Oil Shortages
Matthew 25:1-13

November 6, 2005

One week it’s being a Reformed Protestant and the next it’s becoming a saint. Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox stereotypes appear to be jumbled and confused here, but nothing is odd about being a reformed saint. Protestants are talking admirably today about Mary the Mother of God, and Catholics are singing Martin Luther hymns and affirming the doctrine of justification by faith alone that more or less divided us in the 16th century. I would like us to listen again as if for the first time to a parable of Jesus with reformed ears to hear a saint.

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. That darn sentence again telling us this is the way it’s really going to be, always followed by a situation that doesn’t make sense to our sense of Christianity. The kingdom of heaven is supposed to be brimming with saints, so perhaps this is the right time for the right story.

Ten young women took their lamps to meet the bridegroom. It has that tone of a traditional anecdote, perhaps even a joke. Some of us perk up our ears; some sigh and wait for the punch line to pass judgment. Jesus already has exercised his judgment: five were foolish or silly and five were wise or smart. Actually, the best vocabulary is in Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Version. Five were “giddy-witted” and five were “cool.” Many versions note that they were virgins, which is an important fact if you are one.

They were giddy-witted or cool regarding how they managed their oil resources. It was a different kind of oil that burned in those old lamps than the kind killing us at the pumps. Oh, we can go on a tangent, but right now there is a wedding to celebrate.

Can there be bad virgins? One never gets enough of the surrounding situation in these parables, but surely there is no evidence that the giddy-wits were anything but morally upright, probably very devout religious young women. Five of them, Jesus notices, did not bring extra flasks of lamp oil; and five others did bring a flask. Experience matters, I suppose, and perhaps this was the first wedding for the inadequately oiled virgins. They just didn’t know the routines of what bridegrooms do at their weddings. They were saints just as much as those who thought ahead about their oil.

Saints are saints within their own particular culture and time. There was no electricity back then, and it became dark around 6:00 p.m. It was really dark out there, so you needed a torch or a lamp. And there were no clocks so that one could say, “the wedding banquet will begin at 9:00 p.m.” Being no clocks, people were not driven by time in the same way. A wedding banquet takes a lot of time to prepare: ask any of you with a recent family wedding. Preparing those fatted calves for dinner was no quick matter. It could take days from the time you first thought of it.

And there also seemed to be a game about when the bridegroom would return to his house with his bride. It could be hours and hours, long past any reasonable expectations. When the bridegroom finally shows up, he is trying to catch them napping. At midnight there was a shout, “Here he comes!” Even the cool, wise, smart young women were dozing off and sleeping by this time. You cannot be alert all the time. You do have to sleep sometime, but all ten of the young women did wake up. For the cool ones, it was simple: pull out that flask and refill your now cold lamp. The giddy-wits had not thought that far ahead and now it was darkly obvious what they should have been thinking. They needed oil and the others did not have enough to share. No choice but to go to the oil store, and at midnight I doubt there were many open.

Saints they may have been, but now they had to remove themselves from the action and excitement. They had to remove themselves from kingdom of heaven business. Now I suppose that you can be a saint anywhere. Mother Teresa showed us that amidst the human squalor and denigration in the worst parts of Calcutta in a culture that was not Christian. She had allowed the Christian environment to inhabit her heart and every action she took: the kingdom of heaven was within her. But for most of us, you can’t cook if you’re not in the kitchen. You can’t curl if you are not on a sheet of ice. Looking for oil actually has nothing in common with having a good time eating and celebrating at the Messianic banquet in the kingdom of heaven. If you are away from saint stuff long enough, you forget what it means to live and be like a saint.

As we read and hear these parables time keeps on getting squeezed and compressed. The giddy-wits do come back with lamps burning bright full of oil and knock at the Bridegroom’s door, but God knows how long they took. After all, there were no 24 hour oil stores open in first century Palestine, so it could not really have been later that night. Maybe the next night or next week or next month or next year. The Bridegroom looks them up and down and declares, “I don’t know you.” Maybe by then he had simply forgotten who they were - out of sight, out of mind.

I have to admit, that rejection was harsh. Reading this harsh ending, some of us have wondered out loud whether it would have been better for the wise, smart cool women to have shared some of their oil, or perhaps two could have shared the light of one lamp, like two people will share an umbrella. What makes those wise cool ones so saintly when they act so greedily? There is no doubt those would have been the strategies suggested if this had happened in our normal daily world. But the kingdom of heaven is like this. You can’t avoid the responsibility of needing to be ready and prepared, and most of the time to be awake. Keep awake, Jesus concludes, for you know neither the day nor the hour. You can’t give up being saintly for a few years and think you can pick right up where you thought you left off. Muscles atrophy when they are not used and spiritual muscles atrophy just as quickly. It would be nice to do everything for everybody, but sometimes every body has got to do it for themselves or nobody gets anything done.

By the way, this parable of Jesus is not meant to be that subtle. Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels was a modest person, never referring to himself or his mission directly. When he had to, he talked about a mysterious third person - the Son of Man - and readers of the Gospel still are not sure exactly what he meant. He also referred to himself as the Bridegroom on a number of occasions. So these bridesmaids were waiting for Jesus and his ushering in the kingdom of heaven. Some were so committed to be with him that they planned out every detail to be ready. Sure, they had dozed off, but in a crisis they were prepared and had resources to rely upon. Others felt that they could “wing it,” that they could do it off their natural talents, that it really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find a parking spot in the kingdom of heaven.

None of us are that “natural.” That’s really the whole point of the Bible, that you and I are not naturally God. You have to do some serious preparation to be able to handle those crises and rejections, those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the absurdities of life. You and I can’t get by without some heavy duty studying so that you know how things really work and how they might be fixed. You’ve got to think through all those situations and figure out as best as you can what is going to be required of you, down to the most minute detail. You have to stay active and busy, keep exercising those muscles, keeping alert and on the lookout. And you have to keep praying, keep finding your way into the presence of God to know that when you are caught short and surprised by circumstances, you know that there is someone who will respond to you. But you have to be ready, plenty of extra oil, awake as you can be to the possibilities.

For years our family has lived in the central part of the North American continent, and it’s cold here, but you know that when it’s cold the sun shines a lot. Estevan receives the most sunlight of any city in Canada, and in Regina we are not far behind. We were used to a lot of sun and then we moved to England. A lot of you know exactly what I’m going to say. That first year it seemed to rain all the time, the sun becoming a dim memory. When all we could see was that foggy gloom, we became gloomy too.

I went back for a second year, and I returned with a changed attitude. I knew by then the meteorological reasons for all that rain and cloudiness. But I decided I was going to look vigilantly for the sun. No, I didn’t have the right or the ability to have the sun as much as I did in the middle of North America, but when the sun shone, I would be ready to enjoy it.

Almost immediately, I started seeing the sun an awful lot more than I did the previous year. Last year I was focused on missing the sun; this year, I reveled whenever it peeked out in the middle of the morning between rain showers, when it shone with those brilliant colours at the end of the day. That sun never escaped me in England that year; I was always waiting for it and alert to the moment it peered through the clouds. The day was full of the possibility of sunlight, not empty with the gloom of clouds. If I saw the sun, felt it once a day for 10 minutes, I had all the sun I really needed. When human beings get enough sun, they feel better, they are more optimistic and hopeful, they are healthier.

Keep awake, for the sun also rises here. At midnight a knock at the door is heard, a shout rings out, and the party begins.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan