Sunday Talk

I was due to speak at a little chapel last Sunday, but in the end everyone decided to join the Remembrance Service at the parish church instead, which I think was the right thing to do. I had chosen not to preach on the Remembrance theme, as it happens, but on the set readings for the day (the parable of the wise and foolish virgins), as given below :-

  Weddings in first century Palestine were rather different from weddings today. So far as we can tell, the marriage ceremony followed a lengthy betrothal or engagement period which was itself a contractual arrangement that could be ended only by a formal divorce. On the marriage day itself, the bridegroom would come to collect his bride and they would make their way in procession to the place where the marriage was to be celebrated. In the story Jesus told, perhaps it was a procession of this sort for which the ten bridesmaids were waiting, with their oil lamps.  And the bridegroom, as we heard, was late.

I thought it was brides who were supposed to be late. My daughter got married two months ago, and she was 25 minutes late. That actually counted as a minor success; the photographer had told us she’d be an hour late. Her new hairdo fell out and they had to start again, apparently. On the day, all sorts of people could have been late in fact: my brother Colin was travelling from Llandudno, I’d a nephew coming from Anglesey; my sister was coming across from Oakham in Rutland and picking up her daughter in Stratford-on-Avon on the way. My son was coming from London, as were many of the groom’s friends, and another brother, Terry, was coming down from Blackpool. And since my son-in-law is Polish, all his family had flown in from Krakow. In fact everyone apart from the bride arrived on-time, though my brother and sister-in-law from Llandudno did run things a bit tight.

But the tension! Had we done everything, prepared everything, paid for everything? For weeks, my daughter’d been sending us planning rotas, showing what we should all be doing, and the date we should have done it by. Mostly, we ignored them, and it didn’t matter. It all went really well, and everyone had a good day, especially the bride and groom.

We forgot a few things, and we didn’t quite get round to doing a few things. None of them mattered too much as it happens, but with so much to coordinate, we could easily have missed something important. And then it would have mattered a lot. Weddings today are very different from weddings in first century Palestine, but they’re just as important, that’s for sure.

Whatever you’re planning, it’s important to have a plan B. Not everything will go exactly as predicted in plan A, so you need to make sure you can still keep all the wheels on the road, even so.  Keep things slick, and no-one else will notice, that’s the theory. It’s wise to make sure you have oil in your lamp.

Well, this is a parable about judgement, of course. Jesus had a lot to say about judgement, of course. He didn’t only talk about finding lost sheep and binding up wounds; there’s also a hard edge to his teaching. His people will have to answer for their action and for their inaction.

It’s good that this is a parable about inaction. When we use the word ‘sin’, we’re mostly thinking in term of sins, plural, in other words of the bad things we might do, or maybe see other people doing. Mostly we ourselves are nice and good, and don’t do much that’s wrong. But sin mostly isn’t sins at all. Sin is less about what we do, more about what we don’t do. When we don’t get round to things, when we can’t be bothered. Too much of the time, that’s me. I’m dreadful at not getting round to things. A procrastinator, a last-minute man, that’s me. To be honest, we’re a family of them; that’s why my daughter kept making out her rotas and lists, and that’s also why we mostly ignored them. Which group of bridesmaids would I have been in? I think I know.

More than once, I’ve been saved by the fact that Tesco’s open 24 hours. Well, there were no 24 hour superstores back in those days, to sell foolish young ladies oil for their lamps. I can imagine them hammering on the dealer’s door to wake him up. It must have taken them ages; and when they got back, they were too late.

So let’s think about what the message might be of this story for the people who first heard it, and for us today. We all know the song, “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning.” This is a story about how we make ourselves ready for the Lord. Maybe those who first heard Jesus were thinking mostly about being prepared and ready for the second coming, the Lord coming in judgement and fire, the end of all things, the moment of reckoning. Will he find us ready and prepared, or will he find us wanting? It has that meaning for us as well, but I think we must also read it as referring to the ways in which we prepare ourselves for service in the world today. These are not alternative readings, and mutually exclusive; as we wait for our Lord, our waiting needs to be active and purposeful. We should be waiting as witnesses and as those who have a story to share.

We wait as members of a servant Church, dedicating its energies and skills into making the world around us here as heavenly a place as it can be. We proclaim the kingdom to come by building kingdom values of love and peace and compassion and service here where we are – loving our neighbours as ourselves.  Our beginning point in being sorted out and ready and prepared as Christians is constancy in prayer and in our reading of God’s word. If we don’t pray regularly and we don’t read regularly that’s like having the lamp but no oil to put in it. Lamps without oil go out; so does faith without prayer.

So, next question: what do I mean by prayer, and how do we go about reading God’s word? It isn’t just that we do it, it’s how we do it. Let’s think about prayer. Prayer isn’t really about reciting things, even something as holy and relevant and beautiful as the Lord’s Prayer. Of course reciting prayers can and should be part of our prayer life, but it shouldn’t be all we do. We don’t necessarily have to kneel to pray, nor even to speak. One definition of prayer speaks of “the practice of the presence of God”.

I love the story of the old men who used to wander into church every lunchtime and sit there for a half hour or so. One day the minister stopped him as he was leaving and said, “I love the way you come here every day to talk to God.” “Oh, I don’t talk to God,” said the old man, “leastways, I do sometimes, when I’ve got something to say, and sometimes I reckon he talks to me. But most of the time we just sits here together in peace.” Now that’s praying: choosing, in our busy lives, to make some space to sit a while with God. Words are optional, so is sitting, some to that. We may be busy, but we can never be too busy to pray. So I know one person who prays as she washes up after breakfast, another who prays as she drives to work each day (in case you’re worrying, she doesn’t close her eyes to do it).

How we do our reading is also important. There’s no prize for being able to devour bigger chunks of scripture than the next person. Often, small is beautiful in our scripture reading. It’s good to hear what others make of what we read, which is why bible study groups can be helpful. A word of warning, though: avoid any bible studies I might be leading, if you want to actually stay on the subject! Better still perhaps, read using a study guide or notes like the ones produced by Scripture Union, Bible Reading Fellowship and others.

But don’t read just to be dutiful, just in order to have done it.  It’s often worth doing a bit of serious study: the Bible comes alive when we understand it more clearly, the geography, the political context, the cultural practices, all of that. When we understand clearly what each story meant for the people who first read it, then that can help us to understand what it might be saying for us today.

But on the other hand we don’t always want to get too academic about things, because we can also just use the Bible as a catalyst for prayer. Read a short passage, perhaps one that’s so well known you don’t need to really think about it too deeply; so just read it and pause, reflect, don’t worry about the meaning so much as what God might be wanting to say to you personally through those verses. I remember being told about this sort of use of the Bible by a member of the Iona Community, and finding it quite exciting, that God might use these age old words today to say something to me that’s fresh and new. Expect to find new things as you read, expect that God might want to meet you here.

Please don’t imagine that I’m any sort of expert. In fact, I suppose I’m advising you to do things I don’t do very well myself. That’s something I have to admit. But I know I need to pray and to read, and I know I can always grow and develop in the way I do those things, and I know that it’s here, in my praying and in my reading, that I’ll I get the fuel and the motivation to keep on serving, burning.

Here’s a final thought, not about fuel for oil lamps but fuel for motors. I’ve an old friend who’s a motor mechanic, and he always has virtually no fuel in his car; someone else I know who drives for a living never lets his fuel tank go below half way. I know which one of the two I’d prefer to travel with!