The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of Proper 27
23rd Sunday After Pentecost
12 November 2017
Readings:
Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16
Psalm 70
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13
I’ve had some good conversations this week about the intersection of faith and wisdom. At our Thursday service, we discussed the overlap between teachings of Jesus and teachings of the Buddha, both of whom focus on the inward state of our hearts. Jesus tells us that each of us has that divine spark of love and creativity that must be put into practice in our lives to bring God’s reign into the here and now of our world. The Buddha teaches the same by different terms—that each being has enlightenment within them, but it must be practiced before it can be attained.
Solomon tells us that wisdom will be recognized and found by those who love and seek her.
Our Psalmist reaches out in faith, certain both in God’s presence and in God’s listening and intent to act.
Paul is similarly assured of not only God’s presence with us, but in our presence with and in God after death—a reading that would have gone extraordinarily well in last week’s lectionary selections for All Saints Day, but is certainly fitting on this Veterans’ Day Weekend as well.
And in the mix of wisdom, faith, God’s presence, and God’s steadfast care in both this life and the next, we find the bridesmaids in today’s gospel.
For that one I think some context is necessary, but with a point. After teaching the crowds and rebuffing the challenges of the religious authorities, Jesus spends nearly two full chapters in Matthew’s gospel directly attacking them as hypocrites and calls them a brood of vipers. Then he leaves and foretells the destruction of the temple to his disciples with whom he goes to sit down on the Mount of Olives for a conversation. They ask him about the time of the fall of the temple and what will be the sign of the end of the age in which they were living. Jesus’ response was that no one can tell them when the time will come, but that blessed will be the one whose master finds them working when the master comes, rather than reveling in self-centered amusements while chaos reigns around them.
“Then,” the kingdom of heaven will look like the ten bridesmaids from today’s Gospel. Within its context, this is a story about how one is living one’s faith in the world—or failing to do so, as the case may be. It is a caution to the disciples to carry on living as instruments of God’s reign, to carry on in faith, to carry on teaching others to love as God loves and making the world a better place by being in it. It is a caution to not be lulled back into living as they experienced the world before encountering Christ, but to continue to seek and serve God in all those they encountered. The five foolish bridesmaids weren’t rebuffed for their lack of oil, they were rebuffed for not having been present at all. Oil or no oil, had they taken the time to get to know the brides groom ahead of time, they’d have known that what mattered most was to be present—to be in relationship. Bringing a lit lamp to the door of a bridegroom they never bothered to get to know beforehand only shines light on the fact that they’re strangers.
Of course, the beauty of metaphor is that this could mean any number of different things, but for someone for whom relationship is everything, it makes a lot of sense. To be honest, the kingdom of heaven in today’s readings sounds a lot like the story of my life.
I grew up simply grabbing my lamp and running for the door. I was never encouraged to question my faith or to deepen my understanding of who God was by allowing myself the space to doubt and struggle, because that simply wasn’t a part of how my church understood faith.Healings were a question of having enough faith—and if you couldn’t be healed through prayer you simply didn’t have enough faith. Families that “prayed together stayed together.” God was active throughout history and present today, but only through the work of the church, which was my solace on Sunday where I felt close to God and safe.
Well, I accepted God as the distant old whitebeard in the clouds, sitting on the golden throne, watching me live my life and judging me all the while for how well I was doing. And you know what? Prayer didn’t heal my dog or my aunt, or my great aunt, all who died even though I prayed for them to get better. My family that prayed together didn’t stay together. And while God was present at church, “he” certainly wasn’t present outside the doors of the church when I was being belittled and tormented by the harsh realities of life at home. I went to church to have my oil refilled, but by the next weekend it was almost always in need of another serious refill. Finally my lamp went out midweek when I was about eleven or twelve and I found that the darkness had won out.
It wasn’t until I was discovered seven years later, searching for more oil in the darkness of my own life by a friend, that I was finally able to find my way back to that place where my light had gone out and I was able to restart the journey with new understanding. The journey, as I discovered, isn’t one with a weekly destination, or even with an ultimate destination where a well-stocked lamp will get us there without the need for more oil. Our faith is not learned, it is not found in the words printed on a page in the bible, unchanging and lifeless. It is a living journey in search of an ultimate destination that is at once beyond destination. The true wisdom of our faith, the true wellspring that becomes for us a bottomless oil flask from which to refill our lamps time and time again is that the journey itself IS our faith. Our flame waxes and wanes as we follow the path that leads toward God, yet we are at the same time accompanied constantly by God all along the journey as we get to know one another as traveling companions. It is only when we stop moving forward that we truly risk running out of oil—when we stagnate and our faith stops growing, we stop traveling with God toward God and we simply wait until our oil runs out and our lamps languish and go out. Yet even then, God is still with us, we just lack the light to see that we’re accompanied in the darkness just as we are accompanied in the light.
My dad served as a radar technician on the USS Vesuvius, an ammunition ship bringing supplies into the Tonkin Gulf of Vietnam He was lucky enough to come home, but like so many veterans, assimilation back into civilian life was a lot like walking around in the dark without a light. After living with PTSD nightmares every night for forty-three years, he finally sought and received treatment and only within these past six years has he been able to finally talk to me about some of his experiences. While I’ll spare all of us recounting his horrific experiences of war, the coming home was in some ways the most debilitating. He recalls that when he first arrived back, he had to will himself to simply cross the street, having no orders to do so. His world had to become black and white for many many years, just so that he could make decisions and live in a world where only by sheer force of will was he able to get out of bed, dress, work, have a family, and succeed where so many of his fellow veterans still struggle on a street corner seeking oil for their lanterns—to relight their path after waiting in darkness for the better part of fifty years since their time in Vietnam ended and their lights went out.
So despite the struggles I had with him as a child. Despite being terrified of him for the first thirty years of my life. Despite the anger I felt toward him for seeing the world, the bible, God, right and wrong, and life itself as black and white. Or perhaps even because of all of these—I find that as an adult who has faced some time of my own darkness, I have an incredible amount of admiration and respect for what he was able not only to accomplish, but for who has been able to become after the darkness was finally dispelled.
And while it may have been only black and white for a lot of years, the wisdom he sought, the light he sought, the God he sought—even in the darkness of reassimilating into civilian life, in the darkness of going through divorce and losing his family for a time, in the darkness of losing his parents, he never lost faith in the one he knew was with him—even in the darkness.
Lamps are great for what they offer us in times of darkness, but the oil that keeps them lit isn’t half as important as the travelling companion who accompanies us in the light or in the darkness—whether we have oil or not.
May we be foolish enough to grab our lamps and run for the door—to take our faith into the unknown journeys of our lives and world. And may we be wise enough to realize that the one who accompanies us on the journey is light enough, even when our own lamps go out.
Amen.