Faith for the Long Haul

11-12-17

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and our lord and savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Think about all the weddings you have been to all through the years. Each wedding is very different, but each wedding was also the same –they seem to be a continuous game of “Hurry Up and Wait.”

Hurry up and Wait for the service to start. …to greet the bride and groom after. Waiting to take pictures. … for cocktail hour to be over and dinner to begin. … for dancing, and then the cutting of the cake. All that waiting makes for a long night!

Another thing that’s true about weddings – the unexpected always happens. When I preformed my brother’s wedding two years ago, a bee got stuck my very hairsprayed hair right before the service! Fortunately, no bees or hair were harmed, and the rest of the service happened without incident! Another time, at my former congregation, one of the bridesmaids was in desperate need of a safety pin, which fortunately we had in the sacristy.

I’ve been a bridesmaid a couple of times too. Like weddings, there is something that all bridesmaid’s dresses seem have in common, no matter what the style. Almost none of them have pockets.

If you are a woman, you know the struggle. If you are a man, prepare to be enlightened. Do you ever wonder why women carry around gigantic purses and occasionally ask you to hold them for us? It’s because clothing manufactures have decided that pockets big enough to hold something useful like a cell phone, don’t look good on women’s clothing. So many of us make do with purses to carry everything we need, just in case.

Have you ever played that game at baby showers or bridal showers called Purse Bingo? It’s the one where you’re asked to dig through your purse to find strange or random items that you might be carrying around in there…. Like floss, socks, a screwdriver, extra batteries, or extra lamp oil.

Just kidding about the last one. But I wonder, if all of the bridesmaids in Jesus’s parable today had a purse, or at least bridesmaids’ dresses with pockets, would the story have gone any differently?

This is a really tough story to hear, most especially because Jesus starts out with “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this….” But Jesus, I have so many questions! Why do the “wise” bridesmaids seem so mean? What happens to the foolish bridesmaids? Is Jesus the bridegroom, and the wedding banquet, is that heaven?

And to top it all off, I find this parable hard to jive with what I know and believe to be true about Jesus and his message of love and grace. What happened to - share with our neighbors in need? Or welcoming people who are outsiders?

And who are we supposed to be in the parable? Are we wise bridesmaids or are we foolish bridesmaids? And maybe our answer will change tomorrow, and change again the day after. Today you could might feel like ready and prepared to face whatever life throws at you… and other days you might feel foolish and unprepared, like your lamp is flickering dangerously low and about to go out, and you too are panicking and desperate to keep the darkness at bay…. wondering, why won’t Jesus just come and rescue us already????

Both wise and foolish bridesmaids were waiting in the dark, waiting for the arrival of the bridegroom and the coming wedding celebration. Both wise and foolish bridesmaids fell asleep, since the bridegroom was taking SO LONG.

I wonder if the wise bridesmaids had been in this position before. Perhaps this was familiar to them, and they knew what to expect. They might have known that the night might be long and dark, they might have known what it’s like to run out of oil. Perhaps they had been foolish bridesmaids in the past, and came this time ready for the long dark night ahead.

But shouldn’t this elicit some compassion toward the foolish on the part of the wise? Perhaps not, given the demand that the foolish bridesmaids make – “GIVE US some of your oil!”

Whoa, hold on here. No “please and thank you,” no acknowledgement that they “done messed up,” and didn’t show up prepared. The foolish bridesmaids are foolish not just because they didn’t come ready for a long night, but also because they DEMANDED that their more prepared sisters cough up some of their hard-earned and hard -won wisdom, I mean, oil. The foolish wanted a quick fix, and easy solution, with no accountability on their part.

No one WANTS to sit in the DARK as the night falls. Just look at how much light we put in our lives, especially now that it gets dark out so early in the evening, it seems. No one wants to sit in the “dark night of our souls” sometimes, where things are unclear and uncertain, and the way forward is clouded, relief is nowhere in sight, and joy seems to have run far, far away. But sitting in the dark, your lamp about to go out, waiting for SOMETHING, ANYTHING…. is a place we ALL have been. Probably multiple times by now. The people we love hurt us. The bodies we have been given fall apart and fail us. The things in our lives we though were constant and secure, crumble around us. If there is an easy way to get some light in our lives, let’s do it, drop everything and go after it, spend any amount of money to buy it…. anything but sit in the dark waiting for Jesus.

The foolish bridesmaids were not foolish because they weren’t ready. The foolish bridesmaids were foolish because they didn’t stay in the dark. They didn’t trust the light of the other bridesmaids to carry them through the night. They didn’t acknowledge their lack and ask for help, but instead gave up, seeking a quick fix rather than trust in the other’s light and the love of the approaching bridegroom. They didn’t trust that nothing, not even the deepest point of the night, can stop the bridegroom from arriving.

So here WE are, waiting in the dark, maybe almost asleep, tired out from waiting, maybe with our wicks burning dangerously low. We’re in the “in-between time,” waiting in a twilight world between two dawns – the first being the birth of a baby two thousand years ago to a teenage mom in occupied territory in the Middle East. And the second? Presumably that’s the one that all of us bridesmaids are still waiting for, which is the final victory feast over death and the grave. It’s like the worst invitation to a wedding EVER. We don’t know WHEN or WHERE or HOW it’s happening… only that it WILL.

That doesn’t mean it’s nap time. To make it through this waiting time in one piece, together, as the body of Christ, we’re going to need all-hands-on-deck, and pool together every single gift that God has given us. For some of is that may mean giving a portion of what we earn or increasing our offering to the church, to do the holy and humble work of keeping the lights on so that our building may continue to be a ministry to the community - being of use to groups like AA, NA, Al. Anon, Girl Scouts, Civil Air Patrol, and the homeschool group. For others, it may come as a calling to serve on one of the committees that help KEEPS our ministries going. For others, it may mean giving time for service projects. For still others, we may be called to offer our talents and passions for justice, for the good of this community.

How do we want to be a part of God’s kingdom here on earth for the next 500 years? Are we going to be a church that falls asleep on the job? Are we going to up and leave, and let our lights go out in a world that needs us? Or are we going to work together, even though the way might be dark, working to keep our lights shining for Jesus and his work for justice, reconciliation, and an end to every kind of violence for all God’s children?

On this day that we make our commitments to something as seeming small and inconsequential as a church budget, we ask ourselves …. how are we going to be actively waiting… together… to build up this community and our world in the name of Jesus, the one we place our trust in?

Speaking of being prepared, I would like us to take a moment to reflect on what you have written or want to write on your leaf that you received this morning. This is not a binding contract, of course. And we are not limited to one thing. But I would like us to sit for just a minute and think about what we want to write on our leaves, which will soon join other leaves on our little offering tree here.

(Here is where we filled out our leaves)

In a few minutes we’ll be handing in our pledge cards, and also hanging our leaves on this little tree here. This is an act of daring, holy hope. This is an act that says, we are not just willing to wait for Jesus to arrive for us, but we are willing to help make that happen in this church, in the community, and in our world.

We are not giving up. We won’t be distracted. We are not searching for a quick fix. We are in this for the long haul, folks, and we are in this TOGETHER. The going might be tough. The way might be hard to see. Our lamps might threaten to go out on us. And Jesus might take his sweet time showing up.

But we have each other to sit in the shadows, waiting for the dawn together. We have the call of our baptisms to wake us from the sleep of despair and complacency. We have the body and blood of Christ to sustain us as we work. And we do have Jesus, who always comes out to meet us. Amen.