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We are getting close now to the end of the church
year. These Sundays in November are the last Sundays of the liturgical
calendar, before we begin a new church year with the First Sunday of
Advent in December. And in these last Sundays of the Season after
Pentecost, our Gospel lessons focus, naturally enough, on the last days
of Jesus’ earthly ministry, his final teachings in Jerusalem before
his death and resurrection. And what Jesus taught about at the end of
his earthly ministry was the end of the world—the last things, the end
times, the promise of an ultimate confrontation with God and an ultimate
fulfillment of all God’s good will. In fact, all our scripture
lessons for these Sundays focus on the End and the Judgment and the
Fulfillment—certainly all our lessons today do—and they all point to
the same message for us: Prepare yourselves. Expect God’s presence at
an unexpected time. Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the
hour when the kingdom will come. Be ready.
That much of the message is clear. But almost
immediately it raises another question: How can we be ready? How
can we prepare ourselves for confrontation and fulfillment in God? What
can we do—or perhaps more importantly, what can we be—to be
ready for our end in God?
Our lessons this morning tell us some things we can
do to be ready for God.
Amos says it first, and says it most bluntly and
unmistakably: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness
like an everflowing stream.” Amos warned the faithful people of his
time than nothing could stand the Day of the Lord apart from justice
that came from the Lord in the first place. In Amos’s time, people
talked about the Day of the Lord a lot. They looked forward to it. It
was common to think of the Day of the Lord as the time when God would
act decisively to vindicate the faithful and punish all God’s enemies.
The people of Israel thought of the Day of the Lord as the day of their
own triumph and exaltation.
But Amos saw things differently. If the Day of the
Lord was the day of God’s vindication, then what would be vindicated
would be justice and righteousness. Everything that wasn’t
justice and righteousness would be burned away. But the people
themselves, Amos saw, were not living in justice and righteousness. They
were cheating their neighbors in bad business deals. The rich were
buying up farm land and forcing the former owners to work as indentured
servants, as wage slaves, on their own land. The powerful were building
ivory palaces while the poor could not pay the taxes of wheat that were
their only source of bread. Any of that sound familiar? In the midst of
that daily unrighteousness, that casual injustice, Amos proclaims that
the Day of the Lord will not favor the Israelites; it will be
darkness, not light; it will be like running away from a lion and
running right into a bear; it will be like hiding in a house where you
thought you were safe and suddenly being bitten by a snake. The Day of
the Lord will bring destruction to the unrighteous, Amos says, and no
amount of pious posturing or meticulous ritual can escape that. And so,
Amos says, the only way to be ready for that judment is to be just—the
only way to be prepared for the future triumph of righteousness is to be
striving for righteousness right here and now. Working together to build
a community of right relationships— right relationships in business,
in property, in politics, in power—working together to build a
community of right relationships is the best way to prepare ourselves
for the righting of all relationships that will come on the Day
of the Lord. So Amos tells us one way we can be ready for God: we can do
justice.
Jesus also picks up on the theme of judgment in the
Gospel lesson today. But instead of a Day of the Lord that brings
darkness and destruction, Jesus speaks of the coming of the Kingdom as a
wedding feast, a great huge party—and the point that Jesus
makes is that we don’t want to be left out of the party just because
we’re not ready to play our part in the festivities. That’s what’s
going on in this parable of the bridesmaids: according to the marriage
customs of the time, it was the bridesmaids’ job to wait for the
arrival of the bridegroom, and then conduct him in a sort of torchlight
procession to the wedding hall where the cermony and the feast would
take place. A ten-bridesmaid procession is a pretty big deal, so the
implication is this is going to be a pretty big party. The problem, of
course, is that five of the bridesmaids do not have enough oil for their
lamps to be able to take their part in the procession when the
bridegroom comes. Instead of lighting the way to the feast, they get
left out in the dark, when midnight is past and the door is shut and all
the lights go out. The parable tells us to make sure we have enough oil.
Commentators thoughout the centuries have given
different interpretations of what the oil in the parable really means.
Some say that the oil in the parable is a symbol for good deeds, and the
message is that we must do good in our earthly life so that we can earn
our place at the heavenly banquet. Others say that the oil is a symbol
for prayer and contemplation, and the message is that we must cultivate
a personal holiness so that we can be holy enough for Jesus when he
comes. For myself, I don’t like to put too narrow a meaning on the
symbolism of the parable; I think symbols work best when you give them
some freedom to play around and attach to different meanings and point
to a reality that’s “too big” to fit in simple words. I’m
reminded that the oil for the lamps would have been olive oil, the same
kind of oil they’d use for cooking or washing or anointing. I’m
reminded the the title “Christ” means “the Anointed One”; and
that Luke speaks of Jesus being “anointed with the Holy Spirit and
with power to go about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the
devil”; and that in our baptism we speak of being anointed with the
Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. I think of the light
of Christ that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome
it; I think of the light of Christ that shines in our hearts and shows
forth Christ’s glory for the world. I think the oil in the parable is
nothing less than the Spirit of Christ, and the message is that we must
let our light shine through good deeds and through prayer and
through service and through celebration and through love,
so that people around us may see the light and give glory to our Father
in heaven. We can meet the bridegroom when he comes, not because we’ve
done something to earn his favor, but because we share his light, and in
that light we recognize each other in love. So Jesus tells us another
way to be ready for God: we can let our light shine.
Finally, Paul tells about a third way to be ready
for God: and that is the way of hope. The Christians in Thessalonika
were concerned because some members of their community had died without
witnessing the return of Jesus. They expected that Jesus would return
any day, any moment, within their own lifetime—and they were worried
that those who had died before Jesus came back would be left out
of Jesus’ kingdom. So Paul writes to assure them that life and death
are no barriers to Christ’s reign. When Jesus comes, Paul assures
them, the dead will be raised and the living will be caught up, and all
of us will be together where we’ve always been together, in Christ.
The Christian community might grieve the loss of those they’ve loved;
but, Paul says, they should not grieve “as others do who have no
hope.” Because Christ’s love will give life to us all, there is no
loss that is permanent, there is no hurt that will not ultimately be
healed, there is no grief that cannot be set in the context of a larger
hope that in God all shall be well. And so, Paul says, we can
“encourage one another with these words.” Even though we may
experience many griefs in our lives—lost relationships, lost
opportunities, broken health, the suffering of the innocent, dreams that
die before their time, lives that are over when we still have so much to
share—even though we experience many griefs, we do not grieve as those
who have no hope, but even in the midst of grief we keep looking
forward, even in the midst of grief we keep looking for the fulfillment
of all our hopes in God. And so we are encouraged, so we take heart, to
live the gift of life to its fullest, to be awake and aware of the
abundance of life in Christ, and to share that abundant life with those
who need it most. We will meet Jesus when he comes, Paul says, not
simply in the power of our lives, but because we’ve been hoping in his
life all along. So Paul tells us another way to be ready for God: we can
be hopeful.
Do justice. Let your light shine. Be hopeful. The
Good News for us today is that we can be ready to be face-to-face
with God, whether that means at the end of the world, or the end of our
lives, or any moment, any time when God comes to us and calls us to love
and service and joy and grace. The Good News is that God’s justice and
God’s light and God’s hope are making us ready today, and will lift
us up forever.
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