2026-11-08 Mt 25 01-13 Always a Bridesmaid
So, last week, while getting a touch-up on my Botox treatments and collagen fillers… [yeah, right]
my style consultant offered me the kind of advice you can only get from a licensed aesthetician.
She said that even though the diamond-based moisturizers were doing a great job of making me LOOK mad youthful, that maybe I should DO something that I did, you know, back in the 1900’s. She said, “Looking young slaps, but FEELING young is fire.”
If I’ve learned anything in these 65 years, it’s that you should always listen to your looksmaxxer, even if you’re not sure what they’re saying.
The scripture today, about Bridesmaids – the parable, not the movie – was the source material for the very first sermon I ever wrote, back when I was in seminary, riding my horse to class, and preaching by kerosine lamps. I dusted off the stone tablets, and share it with you now, in the hopes that it’ll bring all of us back to a youthful, childlike love of Jesus.
“Always a Bridesmaid”
My mother has blocked out the memory of exactly how many weeks premature I was born, she just remembers that I was.
Surprise!
I thus began my life by disregarding the people around me
(namely my mother),
and heading out into the world full of the one attribute which has become my birthright and my lifestyle: Impatience.
Luckily, I am not alone.
The best and the brightest minds in history have banded together to create a world where arms and legs have been replaced by the fingertip,
a world where the point and click is now a thousand times stronger than the clean and jerk.
Thanks to miraculous technology, what was once considered a character flaw – nay, a sin – has become the grand motivator, the driver of all society: impatience.
Move over Jesus. Impatience has taken the wheel. Impatience makes all the wheels spin.
And designing our conveniences to avoid impatience has been elevated to a fine art.
And the men – mostly men – who create these wonders have become like gods. And we, the worshipers, bent over our own devices.
I was thinking about this yesterday, when I did an emergency half-time run to our local convenience store.
They had two lines going because of the rush, both about the same length.
Predictably, I chose the slow one.
The people in front of me -- two women in dark sunglasses to conceal eye redness – were debating which cigarettes to buy.
I began to wonder what the heat lamp that warms the ham biscuits to the optimal temperature for growing bacteria was doing to my pint of Ben and Jerry’s.
(One of life’s cruel jokes – when a “convenience store” isn’t.)
It was around this point, perhaps because I was blankly staring at a deodorant stick, that I realized how most everything I own provides a second layer of added protection against my impatience.
We have a remote control that flips through 40 TV channels in 36.2 seconds.
We have a VCR that we can preset for decades, providing Y2K doesn’t wipe it out.
(Oh, were we ever that young?)
Our microwave has preset “quick-times,” so instead of having to manually punch in “2 - 0 - 0" minutes, we can just hit, “Popcorn" – and voila! Food-like substance arises.
Our telephone not only greets our calls with a very pleasant recording, it also lists the names of our top ten friends beside buttons for speed dialing their answering machines.
(Again, laughably antiquated.)
Our cars are electronically ignited.
Our banking is done by an instant teller.
Our spelling is checked by a computer,
and our pizza is guaranteed delivered in 30 minutes.
Life is so good.
I know I’m an impatient person.
These moments of checkout line lucidity do little more than confirm the obvious.
I hate to wait.
I have surrounded myself with gadgets, buttons, and services which save me from the pain of exertion,
and which I have come to call “mine” (as in “my” personal computer) – as if no one else has anything quite like them.
As if they have in subtle ways become extensions of myself.
Perish the thought that I might have become an extension of them.
It is not without some anxiety that I recall a famous television commercial and ask, “Am I really able to see myself in my dishes?”
It would be rather strange if I had heard a frustrated sigh behind me in that convenience store checkout line,
and had turned around to see five women in first century Jewish party dresses,
each clutching their own can of lighter fluid, tapping their feet, and rolling their eyes in impatience.
Strange, indeed.
But according to the scripture we read today, two thousand years ago the night manager of a Jerusalem 7-11 might have had his crossword puzzle interrupted by five impatient women bursting through his doors and yelling for butane.
As someone for whom “stocking up on food” means buying more microwave burritos,
as a person who kind of likes being able to drive to a money machine (four times a week),
I’m not certain I would want to rush to call these five women “foolish” as quickly as Jesus did.
I would prefer to see the situation as “taking reasoned advantage of the services offered by the market forces of supply and demand.”
Someone knew that people would forget to plan ahead, that they would need fuel to get themselves through a late night,
things like, lighter fluid, and slow-rotating hotdogs, and Slurpees,
so a place was invented where these things could be obtained: A store called “convenience.”
These so-called “foolish” women were just helping their capital trickle down.
This is the economic order.
But Jesus was talking about a different kind of order.
The parable of the wise and foolish maidens is found at the heart of the section of the Gospel According to Matthew in which Jesus teaches his disciples about those things which are to come.
The first time I read through this passage, it sounded as though Jesus was simply giving a warning to “stay prepared” for his second coming.
