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Lesson: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78:1-7
Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Holy Gospel: Matthew 25:1-13
The Rev. Karen Evans
I speak to you in the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I thought I would start out with a little bit of “show and tell” this morning. This is an oil lamp. If you promise not to tell anybody, it was brought back to me by a friend from a dig in Syria. I am not absolutely sure she was allowed to take it out of the country. But this is an oil lamp. You would put the oil in there, and see the little hole at this end, you would put a piece of rag or something in there as a wick. You would trim it to the appropriate length, then light it. It would continue to burn as it soaked up the oil in the lamp. You can see that it does not hold a lot, so you would need to have a separate container of oil to keep filling it if you were going to keep it burning for a considerable period of time. That is the background of our Gospel, and we will get to that in a minute.
Today’s lessons are about making a commitment and living it out.
As many of you know, in the last couple of months I have been preoccupied, obsessed, with our younger daughter’s wedding, which took place two weeks ago yesterday. One of the things that continually worried me was, What in the world was I going to say to my own daughter as part of the wedding Homily. I had two choices; I ended up talking about wedding rings (and I will give you that sermon another time), but the other choice was that part of the service that says, “…for better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until you are parted by death.”
It is my experience that some people are “better richer and health” people and others are “worse, poorer and sickness” people. What I mean is that some couples do just fine, in fact they do extremely well, when everything is going right for them. The more they prosper, the stronger their marriage seems to get. But when hardship hits, as it does in everybody’s life, they do not know how to handle it, and particularly they do not know how to handle it together, and so it drives a wedge between them; the marriage begins to be in trouble and sometimes breaks up.
However, the other can be true as well. I know couples who have hung in there through times when they had nothing to live on but love – when they had to go through long hospitalizations or disfiguring illnesses – real problems and crises to deal with on an ongoing basis. Then all of a sudden the crises were over, and they got bored. The did not know what to do with each other because they were so used to dealing in a crisis mode that they did not know how to handle normal life.
These situations are not limited to marriage, nor are they unique to our time. In the story of the Israelites that we have been hearing for the last months – first the exodus and then moving through the wilderness – and, if you remember, when difficulties got to be too much for them in the wilderness, they murmured and complained about God, about Moses, and they sought security in gods of their own making, especially if you remember the story of the golden calf that Aaron made by melting down their earrings.
Today’s lesson from the Book of Joshua is about the time when they have made it through the wilderness and have arrived in the Promised Land. Led by Joshua, they conquered the people who lived there and they established their own communities. As they settled into their homes, they began to interact, and eventually, to intermarry with the local citizens, and they began to be influenced by the local gods.
Joshua gathered all of the tribes together and he put before them a choice. Will you stay faithful to the God who freed them from slavery in Egypt, who brought you through the wilderness, and who gave you the land? Or, will you serve the ancient gods of the people or the local gods of this new place?
Joshua called them to make a commitment. “Who will you serve?” And he gave his own response, “…as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
Israel was called up to make that commitment over and over again. Their history is pretty spotty. Sometimes they were right in there, and sometimes, like a passing whim, they were attracted by the gods and started worshipping them, and were completely sidetracked from the worship of the God if Israel that they had been taught and that they had promised to obey.
By Jesus time, he was redefining what it was to make a commitment to God, and who it was who would live in the Kingdom of God and be saved at the “day of the Lord,” that is, the day of final judgment.
Today’s Gospel is a story, some might say an allegory, about that last day. The bridegroom is God or Christ. The bridesmaids are all Christians. All of the bridesmaids seem to be the same. They have all come to meet the bridegroom. They have all brought oil lamps with them. They have all gotten tired waiting, and have fallen asleep when the bridegroom was delayed.
What distinguishes the wise bridesmaids from the foolish ones is that the wise ones are prepared. They are prepared to meet the bridegroom and they are prepared to meet him even if he is delayed. The foolish bridesmaids are only prepared for the immediate future. When the bridegroom is delayed they have no oil left, and have to go running off to buy more. It takes too long and when they get back, the wedding feast has already started and they are shut out.
Just as an aside, it reminds me of a wedding that I officiated at that was held on a riverboat in the Missouri River. The reality was that the boat sailed at a specific time and if you were not on board you missed the boat, and you missed the wedding, and you missed the wedding feast. So in some ways, that is what this story is saying – that when the time comes, when the Lord returns, you need to be ready because there is not going to be time to run off and make the preparations you should have been making all along. You will just plain miss the boat.
Allegorically speaking, the wise bridesmaids are the ones who live every day as though it might be the last, and yet are prepared to live that way as long as it takes until Christ returns and brings into its fullness the Kingdom of God. The foolish bridesmaids are those who either put off their Christian living, figuring they can start any time; or those who start out well, but give up when Christ’s return takes longer than they think it will.
Jewish tradition used oil as a symbol of good deeds. At the last day, therefore, those who will be acceptable and admitted to the Kingdom of God, says Matthew, are those who have prepared for that day by doing deeds of love and mercy.
So today’s lessons are about making a commitment, in our case a commitment to God in Jesus Christ, and sticking by that commitment in good times and in bad. Some of us will find it easier to stay faithful to God when things are going well, but when illness, or death, or financial troubles, or disappointments strike, we find it hard to hold on to our faith. Others will come to God in times of trouble. But when times are good again, will go back to our normal life and our dependence on ourselves instead of on God alone.
I am here today to call all of us to commit ourselves, all that we have, all that we are, to God in Christ. I call all of us, through our stewardship of our time, our talent and our money, to act out our dependence and reliance on God every day. I call on all of us to prepare for the Kingdom of God by deeds of love and mercy. “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Amen.
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