Transcription
Offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs, I will not listen to the melody of your harps, but let justice roll down the waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
And our New Testament lesson from Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew chapter 25, starting at verse 1. Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the groom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, look, here is the bridegroom, come out to meet him. Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, give us some oil, some of your oil, for our lamps are going out. But 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. And 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. Later the other bridesmaids came also saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. But he replied, truly, I tell you, I do not know you. Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. This is the word of the Lord.
Let us pray. Gracious and loving God, we thank you. We thank you for your word that lights our path and guides our hearts, that shows us the way to serve. Be with us as we listen to your word. Be with us as it moves within us and through us as we are led to serve your people. Gracious God, hear our prayer. Amen.
So it got me thinking about certain weird wedding traditions as I read this scripture. Because how many of us have ever been to a wedding where the bridesmaids all stood outside for an undetermined, unknown period of time and waited for the bridegroom to show up? And, we’ll throw a little extra onto it, if they weren’t there and weren’t awake when he showed up, they didn’t get to go to the party. What is more, the party was not just a one-day deal. It was an all-week deal. Instead of the honeymoon, the bride and groom would sit around in their new home together and play host to everybody in town who would come and visit and celebrate. And after that week, they took a week off of work and just stayed inside and didn’t open the door for anybody. The last part I made up.
Now, as I was thinking about this, I started thinking about when Sarah and I planned our wedding and some of the weird family Croatian traditions. You ever heard of a bride dance where the groomsmen all basically sit there and you go and you buy a dance with the bride and the poor bride’s feet are ready to fall off by the end of the night because she had to dance with Uncle Al, who literally can’t dance and steps on her toes the whole time?
Or kidnapping the groom or the bride. That’s a Croatian one. They take the bride or groom, take them to a room in the reception, and they go find the uncle or aunt, and they’ve already set it up already, and they basically say, how much to get the bride or groom back? And literally, they pay, and the whole proceeds go to the bride or groom, and it’s supposed to help them start off their life together. Again, weird traditions that were probably a little like, eh, but all traditions that Sarah and I had to tell my great aunts, we’re not doing those.
So you can imagine how different a wedding would look like now versus when Jesus was telling this parable. There’s quite a bit of difference. One, I think for most of us, the idea of having 10 bridesmaids, or even 10 groomsmen for that matter. But the fact that they have to go out for an unknown amount of time and be ready and wait. There’s no GPS, no air tag slipped into the groom’s shoe. You can’t track him with find by phone. When he shows up, that’s when the party starts. And I’m sure we’re all right now thinking of that person we know who we would never want to go to his wedding because he would be about eight hours late. Now, the hard part with Russ here is, Russ would be the guy who was there before the wedding was scheduled to start. Two hours early, that’s right. The fact of the matter is, this is all about being prepared, being ready for what and when you didn’t know. When we think about certain weddings in scripture, the wedding at Cana always comes to mind. Why’d they run out of wine? Because they weren’t prepared. Because they expected fewer guests who were sticking around for less time, and it caused quite a problem until, well, Jesus saved them.
The reality is, this wedding tradition is all about being ready. Some of the bridesmaids are ready, and some of them are very much not. Half are, half aren’t. All it took was to have a little bit of oil. Now, we’re not talking packing for a trip to go, say, to the middle of Colorado in the mountains where you have to pack a long list of things, right? Being prepared is very simple for these bridesmaids. You have to have the lamp, you have to have enough oil. Enough oil for that unknown, untold amount of time.
And that unknown part, that unknown being ready, is something we don’t get in this modern day and age. If we want to track something, we can hop on Amazon and see where our package is, almost right down to the minute. UPS, UPS has an app, you can track them. Our kids, if they’re on the bus, you just find my phone and see where the bus is so you don’t have to wait a long time to get to the bus stop. We have cut so many corners about waiting, that waiting we don’t encounter so much.
