Twenty Third Sunday After Pentecost

As I speak to you today I want very much to come up with a meaningful sermon and to be honest feel inadequate to the task. And… I’m not sure that Jesus’ parable of the ten bridesmaids offers a whole lot of help! Despite who won the election from president all the way to each city council member I want to share with you some very good news. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Today and every day you are a beloved child of God!  

Through Jesus Christ you are freed from sin, death, and shame! Nothing you say or don’t say will change that.  As St Paul writes in Romans Chapter 8 “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”.  In life and in death, in order and in chaos, in promise and in peril, we belong to God.  As Christians this is who we are. 

On this day and in the days and weeks ahead we need to be reminded that God is bigger than earthly institutions. In the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has defeated death itself. The power of God over the powers that seem to dominate the world is also a theme deeply rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Psalms in particular are full of reminders that the forces of this world are chaotic, inferior, and fleeting. Take these familiar words from Psalm 46: The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts.  The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Democracy, elections, and government: all are phenomenally important, worthy of our attention and our engagement. They are the ways we order our life together as we seek justice for our neighbors and work toward the kingdom of God. We must not neglect these systems. But they far from perfect and in many ways broken.  Yet we must navigate within them, even as we also await with hope a new vision for God’s just and merciful rule.

That said let me speak for a moment about this interesting parable of the 10 bridesmaids.  What is striking in this parable, which appears to focus on judgment, and notice that the power of judgment is confined to one character—the bridegroom? Judgment is reserved to the only one who can judge…. Even the wise young women do not judge the foolish ones; they merely refuse to share their oil and send the foolish women to the shopkeepers.  I don’t know if it was Matthew’s intent to remind his people – let alone us that the power of judgment is reserved for the Lord alone, but Matthew does regularly makes it clear that the Lord who comes in glory is the one to judge.

And what about the judgements we make or try to make. Now that the election is over, and after months of acrimony and accusation, perhaps the fundamental question before us is this: can we regard those in our congregation or our larger church community who voted differently than we did as fellow and faithful Christians? And, more broadly, can we regard those in our larger community and country as fellow children of God, deserving of not just God’s love – which is promised! – but of our respect as well? And, by doing this, leave judgment to the Lord?

Now, before you say, “Sure,” think what we’re talking about. There’s a lot at stake in this election. Few people are on the fence, and many on both sides of the political spectrum have declared this a choice between good and evil. So picture the folks who support the candidate that you simply can’t imagine leading the country and now answer whether you can still regard them as God’s beloved children. Similarly, if you’re tempted to say, “Sorry, I just can’t do that.  Let me remind you that Jesus’ own disciples included someone who had worked for hated Roman Empire, another who stole money from the disciple’s common purse and betrayed Jesus, another who promised to follow Jesus to the very end and then not only deserted him but denied him. Where do you fit within that group?  Let him or her without sin cast the first stone.   Have you ever found yourself thinking that God will only redeem those like you?   If you think that way then maybe, just maybe, you underestimated the capacity of the one who created light from darkness and raised Jesus from the dead? 

This does not mean that the issues at stake in this election are not terribly important. They are. Nor does it mean that the decision we make about who has the best ability – in terms of character, judgment, temperament, experience and empathy – to lead this country doesn’t matter. It does. But at the end of the day, if we cannot see each other as equally deserving of God’s love, and redemption and cannot therefore accord each other a measure of dignity and respect, then we have forgotten that at the root of human sin is, precisely, the willingness to judge others out of our own insecurity.  A seminary professor Duane Priebe was quoted as saying – the minute you draw a line between who’s in and who’s out, you’ll find Jesus on the other side.

There is much in this parable I don’t have an answer for, like why some of the bridesmaids didn’t bring extra oil. Maybe they’d never imagined that the groom could possibly be so delayed. And I don’t know why the others wouldn’t share. Maybe they were so caught up in their own anxiety they found it difficult to be generous. And I don’t know quite what to make of the clear note of judgment sounded in this text.  But I do know that is the Jesus and only Jesus who has the right and power to judge only because he was willing to be judged on our behalf.

In the next few weeks we will read more parables from Matthew 25 all with this element of judgement in them.  It kind of scary, really, and the judgement is quiet harsh.  But then we get to chapter 26 and read these words  ‘You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified’” (26:1-2). And, still knowing this, he went forward… to the cross… for us… and for all people or, as John says at a similar moment in his Gospel, “And having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end”. 

These are challenging days as we live in the time of the three P’s, pandemic, protests, and politics, but God’s love is here for all no matter where we sit on the left or the right.  We are called at a time like this to live in Honesty, Hospitality, and Hope.  As we live in this faith community together it should be a safe place to vote for the other candidate.   There may be just one person in our community who did not vote like the rest of us democrat, republican, conservative, socialist, or whatever we label or brand ourselves we see ourselves as Christians first.  Rather than to allow these modifiers to modify our Christianity. 

I don’t know what this moment means nor do I know what tomorrow holds.  But I do know that because of Jesus we have won the victory.  The very best way, that I know of, to bridge the divide we have today on Politics, Protests, and the Pandemic, is to do and be what Father Peter Scholtes wrote when he wrote the hymn.   “We are one in the Spirit,”  We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, And we pray that our unity will one day be restored, And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love. Amen