Bring Light into the World

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday November 9, 2008, the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78:1-7
1Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matt 25:1-18

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen

Last weekend, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels was the guest on Mike Huckabee’s Fox News TV show. They were discussing political humor during a campaign year. One of the things they agreed on is that all satire, particularly political satire, isn’t funny unless there is some truth inside the joke.

Every year I say that stewardship is about more than money. This is a very biblical interpretation of stewardship. I very strongly believe as the psalmist teaches, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”[1] Yes, there is a focus on cash. Cash can be measured easily. Cash has to be reported to the Presbytery annually. Cash is one of the many ways humans, and particularly Americans, keep score. I have even spoken and written about that quite a bit lately. But in a turn away from the cash call, I have said that more than anything we can take to the bank, proper tithing must start with a change of attitude.

Still if your first responses to these thoughts on stewardship are “Circle the wagons! Grab your wallets! Hide the women and children!” I couldn’t blame you. I could even see this as a satirical skit on Saturday Night Live, the pastor drones on about stewardship as voiceovers of the congregation’s thoughts take center stage over the words of the preacher.

Well, as is so often the case, fools go where angels fear to tread and this year I am going to preach not one, but two stewardship sermons. This week we will explore stewardship through the parable of the twelve bridesmaids, or virgins depending on your translation, and next week it’s onto the parable of the talents.

As with all of the parables Jesus shares with his disciples, there are two things happening, the first is an artistic aspect. We read “the kingdom of heaven will be like this.” This means that the kingdom will be comparable to this description; it does not mean that the kingdom of heaven will be identical to this. We are not supposed to take this description literally.

There is a mythical quality to the artistic element of the parable. The tale Jesus shares with his disciples allows them to think, ponder, and dream beyond the limits they impose upon themselves. It shows us not just the vision of the words, it gives us something to consider beyond the words.

The second thing is that the parable’s situation is one that the people who originally heard this story would know. The disciples themselves would never have been bridesmaids, but they would have all been members of wedding parties at one time or another.

Several were married; Peter we know was married because Jesus healed his mother-in-law. I am reasonably sure all of them had been to a wedding banquet. John’s gospel even has Jesus’ first public miracle at a wedding in Cana. The disciples would have known the lay of the land of the wedding banquet.

Now there was one thing they would have had no problem with that I did. What exactly did Jesus mean when he said that they trimmed their lamps? If you are my age, “trimming the lamp” is as complicated as hoping the proper light bulb is in the cupboard. It’s as easy as making sure the flashlight has batteries.

It seems easy enough to all of us, trim the lamps means trim the lamps; it means to cut the wicks so that the burned stuff is gone and the wick is even. Marie Bolerjack told me that if the lamp is not trimmed properly, it will smoke when it burns and soot builds on the globe. If not trimmed properly, not only will the amount of light the lamp emits be dimmed, the lamp will probably burn more oil and could be dangerous.

Oddly though, the Greek word translated “trimmed” means more than just preparing a wick for burning.[2] Everywhere else in the New Testament, this word means to adorn or to put in order. Since I don’t think any of the bridesmaids were using the bedazzler on their lamps, I don’t think adorn is a proper translation. A more appropriate translation choice could have been to put their lamps in order before the bridegroom arrives. Trimming the wicks as we understand it would be a part of putting the lamps in order, but there is more than that. Another part of trimming the lamps would be filling them with oil.

This is where we separate the wise bridesmaids from the foolish. Nobody wise would have traveled with their lamps filled with oil. The lamp of the day was open at the top. The oil would not be in a closed oil well like globe or hurricane style lanterns. Sloshing and spilling would have emptied the lamp long before they reached the door where they waited. A wise bridesmaid would have carried her oil in a separate sealed container and added it when the time was right. This would have been wise.

Perhaps this is the foolish bridesmaids’ foolishness. Maybe they carried their oil in their lamps, spilling along the way to guarantee that there would be nothing left in their lamps by the time they reached their destination.

Only the wise five that remained, the five that carried the light, were invited to enter the wedding banquet. The other foolish five were waking shopkeepers; maybe one at a time, maybe five at a time; seeking oil for their lamps.

Only the five that had put their lamps in order before reaching the bridegroom’s door were invited to enter the banquet. When the other five arrived with their lamps burning they were denied entrance to the banquet. The master saying, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” To me, this describes the element of stewardship we must acknowledge today, what does it mean to put our lamps in order?

The obvious place to look at this is in the last verse of our gospel reading where Jesus gave his disciples this warning: “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” Some ancient authorities go as far as to say “you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.” This translation bugs me though. Whether the bridesmaids entered the banquet or not had nothing to do with them being awake or asleep. All of them slept, all of them were awake when the bridegroom arrived. The difference was not whether one was awake or not, it was whether they were prepared or not. So simply being awake doesn’t seem to describe the difference well enough.

