An Oil Crisis!

Scriptures:       Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; I Thessalonians 4:13-18;

Matthew 25:1-13

Our members of a certain age may remember gasoline rationing in the 1970’s due to oil shortages – US oil production had peaked and was starting to decline, and various Middle Eastern countries staged an oil embargo against the US - and for our longtimers, during World War II in the 1940’s due to the need to conserve gas for the war effort.  I wasn’t around in the 1940’s, but I do remember the 1970’s – long, long lines at gas pumps, gas stations using red/yellow/green flags to indicate the availability of gasoline, and people being able to buy gasoline only on certain days, depending on whether one’s license plate ended in an odd or even number.  In those days, people had to plan their usage of gasoline very carefully – up to the oil crisis, gasoline had been maybe 30 cents a gallon, though prices increased greatly during the crisis, and most cars of that era didn’t get terrific gas mileage, maybe 10-15 miles a gallon - so if you ran out of gas, it would be another two days before you could fill the tank – that is, if you could find a gas station that wasn’t sold out.

In our gospel reading today, Jesus tells a parable about an oil crisis.  It had nothing to do with gas mileage or Arabs, but rather with a wedding banquet in which one of the guests of honor, the groom, was delayed.   Ten bridesmaids waited for the groom to arrive.   Being a bridesmaid was not only an honor in its own right, but a wedding feast, which went on for days, would have been a chance for them to network and perhaps meet potential husbands.  Five of them had brought extra oil, and five had not.   While the groom was delayed, they all fell asleep, and by the time the groom arrived, their lamps were going out.  Those who brought extra oil were able to get theirs going again, but those who didn’t were forced to go out and buy more oil, and ended up being locked out of the wedding feast, and perhaps their chance to meet their own Mr. Right.

On one level, this is a story about planning ahead.  “Be prepared” is the Boy Scout motto.  Five of the bridesmaids had enough foresight to be prepared by bringing along extra oil, and five didn’t.  And in the same way, we should be prudent, calling on our own foresight to prepare for the unexpected.

But beyond questions of prudence and preparation, the parable is really about faith and endurance.  Will faith go the distance?  The earliest followers of Jesus lived in expectation that Jesus would return very soon – after all, earlier in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus told his followers at the end of Matthew chapter 16 “‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’   We’re not sure exactly what Jesus meant by these words – perhaps he referred to the resurrection.  But many interpreted this as saying that the world would end very soon and Jesus would return.  But at the time Matthew’s gospel was written, though to be around 80-90 AD, those who had walked with Jesus were getting older; some had been executed; some died of natural causes.  And the reality set in that Jesus would not be returning on the schedule they’d anticipated.  And so the writer of Matthew’s gospel remembered this parable from Jesus and included it as encouragement for believers not to lose hope.

This parable has a word of hope and of challenge for us as well.  Do we have a faith that’s prepared to go the distance?  Several times in the Sundays approaching All Saints Day, I compared our part in the story of faith as a lap or two in a relay race, at the beginning of which we receive the baton of faith from those who have gone before us, and at the end of which we pass the baton to those who come after us.  In the contexts of the 2000 year history of the church or the even longer history of God’s dealings with humankind as recorded in Hebrew scripture, in the context of the global church of which our congregation is a small part, our lifespan is a small part of a much greater whole.   And in all candor, I find that very comforting; if I mess up, as I inevitably will, it doesn’t mean the entire global church will come screeching to a halt; there are many others carrying the baton.  But as we live our lives, that lap or two during which we run the relay race of faith represents 70, 80, 90 or more years of carrying the baton and ensuring that it’s passed on to the next generation.   That’s a long, long time to be running.  Will our faith go the distance?

Oscar Wilde wrote that “There are two tragedies in life; one is not getting what you want, and the other is getting it.”  This saying reminds us that both bad times and good times can test our faith.   I think all of us know what it is not to get what we want, or to get what we don’t want.  When we’re getting slammed by one crisis after another – a death in the family followed by a job loss followed by a scary medical diagnosis – it is only natural to ask where God is in all this.  Very often, one answer is that God is suffering right along with us, that though God may not take away the suffering, God likewise will not abandon us in our suffering.  Hard times can make us bitter, or hard times can make us better.  It’s easy, when we’re getting slammed with bad news, to follow the bad advice of Job’s wife to curse God and die, or to deny that there is a God, or to think that God must hate us.  When this happens, we are like the bridesmaids whose lamps ran out of oil.  Alternately, bad news can lead us to hold on to God even tighter, and can give us greater empathy toward others who are also suffering.  We all know of twelve-step groups, such as AA and NA, for those recovering from addiction, or support groups for widow and widowers, or those who have cancer, or those who have lived through other tragedies.  People in such groups have taken their adversity and turned it into something live-giving for others going through similar circumstances…..as I heard it said at a funeral for a longtime member of AA who had started a number of AA groups and given hope to many in recovery, “he took the raging torrent of his life and poured it out as cups of cool water for others to drink.”

