Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost

Zachary Baker Rodes 
Year A, Proper 27 
Let us always seek the truth, whence it comes, cost what it may. Amen. 
 
Brothers and sisters, as we make our march towards Advent, the lectionary gives us a series of complex yet engaging Gospel texts which call for us to pay special attention. Advent is the beginning of our liturgical year and therefore could be seen as a sort of new year. So, as we already take into account the ending of 2020, we can also view this new year of Advent as a way to make spiritual or faith-based resolutions. We should carefully consider, then, what every week’s readings could be telling us for this year. For this week, I am sure many of us are feeling like that last line in Thessalonians. Maybe it would be preferable to be caught up in the clouds to meet our Lord than to do anything else right now. This is not the 2020 we expected, and I am comfortable speaking for most to say that we can’t wait to say goodbye. But remember, things will not go back to normal, whatever that means, suddenly on the first Sunday of Advent or January 1. We need to stay alert and so as we move into this week, let us carefully consider what’s presented to us today. 
 
Let’s start at the end of the parable. Keep awake Jesus tell us; we are to be alert and watchful for the coming of the Lord, or we neither know the day nor the hour. He tells us this a lot, doesn’t he? He proclaims this twice just before in Chapter 24. But this is not some sort of obsessiveness in watching, for all the bridesmaids fall asleep. Augustine remarks that the five wise who did fall asleep, fell asleep knowing their light would shine bright even in some rest. He writes, “No coldness of love then crept over them. In them love did not grow cold. Love preserves its glow even to the very end.” We are followers of Jesus Christ and in being followers of Jesus we are to simply have our oil ready. We can fall asleep, we can go about our personal affairs, but our mind is to be set on this, the preparing of the oil. That is to say that having our oil prepared means we are ready to meet Christ in all and at the Parousia, the second coming. However, what this means is a radical shift in our understanding that we as Christians live into this apocalyptic reality Christ is presenting to us. More on that in a moment.  
 
But preparing is hard, isn’t it? Sometime in middle school I tried to be a Boy Scout. Their motto as maybe most of you know is “be prepared”. How practical, yet also how difficult it is sometimes. I grew up in a family that went camping for vacation, so I grew up with my own sense of preparedness that was much less rigid than the Boy Scout guidebook. As a parable of preparedness, we are called to reflect on how exactly we are preparing and what or whom we are preparing for. We know the answer to the second question, we are preparing for Jesus’ return, as this is a parable ultimately about the day of his coming. How, then, are we preparing? Rather, self-reflectively, how am I preparing? That is the question I wish to pose to you today and only one you can answer. But to emphasize, this is not about fretting over our works and faith and worrying about the end times. We are not Jehovah’s Witnesses or other end times sects whose literalism is caught up in fanatical worry. But as I said, it seems there is something there that we must dwell on.  
 
This parable is considered an apocalyptic one. That is, of course, dealing with revelation. In it, Jesus is calling for us to be prepared and, in this preparedness we are alert and watchful. We live into this firstly as being baptized into Christ, we are baptized into the love of Christ that transforms us to transform the world in this love. This is the hope of the Gospel in which we find what is means to be Christian. Early church father Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” It is in this fullness of life in Christ that we supply our oil. In the face of all of this, this parable, as apocalyptic as it is, is also a parable of hope found in its apocalyptic nature, which is to say a revelatory underpinning. It is in God that we find our truth and life as Christians, whose reality, as reveled through Jesus Christ, transcends history and whose light, poured into us by the Holy Spirit, casts away the darkness of the world; it is the oil in our lamps which helps this light burn. 
 
20th century French lay theologian and scholar, Jacques Ellul, says something stronger which I wish to raise up. Writing in his theological tour de force, Presence of the Modern World, he says, “The only vision Christians can have of the world they live in is an apocalyptic one.” He writes just before this that, “we must indeed consider the present moment as apocalyptic, which is to say the final moment before judgment and pardon.” This is keeping watch! But we know too that Jesus comes to us all the time, not just in the fullness of time. He is our neighbor, the street person, the political opposite, the lowly, and the unborn. His creation is our dominion over which we have the responsibility to care. In all these things are moments full of judgment and pardon, moments of revelation of God’s love not just for us, but for all his creation. We are to see and to seek Christ in all things and in so doing so we are faced with an apocalyptic reality: we come face to face with the revelation of Jesus Christ, God Incarnate. 
 
In this revelation we thus encounter as Christians the apocalyptical reality of what our faith is. For having been baptized into Christ, we are now called to live into this reality. At this alter, I dare say we are nourished by this apocalypse. In the bread and wine, as the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, we are fed in substance and in spirit everything we need through this revelation. This is the sustenance of the reality of being members of the Body of Christ. Being in Christ as Paul mentions throughout his letters, including in today’s letter to the Thessalonians, means we have faith in Christ and it is his love that transforms our reality. This faith is a faith with profound implications. Matthew is chalk full of these implications, of course not just Matthew but the entirety of the Gospel lays it out for us, that is the Gospel! The Good News of God’s Incarnation as Jesus the Nazarene, who has brought God’s reality to us. We know we are called to love through faith in Christ! But are we wise or are we foolish? Our imperfection leads us sometimes to feel we are foolish, but in Christ we are led to be wise. We will make mistakes, we will sin, that is not the foolishness Matthew writes of. But God’s love and grace for us is ever present when we stand back up and turn again towards him.  
 
What does all this mean for us right now and right here? Everything! It means that when we are dismissed today, our worship of praise, thankfulness, and sacrifice is poured forth out into the street and into the body politic. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, healing the sick, friending the friendless, and helping the widowed and orphaned as well as proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and thanking and praising him; and preaching in all of this God’s love for us and his redemption through a reality radically different than our own, which is enmeshed in the world, at odds with God. Then again it isn’t so much about the oil, though important, but about the fire it produces. The oil of our lamps produces light to the world which so often hides in darkness. This is what we present to Christ the bridegroom at his coming whether we meet him on earth or at his return. 
 
My brothers and sisters, as we move into each moment through God’s grace, let us be moved to prayer, to charity, to compassion, to worship and praise and knowledge of God’s love for us. Above all let our oil burn as the light of revelation of God’s love so that those who may need it the most bring their oil to the feast that God calls us to. Through God’s grace may it be so. Amen.  
 
 
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