Matthew 25:1-13
There is a lot going on in the world and in our individual lives right now that might be affecting our sleep. The time change and the changing seasons, shortened days and longer nights are the least troubling of these, but still they affect us in our bodies and impact our ability to keep awake during the day and achieve restful sleep at night. Many of our parish family members are sick or recovering from injuries or surgeries, all of which can lead to an increased need for sleep while the body works to heal itself. The news from the Holy Land and Ukraine and Armenia and many other places within our borders and beyond them might keep us up at night, or cause nightmares and restlessness. We might wake in the night with worry for our children, or spend the wee hours wondering how we will make ends meet this month. Sleep is a valuable commodity, and it is in short supply for most of us these days. And yet Jesus admonishes us to keep awake. This is the same Jesus who regularly went away to quiet places to rest during his earthly ministry, and even fell asleep in a boat in the middle of a storm-tossed sea and only awoke when his disciples were too frantic to think straight. This is the same God who rested after creating the universe, and commands us to honor that rest by enshrining rest in our weekly rhythms. I do not for a minute believe that Jesus is happy with the way so many people in our world are sleep-deprived by overwork and illness and violence and loneliness and the absence of a safe and comfortable place to lay their heads. I see in Jesus a model of prioritizing real rest, including good sleep. So what could it mean when Jesus tells us to keep awake?
I’ll remind us all that our reading this morning is a parable, not an allegory. There is no clean-cut way to define the symbolism of each character, inserting ourselves and God and the people we like and the people we don’t into the story. The parable is meant to make us think, ponder, wonder about the nature of God’s kingdom. It is meant to make us at least a little uncomfortable, and I think on that front this one definitely succeeds.
In the signs and metaphors of Jesus’s time and place, the lamp was a common one. Jesus himself uses this image in several different sermons, most memorably the one about the bushel basket and the lampstand. A flame in a lamp, for Jesus’s audience, would have been a well-known shorthand for righteousness, for good works and holy living. Lamps and lanterns were used to talk about God’s word, lighting the way and guiding people down the right path. So when Jesus first gave this sermon, many people of his audience would have been paying close attention to those lamps. They would assume the wise bridesmaids, the ones who remembered the extra oil, were good and Godly people, and the foolish ones were not. But again, we are in the world of parables, not the world of allegories, so we know it cannot be that simple.
Why exactly did each young woman need to have her own lamp? If the young women whose lamps were burning low had stayed instead of leaving to find more oil, they would have been there when the bridegroom arrived, and they could have entered the wedding banquet filled with light and song. I guess I can understand why the other bridesmaids did not want to give away their oil, but surely they could have shared their light. One lamp burning at full brightness can light the way for two people as easily as it can for one person, and with five full lamps, surely the ten of them could have made it work. They were all waiting in the same dark night, for the same belated bridegroom. Couldn’t they combine resources, take shifts so that some could rest while others kept awake and vigilant for the arrival? Couldn’t a few people at a time keep the lamps burning for the many?
We have a modern word that comes to mind- burnout. In a way, this is what some of these young women are experiencing, the fading of their flames as they exhaust their fuel. When they reach out to their neighbors for help, they find people who not only hoard their own reserves, but withhold their light as well. We see this in ourselves and all around us, as people either push themselves to their limits in an effort to save the entire world, or else shut themselves off so completely from the needs of others that their reserves are well-protected, but their light does not reach beyond the walls they’ve constructed. I hear from people all the time who are simply trying to protect their peace, or practicing self-care, or else binging the world’s pain until hopelessness and despair and cynicism rob them of what little energy they once had. We might find comfort in falling asleep to the world around us, or we might feel that constant vigilance provides us some degree of control over the dark. Neither provides us real rest, and ultimately at this rate we will all run out of fuel.
So if our lamps are to be kept trimmed and burning, as the old song goes, what are we to do? If our righteousness is a flame, who provides the fuel? Can we buy it, or is it a gift freely given? Is it a finite resource, or a bottomless well? I think often, we are like the foolish young women, too embarrassed to show up with a tank bordering on empty. We think we must be burning brightly, perfectly, or we should not show up at all. We forget that there is always enough fuel to go around, always enough light. We forget that even a tiny flame can pierce the deep night, and even a fading ember can keep us warm enough to see the morning if we huddle in close to one another. It is true that you cannot pour from an empty cup. But if you are the cup, you also cannot fill yourself.
This is why we need one another, why the Church as a community exists at all. At any given moment, someone’s lamp is burning brightly, and someone else’s lamp is down to the dregs. At any given moment, half of us cannot imagine a way out of the darkness, and half of us have everything we need to feed the flame. If we choose an individualistic faith experience, in which each of us is responsible for our own lamp and our own oil and our own wick, eventually every one of us will find ourselves alone in the night. But if we choose one another, if we choose to come together and light one another’s path, we will always have plenty- the lamps will never run out. Keeping the faith is keeping the light alive, and it does not require any one of us to be perfect. What it does require is for us to come together, to take care of one another, to keep watch while others sleep. We must keep awake, as Jesus said, but not all at once. I’ll keep the light on for you, you refill the lamp for me. It is only together that we make it through the night.
Mother A Writes 