Going the Distance

Scriptures:       Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25,  Psalm 78:1-7

                        I Thessalonians 4:13-18,  Matthew 25:1-13

In today’s Gospel reading, we have a parable from Jesus about a wedding.  For some reason, it seems strangely appropriate…for Emanuel Church, this has been a year of weddings.  For my first nine years as pastor here, we had exactly one wedding, in August, 2008, for the daughter of the family across the street.  And then 2017 came around, and yesterday afternoon marked my third wedding this year.   Could there be still more on the way?  Stay tuned.

Anyway, Jesus tells us about a wedding, and, then as now, no wedding is complete without bridesmaids.  This wedding had ten bridesmaids.  Also, then as now, weddings would have been a good opportunity for eligible young ladies to catch the eye of an eligible young man, in hopes of having weddings of their own.  And so these young ladies would have wanted to look their best. Scholars tell us that at that time, a marriage came in two stages, the first being an agreement, not between the couple, but between their families – remember that this was a time of arranged marriages.  At some point after the ink had dried on the agreement between the families, the groom, accompanied by bridesmaids, would go to fetch the bride for the wedding.  And the bridesmaids would have been carrying oil-filled lamps – remember there were no street lights in those days.

Just one problem: the groom was delayed.  Not just an hour late, either.  It’s like he got caught in the mother of all traffic jams on the Schuylkill, or maybe like the situation during a snowstorm in January 2016, when two feet of snow literally stopped traffic and stranded motorists for more than a day on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  He was really, really late, so late that all the bridesmaids fell asleep.  But then, at midnight, the cry was heard, “Hear comes the bridegroom.”   We learn that five of the bridesmaids had the foresight to bring extra oil “just in case”, and five had not…..and so the lamps of the bridesmaids who had brought extra oil were shining bright, while the lamps of the bridesmaids who hadn’t were starting to flicker and sputter.   The five bridesmaids who were short of oil asked the others, “Could I borrow some of yours?”  And at this point, the parable turns into a scene from the movie “Mean Girls” – “No, you can’t have any of our oil! Go get your own!”   So the bridegroom came, with five bridesmaids carrying lamps to light the way, while the other five made a quick run to the local 7-11.  By the time they got to the banquet, the doors were locked.  When the five bridesmaids started banging on the door, the bridegroom said told them to go away – he wouldn’t even admit to knowing them.  And so the five bridesmaids missed a chance at landing husbands...and in the patriarchal culture of the day, that truly was an unhappy ending to the story.

What was Jesus trying to say?  In the previous chapter of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples asked Jesus how long it would be until the coming of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.  Jesus responded with a long speech with lots of graphic and disturbing imagery (Matthew 24), but with the qualifier that even he didn’t know the day or the hour.   So Jesus was telling his disciples that even he couldn’t tell them how long they would have to live in the world as it is, with all its problems, but that they needed to be prepared for the long haul.  And indeed, most  Bible scholars believe Matthew’s gospel was written somewhere around 40 to 50 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  The disciples who lived at the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection and their converts had believed Jesus would return within their lifetimes.  Forty to fifty years on, many of these disciples had died – all but one of the remaining eleven apostles had been executed, in fact – while those left who had known Jesus or the original apostles had grown old and gray.   And so they were asking:  Had Jesus forgotten about them? Had there been an unannounced change of plans?  And so Matthew included this parable of Jesus as reassurance and encouragement to persevere.

 How about us?  Will our faith go the distance?  Or will our flame go out at the first gust of high wind, at the first sign of trouble.  It’s notable that elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus tried to prepare his disciples for what it would mean to follow him….and by our standards, Jesus was the world’s worst salesman.  A modern day salesman – or a modern day televangelist (often not a dime’s worth of difference) - will tell prospective converts to sign on the dotted line, to turn their lives over to Jesus, and God will shower blessings on them and their lives will become so easy as they “name and claim” prosperity in God’s name.  And then if hard times come, these followers become disillusioned and walk away.  But Jesus took a very different approach.  He told prospective followers up front to count the cost.  He told prospective followers that if they weren’t willing to leave their families and homes behind to follow him, they weren’t worthy of him.  He told a wealthy potential convert that he had to sell everything and give it away before he could follow Jesus – nowadays, we’d let him keep his money and put him on the finance committee, in hopes maybe he’d leave some money to the church in his will.  Jesus told his disciples that following him would mean taking up a cross, would mean losing their lives.  Jesus was very clear up front about the costs of following him – and so those who followed Jesus, having had fair warning, prepared themselves mentally and spiritually.  And their faith was able to go the distance.  

These days, in our country, living in the way of Jesus may not get you persecuted. In many other countries it’s very different – in many countries around the world, being openly Christian can get you killed -  but in this country, living in the way of Jesus will mostly get you ignored, not killed.  People won’t want to hear you, but they probably won’t kill you.  But if you act on your faith in a public way, you may face opposition, even in our country – as when Christians feeding homeless people have been arrested for violating ordinances against feeding homeless people.  Christians, clergy and lay, have been among those arrested at Standing Rock and other pipeline sites, defending land and water against fossil fuel corporations.  And even if we’re not out there making public statements, living in the way of Jesus, loving God and neighbor, caring for the poor, can involve major sacrifices of time and resources, because we’re living for Jesus, not just for ourselves.  So even here in our country, following in the way of Jesus can come at a cost.

