Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 12, 2023

Faith Requires Patience

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Psalm 131
Matthew 25:1–13

One of the things I have learned over the years is that faith requires patience. A kind of patience that is persistent. I think this is true, and I also find that disappointing, because I’m not always the most patient guy.

Years ago, I was granted a sabbatical by the church I was serving — a summer off to study and renew. I traveled to a seminary out of town. While there, I didn’t have a car. The first morning there I needed some coffee, and the closest coffee I could find was a nearby McDonald’s. So, I went. There was a guy in line in front of me. The woman behind the counter said, “May I take your order?” “Give me just a minute,” he said. I thought, here we go. “I just can’t decide,” he said. “I was going to get pancakes, but that Egg McMuffin looks good. Is the Egg McMuffin good here?” What do you mean is it good? It will kill you. The cashier and I made eye contact. I just wanted a cup of coffee. “I’m thinking,” the man said. And I was thinking, how can you not know what you want? They haven’t changed the menu in thirty-five years. Just get the biscuit, man! I started to walk out, go find coffee somewhere else: I don’t have all day. But then I started laughing at myself. I was on sabbatical. I didn’t have an appointment for three months. I’m not always very patient. Which is unfortunate, because from time to time faith requires some patience.

Jesus told a story about a wedding that didn’t go as planned. No surprise to me. I have done more than a few over my ministry, and one of the things I have learned is that not every wedding goes perfectly.

I was doing a wedding in the Circular Church in Charleston, South Carolina. I was a guest there. The organist at Circular Church told me beforehand that this old historic sanctuary brought a lot of visitors. You can understand. He said, I’ve known people to come in off the street and walk around taking pictures of the sanctuary right in the middle of a wedding. You never know what might happen, he said. Just prepare yourself. OK.

Well, the wedding was just starting. The father of the bride escorted his daughter down the aisle. She was beautiful. He was beaming. But as they reached the chancel, dad’s pants fell down. All the way down. He was standing there in the presence of God and the gathered community in powder-blue boxers — which did not coordinate with the bridesmaids’ dresses, I might add. He was wearing, or at least had been wearing, a rented tux. Sometimes in rental tuxes, there is a little clip to adjust the waist. We were learning the importance of keeping that clip closed, otherwise your pants can turn your 36 into 46s well before you can say “I do.”

To make matters worse, dad had had surgery on his knee and could not bend down to pull his trousers back up. He just stood there looking at me, and I wasn’t exactly sure of what to do. I had skipped class the day we covered this in seminary. The organ was in the balcony. I looked up, and there I saw the organist looking in a mirror, which had become a rear-view mirror, if you follow me. It was at that moment, the guy who had urged me to prepare for anything was completely unprepared and Trumpet Voluntary didn’t conclude, it just stopped, as he fell off the organ bench.

Not everything goes as planned at a wedding.

So it was in this wedding story of Jesus. The groom is late.

The assumption behind the story is the groom has traveled to another village to bring his bride home to his village. The ten women, sometimes called bridesmaids, were from the groom’s village. They were waiting at the edge of town for the groom to return with his new bride. They would wait for love to arrive. When the happy couple returned, the bridesmaids would light their lamps and dance back to the groom’s home where a party like no other party would commence.

But this time, when the groom returns, some of the bridesmaids had oil for their lamps and some did not. The wise women, as they are designated in the text, are also apparently stingy, because they refuse to share. In the end the foolish miss the party, as they must go shopping.

Jesus says our lives are like this story.

This oil is obviously a metaphor, but for what?

Over the years, students of the text have offered various suggestions. Some have suggested that the oil is a metaphor for love. Others have said that oil is a metaphor for faith. That’s good. But one thing I have learned is that faith can’t survive without patience — a particular kind of patience, a persistent patience. Why do I say that?

To call the oil-less bridesmaids foolish is a bit misleading. Sounds like they aren’t good planners. Sounds like they are a bit absentminded. You are not going to believe this, but I left my oil on the breakfast room table, Samantha. Can I borrow a bit of yours?

No. If I understand the text, these so-called foolish ones are not absentminded. They have run out of patience. The reason they did not bring any oil is because they reached the point where they didn’t think they would need any oil. Why? The groom was late. Really late. Late enough that they began to lose trust that he was coming back. They spent all this time living toward a day when a promised love would come. They spent their lives living toward a promise that now seemed unreliable. And if the bridegroom is not returning, you are not going to need any oil.

