Metonymy (Luke 2:22 - 40)

     Mary’s life hadn’t been ... right ... since the night the angel had appeared—out of the starry blue—and scared her half to death, telling her that in spite of her virginity, she was going to bear a child. And if that wasn’t weird enough, her child would be the long-promised heir to the house of David, with all that entailed. Finally, the angel told her what to name this promised child, she was to call him Jesus, and in her native Aramaic, she knew what that meant.

     And in the ensuing months, just when she’d decided that her dream had been just that—a dream, perhaps caused by something she’d eaten, more gravy than the babe—something else strange, if not downright spooky, would happen. First of all, despite her expectations, Joseph had married her anyway, instead of dismissing her as had been his right; it seemed he’d had a nocturnal visit himself. Second, there was all that stuff at Elizabeth’s house, when her child had leapt in the womb in joy and celebration just at the nearness of her own. Finally, at the birth itself, a whole bunch of shepherds, of all people, had shown up at the manger-side claiming they were sent there by their own batch angels.

     And now, on Joseph’s and her obligatory, post-partum trip to Jerusalem, two—count ‘em two—old ones had started up out of their prophetic dreams to recognize her infant. She’d heard about them before: both of them were well-respected devotees of Judaism, well known around the Temple grounds. Simeon was a dreamer of dreams, a man upon whom the Holy Spirit had come to rest, and Anna ... well, what could you say about Anna? She was older than the hills, older than anyone around there could even remember, she’d outlived her husband by decades, and spent all her days around the Temple, praying, worshiping God and getting in the way of the Temple functionaries.

     They were archetypes of the Jewish mystical experience: a pious old man, to whom the Spirit had appeared, and a prophetic old woman in the tradition of the Delphi Oracle and all the female seers who had come before. Although both spent a lot of time at the Temple, they rarely saw one another: Simeon was always in the men’s courtyard while Anna was restricted to the women’s. And both of them, as was the way with such folk, were slightly mad.

     These were the people who confronted the young couple as they came to the Temple to present their child, as required by the Law. And as Simeon approached, for a moment Mary saw the Angel Gabriel, towering over her, just for a moment, and then it was just the old man again, rheumy eyes alight with a fanatic glow, a faintly musty odor preceding his approach. What she didn’t know was that Simeon had been told by the Spirit in a dream that he‘d see the Messiah before he died, and that’s what he sang about: “now you’re dismissing your servant according to your word. My eyes have seen your salvation, prepared in the presence of all your people, a light to reveal to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

     And she was astonished at this outburst, and a little embarrassed—there were people around, after all—but mot of all she was awed: wasn’t this just what the others had said? And now he pinned her with his eyes, and spoke directly to her, saying that her little boy would be the cause of the rise and fall of many in the land of Israel, and of many a revealed heart, and of a sword through her own very soul. And she shivered at that last—well, who wouldn’t have?—and it was as if a goose had trampled all over her grave.

     After that, Anna was petty anticlimactic, to tell you the truth, she came and praised God, throwing up her bony old arms and reaching for the sky, and she began to tell their story to anyone who’d stand still enough to listen. But Mary’s mind lingered on the old man—she didn’t see him, where had he gone? She wanted to question him, to ask him what he had meant when he’d said he’d seen the salvation of the Lord? Had he meant Jesus? He looked like just a little baby to her ... and what kind of salvation had he meant? Physical salvation, salvation from the oppressive Roman rule? Or something more subtle, something more internal, more esoteric? Throughout her stay in Jerusalem, through the presentation of her son to the powers that be and their hard trip back to Nazareth, she turned these things over and over in her mind. If you were of a poetic bent, you might even say that she pondered them in her heart.

     What did Simeon mean when he said that his eyes had seen the salvation that God had sent? Did he mean mystically, as in a waking dream, metaphorically, as if this bringing of the Christ-child to the Temple, into the heart of the Jewish religion, symbolized bringing salvation to Gods people? Or did he mean, very particularly, the physical child Jesus of Nazareth? Likely, a little of all of the above.

     There’s a figure of speech that is beloved of college English teachers everywhere called metonymy. According to Wikipedia, which has as good a definition as any, it’s “a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept.” For example, crown—a thing a monarch wears—is often used to speak of the monarch her-or-himself, as in the crown did this, or the crown decided that. Giving somebody a hand refers to helping someone, not literally giving somebody your hand, which is really bloody and besides: it’s illegal in many jurisdictions.

     And that’s what’s going on here: salvation is a metonym for the Christ child. Through some spirit-given, mystical intuition, Simeon realizes that salvation is what the babe represents, at least to him . . . Of course, he’s not the only one who uses metonymy to refer to Christ ... in Galatians, Paul writes to Christ as faith: “now that faith has come,” he writes, meaning Christ, “we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian,” and in his first letter to the Corinthians, he calls Christ “the power and wisdom of God.”

     The thing is, metonyms are often overloaded: the word crown can refer to the queen herself, or to the royal apparatus, or the office of the monarch as a whole. Giving somebody a hand can mean helping her or applauding her performance. And I think Christ is the ultimate overloaded metonym, the ultimate closely-packed symbol. If he’d thought of it, Simeon might well have sung about that too: my eyes have seen your faith, which you have prepared for all the people ... my eyes have seen your justice, which you have prepared for all the people ... my eyes have seen your love, which you have prepared for all the people.

     You see, that’s the thing about the incarnation, which we celebrate at this time of year. We often think of it simply as Jesus being God made flesh, who dwelt among us, of God walking, for a little while, in human form, but along with that, along with incarnating—somehow—the divine person, he incarnated God’s qualities as well. He was the embodiment, the in-matter-ment, the enfleshment of God’s grace, God’s peace, God’s compassion, God’s hope.

     So as we stand and sing Simeon’s song, in these days of miracles and wonderment, of violence and virtue , of uncertainty and division, let’s remember our own overloaded symbolism ... what God has incarnated in God’s son, but equally important, what God has incarnated in us.. Amen.

Expectation (Luke 1:26 - 38)

So.  Right there in the first couple of lines, Luke says a word that embarrasses some Christians today, and he says it twice.  It says “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary.”  Virgin.  Virgin!  Twice he says it, but he doesn’t emphasize it like Matthew does, who uses it as a kind of living proof-text, where we’re told that it all took place to fulfill a prediction by Isaiah, who said—referring to something that was going to happen in his own time—“Look, a young woman shall conceive and bear a child, and he will be called Emmanuel.”  And Matthew, following the Septuagint, mistranslates the Hebrew word for “young woman” as “virgin;” he adds helpfully that the Hebrew means God with us.