“There are two tragedies in life; one is not getting what we want, and the other is getting it.”  If adversity can erode our faith, prosperity can damage our faith at least as much, or more, if we let it.  When we’re riding high, in our pride we can forget where we came from, and forget who has brought us to where we are.  We can become arrogant, and forget that we depend on God for every breath we take.  The story of the rich young ruler illustrates this; he talked a good game and even to some extent lived a good life, but when push came to shove, his faith in his possessions trumped his faith in God.  Similarly for us, wealth and prosperity can lead us to play it safe, to be silent when we should speak out, to give lip service to our faith while cozying up to spiritual wickedness in high places, of which there is plenty not only in Russia and China and Europe but also right here in the good old USA – spiritual wickedness not confined to any one political party, but wickedness which under both parties, with the best announced intentions for peace, inevitably find their way to acts of violence and war.  It’s a systemic wickedness beyond the control of any one president or political party.  Roman Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton gave the powers and principalities the name “the Unspeakable”.  In his book “Raids on the Unspeakable”, Merton describes “the Unspeakable” thus:

“The Unspeakable:  What is this? …... It is the void we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of official and public declarations at the very moment they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience….Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled to it under this particular aspect:  as the nest of the Unspeakable.  This is what all too few are willing to see.”

As Fr. John McNamee, former pastor of St. Malachy Roman Catholic church in North Philadelphia wrote, “We overcome not by winning but by endurance.”  Living our faith means sacrifice – sacrifice of time, talent and treasure in God’s service – and can mean sacrifice of one’s friends, one’s reputation – even one’s freedom and one’s life, if our faith in God leads us to stand against the powers that be.  At my ordination last Sunday afternoon, the Rev Sharon Morris from the Conference, when she gave me my ordained minister’s card, passed on the sage advice that “this card can get you out of jail.”  What she didn’t say is that following Christ in resisting evil, as an ordained minister or as a layperson, can get you into jail as well, not only to visit, but to stick around a while.   And this doesn’t happen only in places like Syria or Nigeria where ISIL or Boko Haram is running rampant.   It can happen right here.  Consider 90-year-old World War II veteran Arnold Abbott, who has fed homeless people in Ft. Lauderdale for years, and continues to do so despite a city ordinance passed near the end of October banning the practice of feeding homeless in some areas outdoors.   Mr. Arnold, of the Jewish faith, along with two Christian pastors who support him, have been arrested but have no intention of stopping, and now others are feeding the homeless as well and also risking arrest, a form of civil disobedience, disobeying a man-made law in order to follow a higher obedience to the will of God.   Arnold says “I believe I am my brother’s keeper.  I’m Jewish, and in Judaism they say that if you save one person, you save the world.”   I’m also in correspondence with Sr. Megan Rice, an 83-year-old Roman Catholic nun, serving a three-year prison sentence following a Plowshares action – Sr Megan, with two others, breaking into a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge and hanging banners and splashing blood and spray-painting on the walls messages advocating peace.  Her faith tells her that the manufacturing of weapons for killing and destruction is against God’s will, acting as accessory to mass murder, and she acted accordingly, and so her beliefs led her to sacrifice her liberty.  Perhaps, the case of Mr. Abbott and Sr. Megan’s case, their age brings greater freedom of action; neither will have to look for a job or otherwise be negatively impacted to any great extent by a prison record, and Sr. Megan’s religious community will be her safety net and care for her on her release. 

“There are two tragedies in life; one is not getting what we want, and the other is getting it.”  In bad times and good, will our faith go the distance?  Do we have extra oil in our lamps?  I’ll close with a poem written by Dan Berrigan, Roman Catholic Jesuit priest and peace activist, called “Some”.

Some stood up once, and sat down
Some walked a mile, and walked away

Some stood up twice, then sat down,

"I've had it" they said,
Some walked two miles, then walked away

"It's too much," they cried.

Some stood and stood and stood
They were taken for fools   

They were taken for being taken in

Some walked and walked and walked
They walked the earth,

They walked the waters,

They walked the air

"Why do you stand," they were asked,
"and why do you walk?"

"Because of the children," they said,
"And because of the heart,
"And because of the bread,"

"Because the cause is the heart's beat,
And the children born   

And the risen bread" 

May we at Emanuel Church be among those who keep standing and walking with extra oil in our lamps, and inviting our neighbors to be at the wedding banquet of the lamb of God. Amen.