“Watch out!”
“Be ready!”
The warning here is undeniable.
The women who bring fuel for their lights can attend the wedding banquet with the bridegroom.
Those who are willing to wait for Christ will share in his glory.
But the parable cuts deeper than just a command to “watch out.”
Or a description of human impatience.
Jesus gives us a clue in the way he introduces the story.
This is not a parable about wise or foolish people, although they have their parts in the story.
This is a vision of the kingdom of heaven.
It’s a picture that shows how inconvenience is built into God’s divine order.
Inconvenience is built into God’s divine order.
Our Presbyterian church comes from a tradition that says God does indeed have a plan for the way things work.
God created the world and through Jesus Christ, God is calling that world home.
More than that, we believe Jesus Christ will someday return and the kingdom of God will be established in its fullness.
This is one of the things being said by the parable of the maidens:
a wedding feast has been announced.
Unfortunately, the schedule for this great banquet hasn’t been included in the invitations.
God says to RSVP, but doesn’t say when the party starts.
God apparently keeps a very different kind of calendar.
Just as our own impatience with life’s trivialities tends to mold and define who we are, so were ten maidens defined by the way they chose to deal with their inconvenience.
Foolish – Wise.
It all comes down to whether they brought enough fuel to get them through the night.
We aren’t told where it came from, but evidently, the fuel Christ was talking about can neither be borrowed nor bought.
The fuel is, by its very nature, inconvenient.
It’s personal, and hard to define.
If we look through the eyes of those around us, we can begin to see what this fuel looks like.
We can see how it looks in each other.
—
There’s been an argument in this house.
It began in the kitchen and spread into the living room and stopped cold, at the front door that was slammed shut.
The postscript of a car being shoved into reverse was the last the parents heard of their seventeen year-old son.
It had started as something about a party, or his kind of friends, or his homework.
Neither parent was really sure, it happened so fast.
They wanted to lash out at each other, but the anger just seemed to cut them off.
And now they wait in silence over cups of coffee, staring at the kitchen table.
The fuel that keeps them going is not convenient.
“It’s silly. You’re just being silly,” she thinks to herself as she carefully moves down the wide, tiled, disinfected hallway.
But the right front rubber foot piece came off her walker somewhere between the dining room and here, and she worries because the floor is getting scraped each time she takes a step.
Maybe just a little scratch, but somebody’s going to notice.
If she were the only one in the assisted living home she wouldn’t mind.
But there are other people to think of.
If she still lived at home, the scars wouldn’t matter.
Nor would the wobble in the walker.
But now, if she fell, everyone would know.
The fuel that takes her back to her room is not convenient.
Closed windows and locked doors made the farmhouse where these disciples were meeting unbearably hot.
Hours.
Hours they had been inside and nothing seemed to be working.
No one had any ideas.
No one among the men and women crowded together knew what was going to happen.
Any sound that wormed its way in from the world outside froze them in terror.
It might be the Roman guard.
For all they knew, the Romans were looking for them, too, and would gladly crucify them as they had their teacher.
Their Lord had been stolen.
Their hopes had been hung.
There was nothing left but each other.
What does the fuel for our lamps look like?
It looks like parents staring at the second hand of a kitchen clock, counting each of its stops.
It looks like an aging woman who walks the length of a nursing home corridor, balancing her walker on three legs.
It looks like the despondent disciples of a crucified Lord who wait for resolution to come in the form of Roman guards.
It looks like the extra bottle of oil for a lamp, tied to the belt of a bridesmaid.
In a world ticking away on God’s time, the night can be very long.
The wait can exhaust our patience.
God’s plan – not our calendars – and digital watches – and maps,
(maps! LOL)
but God’s divine order – requires us to carry reserves:
hope,
faith,
enough to get us through the night.
Whether we’re waiting for a second coming or hoping for just a brief glimpse of God’s love and grace,
we are asked to sacrifice our own conveniences.
Our hope is not seated in what happens today or tomorrow,
but in the desire to meet the bridegroom, to be able to light our torches and escort him into the wedding feast.
—
At the stroke of midnight, when the call went out, “Behold the bridegroom!”
all the maidens – wise and foolish alike – were found asleep, exhausted.
In that moment of alarm, there must have been terrible confusion, the kind that comes with waking up in a strange place and trying to figure out
where one is
and what’s going on.
Turn on a light. Let’s see.
Even though we may grow impatient,
even though we may fall asleep,
even though God’s absence may be long, uncomfortable, inconvenient,
God has promised to wake us up.
“Behold! The bridegroom comes.” The bridegroom comes.”
“Behold! The bridegroom comes.”
God has promised to wake us up.
So, then, wake up you sleepyheads.
Wake up you who fall asleep waiting.
Wake up you who are bored, you who are lonely, you who are paralyzed by the fear of missing out.
The good news of Jesus’s gospel is contained in one brief wake-up call:
“Behold! The bridegroom comes.”
