The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Waiting in line has been called the timeless form of torture. According to a recent study of consumers in the US, Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line. A 2015 Microsoft study found that the average human attention span clocked in at about eight seconds, a full second shorter than a goldfish. And technology is making matters even worse. It’s teaching us to expect instant gratification, something that the physical world, as we all know, cannot provide. What we want, we usually want now. Read a book? Nope, that’s too long, I’ll try to find the movie version and stream it. Fast food is faster than making food at home, so I might as well go through the drive-thru. It’s how we have come to be.
Christians have been waiting a very long time for Christ’s return, since He ascended in Acts chapter one to sit at the right hand of His heavenly Father in heaven. And it didn’t take Christians very long to get a little antsy about Jesus’ promise to return. In the opening years of the New Testament church, there was an ardent expectation, a hope, that Jesus would come back very soon. And very soon meant in days or weeks, or at least months.
That expectation, along with misunderstanding and foolish decisions, led to the authorship of the first and second epistles to the Christians in Thessalonica. Some Christians in those congregations were, so to speak, packed and ready to go. They made preparation for Christ’s return by divesting themselves of a job, which then led to a problem feeding their families, which then led to a problem in the congregations in Thessalonica, of the people who had common sense and continued to work found themselves having to support those who would not work. Thus that famous paraphrase of the axiom laid out in the book of Thessalonians: if you don’t work, you don’t eat.
They made preparations because they believed that Jesus’ return was imminent, it was about to happen, and the world itself would come to an end. But as time went on, and months turned to years, years to decades, decades to centuries, centuries to millenniums, that wait, it seems, has become too long for most Christians. Christians began to wonder through the centuries whether Christ would in fact come again. They began to wonder if they had misunderstood the teaching of Jesus, and wondered if the second coming of Christ, the promise thereof, would ever really truly be fulfilled.
They seem to have forgotten that the promise of Genesis 3, that a Messiah would come to save the people from their sins and usher in a new heaven and a new earth, had been given thousands and thousands of years before the New Testament period.
Waiting on God in general, and waiting for Christ’s return in particular, requires something that only Christians have: true Christian faith. Faith in what came before the promise, and hope in what is supposed to be fulfilled in the promise. See, faith is hope looking backwards to what has been done. Faith is hope looking forward to what Christ promises is going to be done.
And we have to admit as Christians that the longer the wait, the greater the risk to us. We can forget about our aspirations, our hopes, and our joy. We can lose hope, and we can become distracted in the things of this world. Or worst of all, our faith during that long period of waiting can wither and die.
The assigned Gospel lesson for this 24th Sunday after Pentecost, third to the last Sunday of the church year, is part of a lengthy sermon. Scholars like to use the word “discourse,” it sounds better. On the end of the world, Matthew chapter 24 and 25 consists of one long sermon about the second coming of Jesus.
The particular parable before us this morning, the parable of the ten virgins, is itself a beautiful, hopeful, exciting, and terrifying parable. It’s a dramatic reminder that Jesus is coming back, and that on that day He will judge between those who believe and those who don’t, those who lived in sin and reveled in it, and those who confessed their sins so that He would be faithful and just to forgive their sins and cleanse them from all unrighteousness.
Now the struggle that comes with waiting for God to fulfill His promise is one thing, at least the faith, the hope, and the expectation still present. But downright unbelief is quite another. Now according to survey, still about 61% of all, quote, Christians believe that Jesus is coming back, that there will be a second coming, and that He will usher in a new heaven and a new earth, a sinless heaven. Yet at the same time, a good many of these churchgoing people have come to believe the prophecies of the modern-day climate change priests and prophets.
We accommodate it almost instinctively. When a new, quote, theory comes out, or science speaks, we immediately try to figure out how to fit in what they’re saying with what the Bible says, or what Christ says, without realizing that Christ is the author and perfecter of human history, of the entire cosmos. An increasing number of people believe that the planet as we know it will come to an end, and none of them have too terribly much to say about Jesus or His place therein. These prophets make outrageous projections about what’s going to happen to our planet in the next 12, 120, 12,000, or 250 million years by now. And amazingly, an awful lot of people who go to church buy into it.
Listen to these headlines from just September 25th and 26th of 2023. From newscientist.com, almost, this is the headline: “Almost all land mammals on Earth will die out in 250 million years, according to computer model. The planet’s continents and climate will change for the long term.” CBS News says, “Volcanic supercontinent will likely wipe out human beings in 250 million years.” The New York Times: “Mammals on the Earth’s lifespan half over.” How do they know that? 250 million years? We better do something real fast, like tax you more and limit freedom.
The Gospel lesson this morning we have before us, Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins, He told the parable and other parables in these two chapters during Holy Week, just a couple of days before Good Friday, before His very own death at crucifixion. He tells them with full knowledge that He is soon going to be departing from them, leaving them in local form, that means locally, physically, bodily present. Jesus will leave them, first by way of death, and then a few weeks later by ascension to the right hand of God the Father in heaven.
As He faced His own death, Jesus promised the church that He would come back for her. He would return, first from the grave, we call that Easter, and secondly on the Last Day, the Judgment Day, the day of the new heaven and the new earth, when the old passes away and the new comes.
