Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Weddings are something every culture in the world celebrates. There is almost always feasting, dancing and exhilaration. Today’s gospel lesson also talks about weddings and a marriage feast and the point of today’s parable from Matthew is this: get yourself together and be ready to receive the bridegroom when he comes – or else you will miss the party.
Like so many of his parables, Jesus begins this one with the worlds the “Kingdom of Heaven is like”. What precisely is he talking about?
When we use the word Kingdom in English we almost automatically think of a place. Like the Kingdom of Norway or England. Kingdom equates with geography.
But Kingdom also means rule or reign. The word comes from King and dom. Now the suffix, that tiny little part of a word dom – has to do with a state. People have wise dom the state or condition of being wise, or serfdom or boredom.
But the Kingdom of God has to do with being in close connection to God, of feeling God’s juristiction and an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Holy in one’s life.
Wild things happen when the Kingdom of God comes upon you. When you experience the Kingdom of God you experience great blessing. It is a sheer grace to have the experience.
So the Kingdom of God is this marvelous experience of the closeness of God – it is something to be deserved like, as another parable says, a pearl which you would sell everything you had for, or having a reunion and a reconciliation with a part of yourself that has been lost or ran away – like a child coming home after years of absence and no communication, a prodigal son or daughter.
Today’s parable talks about being ready when that Kingdom of Heaven experience happens. The parable says simply be ready with your oil, so that you can have a light to go to the party.
Oil figures prominently in the story. What are we in the church to understand oil to mean? Oil, in short, is the power source. If they had been modern girls and this a modern story we would have said batteries for your flashlight. The oil was the source of the power to give light.
Now we all know that batteries, and oil, even coal are all derivative sources of power – they can be traced back to an original source the sun.
We get, as human beings, our power from our relationship with God. Our relationship is based on communication – our oil – is our talking to God, our relating to God, our prayers, our worship, our reading, study and mediation in the Word of God. It is our food, our nourishment. Without it our energy reserves run down and our light grows faint and can go out.
The prudent maidens had a reserve of oil – they were close to God – they could go to sleep and sleep in peace knowing that when the time came they would be in relationship with the Lord.
I heard yesterday morning from the daughter of one such wise maiden. She called me to tell me her mother was in the hospital in Lewisburg, diagnosed with an enormous cancerous mass throughout her abdomen and lower organs. She is 83 years old and had been faithful to her Lord all her life. I called her in the hospital and she talked with me. Her first questions were about me and our family how we are doing. She has pain, but minimizes it and though she is dying has complete serenity about it. Her lamp burns brightly because she has stored up reserve over the course of a lifetime. Whenever the bridegroom comes she will go in gladness. Her faith is awesome. Sometimes I’d visit her early in the morning and interrupt her at her devotions she was there replenishing her stock of oil
The psalmist said, “I lie down to sleep and awake refreshed, for the Lord upholds me. The woman’s first name is Grace, she was aptly named.
There is a warning in this parable too.
Don’t let an opportunity to touch the Kingdom of Heaven go by.
What does this mean?
Before Debbie and I left our home in New Berlin to move here, we had lots to do. We had all the normal things of completing a ministry. But of the most important things we had to do was say good bye.
Sometimes saying goodbye opens up opportunities for reconciliation. No matter how hard you try, if you take your job seriously, you are going to occasionally offend people or hurt them. This is a broken world filled with real people who make mistakes and sin against on another.
But we really don’t like to leave things that way do we? Have you observed that too? We want somehow, because of that light that lives within us, the Holy Spirit which dwells in us because of our baptism, we want peace, reconciliation, brokenness restored.
Because when you move away it is very much like a death isn’t it? If you’ve been close there will be grief because that closeness will be no more. I thank God that the Kingdom of Heaven came near and I was graced to receive forgiveness and offer forgiveness in return.
The Reign of God, the nearness of God allows us to do daring and reckless things you see. Faith, believing in this incredible gracious reign can do the seemingly impossible – like: putting away your own pride and forgiving that relative or that friend with whom you’ve been angry for a lifetime or like: resisting temptation whatever your personally may be knowing that this reign of God, the nearness to the Holy One is infinitely better and sweeter than anything the flesh can offer up – or faith believing – the promise of God gives us grace to act unselfishly when we decide to make that phone call to a shut-in or sick friend even though we are desperately busy, or make that half hour visit in the nursing home.
The reign of God is risking the openness to share with someone you don’t know very well the mighty acts of God who has spared you from a disease or accident or who has brought you child back from the living death of addiction to alcoholism or drugs.
The reign of God is being able not to worry about the future in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, because Jesus lives and reconciles the whole world to Himself – even Saddam Hussein cannot escape from the awesome power of God.
Luther said in the Small Catechism that the Kingdom of God comes indeed, even without our praying for it, but we ask in this prayer that it may come also to us. It comes, says Luther, when our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit so that by his grace we believe his Holy Word and live a godly life on earth now and in heaven forever.
The New Testament in the book of Revelation refers to us as a Kingdom – Chapter 1, vs 6 says – “To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a Kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever”.
It is plain here that what is meant is that others may experience the Kingdom and Christ in and through us when we forgive freely as Jesus did and serve unselfishly and sacrificially as he did – and especially when we pray as intercessions for others.
But the parable today remind us – don’t miss an opportunity – be prepared – watchful ready, you don’t want to miss the feast and be left outside looking for oil when everyone else is at the party.
In Jesus’ name, Amen
Who We Are