We also don’t like, in the scripture, that people don’t get into the party if they aren’t ready. There’s an element where we kind of bristle at that. But why aren’t people let in? They just went to get some more oil, they were at least trying to get the oil, they weren’t trying to sit there and do nothing. But what Jesus tells us here is that being prepared doesn’t mean a lot. It doesn’t take having a backpack with all sorts of supplies for all potential eventualities. It’s not like when you have your emergency go bag in your house for the moment when whatever natural disaster you’ve prepped for, or all the natural disasters you’ve prepped for, sit there. You know, one of those heavy bags that they tell you to have in case of emergencies with canned goods, flashlights, matches. It’s been a while since I’ve prepped one of these, but you know what I’m talking about. The reality is that it’s about being ready. So what does it mean for us to be ready? What does it mean for the average Christian to be ready? Well, as we can see through the bridesmaids, there are those who are ready in the immediate, and those who kick being ready down to the curb. I’ll get ready later. I’ll ask for more oil later. I’ll have to do that later.
The challenge here is later does not exist in this parable, because later is not a concept. You have to prepare. You have to make ready. You have to get ready. You have to do the little things to prepare yourself. Not long ago, we sat in here as the fire alarm went off and it was distracting a little bit, because the kids were preparing for what might happen. They were getting ready. Does that mean that a fire could happen at any moment? No. It might, but the kids did a drill to prepare.
When I was a kid growing up in the Midwest, we had tornado drills. You go into the hallway of your school, you turn this way, you get all small. We were preparing and making ready. Did any of us have any idea that we would be safe if a tornado hit our school? We didn’t know.
I remember my grandfather, when I got my first car, he decided I had to get ready. So I got handed two things with that first car. I got handed a check and a list. The check was to pay for what was on the list. And it was a list of things like a toolbox, jumper cables, flares, all the necessities that I needed to have my car ready.
So what does being prepared look like for a Christian? Well, the first thing is to consider what we are preparing for. The thing we’re preparing for is, of course, the return of the King of Kings, the return of Christ, when Christ will come again. And being prepared means living as he commanded. Every moment we can. Every moment we live. Now that means we’re prepared for the moment, for every second, for every time we are walking and living as Christ commands. Because why? Because we are prepared.
We don’t pass that commandment to love God and love our neighbor to tomorrow. Because tomorrow is not prepared. To love our neighbor as ourselves, to love God with all of our everything, is now, is being prepared. There’s no surprise if Jesus comes and we’re not ready. He’s told us what it looks like. He’s told us what we need to do to be prepared. There’s no jump scare about it, you know, where somebody hides behind a doorway waiting for you to go past and then they jump out. There’s none of that with Jesus. Jesus will tell you exactly what you need to do, how you need to do it, and the reality is you’ve got to do it. Because if you don’t do it, if you aren’t prepared, what happens? We can argue and say, well, but He needs to tell us the moment, He needs to tell us when, He needs to tell us… He’s told us when. At some point. He’s told us to live prepared, to live every minute sustained of that place. And it’s not like following the gospel, following Christ is like leaving your engine running for four days. It’s not like that. Because when we follow what Christ teaches, when we live out the gospel, when we live as Christ has commanded, it’s not going to burn us out. It’s going to give us life. It’s going to lighten our load. It’s going to give us steps a little lighter. It will help us to live every day. But we can’t kick that can down the road. We can’t say, I’ll be ready tomorrow. I’ll be ready later. I’ll be ready when I want to be ready.
Because at some point, He will return. At some point, Christ will come back. And the challenge for us is to be ready when it happens. And if we aren’t, if we aren’t, what will we say? Oh, but Jesus, I was going to be ready tomorrow. If we were teachers in the room, former teachers, current teachers, let me ask you a question. If you tell a kid that a test is coming and they tell you, but I was going to study tomorrow. Are you going to give him the test tomorrow? No, because you told them to be ready. You told them that it was coming. The challenge for us is, are we going to be ready? Will we live out the gospel every day as if today is the day that Christ returns? Today will be the moment, being prepared. Will we? Because Christ has not suggested these things. He has commanded. He has commanded that we be prepared.
So brothers and sisters, let us live today, tomorrow, as if Christ were coming today or tomorrow.