A Sermon Preached at University Baptist Church, Columbus, Ohio
6 November 2011
I. Introduction
- In some Christian circles, this parable is extremely important – when I was researching and writing my dissertation, the parable came up repeatedly – you may know that my dissertation is a biography of William Miller, a nineteenth-century self-educated farmer and lay preacher in Upstate New York – after an extensive study of the Bible, Miller reached the conclusion that Jesus Christ would return about the year 1843 – this parable was a significant piece of Miller’s justification of his preaching and teaching the Second Coming – he said more than once that if Christ did not return when Miller believed he would, then the worst thing anyone could say of him was that he had been wrong – at the same time, Miller reasoned that the religious revivals that frequently occurred in the churches and towns where he taught were reason enough to endure any scorn of which he might be the object – if, on the other hand, Miller kept his beliefs to himself and many people came to a bad end at the Second Coming, then Miller believed he would be liable to God for having known the truth and not spoken it
- Time has taught us, of course, that William Miller, as sincere as he was, was wrong about the date – and after the dates had all passed, Miller vowed never to set another, but to live only as if each day were the day of the Second Coming – in many ways, Miller was a person of great integrity, but he was wrong – he probably would have been better off if he had taken verse less literally – as an aside, Miller saw that the verse declares that no one may know the day or the hour, and he concluded that since the verse does not mention the year, that he could decipher biblical clues to discover the year – oh, well
- Miller’s use of the parable was not atypical in his day, and still is not atypical today – Christians who give a good deal of attention to the issue of the Second Coming have frequently used the parable of the wise and unwise bridesmaids in their predictions – it has served as a sort of a cautionary tale, a warning to everyone to be prepared – by contrast, I would like us to look at the text and apply it more broadly in our lives today
II. The Parable of Preparedness
- There is something about end-time predictions that is attractive to many people – I am not quite sure what it is – it may be the sense that, in the end, all one’s enemies experience the agony of defeat – it may be joy that when all is said and done, God’s righteousness and justice prevail, even if God’s mercy is somehow not a factor in the equation – maybe it is a simple, sincere belief in some so-called literal interpretation of the Bible, even if the interpretation is largely speculative (I refer you here to the Hal Lindsay’s apocalyptic predictions in The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970)) – the problem with so many of these predictions is that they inevitably focus on calendars, timetables, and schedules, even if there is no actual setting of dates
- Some people want to know about the end-time because they want to prepare, but not in any positive sense – even William Miller worried about this – he was afraid that if anyone tried to predict to narrowly when the end would be, some would live their wild, unchristian lives right up until the final days when they would undergo a so-called conversion
- As I read this parable about the ten bridesmaids, I think less of some unknown and unknowable date when Jesus Messiah may or may not return than I think about living lives of preparedness – that is how I prefer to think of the story, as a parable of preparedness
- Jesus is speaking to his disciples, his closest followers in this text – this is a part of a long dialogue in which Jesus says a lot of things that are interpreted as apocalyptic or eschatological, focusing on the last days – but he says repeatedly in different ways, that the disciples cannot expect a strict schedule of events – the key is not what happens when, but being ready for whatever happens – throughout chapter 24, Jesus says that a lot of things will happen, but they are the types of things that happen in every age, every generation – in effect, every generation could be the one, could it not? – so “you must also be ready” (Mt. 24.44)
- In our story for today there are ten bridesmaids (the Greek word translates literally as “virgins”) preparing to meet the arriving bridegroom, but he is delayed – five of the women were wise and five were foolish – they all have their lamps trimmed and ready to provide light for the bridegroom – they all get tired and sleep – and when they hear the shout that the bridegroom is near, they all awaken – the only difference between the wise women and the foolish ones is that the wise women are prepared to wait – they have brought extra oil for their lamps – the foolish women realize that they do not have enough oil for the celebration and ask the wise women to share some of their excess, but the wise women refuse, saying that if they share then all ten of them will run out too early – so the foolish women are on their own to find the oil they need – by the time they find it, the bridegroom has arrived, the party has started, and the door is locked – no one else can enter the party – and, oddly enough, the end of the story is a warning to keep awake
III. Be Prepared
- The first couple of generations after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the idea of his Second Coming had a lot of traction, especially after Paul’s letters started to circulate among the churches – the Second Coming, however, is hardly a part of the gospels – there are some few eschatological passages (Matthew 24; the Little Apocalypse of Mark 13), but beyond those, there is really not much about Jesus’ return – I think that is in part because by the time the Evangelists composed the gospels, the idea of the Second Coming, while still important, was becoming less immediate – fifty or sixty years after the resurrection, I think the churches were beginning to adjust their thinking to cope with the delay – so I believe they were thinking, “if Jesus is not coming right away, what are we to do in the meantime?”
- For us, the question of the Second Coming is probably second nature – we no longer expect that Jesus’ return is imminent – some of us believe that the Second Coming really is a metaphor, thinking that whenever a person chooses to become a follower of Jesus, that is a Second Coming, or thinking that in Jesus God is constantly coming into our lives and into the world in new ways
- In whatever ways we choose to think of the Second Coming, the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids is a way for us to remember to be prepared, to be always ready – I do not mean that we have to live in ways that are constant high alert – it is not like the published Homeland Security threat levels – I have heard so often that the level is “orange” that I think “orange” (high risk) has become the new “green” (low risk) – I do not even hear the warning any more – living with constant threat wears me out – and I suspect that I am not alone in this
- In the same way, we cannot live lives of constant vigilance for the Second Coming – so what I believe Jesus is saying to his disciples, and to us, is that we should live our lives according to the Vision of God – remember he begins the parable by saying “The kingdom of heaven (or the Vision of God) will be like this” — the question we need to ask ourselves, then, is what being prepared means for us – we do not need to carry oil for our lamps or even gas masks to defend against biological threats from terrorists
- Being prepared means living into the Vision – it means loving our neighbors and our enemies – it means doing everything as bearers of the Vision to the world – being prepared does not mean ceasing the normal activity of our lives so that we can gather on hilltops and scan the skies for evidence of the coming apocalypse – it does not mean that we stop living – quite the opposite – being prepared means we start living life to its fullest extent, that we live in the most authentic relationships we can, that we love others as God has loved us – it means that we never stop learning, studying, striving – that is what I believe it means to be prepared
IV. Conclusion
- I admire William Miller, and not only because he helped me earn a doctorate – I admire him because he was a genuine, sincere person who believed God called him to act in a way that set him at odds with the wider world, and William Miller still did it – of course he was wrong, but I admire the commitment, the courage to do what he believed was right – he is sorely misunderstood today, and I do not recommend that any of us put our heads in the mouths of the lions of society as he did, but he was prepared in the only way he knew how to be
- I pray that we are all prepared, for the Second Coming in whatever ways we conceive it, and for living as ministers and missionaries to all the world, from the corner of Lane and High to the farthest reaches of creation
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Tags: Matthew 25.1-13