But even though Luke doesn’t use the virgin comment as a lynch-pin of his argument like Matthew, he does say it twice, which is a subtle way of emphasis—he could have just said “her name was Mary” after all—and so he wants us to know it, he wants us to get that she was a virgin, and so almost two-thousand years ago began the near-deification of Mary, her use as a theological sound bite, a interpretive lens through which we view the Christ. Today, she’s used almost as a punching bag, sometimes; liberal Protest theologians say “Bam!  Take that!  There was no virgin birth, it’s ridiculous to say such a thing, and those primitive beliefs are holding us back, keeping us from entering into the twenty-first century and attracting shiny, new, modern Christians.”

And conservative evangelical theologians say “Pow!  Take that!  She’s a litmus test for true Christianity, a slippery slope down which we must not slide.  If you don’t believe in the Virgin Birth”—and they always capitalize it, Virgin Birth—“Then you’re not a real Christian, or not a real good Christian, anyway . . .”  And don’t even get me started on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which holds that Mary was always a virgin, never did anything untoward or . . . nasty . . . and thereby warped the brains of generations of Christians, who leapt to the understandable conclusion if the World’s Greatest Woman got that way because she didn’t have sex, and sex must ergo be bad . . .

Man!  We Christians have really messed up what is essentially a sweet story of God doing something new, something untoward . . . and I wonder how Mary feels?  I wonder what she thinks of being an icon in the ongoing wars between the right and the left, what would she have felt, little slip of a girl that she was . . . she was probably thirteen or so, they got married early in those days, and she was betrothed to one Joseph, a tradesman, a working-class, blue-collar kind of guy who probably went down to Fountain Square and did the Chicken Dance every Fall. And he was of the house of David, a pretty famous house in those parts, because the prophecies foretold it, you understand, they foretold that the house of David was going to be restored, and Messianic expectations had been running high for several generations or so.  The Messiah, the anointed one—in Greek “Christ”—would be of the house of David, a king come, or so the tale went, to restore the house of David and its glorious, earthly reign.

And Gabriel comes to Mary in the sixth month, and it’s important that we realize what it is that it’s the sixth month of—it’s the sixth month of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, a pregnancy that in itself was miraculous, a pregnancy that recalled the coming of the Lord to Sarah in her old age.  Elizabeth was barren, and past her child-bearing years, and God—like God did to Sarah—opened up her womb.  And so it’s in the context of one miracle that another is done, as listeners and receivers of this good news, we must keep that in mind: the miracle of Jesus’ birth is in the context of John’s.  But it’s a greater miracle still, for if John the messenger is born to a barren woman, Jesus the Christ, the subject of John’s message, is born to a virgin.  And virgin trumps barren any day of the week.

Anyway.  The angel Gabriel comes to Mary, and we should stop just a moment and see how significant that is.  A messenger from God, a mouthpiece of God comes to a woman, just like Jesus himself would come to the woman at the well, the angel has come to a person that wasn’t even allowed to sit at the feet of the teachers, who wasn’t even allowed, really, into the temple, only into the women’s gallery around the edges . . . it was kind of like where the black folks were allowed to sit at Clemson University football games in the bad old days, on a hill overlooking the stadium, the women were allowed in a place kind of around the outside, on the margins, but here Mary was center stage.  The angel—and it wasn’t just any old angel, it was Gabriel, one of the senior management—the angel comes to Mary.  And here again, it’s greater than the case of John, or at least a lot more wondrous: because the good news of John had come to Elizabeth’s husband, as the patriarchy demanded, but the Good News of Jesus, the gospel of the Christ, had come first to a woman.

And so right at the outset, this is marked as something that is unprecedented, at least in terms of inclusiveness: the angel comes to the marginalized one, the one that, if not last, is certainly not first, to announce the birth of the savior of the world.  Could this be kind of a foretaste of one of Jesus’ primary preaching points?  Could it be a herald of what he would repeat over and over again, that the last shall be first and the first shall be last?  Staid old traditional Matthew didn’t mention this apparition.  No.  In Matthew, the announcement comes to Joseph, and then only when he was about to put Mary away for infidelity, but Luke starts off with it, and it shows why Luke is a favorite of progressive preachers everywhere, he seems to have the most inclusive view, seems to take most seriously the universal appeal of the gospel to everyone, Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female . . . and so you can imagine what Mary was thinking when an angel came to her, or maybe you can’t . . . Luke says she was much perplexed, and I suspect this is an understatement, but as was her way, she pondered what sort of greeting it was going to be, but not for long, because the angel told her not to be afraid for, contrary to what it looked like—angels weren’t always the bearer of glad tidings—contrary to what she might’ve thought, she’d actually found favor with God.

Throughout it all, Mary maintains an almost preternatural calm, especially for one so young . . . here an angel, a messenger of God, tells her she’s favored by God, and further that she’s going to give birth to the Son of the Most High, to whom the Lord God will give the throne of David, who’ll reign over the hose of the Jacob—that’s Israel—forever and ever, amen.  And right here something strange happens: she says “how can this be, since I am a virgin? And it’s strange because, as novelist Ron Hansen has pointed out, why would she assume something miraculous was going to happen?  After all, she was betrothed to a perfectly fine man, for all she knew her first born from that union would be the Messiah . . . how did she know Gabriel was talking about her becoming pregnant without the benefit of human aid?

Did she intuit it?  Did she sense something of the moment?  Did she somehow know that the child within her would not be conceived of natural means?  Whatever the case, the angel confirms her suspicion:  The holy spirit will come upon you, he says, and the power of the most high will overshadow you; the child to be born will be holy, called Son of God.  And the angel reveals something else, as well: her relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.

And then the angels says something that put it all together, something that reminded them of God’s good graces, God’s good providence: For nothing, Gabriel says, will be impossible with God.  And I don’t know about you, but for me it evokes another time, another place, where God opened up another womb . . . there in the tent at the oaks of Mamre, when three celestial visitors—one of whom just happened to be God—when three celestial visitors predict that Sarah will bear a child, after years of barrenness, after she had long passed the time of child-bearing, the Lord said “Why did Sarah laugh, and say: ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’  Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

And here, centuries later, comes the answer: nothing will be impossible with God.  Nothing will be impossible with God!  And it comes in the form not of a mighty king riding on a great horse, not in the guise of a Pharaoh, riding rank after rank of chariots, the answer comes to a slip of a woman, just a girl really, in the back-water town of Nazareth.  Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?  And the answer is embodied, incarnate in the child that will be born in just a few days.  The answer is Jesus Christ, born to a young woman, born in a stable.  See?  A barren womb is opened.  See?  A childless woman is made whole.  See?  A babe is born of a virgin. Nothing will be impossible with God.