But another way this can be translated is that Jesus warned his disciples not just to be awake, but to be alive, to be fully alive.[3] Jesus wants more than warm bodies. He wants the church to be filled with people who are more than just awake. Awake is a threshold; alive, truly alive is what he wants the church to be.

Our Lord calls us to aspire to and to work toward the life He gives us and calls us to live; to be good stewards of the life, the world, and the gifts we have been given. Our goal, our call, our vocation is be the light of God in the world and to bring light into the world.

The most common way we bring the light is by doing good works. Praise God this part of the body of Christ does many good works in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the last year, we delivered 360 backpacks filled with school supplies to the Loaves and Fishes Food Bank for needy children in Carroll County. Some members also contribute their time and their vehicle to the Food Bank.

We have opened our doors for community worship services and for civic organizations. We contribute time and money to Presbyterian seminaries and Hispanic ministry in northwest Arkansas.

We work to fight hunger and do the work of the greater church, including Presbyterian Disaster Relief, through contributions to the Presbytery. We give time and energy to many good causes for the glory of our Father who is in heaven. But there is more, oh so much more we can do and need to do.

One thing we all need to do more of is to share worship. Here’s an uncomfortable question, “When was the last time you invited someone to come and worship with this part of the body of Christ?” Mike Nelson tells this story about this:

When I was interning at a Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis, I had the privilege of sharing an office with Bob Evans, a retired pastor who served our congregation as voluntary “evangelism consultant.”

One week he had an insert run off for the Sunday worship bulletin that simply stated, “Surveys show that the average Lutheran invites someone to church once every 14 years.”

At the bottom he asked the tongue-in-cheek question: “How many of you are past due?”[4]

This is just one way we can trim the lamps of our lives. Don’t misunderstand me, I know that inviting someone to worship may cost more than we will ever find in our bank accounts. Inviting others puts us individually and corporately on display. It puts us on the line to show that we worship and work for the glory of God in the world. What could cost us more than that?

This parable is loaded with many symbols. When this gospel was written these elements would have been important to all of its listeners. Jesus is known far and wide as the bridegroom. While not mentioned by name in this parable, the church is called the Bride of Christ. The wedding banquet refers to the anticipated Messianic Banquet; a great feast for the faithful in the age to come that was a feature in Jewish and Christian speculation about the end time.[5] Oil is often used in scripture and in worship to represent the Holy Spirit. But frankly, there isn’t a scriptural parabolic use of bridesmaids. Interpreters instead liken them to the members of the church who will be sorted like the sheep and the goats in the end times.[6]

The symbols are glorious and illuminating, but there is still that same old problem of reading parables like watching “The Da Vinci Code” filling in scriptural allusions like watching Tom Hanks fill in the blanks of Dan Brown’s prose.

What we can say is that the kingdom of heaven will be like a great banquet. A banquet the Lord our God hosts when all of creation is put into order. When through the Holy Spirit we work to do God’s will to put creation into order.

Another interesting thing about the word English bibles translate as trimmed is that it comes from the same root word as the words for world, earth, and ultimately creation; the sum of everything here and now, all of the cosmos. In the common use of the word, it pointed to an orderly creation, a universe where all is beautiful.[7] So as the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, all of what is good and ordered and created is from and for the Lord. As we trim the lamps of our lives, we participate in making the orderly creation which God envisions. As we trim the lamps of our lives, we work to bring back toward Eden the creation our Lord began.

So this is our goal, this is our endeavor; this is how we serve as good stewards over God’s creation. We let our light shine before others, that they may see our good works and give glory to our Father who is in heaven.[8]

[1] Psalm 24:1, NRSV
[2] Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Gerhard Kittel, editor. Vol. III. Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 1965, page 867.
[3] gragorew, “A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature.” Revised and edited by Frederick William Danker, Editor, based on Walter Bauer's Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der frühchristlichen Literatur, sixth edition, ed. Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, with Viktor Reichmann and on previous English editions by W.F.Arndt, F.W.Gingrich, and F.W.Danker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, electronic edition 2000
[4] HomileticsOnline.com, Timothy F. Merrill, Executive Editor, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/illustration_search.asp?keywords=invite , retrieved November 8, 2008.
[5] Messianic Banquet, Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible
[6] New Interpreter’s Bible, v. viii, Leander Keck, General Editor. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995, page 450 and HomileticsOnline.com, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93000101, retrieved November 5, 2008.
[7] Kittel, page 868-880
[8] From The Second Helvetic Confession, Chapter XVI - Of Faith and Good Works, and of Their Reward, and of Man's Merit, paragraph 6..