READY FOR THE WEDDING
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Matthew 25:1-13
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
The other day I was watching a scene from the movie City Slickers on You Tube. It's amazing what you can get on that website. You can get almost any scene from any movie ever made on You Tube these days. Check it out if you haven't seen it yet. But, one of my favorite scenes from that movie, City Slickers, is a scene--I don't know if you remember...when the three main characters...the Daniel Stern character, and the Bruno Kirby character, and the Billy Crystal character...they are ambling along on their horses during a quiet time during the ride, and they're playing this game. They're talking about "Best Day." You remember this? "What was your best day? And your worst day?"
What was your best day? And they're all giving their answers to that question. Then they ask the Daniel Stern character--a guy who had a very troubled marriage to begin with, and had completely screwed up his marriage and his life by sleeping with the checkout girl in the grocery store that he owned. So they said, "OK, best day. What was your best day?"
"My best day?" he said. "My wedding day. That was a day when Arlene really looked good....The water pills really did the trick. My dad paid me respect that day. That was my best day." So OK, worst day, they asked him. And he said, "Pretty much every day since is a tie."
So, as today's sermon proceeds, if you get bored, that might be a good question to think about for you. We could play that game as we're ambling along today, this morning, on this ride. What was your best day? What was your best day, and what made it your best day? And did you do anything to prepare yourself for that best day? Because that is really the subject of my sermon this morning: can you prepare for your best day?
In this rather strange parable from Matthew that you heard a moment ago, a wedding, as it is in much of the Biblical witness, a wedding is a symbol for the "best day." If we think of the best day in history for Christians, a wedding is the symbol--a thing for which, in most cases, one must apply quite a lot of preparation. I know; Mary Alice knows; because we have been a part of a number of weddings, and using the data of my own wedding, I can say how much preparation goes into that one day. I mean, some of you know too. Some of you are preparing for your own wedding. Some of you are preparing for weddings of a child, or you have just had that experience. And you know how much effort goes into...the caterer, and the hall for the banquet, and the service, and the clergy...it's a lot.
I looked up on the Internet the average cost of a wedding in Mercer County. You want to know what it is? Thirty to fifty thousand dollars. And I actually think that's kind of a lowball for some of the weddings that I've been part of. Of course, not judging by the honorarium the clergy receives--you don't get much of a cut, let me tell you! But it's amazing. You know how many resources, monetary and psychic, how many family dynamics come into play, how much anxiety proceeds...all of it focused on one day. One moment--not even a day. A part of a day--it all boils down to that. All that energy and preparation.
I have a certain theory--a certain theory of spiritual physics concerning such events as weddings, that require that kind of preparation, and the math goes something like this: the quality of the preparation--all the time and the stuff that one does in preparation for that moment--has some direct relationship to our experience of that moment. How we prepare for that moment, in a mysterious way, shows in that moment for which we prepare.
That certainly was how I experienced my own wedding, which truly was one of the best, if not the best, days of my life. And you know, I can say that I prepared for it, but I wasn't prepared for it. You know, I wasn't really prepared for how incredibly joyful it was. After all the anxiety, all the details--how joyful it was! It felt like being carried on a wave of joy that was carrying everybody: my family, my friends--every bad thing in preparation was forgotten and it was...joy. I wasn't prepared for that. It was a divine surprise to experience the joyfulness of that day.
The wedding. It's a great symbol for what we are waiting for--not only as Christians, but as human beings: that kind of wedding, where we experience that kind of joy.
But the question is, can you prepare yourself for joy? Because I think that's the question that does emerge from these texts that we heard this morning. Though it's not the specific question that Paul and Matthew are addressing, it's really what they are talking about--and we should get to that. Let's take a moment to look a little bit in detail at what's going on in the context of Matthew and Paul--what we call exegesis in the trade. Tease out the meaning of these passages.
