A Fourth Church Sermon by Rocky Supinger | Sunday, November 12, 2017

Sunday, November 12, 2017 | 8:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Why don’t you think of [God] as the one who is coming,
who has been approaching from all eternity?
What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages
that are coming into existence,
and living your life as a painful and lovely day
in the history of a great pregnancy?

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

I’m in high school, and I’m driving back to my home in suburban Denver when my 1982 Datsun 200sx starts to sputter. The heat gauge goes all the way to hot, and a clanging noise starts intruding from under the hood. I drive on, praying only to make it home. It’s late at night. And cold—January.
Then, the engine dies. Fortunately I’m close enough to an exit to pull off I-70, but the car doesn’t even roll to the end of the exit; I pull it over on the shoulder and try to figure out what to do.

There’s an office park about 100 yards from the ramp up a little snowy embankment, and I can see some lights on. So I climb up through the dark and approach one of the glass doors, where I can see three people inside.

I tap on the glass, and those three jump right out of their seats. They look at me bewildered. They look at each other, then look at me again. After some tense moments of internal deliberation, one of them cautiously approaches the door and asks, “What do you want?”

I explain my situation as calmly as I can and ask only if I can use their phone to call my parents. No.
I plead, practically beg. Finally, she offers a compromise: she will call my parents for me. Fine. She calls. I watch from outside. She’s talking to my parents. She keeps looking over at me. She never smiles. Finally she comes back to the door to report that my dad is on his way.

She never did let me in.

This is where we find the foolish bridesmaids in this parable from the Gospel of Matthew: outside. The door is shut. They’re are not allowed in.

Have you ever been in that place, looking up at a door that’s been closed to you? I’m sure you have.
Now, some doors were never open to begin with. I was never going to be a bullfighter or a rock star. We hear from childhood, “You can be anything you set your mind to,” but we learn in time that’s not true. Some doors are just never open to us. It’s circumstance. Timing. Inclination. Natural ability.

While we’re talking about closed doors, we should note that some doors are kept shut by forces on the inside that don’t want us to get in. Lots and lots of doors have been closed and kept closed tight to people who aren’t white, aren’t heterosexual, aren’t male. Changing laws cracks those doors open a bit, but not all the way; there are still powerful forces at work to keep them shut enough to prevent people from getting in.

The door that’s shut on the foolish bridesmaids is not that kind of door, though. It was open to them. They just missed their chance to go through it.

I imagine we’ve all let some doors close that we know won’t open to us again. It happens. We make our peace with it, hopefully.

But the parable of the ten bridesmaids says something unsettling about the possibility of missing out on what Matthew’s Gospel calls “The kingdom of heaven.” And that’s a terrible thing to miss.

The five foolish bridesmaids miss out on a wedding banquet. In Jesus’ time this would have been a party that lasted for days. There would have been feasting, of course, and drinking and dancing. Anybody who is anybody would be there—family, friends, neighbors.

It’s all anybody has talked about for weeks, and the foolish bridesmaids are on the guest list—they’re in the wedding party!—only now they’re not. Now they’re sitting outside on the curb while the party rages only feet from them.

I’m twenty-two. Some friends have invited me out for a Friday night at this new nightclub. I eagerly accepted the invitation, and by the time Friday rolls around I am full of the anticipation of young adulthood.

I don’t give much thought to my attire, though, and at this particular nightclub that proves to be a major oversight. The guy at the door looks me over, and when his eyes reach my feet he pronounces his verdict: “Sorry, mate, no trainers.”

My shoes. They’re the same ones I’ve worn all day, the same ones I wear every day. It never occurred to me to change them. I hadn’t counted on a dress code.

I’m right outside the door. I can hear the music. My friends are in there. People are strolling past me in nicer shoes and ushered in by the door guy. He never did let me in.

Again and again, Jesus compares the movements of God to a party. There is this parable and plenty others about wedding banquets and great feasts—feasts for returned prodigals, feasts for lost coins that have been found. The kingdom of heaven is a feast. The kingdom of heaven is invited guests coming from east and west, north and south to sit at table.

That’s what the foolish bridesmaids miss.

It’s too bad.

But they didn’t know.

“You don’t know,” Jesus said. “You don’t know the day or the hour.” The reign of God pokes its head in on our lives at an unexpected time, when we’re not planning on it. And we don’t know. We just don’t know.

