Matthew 25:1-13 "Therefore Keep Watch" Scott Hoezee

Many of you no doubt saw the ironic picture. It appeared in newspapers around the country on Monday morning , December 4--that, of course, was one day shy of this year's presidential election reaching the one-month mark. In the photo Al and Tipper Gore were waving to some folks as they left church on that first Sunday in Advent. Next to the Gores was the church sign with the pastor's sermon title: "A Time of Waiting." Only an hour or two after I saw that picture on the front page of the New York Times I brought my son to preschool at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton where I saw that church sign featuring the title of Rev. David Davis's sermon for the next Sunday: "When Waiting Isn't Enough."

In a way both titles applied not only to our recent electoral mess but those titles apply pretty well to the parable we just read as well as to our lives as Christians generally. After all, here we are on the cusp of a new year. Chronological purists assure us that this evening, and not the New Year's Eve of one year ago, is the true turn of the new millennium and century. 2001. The third millennium. Some refer to it as 2001 A.D., from the Latin words anno domini, which mean "the year of the Lord." In a pluralist world reckoning the years based on Jesus' birth is not very proper, of course, and so some will refer to the new year as 2001 C.E. meaning "common era."

But whether you call it A.D. or C.E. everyone will call it 2001. And whether you're 74-years-old tonight or 24, 2,001 years will most certainly strike you as a very long time. It's over 24,000 months, 720,000+ days, over 17 million hours and something like a billion minutes. 2,001 years is a pretty sizeable temporal chunk to wrap our minds around.

Yet among all of the other things which a year like 2001 may signal for people around the world, one of the chief things it signals for Christians is that this is about how long we've been waiting for Jesus to come back. We now enter the third millennium A.D. because two entire other millennia have come and gone. As we noted in a sermon some while back, when the apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians long about 50 A.D., he told the Thessalonians to be patient. Jesus would come back one day soon, Paul re-assured them, but keep in mind that with God "a thousand years is like a day." Paul was no doubt trying to invoke hyperbole or exaggeration to make his point. But not any more! "A thousand years" is no metaphor for us--we now have two thousand-year sets behind us!

And so we go on waiting. Of course, in most every era of the Christian church's history there have been impatient people who tried to force God's hand. There are always apocalyptic fringe groups which run through the church carrying those "The End Is Near!" signs. There are always those who claim that the Spirit has revealed to them that Jesus will most definitely be coming back by such-and-such a date. (These are the folks whom, in his own day, Martin Luther described as having swallowed the Holy Spirit "feathers and all"). In more recent decades certain authors have even made a tidy profit on such predictions: they are profit prophets who write books which pinpoint the date of Jesus' return. Then, when those dates come and go, these authors issue revised editions of their books with new dates. So gullible is at least a part of the Christian reading audience that the books sell almost as well when revised as when first printed.

Or maybe it's less gullibility and more impatience or desperation. It's been a long time, after all. In the absence of Jesus' actually returning we can at least fill our days reading books about the parousia and so in this way vicariously experience the event. Surely something like that lies behind the meteoric success of the "Left Behind" series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Some are desperate to make Jesus' return seem more real.

In the gospels Jesus himself admitted that he did not know the day or the hour of his return. In fact, in Matthew's gospel Jesus said that only a handful of verses prior to the parable of the bridesmaids. Jesus may not have known the precise timelines but you get the sense that he knew it would be a while. Hence, he told parables about waiting. He told these stories not merely to state the fact that there would be a delay but to provide examples, to issue some warnings, and so in this way to dole out some advice on what true believers were supposed to do during the wait.