And it’s true: nothing is impossible with God.  Neither miracles, nor healings, nor ends to wars . . . neither feeding the hungry, freeing the captives, or comforting the brokenhearted . . . nothing is impossible with God.  And if it’s possible that a babe is born in a manger to rule the world, if it’s possible that a fourteen-year-old child from Nazareth, betrothed to a carpenter, would be the mother of the Son of God, why then it’s certainly possible that God will renew our hearts in the coming years.  If God can bring about the redemption of the world, whether on a cold winter’s night or a hot June day, as some new calculations point to, if God can bring about the redemption of the world on that first Christmas 2000 years ago, God can surely redeem our hearts.

Christmas is a season to contemplate new beginnings, to look toward the future, to renew our hope and expect God to do God’s part.  As we celebrate God’s incarnation this year, as we travel and entertain our families and guests, as we open our presents underneath the tree, let us remember that the answer to all our questions has already come, and will come again. Is anything too wonderful for God?  No.  Nothing will be impossible with God.  Amen.

Power Play (Mark 1:1 -8; Advent 2B)

      Imagine you’re a denizen of Galilee in around 70 CE, some 40 years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s wartime: some Jewish radicals have revolted against Rome and Jerusalem is under siege. You’ve got family trapped in the city, and you’ve heard things are pretty bad ... food and water are scarce; children and the elderly are in grave danger. Everybody feels caught between edgy Roman soldiers and extremist guerrillas, and opinions about what to do are sharply divided as well. Some feel that God has raised up strong leaders for their salvation, while others favor the safety and known quantity of Roman rule. Rome itself is in chaos—it's had four emperors and four assassination—bam,bam, bam, bam!—and the latest is Vespasian, former general of the besieging army.

     In the midst of all this, you sneak into the home of your friend Jacob where a house church meets. Despite the scorching weather, the shutters are closed against prying eyes; after all, your faith is still illegal, and its just a year after the death of the great persecutor Nero. And there in the sweltering candlelight, the writer we’ve come to know as Mark starts to read his gospel. And he begins by poking sharp sticks into the eyes of not one but two political establishments.

      Here’s what you hear: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The first stick is calling Jesus Christ—Greek for Messiah—and the corresponding eye is that of Mark’s own religious establishment. Messiah means “anointed one,” and laying it on Jesus confers enormous theological and political meaning. Theological because of the unspoken acknowledgement that the one doing the anointing is the God of Israel and Jacob and Moses, and political because Jewish expectations hold that the Messiah will kick the Romans out on their collective keisters, reestablish the House of David and reign over a restored Israel.

      The second stick is poked firmly into the eye of the Roman establishment, and consists of calling Jesus the “Son of God, a title claimed by whatever Emperor is sitting on the throne, in your case Vespasian. So, in the very first sentence of his gospel, Mark succeeds in signaling to anyone who is paying attention that what follows is one dangerous document, seditious to both sides of the power equation.

      And you can’t help but wonder which side will catch up to you first—the Romans or the Jewish religious establishment. They both have tremendous power over you . . . the Romans the power of the sword, the power to take your life and the lives of everyone you love. The religious authorities—the San Hedron and the like—had the the power of God, the power to isolate you from your religious faith, the core of your being. And in many ways, that would be worse.

     All of that is packed into Mark’s opening statement: references to (and provocations of) two power centers, two establishments with control over everyday lives. In one case exerted by threats of physical violence and the other by violence of another sort—religious dogma held too tightly, a power structure embedded in the throws of self-preservation, more interested in external compliance than internal transformation.

      But wait . . . There’s more! There’s something else in that first, concise statement, and it’s called “good news!” And you wonder: how on God’s green earth do you justify calling this story of an itinerant preacher—born literally in a barn and executed ignominiously by the two powers —“good news?” Doesn’t sound like any good news you’ve ever heard of . . .

And so you settle in to hear what the evangelist has to say, he probably won’t read the whole thing tonight, but you’re curious enough to stay tonight. And it can be argued that all of what follows in Mark’s gospel—the first one out of the four written—it can be said that all of what follows is an explanation of that first sentence: what does it mean to call Jesus the Christ and at the same time Son of God, and especially, how can we say that anyof it’s Good News?

      Well, the first thing Mark does is to put it in  context, and the context he puts it in is that of the prophets. Now, prophets were a diverse lot, from shepherds like Amos and Moses in his later life, to priests like Isaiah and Jeremiah, but the thing that they all had in common, the thing that made them prophets were that they were mouthpieces for God. They relayed the word of God to the people of God. This may or may not involve predicting the future, but it more often involved judgement. Which was why prophets weren’t always beloved of the people to whom they prophesied: they were noted for saying things their employers didn’t want to hear.

     Prophets were characteristic of the Semitic peoples; there’d been twelve or so of them in the Hebrew religion, depending on who you count as one, and there would be a passel more of them in Islam, including their central figure, Muhammad. And so quoting prophets puts this “good news” squarely in line with the past, as well as the future, of middle eastern culture.          

     And note how Mark does it—he compares the situation to what was spoken by God through the prophets: “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”. And it’s one of the most famous passages in the prophets, spoken by God through second Isaiah, the one in Babylon exile, and one—not coincidentally—that I we just read.

     And you stand there, listening to Mark read in the lowering dark, when your world seems to be splitting asunder, fracturing apart, and you know the passage he is quoting, and you realize that not only does it in compare John to the original one crying in the wilderness of Babylonian exile, it conveys the central message of that Isaiah passage as well: comfort. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, where people are starving . . . People you know, people you love, people who are competing with dogs for scraps in the streets, who are going hungry so that their children will have what meager food there is . . . speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty at last is paid, that she will be delivered from the the horror of the Roman siege.

      And you begin to get an idea of what this “good news” is all about: it’s about hope. Hope for your people, hope for Jerusalem, but not unalloyed hope, because Mark slips in a mickey: he begins his quote from Isaiah with one from Malachi: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me,” and you know that passage as well, and it’s about repentance, the turning away of Israel from her bad behavior, and sure enough, when he introduces John the forerunner, the one he’s just compared to that long ago wilderness guy, he says he’s proclaiming a baptism of (a) repentance and (b) forgiveness of sins. Israel, in the throws of God-sent punishment for its sins, isn’t going to get off scott free. It’s going to have to turn away, to repent from those sins.

     And John’s a prophet all right, you can tell by what he wore—he’s was dressed in camel hair, held together with a leather belt, standard prophetic garb, and although Mark tells you what he ate—honey and bugs, for Pete’s sake—he politely refrains from mentioning the smell. And although John was baptizing on his own, without benefit of being a member of the Jewish religious establishment, what he was doing wasn’t all that different from business as usual: it was akin to the ritual baths prescribed for Jews so that they would be forgiven their sins, language that was code for being welcomed back into Temple fellowship.

