November 8, 206

I'd like to start this morning by just acknowledging a reality of kind of who we are and where we are as a people and a congregation.

You know, we live in a very purple place. We as a congregation are a very purple people. And yet, I think the vast majority of you, from what I have heard and the feedback that I've received over these last many months, and especially this last week, are breathing a little bit of a sigh of relief this week, a sense of fresh air, a sense of a turning of the page.

Even for some of our folks who are more politically conservative, there's been this sense of exhaustion, of embarrassment, of just readying to kind of move on to the next phase. And there's this reality of just feeling like something different is on the horizon.

I want to be honest about that this morning with you all because I think it's important to name that and at least recognize where we are as a people and where we feel ourselves emotively and physically in some sense.

You know, some of our brothers and sisters in this very congregation have suffered tremendously over these last couple of years, especially with everything that happened at the beginning of the administration with the reductions in forces and the layoffs.

And so there's a moment now for us to take a breath, to breathe, and to recognize this moment for what it is.

And I want to not only just name that, but think about it in the context of our gospel lesson today. Because the result of the elections on Tuesday night in many parts of the country were not just a reaction to the current state of affairs and a kind of instinctive turning in the opposite direction. There's a lot of that that often happens in midterm election cycles.

But it was also the fruit of years' worth of labor, years' worth of commitment and work that was put in by folks who didn't necessarily see the opportunity or the possibility of change on the horizon.

And I think in many ways there was this sense of connection to what we hear in our lesson from Wisdom this morning, that they had this vigilance on account of wisdom, that they could see a future freedom that they were not yet experiencing.

And in a place like ours, in this context here in Montgomery County, we can often sort of feel, dare I say, complacent because of where we are, who we are, the kind of long arc of the reality of the political and social environment in this place.

But for many in other parts of the country, the passions and the commitments they have for their political or social sensibilities take a lot of work, take a lot of commitment, without necessarily the guarantee that that's going to change things in their lifetime.

This is probably an apocryphal story, but this last week I heard a vignette from Bill Moyers' life. He was LBJ's kind of special assistant in 1961 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. And I've heard on many occasions in the past that LBJ famously quipped that this would lose the Democrats the South for a generation. I've heard that many times.

But apparently, supposedly, LBJ specifically said to Bill Moyers, "We have lost the Democrats in the South for my lifetime and yours."

And Bill died in June of last year, so this was the first election cycle after he died. Now, whether that actually happened, whether that actually came to fruition, you know, who knows.

Point being that there are many examples throughout many of our lives of people who work and toil for the things that they care about, the things that matter to them, without this guarantee that they're going to see the fruit of that work.

And in some ways, that's sort of the basis of this parable that Jesus is teaching. Because this wedding party doesn't know when the bridegroom's going to arrive. There is this work that is being done simultaneously while this period of great waiting is occurring.

And that's a really profound lesson for us. Because I think that's something that most of us in our society today struggle with.

We want the outcome, but we don't want to wait or we don't want to put in the work while waiting. We struggle with that. When we initiate some kind of action, we want an immediate outcome, an immediate response.

Or if we're waiting, we don't feel called or we don't feel passionate about putting the work in while we're waiting.

So I think sometimes we can wait, sometimes we can work. But to do both simultaneously just somehow, in some way, rubs us wrong. It's not the thing that we are best at doing.

But that's precisely the reality that Jesus is offering us today.

I'll offer one more quick vignette from our current political climate. I came across an article earlier this week that our brothers and sisters in some small municipality, I think it was in Iowa or Indiana, it was one of the I states, approved the construction of a new library in their community by a margin of like 59 to 41 percent and simultaneously rejected the ballot initiative that would create a bond to pay for the library at like 59 to 41 percent.

So it was, yes, we want this thing, but we're not going to do what we need to do to make it happen.

And I think so often we find ourselves in those kinds of situations in our country, in our context today.

And so let us unpack this gospel lesson just a little bit and see how it informs us and kind of deepens our awareness of these complexities that kind of are countercultural, are counter to so much of what the world and society tries to instill and form in us in this day and time.