The bottom line was this: the delay was not to be treated by Christians like those "Please Stand By" messages which used to get flashed on TV screens whenever the network was experiencing technical difficulties. The message "Please Stand By" means just that: don't just do something, stand there. Don't change the station, don't adjust your set. You cannot do a blessed thing about this problem so just sit back and wait it out. Do you remember that one presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter? For some inexplicable reason the sound system totally failed quite early on in the debate and so the technicians issued their standard "Please Stand By" announcement. As it turned out, it took quite a while to fix the sound: probably 30-40 minutes or so. But so ill-at-ease were President Ford and Governor Carter that they simply stayed standing behind their debate lecterns like statues. They did not look at each other, certainly did not speak to each other. They just stood there and today both men admit that they looked completely silly as a result.

The church is waiting. It has been for two millennia now. But if it's wrong to force God's hand, wrong to engage in fanciful speculations, and if we also would just as soon avoid looking silly while we wait, then what are we to do? Let's see what Matthew 25 says.

If you go to enough weddings, then you know that delays go with the territory. If you arrive at 3:45 for a 4:00 wedding, it is fully possible that you will still be sitting in the pew at 4:15 before an usher lights even the first candle. Things can get even worse at the reception. The wedding may be scheduled for 11:00am but if I were you, I would not assume that after the reception you will still have a nice chunk of your Saturday afternoon to get a few things done around the house! We've all attended 11am weddings whose receptions somehow managed to stretch until 3:30 or 4:00.

So how nice to know, based on Jesus' parable, that similar things were common in also Jesus' time. "The bridegroom was a long time in showing up," Jesus says in verse 5, and you have the feeling that lots of people nodded their heads when he said it. "Typical," some no doubt thought to themselves. In that day it was the custom that the groom would travel to the home of the bride. There the wedding proper would be conducted after which the groom and his new wife would then travel back to the groom's place, which is where the wedding party was waiting and where the wedding feast or reception would be held.

But this time there is a long, unexpected delay. Who knows what happened. As my Princeton pastor, Rev. Davis, suggested, the wedding party probably stopped off somewhere for pictures! Or maybe they thought it would be fun to go through the Dairy Queen drive-thru in their wedding duds and slurp down a Flurry or two. Whatever happened, it left the bridal party on the other end high and dry with nothing to do but wait it out.

In those days bridesmaids carried pretty little oil lamps instead of flowers. These were festive lamps meant to lead the way for the bride and groom. They were also necessary illumination in a time when there was no electricity. You could not have a wedding reception without lamps and the oil to fuel them. In this case the bridal party consisted of ten young women, half of whom Jesus describes as wise, the other half are called foolish. As we all know, the wise are the ones who had not just their lamps but extra oil just in case.

That's the difference between the wise and the foolish, but their similarities are even more striking. All ten of them both know about and are expecting the bridegroom's arrival. All ten of them are dressed for the occasion and have a lamp with oil. All of them wait and, when the wait goes on and on and on even pressing on toward midnight, all of them fall asleep. Also, all of them are awakened by the cry of some excited relative "They're coming, they're coming!" and all of them are glad to hear it. Ah, but it's been hours. The lamps have long since gone out while the bridesmaids slept and now, with a jolt, the so-called foolish girls realize that without some new oil, they cannot light their lamps. When they cannot secure any oil from those who were smart enough to lug along an extra oil can, they go and buy some oil at some open-all-night Seven-Eleven kind of store, and then rush back. As they approach the house, they can hear the party has begun, so they furiously knock on the door. The groom opens it a crack as he peers out overtop the little security chain. "I'm sorry," he says, "do I know you?" And then the door slams shut, echoing along the ages in a way that cannot help but send a chill down your spine.

What is going on in this story? After all, at the end of Matthew 24 we hear a similar parable from Jesus, but in that case we see a wise and foolish servant dealing with a much-delayed return of the boss. The wise servant carries on with his normal duties whereas the foolish servant concludes the boss is never coming back and so pilfers the company's funds, gets drunk every day, and cleans the clock of anyone who suggests he's not acting in accordance with company policy. When the boss comes back and tosses this lout out into that weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth place, you conclude he got what he deserved.

