Getting Lit – In the Right Way
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, WI
26th Sunday after Pentecost – November 9, 2008
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25/Matthew 25:1-13]

“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this.”

The phrase “getting lit” can have a number of meanings; which is something of a marvel considering it’s only two words. “Getting lit” can talk about candles, lamps, or even people, and most often does refer to people – especially those who have been to a party. Getting lit – in the right way – is what Jesus is describing in Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew’s work is rightly called “the gospel of the kingdom.” Jesus talks about the kingdom of God more often in Matthew than in any other Gospel. He uses powerful stories – parables – to tell us what the kingdom of God is like. Today we read a parable of judgment – the Greek word for it is krisis, from which we get our word ‘crisis,’ a moment where a decision, a judgment must be made – Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like ten bridesmaids who come to a crisis moment. Five of them are wise and five of them foolish, who go to a wedding, but the bridegroom is delayed and off the story goes as some try to get lit and others to stay lit.

The delayed bridegroom is the operative term. What Matthew describes is what theologians have called the Deus absconditus – the hidden God. To live toward the kingdom, then, is to come to terms with living in the presence of a God who appears to be absent. In short, Jesus is telling us that the kingdom of heaven is prepared for those who are faithful even when circumstances see to indicate that God is nowhere around. Faithfulness is getting lit in the right way and being ready when that elusive bridegroom shows up.

It is one thing to live faithfully knowing that we’ll be seen, knowing that we’re being watched. Isn’t it true that children are generally good when a parent or a teacher is around? Haven’t we all observed that even slackers can make themselves look busy when the boss is walking around? When I was in monastic life we had a brother in the community who, I swear to the Almighty, could sweat on command. He would be doing nothing and if the Abbot or Prior came walking anyone close he would jump up, grab a shovel and sweat would pour off him. I finally asked him, “How do you do that?” And he told me that it just happened. Who knows, could have been nerves? It is something entirely different, however, to be faithful when we don’t know if the parent, the teacher, the boss is around or not – or even if this person even really exists! Yet, this is precisely what Jesus is telling us that we must do if we are to find out what the kingdom of heaven is like.

The point of the parable isn’t about practical good works. While good works are outstanding and should be done, the kingdom of heaven is more than the sum of the good deeds we’ve managed to do. The point of the parable is not have you done good things, but have you done good things for the right reason. Our lives are to be lived with integrity, lived with wholeness. Remember the definition of integrity that D.L. Moody, the great Congregational lay evangelist of the 19th century gave: “Integrity is what you are in the dark.” When we live our lives with wholeness, integrity we show that we have become identified with the One for whom we wait, the bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ.

As we go through life all of us are going to slip and end up doing things we shouldn’t do; things that we’re not proud of; things we’re actually ashamed of. The question is whether we can right ourselves and keep our lamp lit, keep waiting, keep living appropriately, rather than getting bogged down in how we’ve failed. And sometimes folks do that, they get ashamed, they get caught up and they can’t move on. At the core of this parable the reason for moving on isn’t about the deeds, it’s about the relationship and that is the point. What the kingdom of heaven is about is coming to faith in this “hidden God” who chooses to be revealed in Jesus and who lives out a life with us and we then, in turn, are to live out a life of faith and trust with God at the very center of our lives. So, again, the kingdom of heaven isn’t a place, it’s a person and it’s not a what, but a who – and we’re supposed to be a part of it.

What this means is coming to identify ourselves with the One whom we follow, after whom we call ourselves (Christians), and for whom we wait (the season of Advent is a poignant reminder that we’re still waiting for this parousia, for this coming in fullness of the Lord, we have only in part, the already of “the already but not yet”). In this parable that identification is symbolized by the oil and I particularly appreciated two points that John Shea – theologian and storyteller par excellence – made: “The truth of oil is: you have to have your own. Although everyone has a lamp of consciousness, each person must supply oil from their own living out of the teachings of Christ. One cannot develop spiritually by taking the consciousness and action of another as your own. Each person has enough for himself or herself. Each person’s path is singular, and each person’s lamp (to update the metaphor) produces its own wattage. Or to change the metaphor as Isaac of Nineveh did, ‘There is a love like a small lamp, fed by oil, which goes out when the oil is ended; or like a rain-fed stream which goes dry when rain no longer feeds it. But there is a love, like a spring gushing from the earth, never to be exhausted.’ (E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, Early Fathers from the Philokalia) The wise virgins are in touch with the inexhaustible river. So the oil is continuously replenished rather than consumed.