Jesus’ parable assumed that there was only so much oil to go around, so that the bridesmaids wouldn’t share.  But the oil that keeps our faith going – faith, hope, love, encouragement, mutual support – is unlimited.  In fact, the more we share, the more we have.  And so, unlike the bridesmaids in Jesus’ parable, we can help keep one another’s faith alive, can help keep one another’s lamps trimmed and burning, when difficult times come.   We can help.  It’s also true that we can’t rely entirely on others, that others can’t live our lives for us, that while we can lean on others along the way, there are some parts of the journey only we can walk.  if our relationship with others is all give and no take, or worse yet, all take and no give, we may need to ask God to lead us into healthier ways of relating to others.  Even the most generous people don’t appreciate being mistaken for ATMs, and depending entirely on others to rescue us over and over again keeps us functioning on the level of children, when God may be calling us to grow up.

How do we keep our lamps burning.  A part of it is self-care.  God who created us knows we were never intended to be perpetual motion machines.  Indeed, we’re not just encouraged, but commanded, to rest one day out of seven – that’s the commandment about keeping the Sabbath.  And Jesus often pulled away from his disciples to climb a hill and pray to God…..as likely as not, he was praying for strength to deal with those disciples, who constantly misunderstood him.  And so self-care is a part of keeping our flame from going out.

There are times in our spiritual walk when the path can become very dark.  St. John of the Cross wrote about what he called the dark night of the soul, when we just don’t feel God’s presence in our lives, when it feels like our prayers are going up, bouncing off the ceiling, and landing back on the floor, when it feels like God is telling us “talk to the hand”.  We try and try to get that old feeling of assurance back – more prayers, different devotional practices – but still, the way is dark.  John of the Cross assures us that these feelings don’t mean God is abandoning us – far from it - but rather than God is inviting us into a deeper relationship that doesn’t depend on emotional highs or spiritual wows.  It means that God is weaning us off spiritual milk and inviting us to taste spiritual meat.  And yeah, if I’m a baby and don’t have a lot of teeth, a breast or a bottle of milk is appropriate.  But a 20-year old who still fed from a bottle would be grotesque. At some point, we need to cut our spiritual teeth, put the bottle and the binky aside, and try out some solid food. 

Will our faith go the distance? The Rev John McNamee, also known as Father Mac, now retired, was pastor for many years at St Malachy’s Roman Catholic church at 11^th & Master Streets, in North Philly near Temple University.  He wrote a book which has encouraged me in my ministry, called Diary of a City Priest,  basically a year in the life of a North Philly priest.  And here are the chapter titles:  Spiritual Progress: Very Poor at It All, Belonging Nowhere, The Long Haul, Going Away and Coming Back – that chapter was about a trip to Ireland, where the poor man had a chance to get in touch with his roots.  More chapter titles:  Aesthetics of Asymmetry – translation, basically, “here’s what it looks like to do ministry in my off-kilter neighborhood where everything’s broken and nothing works”  More chapter titles:  The Margins of the Church, Tired of Losing, Simply to be Here, or to Be Here Simply, There Is No Payoff, The Primary of the Spiritual, Emotional Exhaustion, and finally, This Dark Night.. A Grace.   Reading these chapter titles and knowing the amazing quality of ministry Father Mac did gives me assurance that if his faith could go the distance, despite the sense of discouragement and defeat that constantly ate at him,  there’s hope for me yet as a pastor here.

Will our faith go the distance? Will our church go the distance?  There was a time in the 40’s and 50’s when a church could just open its doors and people would fill every pew - Build it and they will come.  Those days are long gone.  We can’t count on the church that was always there in the past to be there in the future….and it’s frustrating to watch non-church folks as I read conversations on the  Bridesburg facebook pages just blithely assume that if they need the church someday, it’ll be there.  Bad assumption.  Blink, and that church on the corner may turn into apartments or an antiques shop.  Today churches exist because their people are committed to do what’s necessary to keep them going, however painful, whatever the cost…..and even so, churches like ours are often like the proverbial duck that on the surface just seems to glide along, but underneath is paddling with all its might….and sometimes, even all that paddling isn’t enough to keep a church afloat.  It’s not just about this or that individual church, but a culture that has pushed the church to the sidelines….and that culture is very much present in the ‘Burg as well.  According to congregational statistics I’ve read, Protestant and Catholic, out of over 8000 people in the ‘Burg, at best maybe 1000 attend church regularly, roughly 700 at Cantius, maybe 250 between Grace Baptist and Real Life, and maybe 50 between us and Bridesburg Methodist.  So we need to be intentional, packing plenty of extra oil for our lamps, if we hope to keep the lights on here at Emanuel.

“Keep your lamp trimmed and burning”.  May we journey together on the path of faith, and help to keep one another’s flame from going out.  May we journey together, and together may our faith go the distance.  Amen.