You only need oil if someday, some long-awaited promised day, you will have to light a lamp and enter a celebration like none other.

And here’s the point. If you believe that that day is coming, it changes how you live today. If you trust that love is coming someday, you carry oil today. Am I making sense?

When Carol and I lived in Florida we had a friend at church named Shirley. Shirley had a business cleaning houses. She came to Carol and me one day and said, “I would like to clean your house every couple of weeks.” Carol and I were both working full time and the kids were little and into everything and we just had one nostril out of the water. I said, Shirley you are a Godsend. If you would clean our house, we would rise up and call you blessed.

So, every other Thursday Shirley would come by to clean the house. This meant that every other Wednesday, I would come home from church and Carol would say, “Tom, go clean the kitchen; Shirley is coming tomorrow.” I would say, but isn’t Shirley coming to clean? “Yes.” Well, can’t she clean the kitchen? “Now Tom, how do you expect Shirley to be able to clean anything if the house is a mess. Get busy.” Now I have to confess that I still don’t understand why this worked this way, but my testimony is by the time Wednesday was over, Carol and I were exhausted from the Christian practice of waiting for Shirley.

That’s what carrying oil looks like. It is waiting, being patient, but a Christian patience is a participatory reality. To carry oil is to practice today what we believe will be tomorrow. Even at the midnight hour, we have our oil at the ready, we have our eyes on the horizon, we have our hope fully engaged, because we trust that love is coming and will lead us to a celebration like none other.

Of course, like all of Jesus’ stories, this one is not about a wedding but about the promised day of God, and if anything is late, the promised day of God surely seems to be late.

Our faith promises that the day will come when justice will roll down like waters, because we will finally decide that fairness to everyone is something we can no longer live without. We are not there yet, but if you trust God will be faithful, then every day we carry a little oil.

Our faith promises that someday swords will be beaten into plowshares because it will finally make more sense to us to feed one another than to kill one another. We are not there yet, but if you trust that God will be faithful, then every day you carry a little oil.

Faith asserts that the poor will have good things, because some day we will be dissatisfied with the blessings of life being claimed by only a few. We are not there yet, but every time the Chicago Lights Social Service Center is engaged, every time a sandwich is shared in Anderson Hall, you are carrying a little oil. Am I making sense to you?

The radical promise Jesus made to you and to me is that we can choose to live this moment defined not by what has gone before but by a love that is coming.

Don’t be discouraged by the delay. Just carry the oil that you can carry. That requires a persistent patience.

My friend Dr. Bob Meneilly was the founding pastor of the Village Church, the saints I served for the past twenty years. Dr. Bob founded that congregation in 1949, and without detail, I will just say during the civil rights movement he was strong and courageous and contributed to changes in the community.

I was sitting with him in 2021. Through our masks we were talking about the nation’s struggles in recent years. Our conversation turned to the systemic racism that defines so much of American culture. He said, it’s disappointing that we aren’t farther along. We have been struggling with racism for so long. In his ninth decade, he said, I so hoped we would be further along.

That better day has been a long time coming.

It’s enough to cause some to run out of patience, to give up hope.

But I think Jesus tells us this story because we never know when the next good thing is coming. We never know when the next sign of God’s faithfulness will show up. We never know when that promised love will break through and give us reason to celebrate like we have never celebrated before.

It requires patience, an active kind of patience. When we trust that love that makes sense of the world is coming, it means every day you carry a little oil.

I told you in my first words to you that one of the reasons I have welcomed the invitation to spend this brief time of interim with you is because I have long admired who you have been as a church. In these short but full couple of weeks, that admiration has only grown. But if that were all, I wouldn’t have come, and you wouldn’t want me. Because this is what you know. God has had a practice of showing up among you here at Fourth Church. I don’t know when you have sensed it, but God has had a practice of showing up from time to time in the ministry that you do. And I am confident that the days ahead of us matter as much to God as the days behind us.

So, every day we carry our lamp and we cast our eyes to the horizon, because you never know when God will show up next, but she will.

So, so don’t lose hope. Don’t ever lose hope. Carry the oil, for that holy love is coming, and you want to be ready…. that is the surest way to join the party that God has in mind.       

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church