Raymond Brown, the great Roman Catholic scholar of the New Testament in the 20th century, says that this section of Matthew, which we are in, this section of chapter 25, it's the very last parts of Jesus' teaching ministry in Jerusalem before the great passion arc of his arrest, his trial, his eventual execution on the cross.

And so these are, in some ways, Jesus' last parting words, his last teachings and admonitions.

And so it's not surprising that his instruction to us is to stay awake, to stay alert.

But it's not just about that. Raymond Brown says that this is not just about meriting a reward, but of dedicating ourselves as Christians to the responsiveness we have in Jesus' gift to us, this gift of ultimate sacrifice and restitution.

That Jesus is not just telling us, wait. But he's telling us to wait with this commitment, wait with dedication, that this is a part of the larger whole.

Kenneth Bailey, who spent many years teaching in Lebanon, tracked kind of the historical development of many of these parables and the contextual framework out of which they came in first-century Palestine.

And he draws, in looking at this passage that we have today, which is unique to the Gospel of Matthew, he draws upon a very early Syrian Orthodox monk and scholar named Ibn al-Tayyib.

And Ibn al-Tayyib wrote an entire commentary on this one parable.

He notes that in the Gospels writ large, that the church is always presented in this feminine energy. It is the bride of Christ. It is the mother of all of us who are faithful Christians.

But it's interesting here that Jesus has chosen women to act the part of the church because the wedding party would typically have been men in this context.

There's some evidence to suggest that a wedding could not officially kind of happen, in a legal sense, unless you had ten men there to witness it.

And Jesus is kind of inverting that system by instead replacing the wedding party with ten women.

But the suggestion is, because it's women, this is emblematic of who we are to be as the church. Jesus is using this structure to point us towards who we are to be as the church.

And the reality is that we are going to be simultaneously faithful and unfaithful.

We're going to have times where we do exactly what we are supposed to, that we take on this work of not only awaiting the return of Christ, awaiting the glory of the coming kingdom, but that we actively do the things that prepare us for that coming kingdom.

That we actively continue working in the world to constantly be present to the places where the Spirit is moving us and preparing us.

But we simultaneously can be the people who kind of sit back on our laurels, who wait without doing the important work and get caught off guard when the Lord returns, when the bridegroom arrives.

And there's this question of borrowed resources then. When the bridegroom arrives, how do we respond to that?

And Ibn al-Tayyib says that the image here, the teaching, is that the faithful borrow many things from each other, but they cannot borrow their own preparations.

That we cannot borrow from each other our own preparedness. That to be faithful to what God is calling us to do requires discipleship, it requires commitment.

And those are things that you cannot lend to another, that cannot be borrowed from another.

Each of us, Ibn al-Tayyib says, has to participate in the kingdom with our own resources.

And that's speaking to each of us individually in our own Christian journeys, but as a community of faith, what it means to cultivate and prepare those resources, to be actively engaged in preparing ourselves for the coming kingdom.

And that's not, like we so often have in our society today, this immediate gratification, immediate responsiveness reality.

But it is the reality of the long haul, as Kenneth Bailey names it.

The third point that Ibn al-Tayyib makes is that life in the kingdom and as part of the kingdom requires this commitment over the long term.

As the author of Hebrews so vividly illustrates in that middle passage of the book, so many of our ancestors in faith dedicated their lives to a vision of the kingdom that they did not see.

That they only from afar grasped the implications of what it is that they were doing, and that they went on to their eternal rest with that sense of the fullness of the kingdom being unfulfilled and unrealized in the world today.

And there is neither this instant discipleship or instant maturation or instant reality of the kingdom, but instead, for the vast majority of us throughout history and even in our present time, it is the wise and thoughtful commitment to discipleship, to faithfulness, to this vision for what the kingdom can be, even if our work does not bear that fruit out in its completeness within the course of our earthly lives.

And then the fourth and final element of this is our reaction to failure.

You know, I have encountered many occasions in my life where folks have read this parable very literalistically, where this is an example of how some people will make it into the kingdom and other people won't.

That there's a strict bifurcation between those who will be saved and those who will not be saved.

But as often the case, Jesus is speaking parabolistically and metaphorically in this instance.

And so we have to be very diligent and thoughtful about what it is he's saying precisely.