Paul--his first letter to the Thessalonians scholars believe is the earliest writing in the New Testament. Now the earliest Christians, who called themselves "followers of the Way" thought that the best day was going to be soon, was going to be any day. It would be certainly coming within their lifetime. And the people in the church in Thessalonica, which Paul founded, were dealing with some cognitive dissonance. It hasn't come, and Uncle Fred and Aunt Gladys have died--they missed the best day--what are we going to do about them? And of course, Paul writes to them, "Don't grieve like people who don't have hope. The best day that Christ is bringing will include even the dead in the mystery of that day."
In Matthew's community's somewhat similar circumstance, but he is writing a bit later. So people were still wondering, "When is that day going to come? It was supposed to come, and it hasn't yet!" And his concern is about how we prepare ourselves, and how we can be ready, when that day may be...tomorrow; it may be next month; it may be next millennium. How can we prepare for the best day? How do we wait?
Can you prepare for joy? Can one prepare for the best day? And of course, I'm putting it a little bit differently from Matthew and Paul, but it is the same math. You know, I think that beneath the concept of joy--at the basis of this experience that we human beings call joy--I would submit is the experience of God. Whether you're a believer or not, I would argue that point: that for us, the experience of joy is the experience of God, is the bridge to God. But, now, we as Christians have a highly nuanced concept of joy, and it may be that the highest experience of it for us may occur when you are lying on the ground, bloodied, having stood between the innocent and the oncoming. It may be that the highest experience of joy in is the very experience of self donation. So how do we prepare for that, for that kind of joy?
Maybe one important thing to note is we don't know when it's going to happen. That's what both Paul and Matthew are telling their communities: we don't know when it's going to happen. And we can't make it happen--maybe that's a more important point for us today than it was then. Because, you know, we want to make joy happen, right? There's a story I like telling, about one of the youth that I worked with when I was in Palo Alto--I was doing youth ministry as part of my work there. And Alice was one of my favorite youth, and her family would often invite me over for dinner, and I got to know them really well. And Alice's mom told me a story once about how Alice came home from school one day and she said, "Mom, Mom! I need to have a significant life experience! Because I need to write about it in my college apps. So we need to have a significant life experience this summer!"
You know, of course, we had a laugh, because it doesn't work that way. Joy and significant life experiences--we can't make them happen, they just happen. And the question is, are we ready? Have we prepared our hearts for them?
How many of you have been to such forced celebrations, where we have a sort of metaphorical shotgun to our head...and someone is communicating to you, "better be joyful. I've paid a lot for this wedding." You know? "We're going to Disney World--and you will have fun." "We're going skiing--it cost a lot of money--you're going to have fun." I think the reason that chemicals have been so popular throughout history is because the primary hunger of the human heart is for joy. And we're so hungry for it that if we can't have it we will manufacture it with chemicals--with alcohol or with drugs.
When all we need to do is wait. All we need is to practice the art, the discipline of waiting for joy to come. And in communities of Paul and Matthew, you know, waiting wasn't all that much fun. That was when people were persecuting Christians for their faith. That's more reason why the character of our waiting can reflect that which we wait for. The quality of our waiting can somehow be constituted in that for which we wait.
So how do we prepare for joy? You know, there's a big deal in this story from Matthew about the oil. What is it all about? And there are all kinds of debates throughout history, in the interpretation of this parable, about what the oil is. And the great thing about parables--the brilliance of Jesus' methodology, pedagogy--is that everybody's an expert with a story, right? You know, you can have any interpretation of it, and it can't be wrong. So we can imagine what the oil is. But it certainly has something to do with the quality of our preparation for that moment--the best day.
I'll give you my own take on it. And I think probably it's because I'm a student of Dante and medieval theology--but I think of the ones that didn't prepare and I think of one of the seven deadly sins. I think of sloth. OK, we don't talk a lot about sloth, but I'm going to say a little bit about it this morning. Because I think that's what's going on with these five bridesmaids who weren't ready. We think of sloth, of course, ordinarily, as laziness--do we not? But really, sloth is not that. I mean it might certainly produce laziness, but that's not, at heart, what it is. In Greek, the word for sloth is akedia. And it literally means "absence of caring." Apathy. William Willimon, one of my preaching heroes, in a sermon entitled Sloth says this about it. Because we could be working 14, 16 hours and still be victim of the deadly sin of sloth. Anyway, William Willimon says this about it:
Sloth eats away at the soul, wearing it down by slow degrees. It is a losing of the heart; the poison of pointlessness that kills hope, excitement, effort, and joy. Sloth is that sad sin that when one is confronted by the open, gracious hand of God, one turns away.
