22 Pentecost, Cycle A proper 27, November 9, 2014
Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16 Psalm 78
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 Matthew 25:1-13
Lectionary Link
The sign of effective government in the industrial age was making sure that the trains ran on time. The clock is a major symbol of the industrial age because if workers were late to work then there was a domino effect of inefficiency.
The importance of measured time or clock time is a sense of control because of accurate predictability. Nature has its own clock; the rising and setting of the sun and the seasons of the year and the moon and the tides. The regularity of nature's clocks and the ability to measure time with calendars and clocks has given humanity the ability of predictability and efficiency through the exertion of control. We like Chronos or chronological time because we like precision in predictability.
But there is another type of experience of time which is common to human experience and it is an experience of time which is harder to deal with. The Greek language had another word for this kind of experience of time; it was called Kairos time. Kairos time is "eventful" time because it is defined by the events which cannot be put on a precise schedule. Kairos time is "waiting time," it is judgment time, crisis time, it is rite of passage time. The big event which hangs over the life of everyone and is mostly unscheduled is the event of death. But there are lots of other events which do not provide us with precision in predictability. And these are the events which challenge us. The thought of future happy experiences can set us up for a letdown; the dread of future bad experiences can render us powerless with worry and fear.
The life of faith is the ability to learn not only to live according to regularly scheduled chronological time in meeting our deadlines; we also have to learn to live effectively with eventful time. This is what we try to teach our children. We want them to learn the clock schedule and get to school on time; but we also want them to learn to handle the arising events which occur in their lives over which they do not have precise control. How can they handle unplanned failure, a loss in a contest, or unrequited love? Can they learn to adjust to the circumstances? Can they learn to be prepared for a range of possible events?
The parable in today's Gospel is all about having the wisdom to live under the condition of this eventful or kairotic time.
The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon believes that we should devote our lives to Wisdom. Wisdom is this interpretive ability which is available to everyone. Wisdom is the ability to interpret events of our lives and respond in the most effective way.
The Gospel parable presents two groups of bridesmaids, the wise ones and the foolish ones. Both wisdom and foolishness are presented as ways to instruct us. We are presented with the actions of the foolish ones and warned not to be foolish. We are given the model behavior of the wise and encouraged to follow their examples. You notice that the foolish bridesmaid seem to be emphasized because wisdom is supposed to be what is normal and foolishness stands out as the deprivation of wisdom.
The parable is based upon an event whose time of occurrence cannot precisely be predicted. In ancient Jewish marriage customs, the groom would meet with the father of a girl and form a contract for marriage. When the contract was complete, the state of betrothal began. The groom would go back to his own home and prepare a place where he could bring his bride. The length of the time of betrothal was unpredictable, but at any time the groom could have the place ready to bring home his bride. A shout would go out, the town crier would announce that the groom was ready and was coming to take his bride. The bride and all members of the bridal party knew the scenario. They knew that they had to be prepared for the arrival of the groom. So the bridesmaids had more than just their awful matching dresses to worry about; they had to be ready even for a night time visit. When the visit of the groom occurred at night everyone would go forth with their torches and lamps to greet the groom as a way of celebrating his arrival and presence. All ten of the bridesmaids knew the potential scenario but only five had properly prepared.
What is the punchline of the parable? Practice wisdom. Be ready to respond to anything, any time. This parable about the wisdom of being ready is somewhat different from the statistical and probabilistic thinking of our actuarial scientists. Much of our actuarial science has to do with the probability of bad things occurring so insurance premiums can be set accordingly.
This parable is more like gaming statistics in that it about the wisdom of being prepared for a positive event. Gaming statistics chart the odds of winning. The coming of the bridegroom was a positive event. Those who were wise were ready to fully participate in the event. And so it could be that "luck favors those who are prepared."
Many have interpreted the coming of the bridegroom to be a reference to the second coming of Jesus. In the eschatology or the orientation of the early followers of Jesus toward significant events which would signal a significant end or change of life, the suffering community interpreted the coming of the messianic groom to get his bride as a positive event. And in the midst of suffering, each person needed to have wisdom to be prepared to participate in the celebration.
The first writing of the New Testament was the letter to the Thessalonian church by St. Paul. He was writing to this church because of their anxiety. They believed that the day of the Lord was imminent and so they were worried when some of their members died before this event happened. What would happen to the people who died? St. Paul wrote within the logic of believing that God was just and kind. St. Paul said that they should know that the people who died before the day of the Lord would rise from the grave and meet their companions in the air.
What is true of the ancient world is also true of our world. We believe in the reality of our interior world as much as we believe in what is happening outside of us. We believe in our interpretations and perceptions as often being indistinguishable from what is happening outside of us.
Our interior life is the life of interpretation and it often has to accomplish great compensation for the experiences of pain and loss in our world. Just as we have the resurrection from the dead as the narrative of compensatory hope for our personal deaths and the deaths of our loved one, the coming of future justice for all is the narrative of hope for the entire human community. We should not judge the people of the past for their interpretations of hope and justice through their apocalyptic narratives and eschatological stories of hope. We do the very same thing today except we have pushed our stories outside of religion and moved them into politics, economics, and all of the vast array of compensatory entertainments. I heard someone say that the Giants winning the Series provided them great comfort in the midst of their current illness and pain. We are no better than ancient people in the way in which we use the wisdom of our interior lives to compensate for the great range of losses which come to anyone in this life.
Even though many people in the time of Jesus and Paul were concerned about an imminent end of the world, I think that the wisdom of the parable is valid for an entire range of life events. Wisdom is learning to live in a state of preparedness so that we can respond effectively to an entire range of life events from the disastrous to the sublime and wonderful.