     But you know that John was just a forerunner, and in addition to baptizing, he’s proclaiming the mission of the one before whom he was running. Somebody more powerful than he was coming after him, he said, one whom he himself was “not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” And that in itself impresses you, ‘cause prophets aren’t noted for their humility. After all, it’s hard to be humble when you’re a mouthpiece of God. But it’s what the difference between John’s mission and this new person’s was that makes you sit up in your seat: John baptizes in water, he says, but the new guy will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

     Suddenly, goosebumps prickle your arms, and a breeze springs from nowhere in the shuttered darkness, guttering candles and causing the hair to spring up on the back of your head. And you can take what John says as either being baptized with the Holy Spirit or in it, but however you take it, it makes you shiver. Because although you don’t know exactly what the Baptist means, you do know that it’s radically different from what’s come before. You know that this is a game-changer, a disruptor of the status quo, a radical redesign of the way things are. Water is one thing, it does the liturgical trick, perhaps, it gets you wet and restores you to God’s good graces, but it it doesn’t last. It’s external, it dries up , and you’re susceptible once again.

     But Spirit is in-spir-ation, inspiring, empowering, it is the very breath, the very motive force of the Divine. It is God’s Spirit that swept over the face of the deep, that filled the heroes of old, that powered, and continues to power, all of creation. And if God’s Spirit can power all that, it can certainly power you. The Spirit is God’s agent on earth, God’s motive power, and this new guy, the one John foretold, is baptizing in it. Maybe there is hope after all. Amen.

Third Time's the Charm (Mark 13:24 - 37; Advent 1B)

     Once upon a time, a centurion named Biggus Maximus shuffled into the Blessed City. He’d been away from Rome for years, stationed along the empire’s Eastern border to guard against the invasions of Gothic hordes—the Germanic kind, not the ones with lots of eye shadow—incursions which had been increasing in frequency for the last half a century or so. He’d been separated the from his unit at the Battle of Adrianopole, where that idiot Valens had managed to get himself killed, and he was exhausted. Exhausted and a little depressed, because there was something in the air, some wird, some doom, as if everything was coming to an end, as if it all were coming apart at the seams.

     Biggus shook himself—he was just tired, that’s all. The setbacks were just that: setbacks. No barbarian horde, with their primitive weaponry—clubs, for Caesar’s sake, against good Corinthian steel; slings against mighty catapultic engines of war—no army of thugs like the Visigoths was gonna take them down . . . He was just tired, so the first thing he did, before he even checked into headquarters, was go to his barracks for some well-deserved sleep.

     He came awake with a start after a couple of hours; it was just after dark, and a throbbing beat filled the air. After a minute, he recognized it as Jingle Bell Rock—the Madonna version, not the one by Paul Ankus—which puzzled him to no end . . . Had he lost a whole month in his ramblings? Did that Visigoth cudgel do more damage than he thought? He could have sworn that it was still before All Hallows’ Eve . . .

     He fumbled around in the dark until he found his wrist-dial—thank Apollo it was one of those new, self-illuminating models—and sure enough, it was only October 15th. With a heavy sigh, he clambered out of bed, donned his toga and livery, and went looking for the moron who was keeping him awake playing Christmas music more than two months before the fact.

     Well. We all know the end of this tale . . . Despite all the Roman might, despite a defense budget bigger than the economies of France and Britain combined, 70 year’s later the Western Roman Empire collapsed. And as for ol’ Biggus Maximus, he got more and more grumpy and less and less sleep, and became the first person in recorded history to complain that Christmas was getting earlier and earlier every year.

     The first hints of what would become Advent appeared about a century after Biggus lost his night’s sleep—just after the official fall of the Empire—when a Bishop named Perpetuus declared—forever, one assumes—that there would be a season of fasting beginning on St. Martin’s Day in the middle of November and lasting all the way through Epiphany—the twelfth day of Christmas for those who are counting—and about a century after that it became known as Saint Martin’s Lent because there were a total of 40 days of fasting. In the West, it was shortened to the 4 Sundays we know today

     And while Biggus Maximus may have been the first to complain about Christmas coming too soon, but he certainly wasn’t the last . . . Each year we complain about it too, we shake our heads ruefully as if it’s unavoidable, saying “it’s the culture . . . what are you going to do?” Well, not to be pushy, or anything, but I can tell you what you can do . . . Celebrate Advent instead. That’s what it’s for, it’s whole purpose is so we be still and think, instead of hurtling mindlessly into tinsel-bedecked, over-the-top celebration of Baby Jesus the day after Labor Day (I swear, it’ll get there soon). Even the name reflects this purpose: it comes from the Latin word adventus, which means coming. Coming. Not “it came the week before Halloween,” or “it arrived at 12:01 the morning after Thanksgiving.” It’s not here , already, but coming.

     Now. Before I start foaming at the mouth, let me say that there is a lot of pressure to go along, and it’s understandable to a certain degree. After all, we Presbyterians have always been pretty integrated with our culture, we’ve never been particularly separatist about our faith or it’s expression. In fact, some of us seem downright embarrassed about it. And cultural norms havebeen changing over the last half century or so, but still: as I often say, what kind of witness is it if we’re no different from anyone else?

     Ironically, our evangelical brothers and sisters are better at this sort of thing than we are . . . They often have little problem taking stands on issues that separate them from the culture at large, even though these have begun to fray around the edges a bit. And most evangelicals have only a dim notion of what Advent is all about, much less how to celebrate it.

     You see, there’s a lot of symbolic and theological and symbolic weight packed into these four Sundays In about the 12th century, a monk named Bernard of Clairveaux—who founded the Cistercian monastic order—wrote that Advent is a time of preparation for not just one coming of Christ, as a manger-child on a chilly winter night, nor even for two, at the end of time. “There are three comings of the Lord” he wrote. “The third lies between the other two. It is invisible while the other two are visible.”

     Our passage describes the second of Bernard’s comings in poetic language, when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” It’s very much couched in the world-view of the time, with Heaven—the abode of the gods and the realm of the stars—pictured as being above us, and that the coming of the Son of Man would shake up even that realm.

     It’s important to understand that this is poetic language, that’s it’s not to be taken literally. The folks in Jesus’ time—or Mark’s 40 year’s later—would have understood that, they would have understood that poetry can be a way of expressing the inexpressible, that somehow the present order, the way things are, will change, it will cease being what they are and become something new. It’s an example of how the Christian view of things differs markedly from the purely scientific, materialistic world-view, where things just keep on keeping on, following the second law of thermodynamics, until the Star we call the Sun burns out. What happens to us is governed by these things alone, there is no overarching reason for things, no overarching end.