Here's what sloth is: it's the knowing, the knowledge that is intuitive for every human being, that at the heart of our existence is a wedding banquet. A wedding banquet that has been given to us by God. And sloth is the refusal to attend. And by that I don't mean to show up, I mean to pay attention; to fully appropriate the joyfulness of that gift. I think that's what sloth is. Sloth is the living of life as one long series of things to get over with. Sloth is that life that simply is trying to get past things by just getting by. And so I think the foolishness of the five bridesmaids, to me, has to do with their taking for granted the wedding feast. Their assumption that it would be no big deal if they didn't bring extra oil. They could score some from the other bridesmaids. But as we learned with the kids this morning, sharing oil with these folks would spoil the whole celebration; it would mean that the procession would run out of oil halfway.
So their sin is a lack of attentiveness to the moment. The cheapening of the joy that is at hand.
So how do we prepare for joy? How do we acquire that oil that we might need, because the bridegroom isn't going to show up on time? Especially if the quality of our waiting and our preparation has something to do with the moment of joy when it comes to us. How do we do that? I want to offer you just a few ideas that came to my mind, in shooting the breeze a little bit with Catherine as well. But these are meant to get your own imagination going. For you--what would it mean for you to prepare for joy? As I thought about that question, I thought for a moment about when I was in California and I was working hard. I certainly enjoy working hard, but I was thinking, you know, I'm not spending a lot of time with my friends--with people in my life who matter to me. I'm spending all my time working. I started to think, you know, the banquet? It's friends. Friendship is the banquet. It means something to me. But I'm not expressing that in my use of time. So what I did was--I love baseball, too--and so I got a 10 game package to the San Francisco Giants. And it was an investment in the banquet that is friendship. I would take a different friend each time. It was time to hang out. To attend the banquet.
If friendship is the feast, how are we attending it through our use of resources? And I know this is a tricky subject, especially in this time, but I'd feel kind of like a "chicken" if I didn't mention it here, too. How can we use our resources as a way to prepare for the feast? And I think about the story from the gospels about the rich young ruler, who asked Jesus, "What do I have to do to get that joy that your folks are experiencing? What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?" That's how he puts it. And Jesus says, "What's in the law? Are you doing what's in the law? Loving neighbor, and God?" And he says, "Yeah, I'm doing that!" And Jesus says, "OK, you lack one thing. Go and sell everything you have, and give it to the poor." And we read in the story that he went away sad. "His countenance fell, because he had many things." It's true that our things can be a symptom of our modern akedia. But it's also true that we can use them to prepare for the feast. Even if we don't have a job or money, how can we give ourselves as a preparation for the great banquet, that is at the end of time, and that is possible at any moment?
You know, I think of the oil that we need to be prepared, I think also, for me, is prayer. As a time during the day to prepare one's heart--to tune one's heart to the frequency of thankfulness. For me it's very important. It's a way that we can, every day, in an ordinary moment, experience the banquet that is a leaf that has turned, and a tree that is bare against the early winter sky. Try it. Take a day, or a week away from the internet, and the television, and the phone, and prepare yourself for joy.
The last thing I'm going to say is a sort of obvious thing, because there's a literal feast we're preparing for, are we not? At the end of the month, called Thanksgiving? And I will admit that there have been times I've approached that feast by thinking, "I just want to get it over with." I'll admit that. You know, we've spent all this time in preparation--it's not always that we enjoy that--but the question might be: how can we prepare for that moment so that we're not just getting through it? So that being with the people in our lives who matter most is a feast of joy. How's that possible? How are you going to be ready when--as B.B. King sings--when love comes to town? How will you be ready when joy comes, the joy that is the point of all history, and of all time, and of all human striving? How will you have made yourself ready for that moment that may be next millennium, or next minute?
Amen.
November 9 , 2008
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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