“Wise and Foolish” 

 Matthew 25: 1 – 13                                                                                   

Makemie Presbyterian Church                                                              

September 5, 2010

 25“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. ²Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. ³When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; ⁴but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. ⁵As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. ⁶But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ ⁷Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. ⁸The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ ⁹But the wise replied, ‘No! There will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ ¹⁰And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. ¹¹Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ ¹²But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ ¹³Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

This ends the reading.

          I think it is at least partly Matthew’s fault I don’t sleep well most nights. Age & stress have something to do with, but as a religious person I can’t ignore Matthew’s influence on my nighttime script, the one I run through my mind while I’m not sleeping; Usually when I’ve woken up from a dream which I’m awfully, hopelessly late for something.

          An exam, a wedding, the last judgment.

          Something that can’t be rescheduled. Something in which my absence will be duly noted & my failure to show up will cost me everything – everything I’ve worked for, everything that matters to me, gone just like that (snap) because I overslept, or could not find my clothes – the door that was open to me—now it’s closed (slap) & don’t even bother to knock because I know how this story will end.

          Does anyone ever wake up on the right side of that door? I don’t. Which is why I lie there in the dark trying to find my place in Matthew’s script where the operative categories are sheep or goat, wheat or weed, wise or foolish, good fish or bad – there is no gray here – everything in Matthew is black or white.

Are things really that clear cut for God?

God knows they aren’t for me. Which is why I lie awake at night obeying the awake command. You know that one don’t you? “Keep awake therefore because you know not the hour or the day. Keep awake therefore – your Lord is coming!”

So I drink two cups of Dunkin Donuts original blend coffee and try to sort out Matthews parables where I can usually remember that his stories don’t involve individuals things, but communities of things; flocks of animals, fields of crops, nest of fish, bunches of bridesmaids – and that these communities are always mixed – they exist in that mix-a-ness without much fanfare until that day someone comes to sort them out; then the differences between them are revealed so some go into glory to flourish and others go into the fire, or pound on doors that will never ever open to them.

So the stories are about groups not individuals – groups that do not have forever to figure out their categories.

By day at least I’m able to figure out what Matthews parable may man for the mixed group I’ve belonged to my entire life – the church – although I should probably say churches – as different from one another as a praise band is to a gospel choir – as different as a solemn high mass is from a small town congregation’s Lord Supper. The church I know best is a mixed group of mixed groups – bridesmaids walking around with baskets of fish on their arms & goats loose in the fields, eating the weeds & the oil lamps, while the sheep sniff baskets that smell like seaweed.

All this is too much chaos for most people. Which is why some of us stay so busy trying to divide our groups up – maybe save God some trouble later. I don’t need to tell you all how well that’s going for us.

But, I think we’re all doing our imperfect best to make sure everybody gets their way. The question is, do we have what it takes to get there? As churches do we have what we need to endure? Some do & some don’t according to Matthew. Some make it to the party in time & others do not. Some are wise & some are foolish, he says. Counting on us to stick around long enough to discover what sets the two apart so we can change course before it’s too late. But we don’t have to wait too long in our story this morning to discover the obvious answer to that question, of what sets the groups apart, it’s Extra Fuel! Matthew says when the foolish took their lamps—they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with them.

Since this is an educated crowd & because I would like to keep your attention I won’t go into the difference between a parable & an allegory but remind you whatever the story is, it appears only in Matthew and interpretations of this story vary widely depending on whether the reader see the grace in it or good works.

I know that you know I know. And you know that I know you know – so let’s save that for later and get back to the story because as much as I love higher criticism – I love a story even more; especially a story with this many holes.

The first hole is – why take extra fuel to a wedding? Do you make sure you have one of those red plastic things full of gas in your car when you leave home? I mean do you count on things going wrong? Usually the issue when we go to a wedding is finding a place to park so we don’t have to walk too far in our painful shoes. So the extra fuel seems a bit obsessive. Why not pack a cooler of extra food to in case you have to wait six hours for the wedding to start. Why not take your dog & some dog chow in case you should be held up longer than that?

I guess you could call all the extra precautions faith, I’ve heard the extra fuel called faith – but it seems like a lack of faith to me.

The wise virgins were not content to have enough to get them where they were going they wanted more than enough to make sure –they had their own back up packs; where the foolish virgins simply trusted the groom to be where he said he would be. They believed him. And if it started when he said it would start – why in the world would they need back up?

So there’s another hole. Whose fault was it the foolish virgins ran out of oil?