     Christians, like all world religions, believe that there is such a reason, such an end, and that the divine is working through cosmic history towards it. Teilhard de Chardin called it the Omega Point, and believed that it will be a culmination of the Christification, the bringing humanity together as one, pushed there by evolution, and bound by the forces of love. Teilhard’s vision is a hopeful one that views all the trials and tribulations, as Jesus would call today’s increasing chaos, as necessary prelude to that coming together, when the lion will lie down with the lamb and we will practice war no more.

     But what about St. Bernard’s third coming, the one that comes between the other two? “The intermediate coming is a hidden one” he wrote, in which we see the Lord’s coming within our own hearts. It’s a coming that happens every day, one that was promised by Jesus himself, in spirit and power. Where he is in us just as the Father is in him.

And so, sisters and brothers, this Advent I suggest that we look not only to the external, not only to the lights and advent wreaths and candles, and not only toward the future either, toward that image of time and place—however it’s pictured—when the stars fall from the sky. I suggest that we look inward, into our hearts, to find the Christ within, who comes to us not only at this chilly time and place, but every day and minute and hour of our lives. Amen.

Shepherd-King (Matthew 25:31 - 26:2)

     Next week is the first week in Advent, and it has kind of a double vision, looking both forward and backward, forward to what we call the second coming, and backward to the first.  This week, we’ve jumped forward to the kingdom’s arrival, and it’s a well-known passage: Jesus says “just as you did it to one of the least of these . . .  you did it to me.” And we often stop right there, and interpret it as exhortation to do good, to be all around good people, to do social justice in Christ’s name. And that’s not a bad way to see it, of course . . . how many of us, when we see somebody in rags, or obviously homeless or stranded, how many of us have passed on by? No need to raise your hands . . . I bet most of us have done that . . . I know I have . . . but how many of us, if we saw it was Jesus trudging along Highway 4, would keep on truckin’? None of us, I imagine. And that’s what this passage says, at least in part – refusing to help people in need is the same as passing by Jesus. Helping people in need is the same thing as helping Jesus.

But if we see this passage as just a call to visit the jail once in awhile, or haul some clothes down to Goodwill, we miss the overall thrust of the passage. It isn’t about the righteous sheep, or the accursed goats, or even about the needy themselves. It’s about Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, and that’s appropriate – it is, after all, Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Church year. Next week, it all starts up again – the lighting of the Advent candles, the singing of “O Come O Come, Emmanuel,” the count-down to Christmas and then Easter . . . but this week we take a look at the person of Jesus, whom we call the Christ.

Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man,” and it’s the most disputed of all his titles. Just what it meant is obscure to us two thousand years after the fact . . . but for Matthew and his readers, it probably implies an apocalyptic rescuer who will come as a judge at the end of time, and sure enough, our passage is about judgment at the end of time, it’s about judgment day – the Son of Man will come in glory, Jesus says, and “all the angels with him,” and “he will sit on the throne of his glory.” And it is glorious, this image of the final times . . . all the nations will be gathered there, all the peoples from the ends of the earth, and he will rule over them all from his throne of glory.

But our image of the future comes crashing back down to the present reality, or at least to the reality at the time Jesus spoke . . . in the last lines of his speech, as the disciples wonder at the sheep and goats, and the Shepard-King who separates them, in the last line of his speech Jesus brings them right back down to earth – “after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” The Son of Man! The king and judge and jury, all rolled into one – handed over like a slave to a horrible death.

And our tale of sheep and goats and clothing and feeding is embraced within diametrically opposed images of the Son of Man – sovereign Lord, Son of God, sitting on the judgment-throne versus humiliated slave, spiked to a tree, gasping out his last breaths in the gloom . . . and the identity of Christ spans these two extremes, because as Christians we confess that he has been crucified, dead and buried and yet will return in glory, thus, as we say, “to judge the quick and the dead.”

But in the meantime . . . haven’t we been assured that Jesus is here? Doesn’t he say, in the last line of Matthew’s Gospel “Lo, I am with you, even to the end of the age”? How can he be with us, and yet return to us?  Most often we say – he’s with us in spirit now, but will return in flesh at the second coming, and although it’s a workable answer, it’s not very satisfying, because it doesn’t really say anything . . . it sounds like what we say at funerals – “Uncle Bob will always be with us in our hearts . . .” but you’d hope it’d mean a little more than that.

Our passage gives us a clue . . . sandwiched in between contrasting images of the Son of Man is the story of the separation of the flock. He sits on his throne and separates the sheep from the goats, and tells the sheep:  “Come . . . inherit the kingdom prepared for you.” But he tells the goats: “depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels!” These goats, he says, “will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.”

Eternal punishment. Consuming fire. Pretty serious stuff . . . but the kicker, the really surprising thing is the reasoning: the righteous and accursed aren’t separated according to those who have faith, and those who don’t; or who is chosen by God and who isn’t. There’s not a lot of grace here, that I can see – those who inherit the kingdom are those that give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, who welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick and visit the prisoners. Those that are consigned to the fires with the devil and his minions are those that don’t do those things. It’s as simple as that.

Now this may be surprising to those of us brought up on God’s grace, and it surprises the sheep, too, so they ask him about it, they ask when they did this stuff for him, when did they feed him, and clothe him and comfort him and visit him in jail? And his answer is simple “when you did it to the least of these.” But the goats are just as shocked: “when was it we did not take care of you?” Jesus answers them the same way: “When you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

So here’s one way Jesus is “with us always”  he’s with the hungry, he’s with the naked, the stranger and the prisoner . . . but it’s more than just being with them, it’s a stunning, intimate closeness . . . in some sense he is them, because whatever we do – or don’t do – to the naked and the stranger, the hungry and the sick, we do – or don’t do – to Jesus. It’s more than just he is with them, it’s an identification with them, they represent Christ to us on this earth, in this age, until the fulfillment of the kingdom, until he comes again.

So here we have a triple-lensed image of Christ, a three-fold rendering of the Lord’s presence. First, he is Son of Man who comes in glory, trailing angels like stars, sitting in judgment on a brilliant throne. Second, he is the despised and rejected of the world, the hungry and the naked, the sick and the stranger. Finally, he is the Son of God, who suffers and is handed over to be crucified, to be hung up on a cross. The three views are inextricable one from another, you can’t untangle them, or talk about one apart from the others. He is the judge who will come like the morning, to separate the sheep from the goats, but who is himself judged, who dies to “save his people from their sins.” A different kind of judge, to say the least, and a different kind of judgment.  He is the king of the universe, ruler of the cosmos, ensconced on a throne of glory, who is at the same time suffering and hungry and naked, at one with the sick and the outcast and the marginal. A different kind of king, to say the least, and a different kind of kingdom.

In Jesus Christ, these three roles, these three images are held in tension, they are compatible only in him . . . he is at their center, and if we reject any one of them, we reject him . . . if we reject the Shepherd king, we reject the outcasts. And if we reject the outcasts, the hungry and the unclothed, we reject the savior of us all.

