Till He Come

Matthew 25.1-13 Jesus spoke this parable to the disciples: 1‘The kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; 4but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6But at midnight there was a shout, “Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” 7Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. 8The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” 9But the wise replied, “No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.” 10And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” 12But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” 13Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.’  Sermon by John Pridmore(Church Times) THE BAPTIST CHURCH of my boyhood did not have an altar. It was furnished simply with a plain wooden table. Save for a bunch of flowers, the table was unadorned — except, that is, for three words carved along the front. There was little else to catch the eye; so my gaze kept returning to these words. Even as a boy, I brooded on them. I still do. “Till he come.” When we break bread and share wine, says St Paul, “we show forth the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11.26). The Foolish Virgins by Narcisse Diaz de la Peña © not advert" longdesc="http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/Before%20they%20slept:%20%3Ci%3EThe%20Foolish%20Virgins%3C/i%3E%20by%20Narcisse%20Diaz%20de%20la%20Pe%C3%B1a%20%20%C2%A9%20not%20advert" border="0" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; "> Before they slept: The Foolish Virgins by Narcisse Diaz de la Peña We await the day of the Lord’s coming — of his “Second Coming”, as we sometimes say, although that precise phrase is not scriptural. My boyhood church took the promise of the Lord’s return seriously. When we broke bread together, we half expected that Jesus would be back before the meal was done. Naïve or not, that expectation was very close to that of the New Testament church. The night is far spent. The day is at hand. Such was the faith of the first Christians. Such was the faith of Coney Hall Baptist Church in the 1950s. All three of our readings on Sunday are about “the day of the Lord”, the day when our prayer is answered and his Kingdom comes. All three readings, too, emphasise that we should live now in the light of what will happen then. What will be must shape what we are. Chris tianity is a waiting game. What matters is how we wait. The contemporaries of the prophet Amos were confidently awaiting the day of the Lord, the day when God would crush their ancient enemies — the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the rest. Their way of waiting was to participate in ever more frequent and extravagant festivals, to slaughter more and more sacrificial beasts, to sing still more “worship songs”, and to indulge in any and every form of observance that, they hoped, would confirm the Almighty’s good opinion of them, and encourage him to inter vene decisively on their behalf. In a word, they resorted to religion. In my Baptist boyhood, “winsomeness” was held to be a virtue. (“If you’re winsome, you’ll win some.”) Winsome Amos was not. He was brutal. He had to be. Some misconceptions are worse than life-threatening. To cherish them is to imperil one’s eternal destiny. If violent words are needed to demolish them, so be it. One such misconception is the belief that God is im pressed by industrial quantities of religion. So the prophet tells the people what they must hear: that the day they so desire will be “darkness, not light”; that there will be no escaping the judgement that the day will visit on them; that the Lord loathes the liturgies they love; and that he cannot stand their singing. A debating point used to be whether there can be morality without religion. It is not an issue that Amos cares to discuss. What appals him is there should be religion without morality, that religion should flourish — to use his great word — without righteousness. We, too, need to hear Amos. The world’s inequities are still with us. The poor are still trampled in the dust; the afflicted are still bundled out of the way (Amos 2.7). We, too, “desire the day of the Lord”. At least, we say we do each time we pray “Your kingdom come.” We believe that the day we desire will be all sweetness and light. Only last Sunday we were singing “But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day.” So there will. But, by the light of that day, we shall know what we have done, and — more pertinently — what we have left undone. We may wonder then whether our Sundays were entirely well spent. Paul, too, addresses those who wait for the day of the Lord. There is an undertow of bewilderment and sadness about their waiting; for some of the community have died — some thing they had no business to do before the Lord’s return. Paul tells the young church at Thessalonica what they must do while they wait. The dead now rest, but they shall rise. So those who remain — “we who are left”, as we shall say this Remembrance Sunday — must not grieve. And while we wait, we are to encourage each other. So to our Gospel, to “the parable of the ten bridesmaids”: they, too, had to wait. Half of them were better at waiting than the others. Unlike the contemporaries of Amos, the foolish bridesmaids do not pass the time engaging in religious exercises. They simply sleep. A mischievous stanza from T. S. Eliot comes to mind: The hippopotamus’s day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way — The Church can feed and sleep at once. Our Gospel is a wake-up call. If we do not rouse ourselves, someone else will. Pray God his first words to us will not be: “Sorry, do I know you?”