As Jesus drew closer and closer to Good Friday, He began to focus His teaching on two specific aspects of His work. First, that He would be rejected. He would be rejected and beaten and tortured and murdered at the hands of the religious elite of the day. And second, He taught that Christians needed to stay alert in the face of a hostile world. They needed to wait and be prepared for the long haul, for His second coming.
He said, “At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five of them were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but didn’t take any oil with them. The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.” The wise prepared for the long haul. They brought the extra oil that would be needed. That is the only distinguishing mark between the wise and the foolish virgins waiting for the summons from the bridegroom to come to the wedding feast.
Verse 5: “But the bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep.” They all fell asleep, but five of them were prepared. It puts me in mind of the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus could be taken from them at any moment. He had signaled and told them such a thing was about to happen. He was ready for it. He was praying over it, about it, in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the point of sweating blood. But what were the disciples doing? And Jesus came and found them sleeping, and He said to Simon Peter, “Are you asleep? Could you not keep watch with Me for just one hour? Keep watching and praying, so that you may not come into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Those foolish virgins didn’t plan for the long haul. They didn’t understand what Jesus was teaching. It was not as though the wise virgins were more virtuous, stronger in faith and understanding, than the foolish. They fell asleep too. As for the foolish virgins of Matthew 25:1-13, they were not likened or made out to be like the evil slave in the next parable that would follow, right in Matthew 25. The parable tells us that the master puts a slave in charge of his affairs while he leaves, telling the slave that he will return. But the, quote, evil slave says in his heart, “My master is not coming for a long time,” and he begins to beat his fellow slaves and eats and drinks with those who are habitually drunk. This slave used the master’s delay for evil purposes.
We don’t have any kind of thing like that in the parable of the ten virgins. They simply failed, failed to take enough oil with them, to make use of the oil to keep the flame of faith alive. The foolish did not act as if the bridegroom was going to be delayed a long time in coming, as the evil slave did. They thought he was going to be there soon, and prepared for a short wait, no extra oil.
Verse 5: “Then the bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. And at midnight the cry rang out, ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish one said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, our lamps are going out.’ ‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.'”
As for the important elements of this particular parable, that is, the lamp, the oil, the flame, most commentators believe that the oil and the lamp refers to Christian faith and the flame, good works. The wise virgins were women who had faith that carried them to the wedding feast, and the foolish did not.
The problem with equating the oil to faith is that one Christian cannot give a measure of faith to another person. Faith can’t be shared in that sense. Your faith belongs to you, it’s yours. And as much as you bear witness to the faith, the doctrines, teachings, preachings, and the like of the Christian faith, that’s one thing. But here this parable is talking about the faith that resides in the heart, that which brings saving grace.
Besides, saving faith is a gift from God, which is created and sustained by the Word and Sacrament ministry of the church. It would be better to think of the oil, which keeps the flame of faith alive, as the Word and Sacrament ministry of the church, the means of grace. The lamp is the vessel for the oil, and the flame. The lamp is the church, the oil is the Word and Sacrament ministry, the flame, the faith of the Christian in the heart. And without the Word and Sacrament ministry, the flame dies, it fades away and goes out.
The foolish virgins had fallen away from the church. They had fallen away from the use of the oil, the oil that was necessary in order to feed and grow their personal faith in Christ Jesus. These are the ones who stopped coming to the church. They stopped offering their confession of sin. They stopped listening to the words of absolution. They stopped listening to the reading of God’s Word. They stopped speaking and singing the hymns and the liturgy of the church. They neglected the means of grace.
As a result, the five foolish virgins were not ready when the groom came calling for them. So they heard the most terrible words that the Lord could ever speak to a person. “Sir, sir,” they said, “open the door for us.” But He replied, “I tell you the truth, I do not know you.”
The wise virgins were wise because they fed the flame with what it needed. They made use of the church’s oil: the Word of God, Holy Baptism, Holy Communion, the Divine Service, and have received the forgiveness of sins throughout their entire lives as they wait to meet the Lord.
In this parable, Jesus teaches that we wait for either our departure from this veil of tears through the normal process of nature, that is, mortal death, or as a result of Christ’s second coming. We are to be about the oil business, keeping our faith supplied with God’s Word and Sacrament ministry, thus receiving the forgiveness of sins. The oil of God’s Word is found only in the church, and the true church never runs out of the oil. Heaven and earth, Jesus said, will pass away, but My words, the oil in this case, will never pass away.
As you go about your daily business, engaged in your respective stations in life, don’t neglect the vessel, the lamp of your body and soul and mind. Keep the lamp full of oil. Confident of this very thing, written to Christians who got confused about the second coming, our epistle lesson this morning, 1 Thessalonians: “Jesus died and rose again. Even so, through Jesus, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep. For we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of a command, and the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet of God will sound, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
That’s what the oil does. The Word and Sacrament ministry keeps your faith alive, that you one day will meet the Lord. You are the wise ones in the parable, because God has given you everything you need to wait for Him. God Himself has made you ready for your departure from this world and your entrance into the life of the world to come. You are in fact the lamp, filled with the oil, the Word of God, and trusting by faith in Him alone for your salvation. For your sins are forgiven. You’re on your way home. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.