I need to be clear about what’s really going on with this parable. It is tempting, let me tell you, to elide the substance of the parable of the ten bridesmaids and even more to gloss over its narrative context in Matthew’s Gospel.

It feels acutely tempting to me personally to tarry here, to emphasize the unpredictability of life, how at any given moment, when you’re at school or at a concert or church, some random tragedy may burst in and grab you by the throat, so seize the day.

There is plenty of that sentiment in the Bible. “Eat, drink, be merry. For tomorrow we die.” That’s in Ecclesiastes, speaking of wisdom. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” That’s the Sermon on the Mount. “You do not even know what tomorrow will bring. You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” That’s the epistle of James.

But this is not that. It wasn’t that for the disciples hearing the parable of the ten bridesmaids, and it wasn’t that for the early church reading Matthew’s Gospel.

This parable belongs to a long sermon on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, the entirety of which is a response to a question from the disciples: “What will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age?”

Jesus’ answer to that query lasts for all of chapters 24 and 25. It is the final installment of Jesus’ teaching prior to the onset of the passion story.

Jesus warns of false messiahs, coming persecutions, and something called “the desolating sacrilege.” These things are part of the “coming of the Son of Man,” when the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven and the powers of heaven will be shaken. The Son of Man will come on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call and gather the elect from the four winds.

All of that comes before the parable of the ten bridesmaids, so the bridegroom in the parable is clearly this Son of Man, coming after a long and unexpected delay.

Jesus’ hearers are waiting for all of this, really waiting, really for this. And Matthew’s readers, too—the early church—are really waiting, and really for all of this. And it’s not coming. It never does happen.
No trumpet blast, nothing coming on the clouds. Just more death and taxes.

Still they wait for the trumpet blast and the angels’ call. Some are waiting still.

The church of my childhood spent countless hours pouring over these words and images looking for literal clues to its imminent appearing. I haven’t taken it literally like that since I was a child, although I am still trying to take it seriously.

And what I think it seriously portends is a future that is in God’s hands and that will comply neither with our assumptions or our demands. The foolish bridesmaids assume that the wedding festivities will proceed along a predictable timeline. The wise know they won’t. The wise expect a delay. They know that the timing of the heavenly banquet is not decided by them or their lamps but only by the bridegroom. They know they don’t know the day or the hour and still they are prepared to wait.

We don’t know the day or the hour. Like the bridesmaids, like Jesus’ disciples, like the early church, like all the faithful ever since, we live in the delay between our gospel-inspired visions of justice and of peace and of equality and the current reality, which is so much longer and darker than we want to say.

It is in that very delay that Jesus calls the church in every age to stay awake. But how?

This whole discourse ends with a sort of parable about the judgment of the nations, when the Son of Man comes and separates everyone like sheep and goats on the right and the left, saying to those on the right, “Come, inherit this kingdom. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

And those on the right say, “When? When did we do all this?”

And Jesus answers, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these, so also you did it to me.”

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas sees in this description of the actions of the righteous a program for staying awake when you don’t know the day or the hour. Alert discipleship is active discipleship, particularly discipleship on behalf of the hungry and thirsty, strangers, the naked, sick, and imprisoned. Caring for the least of these is how you stay awake.

I like that. The time to get to work is now, not in the future when it feels more urgent. It makes me think of relational community organizing. Pastor Shannon spent a week in Baltimore recently getting trained in that, and I expect we’ll be hearing more about it. Relational organizing, for a church, or a school, or a union, or a neighborhood, is all about building relationships with people in institutions today so that, if there ever is a crisis, you’ve built some power together. You know each other already.

Relational organizing views one-on-one, public relationships as oil for our lamps. If you don’t have relationships when the moment arrives that you need some help, you’re in trouble. That is not the time to start trying to build relationships. It’s the middle of the night then and so, so dark. By the time you build the relationships you need, the door’s likely to be shut already and the people who took the time to build some relational power while you were gone already inside getting things done.

We stay alert and awake in this age by caring for those in need and by building relationships with each other and our neighbors.

Worship is a major part of how we do that. Prayer and song call us out of mindless slumber and into expectation. The Table enlivens us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation. Affirmation and offering attune us to our mission of feeding and clothing, welcoming and caring. Charge and benediction inspire us for that journey, however long it may be.

The church at worship is the church awake. Thanks be to God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.