Dear church,
How many of your important life decisions were influenced by something as simple as timing? An opportunity arose for you at just the right time, and you took advantage of it. I remember coming to this country 30 years ago. After an urban internship in Pittsburgh, there just happened to be an opening in an urban church in Philadelphia, a parish that also happened to need a German speaking pastor. It was great timing. It was God’s timing.
Timing can also work against you sometimes. Maybe you pursued a career goal, and the timing was never quite right. You had children to take care of. You had parents that needed attention. Your health was not the best. Or a pandemic rolled around. I hear they come every 100 years or so. And just when you were getting ready, the opportunity disappeared.
How many people who are considered “successful” reached the height of their success because of timely encounters with people who helped steer them in the right direction? It’s humbling to think about that because we realize our success isn’t always owed to our own greatness. The reverse is true as well: when we fail it’s not always because of us; bad timing and circumstances may be a significant factor.
Imagine for a moment you were born a few centuries ago… How much do you know about your family history? Judging from what I know about my own kin, those farmers with their weatherworn faces that I see on fading old photographs, my life would be hard, with lots of physical labor, toil, no financial safety, and a much shorter lifespan, - that is, if I ever made it past age 2. Vacations? Almost unheard of. We may say that these times are bad, but think about it, in many ways they are not so bad. How many of our senior citizens would still be alive if we lived in colonial times? Not many. Timing is a big factor.
And now Jesus speaks to us in this parable about the timing of Christ, which is something we cannot control. He tells the parable of the Ten Bridesmaids, also called the Ten Virgins. Our Lord is asking us to be prepared for the moment when Christ comes into our lives, when the timing is right for God to speak to us, a pivotal spiritual moment in life. Jesus speaks about this in the metaphor of a wedding. He is saying: when the Son of Man meets you, it might just be a time of joy and celebration, don’t be scared. Why do we only call the serious confrontations a “come-to-Jesus-moment?” Why don’t we call the joyful conversations around spiritual and other matters the same thing?
In the veiled language of the parable, Jesus warns that some of us, maybe half of us, won’t experience that precious moment when God wants to meet us on our turf because we are too rushed and too occupied, we have no spiritual oil left in the tank to keep our lamps burning… By the time the Messiah comes, we have run out of fuel. We sit in the dark. We think God doesn’t care, maybe doesn’t exist. To be honest, I think the 50-50 break-up between the wise and the foolish bridesmaids is a gracious depiction of humanity. I would have guessed 20% wise and 80% foolish, but God is kind.
The question then is: what does it mean to keep spiritual fuel in the tank? It means to maintain an openness that comes from the heart. It means to reserve some inner space for the spiritual dimension of life. It means to build into our frantic lives moments of rest and reflection when the fuel tank gets refilled. The fuel tank doesn’t always need to be full but don’t play with it like some drivers I know, who bring the fuel gauge down to nothing. Living like that, Jesus says, is foolish, and he doesn’t mean that as judgment. It’s a warning out of love.
What did we learn from the great pandemic of 2020-2022? I’m afraid, foolish as we tend to be, we didn’t learn enough, but maybe a few things. For instance: working people don’t need to commute all over the place all the time. One of the greatest and perhaps most surprising effects of the pandemic were the dreaded supply chain issues. You remember that, right? When we had trouble finding toilet paper, when the masks from China couldn’t come fast enough and people in this church made them with their own sowing machines, when the prices of used cars spiked and when you couldn’t even buy a new bicycle because there weren’t any... We depended on too many parts from too many places, faraway places, for essential items . Well, in the parable the bridesmaids have supply chain issues. When push came to shove, they couldn’t find oil quickly enough.
We hope that the American people and their leaders gained wisdom from those difficult years. We are allowed to believe in miracles! And of course, we cannot forget the deeper spiritual implications of this story. A short supply of spiritual fuel, also called “faith,” is a problem. A short supply of love and hope is a problem. We can’t live like that; and yet many people run on empty… And they wonder: why am I so burnt out? Literally burnt out, bereft of spiritual fuel! They treat church like another thing on their busy calendar, a non-essential thing and not as an opportunity to recharge and keep their inner lamps burning. Jesus would probably call that foolish. May God give us the grace to become wise - or at least wiser. To keep our lamps burning, we’ll need them soon enough! When the night comes, we need our lamps to be bright.
Amen.
