24th Sunday After Pentecost

 

Matthew 25:1-13

So we are back in Ordinary time with no saints day in sight so today we are stuck reading this really, really weird and strange passage the heart of the Gospel of Matthew.  It is the story, where Jesus tells this parable about these bridesmaids waiting for the groom at a wedding and all sorts of very unexpected things happen.  But before we begin, I think we all need to talk a bit about ancient Jewish weddings.  So how they usually worked was that all the guests gathered during the day with the bride at her parent’s house.  And the bride’s parents would entertain them.  And then at dusk, the groom comes, there is a ceremony and then he leads them on a torchlight procession to his parents’ house often in a neighboring village, where there is a huge party that lasts sometimes for days.  It was also one of the few opportunities for young unmarried women to meet and interact with eligible young men and their families, so making a good impression was very important.  But this time, for some reason, the groom is late.  They wait so long they all fall asleep and when the groom finally comes, some guests have enough oil left for the procession, and some don’t.  And the ones who have run out have to quick go find more and they end up being so late and get locked out of the party.  And it’s a weird story, that kind of runs counter to a lot of what we generally think we know about how this should work.  But in doing so, it gives us some very wise lessons about how to live in trying times.

First, this story is weird because often our first question is why didn’t the wise women share?  I mean we are supposed to share right?  Didn’t we just learn like two weeks ago that Jesus tells us that the great is commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves?  But here is the thing.  The procession covers a real distance.  From one village to another with a lot of darkness in between and the resources are in fact finite.  If the women with oil share with those without, everyone is going to run out and the all of them end up lost in the dark. 

I think it is no mistake that all the characters in this story (except the for groom, who manages to show up late and cause the problem in the first place) are women.  Far too often certain people, especially women, people of color and other vulnerable people in our society are expected to give more and more, to give until it hurts, to given until there is nothing left and then give some more.  They are asked to give it all in order to cover for the poor choices of others, in order to be a team player, in order to keep more privileged people comfortable.  But that is not always the best way, or even possible, and it often has very real consequences.   We often like to forget that Jesus’ commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, which means we can’t truly ask each other to love our neighbors if we aren’t also giving space for everyone to love and protect themselves as well.

But even more than that I think this points to the reality that there are some things that just can’t be shared.  Like faith, commitment, spiritual depth and understanding.  You can love someone with all your heart, but there are some things you can’t give them, some things they have to build for themselves.  We are called to love and support one another but those spiritual resources, that resilience can’t be given to others.  It must be built up, over time, in advance.

Notice how all the women appear the same at the beginning of the parable.  They all have full burning oil lamps to start with.  They all tire of waiting and fall asleep.  They all wake and greet the Bridegroom.  If everything had gone according to plan no one would ever know the difference.  It is only in adversity that we see the division.

But how did this come to be?  Notice how the women with enough oil in the parable are called wise, not nice or popular, not favored or superior, but wise.  And wisdom comes from experience, it comes from learning and growing and it often comes from surviving hardships.  Maybe the wise women had been here before, maybe they had run out of oil in the past and now knew enough to store up extra.  These wise women had earned and built up the wisdom and resources to survive this struggle.  A lesson the foolish bridesmaids had to learn for themselves on the fly as they ran to buy more oil to fill their waning lamps.

Except this time, the time it took the unprepared to build up their resources was too long, and when they arrived at the party it was too late and they are locked out.  Which can also seem like an odd addition to the story.  I mean, they made it, the party is still going on, why doesn’t the bridegroom just let them in?  Which leads us to the 3^rd difficult truth of this passage:  Sometimes it is too late.  Sometimes our actions have consequences that can’t easily be avoided or undone.  Some errors are permanent. 

And Matthew’s community likely understood this better than most.  Remember, they were a community formed by Jewish refugees that had just escaped the destruction of Jerusalem.  For so many, it was in fact too late.  For every refugee who made it to Matthew’s community in Antioch how many more, friends, neighbors, family members did not?  And even for those who made it out, they could never go home again, even for them, those losses were real and permanent.

And this is a reality that we need to hold deeply, my friends.  This is a reality that we need to let seep into our bones, because it is still true.  Sometimes it can be too late.  There are decisions we are making right now, about our country, about our democracy, about the future we build for our children and even about the health and survival of the planet we live on, that will not be able to be undone.

And so we are called today in this moment to practice, cultivate and share God’s holy wisdom, not just for ourselves but for the whole of humanity.  So the time to act is right now.  This time, this very moment is the time to build, to practice deep spirituality, to cultivate deep and meaningful relationships, to break down barriers and to fight for what we know is right.  Because as Jesus warns us, we do not know the day or the hour when the turning points comes, but we do know that Jesus is giving us every day everything we need to cultivate the wisdom to answer it when it does.  Amen.