And that was the lesson for Jesus’ disciples, and it’s the same for us today . . . caring for the outcasts, the naked and the stranger, the poor and the prisoner is the same as caring for Jesus; accepting them is accepting Jesus. If feeding the hungry is feeding Jesus, if giving caring for the sick is caring for Jesus, the relationship between them is far more than casual . . . it is one of equivalence, of intimacy . . . Jesus’ identity is somehow bound up in the weakest, most despised members of society. But the taking care of the outcast –  which is taking care of Jesus – places us in a similar, vulnerable position. It’s not just carrying a turkey down to the shelter on Thanksgiving, or working the food bank on Christmas eve, although these things are surely important. Caring as Jesus did means intimate involvement, it means identifying with those we care for, just as he did. When we clothe the naked, we are with them in their shame, in their unclean-ness, we guide them to the healing love of Jesus Christ. When we feed the hungry, we do it no matter how they got that way, like we would a sister, or a brother, or our savior . . . do we judge them? Do we means-test them? And when we welcome the stranger, we welcome the one who’s strange, who’s different, whose thoughts are different, whose desires are different. We welcome her into our family, into our lives, we make room for her at the table.

These are dangerous acts, sometimes for dangerous people . . . if we associate with them, if we welcome them into our fellowship and into our hearts, like Jesus we become identified with them, suddenly we become like them, and that can be risky in polite society. Instead of people like everybody else, who just happen to spend Sunday mornings in church, we become suspect to the rest of society. Neighborhood coalitions start to form, people write editorials maligning our credentials, and the Pharisees –  I mean the police – start to make routine visits, ask probing questions. And the next thing you know, we’re run out of town, or brought before the regional governor on trumped up charges, or maybe sentenced to rot in a Roman prison . . .

Identifying with the weakest, most despised members of society is hazardous – just look what happened to Jesus. But it’s the essence of Christian discipleship, I think. After all, Jesus is there, in solidarity with the outcasts of the world, with the dregs of society . . .  and isn’t that where we’re called to be as well? Aren’t we called to be Christ-like, to follow his example in this age as well as the next? Because after all, the conditions of this world are not ultimate, the misery and suffering and despising and casting-out are only pen-ultimate, only temporary and provisional. For Jesus is present to us as more than just the weak, more than just the despised, he’s present as the crucified savior who dies for our sake, so that at the end of the age, when the last trumpet sounds and the lion lies down with the lamb, when the Son of Man comes in majesty and sits on his throne of glory, he will say to us: “Welcome, blessed of God: come into the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the universe.”  Amen.

A Talented Bunch (Matthew 25:14 - 30)

     One of the things we must consider whenever we interpret one of Jesus’ parables is their nature as mashal . . . remember?   We talked about it before, it means “dark saying.”  As in difficult to interpret, hidden, not-straightforward.  And the thing to remember is that they were just as dark to the first-century Christians, as they are to us.  Even more so:  they didn’t have 2 millennia of interpretive tradition to fix an interpretation in their minds.  Even if it isn’t what Jesus originally had in mind.

The thing is, Jesus must have used mashal for a reason, right?  Otherwise, why do it?   Why didn’t Jesus just say: ok, here’s what I mean, and just blatt it out?  Ok, ok . . . he did do that a couple of times, like in the parable of the seed scattered on the sidewalk, but normally, no.  Even though he could have made them obvious, he could have spelled out what he meant, I am convinced that he wanted us to struggle, to wrestle with his words.  Contrary to popular belief, this Christianity stuff is not easy, even though becoming Christians is . . . but living into our faiths isn’t easy, it isn’t easy figuring out what Jesus meant, much less how we’re supposed to apply it.

And here’s a radical thought: maybe its meaning isn’t fixed.  Maybe there is no one meaning, maybe it depends on the context of those who are listening.  The classic example of this is over in Luke, where he says “I come to bring good news to the poor,” and some folks, folks with money, perhaps, who might be less inclined than others to give “their” money to poor people, tend to spiritualize it, saying it means the good news of salvation, but the poor—who tend to be more concrete, maybe because they’re too busy scrambling for food—the poor tend to say “Hallelujah!  That’s really good news!  We’re gonna get something to eat . . .”

But what if it’s both?  Or neither?  Or some other interpretation we haven’t thought about?  What if that is one of the reasons Jesus spoke so often in mashal form: not only is it good for us to figure out their meanings for ourselves, but they leave wiggle room for interpretation, for being adapted to a time and place.  We Presbyterians profess to believe in “Reformed and always being reformed by the Spirit of God.”  To my mind, this is one way of giving room to the Spirit: admitting of more than one interpretation of any given passage . . .

And the way this parable has traditionally been interpreted by us sober-sided, financially responsible, mainline protestants is through the lens of fiscal responsibility, being good stewards of what God has given us.  God gets mad if we fritter it away, this interpretation goes, but God gets furious when we don’t make something of it, when we don’t multiply it to do mission, to further the Kingdom of God on Earth.  And a related interpretation—more closely related than many of us like to admit—is the prosperity doctrine version, which emphasizes the part where the master says—notice it’s not Jesus saying this as an interpretation, but the master in the parable—“So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents.  For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”   And we think “quite right, quite right . . . it’s like wise investment in a growing business, or in blue chip stocks . . . we as stewards of God’s bounty must be sober and sound, investing it into solid missions where the return in souls is assured.  If a mission doesn’t carry its weight, if numbers served or brought into the church don’t increase, cut it out!  Be done with it! Look what happens to people—and churches!—who accumulate money and don’t do anything with it, don’t use it for the mission of God.  They get thrown into outer darkness, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Gnash, gnash, gnash.”

Note that this assumes a certain kind of reading, an allegorical one where we assign people or things in real life to things in the story, in the allegory, and that means the “master” must be assigned as God for a good-steward reading to make sense.  But there are problems with that kind of reading: the servant says “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed” and is that a fair assessment of God as we understand it? Does God—whom we define, after all, as love—does God take other peoples’ stuff? Does he reap where he hasn’t sewn?  Is that a loving thing to do?  And the “master” doesn’t contradict him!  He doesn’t say: that is not how I operate, you know . . . that may be the way of the world, but it’s not mine . . . no.  The master admits it: “You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.”  And here’s another thing that doesn’t ring true: charging interest was against the Torah, against the laws of Moses, where it is was considered usery no matter how much is charged.  And in this most Jewish of gospels, can you imagine God asking someone to go to a userer?

I have an idea: why don’t we read it exactly as written?  Why don’t we read it straight?  The master is  a wealthy landowner, nothing more nothing less.  Likewise, the slaves are slaves, probably stewards, household slaves charged with managing the affairs of the master.  This was a common enough scenario in the first century, that masters entrusted their stuff to trusted servants.