The foolish virgins do not know the way of individually maturing into a new person in Christ. They only know the way of ‘going and buying,’ looking outside themselves for what they need. ‘Going and buying’ is an image for an outer-directed consciousness. In the first feeding narrative in the Gospel of Mark (6:30-44), the disciples tell Jesus to send the crowds away so they can “go . . . and buy” (v. 36) food themselves. When Jesus tells them to provide the food, the disciples say, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give to [all these people] to eat?” (v. 37). Jesus directs them to their own inner resources, but they insist that the only place that they can get food is outside themselves. While Jesus is giving the Samaritan woman a drink, the author of the Gospel of John tells the readers that ‘His disciples have gone to the city to buy food” (John 4:8). The foolish do not have their own resources and so are addicted to going elsewhere for sustenance. They cannot envision it another way.” [On Earth As It Is In Heaven, p. 315-16]

What is at stake here is learning, growing and maturing so that we become the children of God we’re intended to be. God made us in God’s own image and likeness so that we could experience the fullness of the inner life and light and live accordingly. We have to heed the teaching of Jesus – who, by the way, really beat NIKE to the punch in telling folks, “Just do it!” – and do what he tells us in coming to oneness with the living God. How do we do this? By imitating Jesus, by having, as Paul says, “the same mind” as Christ does and we do this by doing what he did: study, prayer and practice of the spiritual life and loving deeds (which then flow from us naturally). When we live in this manner we become what the early Church teacher Irenaeus proclaimed: “God’s glory – human beings fully alive!” When we are “in Christ,” when the light of God in Christ shines out of us and into the world, then we are fully alive.

I’ve been reading a lot about the current financial crisis and all of the election campaign stuff certainly wouldn’t let you forget that it was going on (not to mention those retirement investment statements that I’m simply not going to look at for a while). The thing that shocks me in all of this is how everyone involved is blaming everyone else – and certainly no one is coming forward to take responsibility in any fashion. I suppose it is natural, but here are people who made deals, reaped profits, and now want to stand around like kids saying, “Not me.” (Shades of ‘Family Circus’!)

Jesus is telling us that to get lit in the right way is to take responsibility for our lives; to take responsibility for our actions; to take responsibility for our spiritual readiness and for our spiritual growth. He is telling us what we hear from Joshua, “I don’t know what you’re about, but as for me and my house we’re going to serve the Lord.” Joshua was accountable. Now he is telling us that getting lit in the right way is opening ourselves to the inner lamp of God’s grace and presence. In the light of that lamp we can see our own faults, our failings, our shortcomings and do it knowing that God loves us – regardless. That love, that grace, that free gift of God’s relationship enables us to live as children of light and to make a difference in the here-now as we live toward the here-after.

To be a child of the light means that we have opened ourselves to the light and that we have steeped ourselves in it, identifying with it and the One who points us toward it. I thought this little story made the point quite well.

“A man knocks on a door. The voice from inside says, ‘Who is it?’ The man says, ‘It is your countryman.’ The voice behind the door says, ‘There is no one here.’

The man wanders for a year, returns to the door and knocks a second time. The voice from inside says, ‘Who is it?’ The man says, ‘It is your brother.’ The voice behind the door says, ‘There is no one here.’

The man wanders for a year, returns to the door, and knocks a third time. The voice from inside says, ‘Who is it?’ The man says, ‘It is you.’ The door opens.”[Shea p. 317]

The Lord recognizes us, the Lord knows us when he knocks on the doors of our lives and sees himself mirrored in us, mirrored in how we live, mirrored in the faith we hold. Episcopal clergyman and theologian Robert Farrar Capon put it this way, “The shut door is God’s final answer to the wisdom of the world. In the death of Jesus, he closes forever the way of winning. . . The dreadful sentence, ‘Amen, I say to you, I never knew you,’ is simply the truth of their condition. He does not say, ‘I never called you.’ He does not say, ‘I never loved you.’ He does not say, ‘I never drew you to myself.’ He only says, ‘I never knew you – because you never bothered to know me.’ “[Capon, p. 500]

The point of this parable is to get us to examine our lives and see whether or not we have bothered to get to know God as God wishes to be revealed to us, to be known to us, to relate to us, to love us into freedom in Jesus the Christ; who “was like us in all things, save sin.” That’s how much God identified with us. God wants to share life with us and simply asks that, in turn, we share life with God and with one another – that’s the point. After all, the kingdom of heaven is like a party to which we’ve been invited and all we’re asked to do is show up, lit in the right way. So this week get lit and share the light – it will make a difference, it will make a difference.