If the bridegroom had been on time – then all 10 bridesmaids could have walked through the door together. Those with enough oil would have been just fine & those wise virgins might even have felt a little “foolish”  about those fuel canisters hanging from their satin sashes—bridal survivalists!

If that bridegroom had just been on time—then those virgins could have checked their extra oil in the coat room & the foolish virgins could have escaped going down in history as double losers – not just foolish but deadly foolish; barred from the party of all times, for all time.

Because they never stopped to think the bridegroom might be late. But he was late! Really late – so that all 10 bridesmaids fell asleep waiting for him in a house that must not of had cable. Their lamps left burning beside them so that whoever looked in on them could see who slept with their mouths open or did not.

It was midnight, Matthew says, when the good news came at last. “He is here! Come out to meet him.” Which was what all 10 of them tried to do; they stood up to show God their skirts totally unaware of the sorting about to take place. The sorting started right away. Half the girls could not get their lamps to burn right, their fuel was almost gone. But the wise girls were all busy tipping the oil from their back up packs into their lamps.

So the foolish girls did what any good Christian bridesmaid would do. They asked their friends for oil. Isn’t that what you would do? Or to turn the question around, if you had realized your friends where running low on oil wouldn’t you have offered them some of yours? I mean the bridegroom was there. The wedding was happening. How much more oil is anyone going to need before they all walk into the light of the banquet hall?

Well, “We won’t have enough, if we give you some.”

Acting out of scarcity when they could have acted out of abundance! Where was my old professor Shirley Guthrie, who assigned all six of us who dared to take his Karl Barth class, “A’s” saying, “I teach from abundance.”    

Instead the wise girls said, “Buy your own oil.” Which is when the foolish virgins did act a little foolish, to think they would find a fuel store opened late in a town with no cable. Or thinking to ask, “Uh, could you tell us to get there without any light?”

And while they were gone the bridegroom came & fetched away the five who were left. Maybe those five were the wise ones because they were the ones who stayed put. If all 10 had stayed put maybe we would have the story of the 10 wise virgins because nothing, not even the fear of being exposed of being less than enough was worth missing the bridegroom when he came.

We’ll never know because that’s not how the story evolved. As it turned out the bridegroom came taking the bridesmaids who were still there with him into the banquet. And when the others arrived he would not open the door. Would it have hurt him to have waited for them? The same way they waited for him? He refused to open the door for them. “Not you,” he said, and that was that.

And then the story of wise & foolish virgins has, I think, the biggest hole at the end, “Keep awake therefore cause you  don’t know the day nor the hour.”

Keep awake? Shouldn’t that be have oil?

Because they all fell asleep, did you notice? Wise & the foolish both. Staying awake would have made them different from each other. It was having enough oil, so they could sing, “This little light of mine” instead of “blowing smoke rings in the dark”.

So, how do we deal with all of the holes in this story? Maybe the holes are there because then this story—the story never lies down & goes to sleep like all 10 of the virgins do. Keep awake? My old friend Chuckie says in some of our middle of the night phone calls, “I’m as wide awake as a tree full of owls.”

This story is full of holes & as much as I do not like it, I do think we live in a world that has been waiting since dark-thirty, waiting for him. Waiting so long that some have decided that the bridegroom was a fiction. Or he headed to Aruba with the diamond.

I think those of us who are still waiting for him have a lot of explaining to do; to ourselves & to anyone we hope to convince to wait with us.  I think there really is some fuel we have been given – not only for us but for those who come after us. So that they too have what they need to live “lit-up” lives. We could probably sit here all day trying to agree about what that fuel is; is it right beliefs or right action, is it the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the Prodigal Son – is it Jesus’ death on the cross or his teachings when he was alive – is it the NRSV, or the NIV or the KJV?

Or maybe we don’t realize in all of our searching – is that the waiting itself is stone witness. Even in mixed groups. Cause when it comes to letting our light shine before others we sometimes forget that even the smallest glow can make all the difference to someone stuck in the dark.

Our lamps help them find us; willing to make room for one more mixed-up person—while we wait for the one who makes sense of us all.

As he said on another occasion “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.”

I tell you, when I’m up late with the virgins, that works like a lullaby on me, at least when I can trust it, more than my need to be wise.

In the end it may be wise enough to agree to stick together while we wait for the bridegroom to come find us. In the dark – or in the light. For when he finds us we shall have no further need of lamps. He will be our lamp; heading our way through the dark. As he does even now, even now.