If we do this, it all falls into line, it all makes perfect sense.  The master is doing what masters often do, and more important, Jesus’ depiction of the master is historically accurate.  In the first century, you didn’t get to be a wealthy landowner by being nice.  You got that way by power tactics, by swindling and cheating and mistreating others.  You got that way by reaping where you did not sew, by taking the fruits of the labors of others.  It was like that Tennessee Ernie Ford song, I owe my soul to the company store:  small landowners were routinely charged outrageous prices, so that in lean years, they got into increasing debt with the big landowners, debt they couldn’t quite pay off in fat years, so that after a time, the only thing left to take was their land.  That’s how wealthy landowners got wealthier, on the backs of the poor—kind of like today, actually, with the income gap becoming ever larger and wider between those with a lot and those with . . . less.

And the last words of the master—remember, they aren’t Jesus’—ring true if the master isn’t supposed to be God, but just a wealthy landowner:  “ . . . to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”  This is a simple statement of historical fact: those with money will get more.  It takes money to make money, doesn’t it?  And second clause was true as well:  from those with nothing, even what they have will be taken away.  And this had, perhaps, literally happened to some of the disciples who were listening:  They would have no trouble understanding just who the master represents, they knew that for all too many just like them, as they began to owe more and more, and could pay less and less, even their land, their ancestral holdings, what little they had, was finally taken away.

And of course, that is what is happening today, isn’t it?  Since the early 1970s, real wages—i.e., wages adjusted for inflation—have decreased for those outside of that notorious top 1%, which have increased.  And as more and more people got further and further behind, consumer debt rose, people began to use credit cards for daily expenses.   In 1980, total CEO pay equaled 42% of the total blue collar pay, while last year, it had grown to 343% of the blue collar.  In the meantime, in the last 10 years alone, median household income fell $3,719.  To those who have, more is certainly being given.  And those who have relatively nothing began to lose what they do have—their homes, the basis of the American dream.

Well, now that we have a good idea what Jesus might have been talking about, why would he say it?  And why would Matthew place that parable right here?  Remember, its in the section of his gospel dealing with the second coming, and it follows a kingdom parable, the parable of the bridesmaids, which we looked at last week.  At the end of that, Jesus says “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”  And ours begins “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them.”  And the “it” it refers to is the second coming, which will happen we know not when.   And like the bridesmaids, the slaves don’t know when the master will return, and like the bridesmaids, some do one thing, and some another.

But here’s the difference: in the parable of the bridesmaids, nothing was said about the character of the bridegroom, just that he was coming.  But here, in the parable of the talents, it’s clear that the master is not a nice guy: even he agrees!   He reaps where he does not sew, gathers where he does not scatter.  He is a rapacious land owner, and the disciples to which this parable was told are all too familiar with the type.  And two of the slaves—the ones to whom more was given, not coincidentally—participate in his rapacious behavior, they go out and emulate the wicked master, and he praises them for it, he rewards them.  But the one to whom the least is given does nothing of the kind:  what he does is not waste the master’s cash, as did the prodigal son, but he buries it.  By doing this, he doesn’t do anything technically wrong, he just refuses to participate in the master’s greedy behavior.  He refuses to reap where he doesn’t sew.

Mahatma Gandhi was a fan of Jesus.  One of his most famous one-liners shows that: “I like your Christ,” he said “I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”   But less known is the fact that he modeled his famous techniques of non-violent resistance, techniques that ultimately drove the British colonialists out of India, on those of Christ.  We’ve talked about them before: turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, whose face is on the coin . . . placed in historical context, these stories can be seen as examples of resisting the Roman oppressors without the use of violence.   Pastor and biblical scholar David Ewart points out that the actions of the third slave are in that vein:  he breaks no law, does nothing violent—as in Colonial India, all the cards are in the hands of the powers that be anyway—yet he refuses to play the world’s game.  He refuses to participate in the master’s selfish ways.  He refuses to help him reap where he does not sew.

And he pays the price doesn’t he?  The same price paid by the early Christian martyrs: all he has is taken, and he is cast into the outer darkness, thrown out of his cushy job as household slave, his family left to starve out on their own.  Gnashing of teeth, indeed.  And in this case, Jesus’ use of mashal takes on a whole different dimension: if he had told it outright, if he’d condemned the master and praised the third slave, it might not have gone well for him.  In fact, in the end, it didn’t, did it?  He was hung up on a tree to die.

Brothers and sisters: last week we talked about the wedding banquet—where all eat their fill, rich as well as poor, servant as well as landowner—we talked about it as a powerful metaphor for the kingdom of God, radically opposed to the ways of the empire.  Radically opposed to the rapacious practices of the powerful, who reap what they have not sewn and gather where they did not scatter.  Where to those who already have, more is given, and from those who have nothing, even that is taken away.  As the Church, we are called to be pointers to a just reality, avatars of God’s just ways.  How will we respond?  Amen.

Lamplight (Matthew 25:1 - 13)

     Like all the other Kingdom parables, it sets us thinking: just how is the Kingdom of heaven like, in this case, ten bridesmaids?  And the first thing to notice is the “this,” in the first line.  “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” he says, and it seems to refer to the entire story.  He doesn’t tell us what it is about the story the Kingdom of Heaven is like.  Not a hint, or a clue, or even a little suggestion.  We’re given no pointers, except what’s found in the story itself.  And to figure it out, we have to think first about its context.  To whom is it told, and when?

Well, Jesus tells the original parable to his disciples, and thus to insiders, in about 30 AD.  And he was talking about the parousia, the second coming of Christ, and though scholars debate how important a concept this was to Jesus, there is little doubt that it was of very great importance to early followers of Christ, like those for whom the gospel of Matthew was written fifty years or so after the crucifixion.   In the first century, the entire locus of Christian hope in the first century revolved around this event, which refers to the fulfillment, the establishment of God’s just rule on earth.  That’s the whole idea behind the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God as Jesus calls it in Mark and Luke: the kingdom of heaven is on earth.  It’s like the Lord’s Prayer says: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Jesus is talking to people who have a world-view that sees heaven—where God lives—as the perfect place, the abode of the gods, where everybody gets along, where there’s no hunger or war and et cetera.  Further, people in Jesus’ day believed that earth is an imperfect approximation of heaven, that place where the gods rule, where in particular God sits on a throne.  New Testament Christian hope is that God’s just rule will come to earth, that’s the “on earth as it is in heaven” part, and there will be no more starvation or oppression or war.

