All Saints

RCL Year A, Proper 27 Happy Birthday, ECA!  On All Saints Day, 1967, ECA founding members formally applied for mission status in the Diocese of California, the diocese we were part of at the time.  Today we remember the saints of 44 years ago who founded this congregation – and we celebrate ourselves, the community […]

RCL Year A, Proper 27

Happy Birthday, ECA!  On All Saints Day, 1967, ECA founding members formally applied for mission status in the Diocese of California, the diocese we were part of at the time.  Today we remember the saints of 44 years ago who founded this congregation – and we celebrate ourselves, the community of saints gathered here, and those yet to come.  The Sunday After All Saints is a chance to remember all the saints, all those who have gone before, all the great heroes of the faith, all the people who make the church what it is and what it will be.

We could be using the readings for All Saints Day today, but the gospel reading for that is the Beatitudes, something that we’ve had already this year (though it’s tempting to do what our Sunday School is focusing on as well!).  So I went with this Sunday’s readings instead, keeping us in the continuity of the story of Jesus and his confrontations with the elders of the people.  Now in that story it’s moving closer to Jesus’ arrest and trial, Jesus’ end times, and he is speaking more about the end times for all of us.  The end times in question, however, have a great deal to do with how we live now.

So today we get another parable.  And with parables, we can sometimes wonder which character is meant to be us.  So please answer:  are you a wise virgin or a foolish virgin? Or are you c) none of the above?

Well, you don’t really have to answer here.  But this is decidedly one of those parables where you are supposed to locate yourself in one camp or another:  are you ready for the bridegroom’s coming, or not; are you wise, or foolish; are you in the in-group, or the out-group; will you be saved, or not.  There’s not a lot of Anglican wiggle room in there – you can’t answer ‘both-and’ to this one.  It’s either one way or the other, it seems.  There are ten bridesmaids, some of whom planned ahead with extra oil for their lamps, and some of whom did not.  And those who did not have enough oil to wait for the late-arriving bridegroom ask the others for help, and are refused.  And then those foolish bridesmaids are locked out of the party when they return from buying more oil for their lamps.

This parable has always reminded me of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  In that story, the ants work all summer long gathering food and the grasshoppers play all summer long.  When winter comes and the grasshoppers are starving, they beg the ants for some food.  The ants refuse, sounding self-righteous and snotty, and say, ‘You should have been working over the summer, lazybones.  This is your own fault!’  Rather the same response the wise bridesmaids give the foolish ones.  The ant and grasshopper story, of course, extols the virtues of hard work, that each one of us needs to pull our own weight and not be lazy and rely on others to take care of us.  There are consequences for our behavior.

Jesus’ parable gives a picture of consequences as well.  The bridesmaids, of course, are the followers of Christ, and Christ is the bridegroom.  The bridegroom takes a while in coming to the feast – the first-century Christians realized that Jesus wasn’t coming back immediately like they’d originally understood, but that it might take a while.  The oil for the lamps symbolizes our readiness for salvation: sufficient good works, right living, faithfulness.  The commentaries take pains to point out that the wise bridesmaids refuse to offer extra oil to their unprepared friends not because of a lack of charity, but simply because readiness for the kingdom isn’t something you can just pass on to another who needs it – we each have our own path to follow and choices to make.  All the same, they still sound pretty snotty to me.

I think that the story of the ant and grasshopper has infected this parable about the wise and foolish bridesmaids.  The American virtues of hard work, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, personal responsibility – they’re part of our idea of salvation.  You could say that hard work and industriousness are seen as the keys to salvation themselves – ‘Jesus is coming – look busy,’ as the bumper sticker says.  Wisdom, then, is in preparing for the future, stocking up enough to last, making sure there’s enough oil to make it through the long dark night ahead.  It’s our job to make the right choices, and if we don’t, it’s no one else’s fault but our own.

But when we take the parables to be all about ‘common sense,’ then chances are we’re not reading them well enough.  Wisdom in the gospels is often worldly wisdom turned on its head:  sell all you have and follow me; leave the 99 sheep and look for the one that is lost; eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners, for they are going into heaven ahead of the righteous; die, and you will live.  Are we really meant to understand that Jesus applauds the wise bridesmaids for their industriousness?

Garrison Keillor once told a story of a church in the dead of winter, running low on fuel for the oil furnace.  The order was made in due time, but then the blizzard hit – snow piled up several feet thick, roads were blocked, no delivery truck could possibly get through.  And Christmas Eve was coming, when folks from the surrounding town would come to gather for the traditional service – with a dead furnace, it would be too bitterly cold to worship.  But the pastor decided to go ahead, not to cancel the service – and the oil furnace kept running, keeping the place warm, running long after the fuel should have given out, running through Christmas Eve and on to the day when the delivery truck could finally get through and restock.  It’s a story like the one celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, remembering the oil lamp in the newly rededicated Temple that kept burning for eight days even though there was only enough oil for one day.  But Hanukkah doesn’t commemorate that someone planned ahead and saved for a rainy day.  And Garrison Keillor’s story doesn’t depend on that either – even though someone placed the order in time, the blizzard kept the oil from being restocked.  Both of those stories tell of miracles, of God doing what humans could not.  People did their part, setting up the lamp and lighting it, starting up the furnace, but then something else kept them burning.

Something else keeps the lamps full and burning for those wise bridesmaids as well.  If our lamps are meant to be burning bright when Jesus comes again, it will in some part depend on us – it is our part to work on our souls, to attend to spiritual disciplines and just living, caring for the needs of others.  It is our part to ask where God wants us and what God wants us to do.  But it does not only depend on us, thank goodness.  It depends on God, on the Spirit burning in us, sustaining us through dark times and dry times when we don’t feel like we have the fuel in us.  It depends on the community God brings us, others through whom God shows us what love and compassion look like.  It depends on all those connections visible and invisible, the communion of saints throughout the ages, the legacy of those who went before and the gifts we will leave to those who live after us.  We don’t just fuel up and burn our lamps, each one of us by ourselves.

We are here because of what a group of people did 40-some years ago.  We give thanks today for them and their vision, the spirit that led them to create something that lasted beyond themselves.  And we’re here because of people who came long before 40 years ago, saints and sinners throughout the generations who one way or another tried to follow Jesus and love God and care for their neighbors.  And we are here to do the same, to continue the gift, to pass along to generations yet unborn the blessings that we have received.  Our lamps do not burn for ourselves alone.

May we today allow God to fill us, to breathe the Spirit into us and fuel us and purify us.  And may God make us all saints, people who show God’s love and light to the world.  Amen.