staying, and going as they needed. But one of the highlights of the festivities was when the bridegroom came in the night to take his bride from her father’s house and carry her back to his house – to their new home. When the bridegroom came, his way would be lit by the unmarried women – the bridesmaids – of the village, who would all hold oil lamps for the bridegroom to see where he was going.
The story we just heard is one of Jesus’ parables that is actually more of an allegory than a parable – meaning that there are characters and situations of the story that can be directly assigned to other people or things. The bridegroom in this story is Jesus. The wedding feast is the Second Coming – Jesus’ triumphal return to earth — the time when all humankind will be subject to the judgment of Christ. And the bridesmaids are us – those who will be prepared and those who will not.
This story appears in the middle of a long speech, or discourse, that begins in the 24th chapter of Matthew and continues until the Last Supper and the beginning of the passion narrative in chapter 26. In this discourse, Jesus prepares the disciples for his departure from them by explaining that He will return at the end of time, on the last day, when He will appear with lightning across the sky, “on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” In this story, Jesus wants the disciples to understand that part of their vocation; part of their calling is to be ready for the 2nd Coming. Part of the message they are to take out to the world after Jesus’ ascension into heaven is that Christians need to prepare for Jesus’ return.
This allegory of the bridesmaids tells us a couple of things about being ready. First is, we have absolutely no idea when Jesus will return so constant preparedness is the order of the day. Jesus made it clear, throughout this discourse, that only God knows the timing of the 2nd Coming, so … always be ready.
The second thing to take from this allegory is what happened to the foolish bridesmaids when they discovered that they didn’t have enough oil. They asked the other bridesmaids for some of their oil. After all, they were all involved in the same celebration. They were all waiting for the return of the same bridegroom. They were all members of the same village, the same community. So it only made sense that those with enough oil would share with those who had too little. Jesus’ hearers must have been thinking of the feeding miracles they had seen Jesus perform. They must have been thinking, “of course they will all pool their resources, offer them to God and then there will be enough.” But that’s not Jesus’ point at all.
The oil in this story is not a worldly resource that people need to survive, like bread, fish or water. The oil in this allegory is the righteousness of the bridesmaids. It is righteousness that Jesus says we need to be prepared with, before He comes again. We can be really anxious to see Jesus again. We can go to bed as excited as children on Christmas Eve, anticipating His triumphant return, but unless we are prepared as righteous people, we will be sorely disappointed. You see, righteousness is something we cannot pool or borrow. It is something we have to have, something we have to develop on our own. The twentieth century Scottish theologian, William Barclay, put it this way,
"This text warns us that there are certain things which cannot be borrowed. The foolish (bridesmaids) found it impossible to borrow oil, when they discovered they needed it. A man cannot borrow a relationship with God; he must possess it. A man cannot borrow a character; he must be clothed with it. We cannot always be living on the spiritual capital which others have amassed. There are certain things which we must win or possess for ourselves, for we cannot borrow them from others."
I think Barclay had a good sense of Jesus’ vision of righteousness. Unfortunately, today when we think of righteousness, what we are really thinking of is self-righteousness; that aura that some folks put off, that they’re better Christians (indeed, better people) than we are because of what they do or how they live. That is not the righteousness that Jesus had in mind. Barclay talks about our relationship with God and our character. That’s what righteousness is really about.
We can do good works all day long and have a horrible relationship with God. And we can have good character traits; honor, truthfulness, generosity, love, and have no relationship with God at all. But those are the exceptions. St. Paul said that works without faith are hollow. And to paraphrase St. James, show me someone with faith and I’ll show you someone who does works. Our character and our relationship with God are intertwined. We need both to be whole. And both are required for us to be righteous.
We live in a particularly fractured and difficult world right now. All around us are the voices of people who tell us to be fearful of each other and to treat each other as enemies, simply because we disagree about issues. There is no righteousness in that mindset at all. As our Presiding Bishop has preached so often, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” Being afraid of each other — or worse yet, wanting to see harm come to each other — because we think about issues differently, is very far removed from the righteousness of God. I don’t care which political party you identify with. I don’t care which news outlet is your favorite. When we agree to be divided from other children of God, and we wish them harm, we are walking apart from the righteousness Jesus requires of us.
If we will spend less time trying to “correct each other,” that is, being self-righteous, and spend more time and effort on trying to love each other the way Jesus loves us, we will have all the righteousness we need. We will not only begin the healing that this world so desperately needs, but we will also be ready for the bridegroom’s return. And we will have no reason to fear – no reason to dream of being unable to find our shoes at an important moment – because the bridegroom knows if the bridesmaids are ready.
In the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Proper 27A Sermon 110820,Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Psalm 78:1-7,1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13
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