And Ibn al-Tayyib, this very ancient Syrian Orthodox monk, suggests that this is not a strict description of what the kingdom of God looks like and who's in it and who's not in it, but it is more emblematic of the reality of what we do when things go wrong, how we can exercise poor judgment or come up short in the ways in which we live our lives.

And what is it that we do then when we experience that sense of failure?

Well, in this instance, these unprepared bridesmaids start shouting orders at their sister bridesmaids.

"Give us oil. Let us come in, Lord. Give us what we didn't get because we showed up late. Give us what we need because we didn't prepare for it in the first place."

And it's in some ways very similar to the parable that Jesus offers about the rich man and Lazarus.

At the end of the day, it's not necessarily just about the way that Lazarus was treated in his earthly life. But it was the inability of the rich man, even after death, to see Lazarus in the fullness of his humanity.

That he continued, even after falling short, to kind of exercise the same demanding sense of privilege and authority that he so dominated Lazarus with in his earthly life.

And these unprepared bridesmaids don't have a metanoia. They don't have a turning.

They don't say, "We are so sorry. We should have been more prepared, but we weren't. Have mercy on us."

No, they say, "Give us what you have. Lord, let us in."

There's this demandingness.

And so what do we do with all of that? How do we bring this into the fullness of who we are and where we are in this moment, and then the life that we are being called into?

And I think we have a lot of sort of layered ways we can encounter this today.

For one thing, we can kind of think about it strictly in this theological sense of our preparedness entering into this season of Advent that we are just about to start.

This time of the year every year where we refocus our attentiveness on the coming kingdom.

It's not just a reminder of what happened those millennia ago, but it is the reminder too of the coming kingdom of Christ that is yet on the horizon that we are looking forward to.

The light breaking through the darkness. The darkness that seems so pervasive.

But also, there's a real and kind of tangible application for us as a community of faith in this place, in this context.

You know, as I was reflecting on my experience as an American citizen, as someone who actively participates in the structures and systems of our common life together in this country, I realized I was rather unprepared myself.

I, to this moment, I had intended to look this up before my sermon and totally forgot to do so. That shows you where my mind is.

I can't tell you who my mayor in Gaithersburg is. I think I have a vague sense of who my delegates are. I don't know who my at-large county council members are.

And yet, there's a sense in which to be a present part of this community, to be a more fulsome part of who we are being called to be in this place, to be the bearers of good news and gospel in this immediate context that we are gifted, we have to have a preparedness.

We have to have an awareness.

Who are we? What are the issues important to us? What are the challenges we face?

How do we speak with a sense of graciousness, of compassion, of transformation into the complexities of the situations that we have in this very place that is our home?

And I think that's another layer of what work we are being called into.

We do a great job as a community of being present to material needs through our work with food insecurity, with our support of Damascus Help, with some of the other initiatives coming into this holiday season that you'll hear about at our announcements.

But how much more engaged might we be?

Instead of just sitting back on our laurels, waiting for the powers that be to work their ways out in the ways that they do, might we be called to be ever more engaged?

In a more tangible sense, to know more completely who we are, where we are, and what issues are in front of us that we might speak to, that we might work on, that we might advocate for, making sure that those in our communities are being taken care of in the best ways that they can be, in the ways that we can be the light of Christ to this world around us.

And things don't happen instantaneously.

There's a lot of waiting. There's a lot of patience that will need to be exercised.

But we're nevertheless called to action, called to this action of speaking and living into this present moment.

And so, to kind of go back to where I began, for many of us this may be a moment and a breath of relief and fresh air, a sense that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

But I want to remind us, friends, that our faithfulness, our citizenship, our ultimate focus is not on these things of this world, but on the things of the coming kingdom.

And as we focus our attentiveness on that coming kingdom, how then do we most successfully and completely speak into the things of this world?

That it's not one or the other, but it is both.

It is the reality of work and patience. It is the reality of faithfulness and action.

It is the reality of being both grounded in the things of the ordinary, the things of the secular, while holding fast to the things of the sacred, and bringing into our spaces and communities the good news of Christ that will transform and renew all.

Maybe not immediately, but in the long arc of that journey towards justice and the fullness of the coming kingdom.

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