Now, a banquet is a common image for that Kingdom because, after all, there is never any want at a banquet … there is always plenty to go around, plenty to eat and drink, and for all the people to whom Jesus preached the Good News—the poor, as it says over in Luke—a banquet is impossibly fine, they’d never be invited to a banquet in real life, only rich people went to banquets, this is good news to the poor indeed.  And on top of that, a wedding banquet . . . well.  Weddings went on for seven days . . .  seven days of eating and drinking, and, uh, other things, seven days of no worries and no trouble, and we know what the number seven represents, don’t we.  It’s the perfect number, it represents fulfillment, completeness, and so the kingdom of heaven is a lack of want and worry . . . perfected, completed.  And as kind of an aside, this illuminates the changing of the water into wine over in John, doesn’t it?  That’s a wedding banquet, and Jesus enables it to be brought to its completion, its fulfillment, by ensuring the abundance of a component critical to all Jewish banquets.

Anyway.  Here’s another feature that’s important to understanding this parable: unlike today, when we are so fixated on time, on events beginning and ending on time, in those days, things happened when they . . . happened.  Nobody said—“ok, the bridegroom is gonna arrive at 6 pm, and it’ll take 2 and a half minutes to march down the aisles, five minutes for the bad rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon and seven for do you Sarah take this man Abraham, yadda, yadda, yadda, so we oughta be at the banquet table by, oh . . . seven-ish.”  Events like weddings happened when they happened, when things were ready, and that wasn’t up to the guests or, in that day, the bride.  They happened when the bridegroom showed up, and him being late wasn’t all that uncommon.  Often times, a little last minute negotiation with the father of the bride would have to be done, a little last minute squabbling over the terms of her dowry which, unlike today, was of critical importance to the whole shebang..

And so although they had a general idea that the bridegroom would arrive there that evening, they weren’t sure when that would be.  That’s why we’re told the bridegroom was delayed, and in fact, the Greek word cronidzo we render as delayed might be more accurately translated as “taking time”, so you must get say the bridegroom was taking his own sweet time, but it’s not that he was late, because there was no deadline that he could be late from.  And of course, this is exactly the nature of the parousia, the second coming—whatever it’s going to be— isn’t it?  Paul says it will come like a thief in the night, Jesus himself warned of the futility of predicting the exact time and date . . . it will come when it comes, it will come when the bridegroom—and in this parable, that’s Jesus himself—is ready. 

But that hasn’t kept everybody from Jack Van Impe to Hal Lindsey to Jerry Falwell from trying to predict the time and days.  The latest I know of was Harold Camping, former head of Family Radio, who predicted the rapture on May 21, 2011 followed by the second coming and destruction of the world by God on October 21 of that year.  When the rapture didn’t happen, he said there’d been a “spiritual judgment,” and that the rapture and destruction of the world would happen on October 21.  When that didn’t happen, a major theological publication—The International Business Journal—labeled him a false prophet.  And to that I say “well, Duh.”

Putting aside the question of why these people would so clearly disregard the advice of Jesus and try to predict the unpredictable, it is this unpredictability that this parable hinges upon.  The first-century Christians had expected the second coming within their generation—mainly because Jesus said so at one point—and they were getting a little antsy.  And this story said something to their impatience . . . but what?  Let’s see . . . there are ten bridesmaids waiting where the wedding is to be held, and what they’re waiting for is to line the streets, to observe and perhaps ooh and ah, over the procession of the bridegroom and also of the bride.  Jewish weddings began this way, perhaps because after the wedding processing would be out of the question.  And remember that the bridegroom is taking a long time in coming, and the bridesmaids had fallen asleep, but that isn’t the problem.  It isn’t like with James and John and Peter in the Garden who couldn’t keep awake, the bridesmaids were human beings and they’d been waiting a long time.  No, the problem is that it’s dark by the time the bridegroom arrives, midnight, in fact, and so here’s the scene: ten bridesmaids snoozing away and suddenly there’s a shout:  the bridegroom!  The bridegroom is here!  And they all wake up with a start, and they start trimming their lamps, so as to light the way for the bridegroom, when the lamps of five of them—who hadn’t brought any extra oil—begin to sputter and go out.  They can’t relight them to light the bridegroom’s way because they have not anticipated that he might arrive after dark.  They had assumed he’d process when it was light, when he was supposed to, for Pete’s sake, and they are caught flat-footed, unable to honor the bridegroom when he arrives.

 By their lack of planning, of taking all contingencies into account, they’d made assumptions about when he was to come, they’d put him in a little box of their own making.  In a way, they’d dishonored his authority, his ability and right to come whenever he wanted to, whenever the time was right, when it was fulfilled, and not before.  They’d done the same thing as our latter day end-times predictors, the Tim LaHayes and Hal Lindsey’s, only the bridesmaids presumably didn’t make any money off of it.

And we in the church are always doing that, aren’t we?  I know I am . . . I’m always reading my own agenda into scripture, thinking “God, you can’t want that, can you?  After all, you’re not like that, are you?  You’re like this, or like that over there . . .”  We often mistake our own agendas for God’s, trying to get God to arrive in our own time, surely before it gets dark, or get God to behave the way we think God should.  We think God can’t really like that new-fangled style of worship—I just know God hates drums—when it’s really we ourselves can’t stand ‘em.  And like the foolish bridesmaids with the bridegroom, this dishonors God, it presumes that God doesn’t have the freedom to act in whatever way God wants.  It presumes that we know better than God, that our own tastes and preferences are to be followed rather than the Divine.

Well.  The bridesmaids without oil frantically try to borrow some from the ones who have it, but they say they don’t have enough, and they go into the wedding banquet and the door is shut, bang.  And it’s midnight, for Pete’s sake, yet the foolish bridesmaids go out looking for an oil seller.  What, is Achmed the oil-dealer open 24/7 these days?  Is the Ameristop keeping holiday hours?  And though we’re not told whether or they get any or not, I suspect they don’t, because they come back and bang on the door, saying “Lord, lord, open to us.”  But the bridegroom opens the door and says “Truly I say to you”—and you know it’s serious when he says that—“Truly I say to you, I do not know you.”  And though the Greek word we translate as “know” means literally “to see,” it has a deep range of meanings—to know about, to be intimately acquainted with, to understand—and the bridegroom doesn’t know the foolish bridesmaids.

When the disciples brought his mother and sister, Jesus would not see them, saying instead that his brothers and sisters and mother are those that do the will of God.  Those he knows, those he understands, those he has intimate familial acquaintance with are those who do God’s will, not their own.  Therefore, sisters and brothers, let us be prepared . . . let us do what the bridegroom wants us to do, not what we think he does.  Let us honor the bridegroom by letting him  determine the course of his ministry: it is not up to us.  Let us be ready for his coming by doing what is expected of us, by working in peace and harmony and loving cooperation, joyfully doing the will of God, lest the time of the bridegroom’s coming takes us unaware.  Amen.