Homily: St. Al’s@5, Oct
11 2015, St. Albans
Reading: Mt 25.1-13
Stuff matters. I like that.
I like living in a world where stuff matters. Where if I put in the extra effort, I can get
an A on that paper I’m writing. Where if
I’m loving to the people around me, my relationships get better. Where if I bring extra oil for my lamp, my
lamp won’t go out. God created a world
where stuff matters, where actions have consequences. God created us in such a way that we can choose,
that we can do things, things that have an impact on our relationships with each
other and with God. I like that. It gives our lives meaning. It enables us to live lives of purpose. In fact, just imagine what it would be like
if stuff didn’t matter. If nothing
mattered, if my choices were meaningless and my actions had no impact. Why
bother getting out of bed in the morning?
Thankfully, God created a universe where stuff does matter and God created
us to be people that matter, people whose choices and actions help to shape our
relationships and make a difference in the lives of others.
I like that. I give thanks for that.
But you can only push
it so far. In today’s gospel Jesus tells
a story about bridesmaids. Some of them
forget to bring extra oil for their lamps, and as a result, they get locked out
of the wedding banquet. Is that okay? Are these the sort of consequences that make
sense to us? It gets even trickier when
you put this story into context. Jesus
tells this story in response to a question about the end times, about the day
of his return, the return of the Son of Man.
Everyone listening would have recognized the image of the wedding
banquet as a symbol of our final union with God beyond this life. And the foolish bridesmaids have been locked
out.
I like living in a
world where stuff matters. But when you
push it this far, when we’re talking about matters of ultimate concern, our
eternal fate, things like that being decided based on whether we brought extra
oil for our lamps, now I start to get pretty uncomfortable. This is harsh.
Our faith sits in this
tension. On the one hand, we believe in
good and evil, in right and wrong, in the importance of justice. Jesus tells us to love God and to love our
neighbours and we believe him and we believe that it matters. But we also believe in grace: in second chances, in forgiveness, in God’s
unconditional love for us. How do we
hold judgment and grace together?
Matthew’s gospel pushes
us deep into this tension. So far in our
St. Al’s @5 parable series we’ve been looking mostly at parables from the
gospel of Luke, and one of Luke’s main concerns is social justice, how we treat
each other here and now. Think of the
parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, or the Good Samaritan. But the parables that Matthew records in his
gospel push us beyond the here and now, into matters of ultimate concern. If you read the parables in the gospel of Matthew,
you’ll notice that just about every story that Jesus tells ends with some sort
of judgment. One of those “or else”
statements tacked on to the end. With a
“weeping and gnashing of teeth.” With sheep and goats. With a sorting into the wheat and the weeds, and
the weeds are then thrown into the fire and burned. With foolish bridesmaids
locked out of the wedding banquet.
There is a tension
between judgment and grace. And it’s tempting for us to resolve the tension too
easily. By saying in essence, that stuff
matters, but in the end it doesn’t matter.
Matthew will not let us off the hook that easily. In part, that’s because he was writing to a
community that was very different from our own.
Matthew’s community had witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Romans. They had been thrown out of the
Jewish synagogues and persecuted for their faith in Jesus. Families had been split, tensions ran high
and those who persisted as Christians were suffering for their faith. How can you tell those people that in the end
none of this matters?
This morning, for
Thanksgiving, we reached back into the gospel of Matthew and read from the Sermon
on the Mount. You’ll recall that the
Sermon on the Mount begins with the beatitudes.
The third beatitude reads:
“Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.” When Jesus says that, do you believe it? It’s not at all obvious to me that the meek
will inherit the earth.
How do we get from here
to there? Think about the beleaguered
community that Matthew is writing to. Think
about people in the tiny village of Kermaz in central Syria, who are caught
between the military forces of the Syrian government, the Syrian rebels, ISIS,
and just this past week were pounded Russian forces, causing most of the
villagers to flee their homes. What
would it mean to say to them “blessed are the meek for they will inherit the
earth?”
Surely these words only
begin to make sense if we have faith that somehow, ‘in the end’, whatever that
means, God cares about what’s going on, God will judge and God will act to
bring about God’s kingdom. Faith that
one day God will turn our world upside-down.
There is, over and over
again in the gospel of Matthew, a word of judgment. In fact there is a narrative of judgement and
it goes something like this:
Yes, there is both good
and evil in our world, and sometimes good and evil get all tangled up like the
wheat and the weeds, and we don’t know what to do and we feel powerless and we
suffer, and this is a big problem.
Therefore, for God’s
kingdom to be fully realized, for the meek to inherit the earth, for the hungry
to be filled, evil will have to be dealt with, because this stuff matters, it
matters to us and it matters to God.
But how all this gets
sorted out, final judgement, if you like, that’s in God’s hands, not ours. All that is evil in God’s sight, violence,
war, abuse, oppression, these will not stand in the end, they will be burned
like garbage in a fire, and the meek will inherit the earth and the hungry will
be filled.
For oppressed people,
this is good news. In fact for all of
us, this is good news. Stuff matters. God cares.
God wants us to be with him for all eternity in a kingdom that is free
from all the junk that pollutes our present world. Some doors will be closed on the way from
here to there.
In the parable of the Ten
Bridesmaids, the foolish bridesmaids encounter one of those closed doors. That is a word of judgment. The word of judgment that Jesus speaks in the
gospel of Matthew is a word that may be difficult to hear, but it is a word
that we need to hear. Stuff matters. God
cares.
But it is not the final
word. Jesus tells many stories such as
the parable of the bridesmaids, but none of them are the final story. The final story takes place on a cross and
then in a tomb. It too is the story of
doors being closed, seemingly forever.
But then, in God’s most dramatic act and most powerful word, those doors
are burst open. The stone is rolled
aside and the door we call death, even that one is burst open.
The five foolish
bridesmaids arrived late, and they found that the door was shut. There’s a lesson in that to be sure. But will they get in? Will that door ever be opened?
For that, you have to
read all the way to the end of the story. Past the cross and past the tomb. And the final word is grace.
Amen.
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