GENESIS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Monday, November 17, 2014

Keep Awake

Keep awake. We only have three Sundays left in our church lectionary year that will restart with the coming first Sunday of Advent. For these three final Sundays, our gospel readings will all be read from my favorite chapter of Matthew, chapter 25. Here we find Jesus has left the Temple, where he confronted the scribes and Pharisees, and is now sitting up on the Mount of Olives speaking to the disciples. The Mount of Olives, to the east of Jerusalem, has prophetic significance that is important to Matthew’s specifically Jewish audience. The Mount of Olives is mentioned in Zechariah 14 as the place where The Lord will return, signaling the Messianic Age. Jesus and his disciples would have been sitting on the mountain, across the Kidron Valley, looking down on the city and the Temple’s courts as Jesus compared the coming Kingdom of God to ten bridesmaids waiting for the arrival of a groom.

Those in the early church had to come to terms with the reality that Jesus did not return to them as soon and as fully as they expected. When they began to accept this and adjust, their objective changed. It was around the time of this realization that the people decided to write down what they knew of Jesus to preserve the stories of the Gospel for generations to come.

They continued waiting expectantly while living faithfully, courageously, and hopefully.
Jesus tells this story of the ten young women in order to clarify for his audience the kind of time in which they live. For Matthew, the bridegroom’s delay is more of an opportunity than a problem. Greek has two different words for time. “Chronos” is what is used to describe physical time and what we consider to be minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years. “Kairos,” on the other hand, is the time transcendent of physics. Kairos is God’s time, the time of the Kingdom of Heaven to come.

Christians live in a perpetual state of watchfulness, waiting on the coming Kingdom of God to interrupt our lives here on earth. Even if and when the faithfully people of God fall asleep waiting on the bridegroom, their preparations displayed in how they have shown mercy and forgiveness to one another while restoring fractured relationships, leave them prepared and ready for the sudden arrival. Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. Keep awake because God exists in kairos and not chronos time.

And Jesus says there will be two kinds of people at that time. There will be wise and faithful servants, and there will be less wise, or foolish servants. The wise and faithful ones are those that God will find living as good stewards of what The Lord has provided to them to use as best they are able to spread the love of God in and to the world. The less wise are those who have taken advantage of what God has provided. The wicked are those who have abused the people in their lives. The less wise have spent too much of their lives surrounded by those whose lifestyles are centered around self-pleasure and fulfillment. These are they who miss out on knowing the fullness of what a life with God can bring. These are they who the groom will not know when he finally comes.

The foolish women were so similar to the wise. They too desired just as much to meet the bridegroom. They too spent their life waiting and living for this moment. They had gone out with the others. But when the groom did not come as soon as they expected, they found themselves distracted and distraught. When the time came, they recognized their mistake of neglecting the oil. They were suffering from a real oil crisis. The only difference between the wise and foolish women is the wise women brought extra oil with them and came prepared to wait.

At this time last year I was serving the historic Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a block away from the Ryman Auditorium. Our sanctuary was used as a venue for the Americana Music Awards where this year the show opened with a song, Going Down to the River, by Doug Seegers. Doug wrote his first song at 16, and, after finishing high school, joined a country band and moved to Austin, performing under the stage name Duke the Drifter. It was hard and one day, Duke the Drifter just split."I didn't even say goodbye to anybody," Seegers says. "For Pete's sake. I just, like, hitchhiked down the road." He headed back to New York, learned a trade and started a family — but the music bug never left him. Some 20 years later, Seegers said goodbye to his now-grown children and former wife, and headed for Nashville, to play music. But again, his music career stalled. Another 17 years passed — and after many years of unsteady work, Seegers ended up homeless, living under a bridge and busking for coins.

Then, last fall, something incredible happened. Jill Johnson, a Swedish singer with her own TV show, came through Nashville. She was shooting footage for a segment about down-and-out musicians and visited a food pantry where Seegers hung out. When Doug began to play Going Down to the River, she was overwhelmed. Before he knew what was happening, Seegers was whisked off to a studio to record the song for the show. Days after it aired, the song went to No. 1 on Swedish iTunes.
"I was slapping myself in the face," Seegers says. "I kept saying, 'Am I dreaming? When am I going to wake up and go back to living under the bridge?' " People started sending money to help Seegers. A Swedish label offered him a record deal. A prominent record producer back in Nashville signed on to make the record, and they finished it in three days.
For one track, someone called in a favor with one of Seegers' longtime heroes, Emmylou Harris. Harris recorded her tracks separately — but she was so moved by Seegers' voice that she called him to let him know.
"I pick up the phone and she says, 'Doug, this is Emmylou Harris,' " Seegers says. "And I immediately start crying. I couldn't even talk, I was crying so hard. It was a dream come true for me."[1]
Keeping awake and waiting on God is a part of faith. Faith is our oil that sustains our lamp and keeps it burning. Faith is the oil for our existence, it is our connection to God. Our empowerment found in God’s Spirit and our relationships both with God and with one another.

Jesus wants us to know: this life, as we are living it, is not as good as it gets. The bridegroom’s delay does not mean he will not come. Keep awake. The wise bridesmaids ask us to live in hope for what has been promised, for what will be but is not complete yet. We each need in order to best do our part to keep our own lamps lit. This oil crisis is about putting things in the right order. While one lesson in this text is that there are some preparations you have to make for yourself, another lesson is this: you can help other people after you’ve filled your own lamp. It is as simple as putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting someone else with theirs. What will it take for you to refill your lamp with oil? What are the reserves you need to shore up so that you will be able to light a path for someone else?

Jesus comes when Christians live in hope and never give up. Jesus comes when faithful disciples express love and compassion for others while working for justice and peace. The challenge for us is to keep enough oil on hand for the lamps when the bridegroom appears, and in the meantime to roll up our sleeves and work for the kingdom that is already and always coming and breaking into history. Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour. May it be so?



[1] Pearson, Vince (2014) Homeless In Nashville, Huge in Sweden. National Public Radio Morning Edition broadcast October 9. Retrieved online http://www.npr.org/2014/10/09/354642327/homeless-in-nashville-huge-in-sweden

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