But what about Matthew 25? Five of the bridesmaids may have been foolish, but they were not wicked. They had every expectation for the groom's arrival. And yes, they may have gotten weary and dozed off eventually, but no more so than the five who ended up going to the party. So what are we to take away from this parable? It's actually a little difficult to know. In all of Jesus' parables it is dangerous to turn them into neat allegories whereby every person and every item is made to stand for something else in a tidy 1:1 correspondence. When people in the past have done that, some have made the oil stand for faith, hence concluding that the difference is simply that the foolish did not have enough faith: oh, they had some faith, maybe a Sunday-only kind of spirituality. But that's not enough and so when the day was done and the kingdom had come, they were revealed as false Christians, mere pretenders who in the end could not make the kingdom cut.

But it is by no means clear that this is the right way to read this parable. Probably allegory is the wrong way to approach any parable. Probably what we should do instead is let the parable shock us, let it pull the rug out from underneath our feet. Because then, when we land with a thud staring up at the ceiling, we may be startled into a new understanding--or at least into a fresh awareness of a very old understanding.

Basically I suspect that what we take away from Matthew 25 is exactly what Jesus says as his own bottom line: Therefore, keep watch. You can make the oil stand for most anything you want, I suppose, but what is clear is that the most basic difference between the wise and the foolish bridesmaids is that the wise had come prepared for a delay. The wise did not know for sure there would be a delay, much less how long. But they were ready. They had pondered the possibility. Because in the end if you cannot stick it out over the long haul, if you have given no thought to the shape of your life during the in-between times, then you're not ready. Everyone waits. But just waiting isn't enough. You need to wait with a plan in mind. You need to wait with the ability to continue plugging away as you work on behalf of the one you just know is coming.

Jesus tells his disciples to keep watch. What is eminently clear from the gospels, however, is that such watchfulness most certainly does not involve a thumb-twiddling scan of the horizon. Jesus' own words from the previous chapter also make it abundantly clear that such watchfulness does not involve untoward speculations and predictions about the day and hour of the end. "Stay away from people who claim they know the time," Jesus warned.

Instead when Jesus tells his followers to keep watch, what he means is that we are to live lives that are so transparent to the kingdom of God that even as we watch for the second coming, the people around us in the world will themselves have something to watch: namely, us! We watch, the world watches us watching. But if the Great Commission with which the Gospel of Matthew concludes is going to be fulfilled, then it is clear that what the world should see as it watches us being watchful is something far more interesting that a bunch of people scanning the horizon or watching the skies.

Having some extra oil, being prepared for the delay, may mean no more than that we just keep plugging away for the kingdom. It may mean no more than simple acts of compassion and kindness, of "living the fire," as we talked about this morning. What does 2001 mean for us as Christians? Well, it means it's been a while since Jesus told the parable we heard again tonight. It's been a very long time.

But we're ready for that, aren't we? Jesus told this story to prepare us for that, didn't he? We pretty well know what to do in the meantime, don't we? We are to love justice, exercise kindness, and walk humbly with our God along all those kingdom pathways which Jesus himself so expertly mapped out for us. We are to keep watch by giving the world something to watch as well: something redolent of hope, full of grace, and transparent to the truth. I'm not exactly sure what extra oil is supposed to symbolize. But thinking to take it along shows holy thoughtfulness--it shows some forethought which not only takes into account the possibility of a delay but which demonstrates that we're OK with such a delay, too. We can handle it. We've got things to do. We're neither bored nor at loose ends.

There's a whole world out there that is still in desperate need of precisely the hope which Jesus alone can bring. Therefore, keep watch. Keep watch by giving the world something to watch and see, too. After all, we do not know the day or the hour, but at least we know there will be such a day and hour eventually. Many people do not know even that much. Among the many things which having extra oil may mean is spreading the news, the good news, that a better day and hour will come. For 2001 or any year, that is task enough to keep us watchfully busy. Amen.