In the Bay Area what are we all preparing for? We are waiting for what is called "The Big One." We waiting of the mother of all earthquakes to occur, and we gradually improve our construction techniques and our disaster training and we try not to let the thought of the "Big One" upset our everyday lives.
Having wisdom is like knowing gaming statistics. We know that every game has rules but what makes a game interesting is that even though we know that there are a range of predictable outcomes, we cannot know the exact outcome in advance. People who have learned wisdom have studied the range of probable outcomes in life events and prepared in some way for the best and worst. And part of preparing for the best and the worst is doing it together as a community.
Wisdom is about being prepared to share losses and mourn together but also to share the joyful events and rejoice together. Wisdom is about the great invitation to a future and about knowing that neither personal death nor the end of human life as we know it will take away the invitation to another future because we believe in a greater all-embracing and all inclusive life, the life of God.
But in the meantime, let us have wisdom to prepare for the worst as just one of the things which could happen to us even while we prepare in hope for the new and wonderful things which we will be able to discover precisely because we are prepared. One of the reason that we need to keep our parish up and running because we don't know yet what wonderful things could occur here in our midst.
Today, let us choose to follow in the path of wisdom. Let us learn from past experiences and act with probabilistic wisdom in our future. It is the invitation to the future which makes our lives excitingly wonderful, because life itself is the really big World Series. It is the big game. And I pray that each of us today is prepared to know and receive the truly Wonderful. Amen.
Lectionary Link
The sign of effective government in the industrial age was making sure that the trains ran on time. The clock is a major symbol of the industrial age because if workers were late to work then there was a domino effect of inefficiency.
The importance of measured time or clock time is a sense of control because of accurate predictability. Nature has its own clock; the rising and setting of the sun and the seasons of the year and the moon and the tides. The regularity of nature's clocks and the ability to measure time with calendars and clocks has given humanity the ability of predictability and efficiency through the exertion of control. We like Chronos or chronological time because we like precision in predictability.
But there is another type of experience of time which is common to human experience and it is an experience of time which is harder to deal with. The Greek language had another word for this kind of experience of time; it was called Kairos time. Kairos time is "eventful" time because it is defined by the events which cannot be put on a precise schedule. Kairos time is "waiting time," it is judgment time, crisis time, it is rite of passage time. The big event which hangs over the life of everyone and is mostly unscheduled is the event of death. But there are lots of other events which do not provide us with precision in predictability. And these are the events which challenge us. The thought of future happy experiences can set us up for a letdown; the dread of future bad experiences can render us powerless with worry and fear.
The life of faith is the ability to learn not only to live according to regularly scheduled chronological time in meeting our deadlines; we also have to learn to live effectively with eventful time. This is what we try to teach our children. We want them to learn the clock schedule and get to school on time; but we also want them to learn to handle the arising events which occur in their lives over which they do not have precise control. How can they handle unplanned failure, a loss in a contest, or unrequited love? Can they learn to adjust to the circumstances? Can they learn to be prepared for a range of possible events?
The parable in today's Gospel is all about having the wisdom to live under the condition of this eventful or kairotic time.
The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon believes that we should devote our lives to Wisdom. Wisdom is this interpretive ability which is available to everyone. Wisdom is the ability to interpret events of our lives and respond in the most effective way.
The Gospel parable presents two groups of bridesmaids, the wise ones and the foolish ones. Both wisdom and foolishness are presented as ways to instruct us. We are presented with the actions of the foolish ones and warned not to be foolish. We are given the model behavior of the wise and encouraged to follow their examples. You notice that the foolish bridesmaid seem to be emphasized because wisdom is supposed to be what is normal and foolishness stands out as the deprivation of wisdom.
The parable is based upon an event whose time of occurrence cannot precisely be predicted. In ancient Jewish marriage customs, the groom would meet with the father of a girl and form a contract for marriage. When the contract was complete, the state of betrothal began. The groom would go back to his own home and prepare a place where he could bring his bride. The length of the time of betrothal was unpredictable, but at any time the groom could have the place ready to bring home his bride. A shout would go out, the town crier would announce that the groom was ready and was coming to take his bride. The bride and all members of the bridal party knew the scenario. They knew that they had to be prepared for the arrival of the groom. So the bridesmaids had more than just their awful matching dresses to worry about; they had to be ready even for a night time visit. When the visit of the groom occurred at night everyone would go forth with their torches and lamps to greet the groom as a way of celebrating his arrival and presence. All ten of the bridesmaids knew the potential scenario but only five had properly prepared.
What is the punchline of the parable? Practice wisdom. Be ready to respond to anything, any time. This parable about the wisdom of being ready is somewhat different from the statistical and probabilistic thinking of our actuarial scientists. Much of our actuarial science has to do with the probability of bad things occurring so insurance premiums can be set accordingly.
This parable is more like gaming statistics in that it about the wisdom of being prepared for a positive event. Gaming statistics chart the odds of winning. The coming of the bridegroom was a positive event. Those who were wise were ready to fully participate in the event. And so it could be that "luck favors those who are prepared."
Many have interpreted the coming of the bridegroom to be a reference to the second coming of Jesus. In the eschatology or the orientation of the early followers of Jesus toward significant events which would signal a significant end or change of life, the suffering community interpreted the coming of the messianic groom to get his bride as a positive event. And in the midst of suffering, each person needed to have wisdom to be prepared to participate in the celebration.
The first writing of the New Testament was the letter to the Thessalonian church by St. Paul. He was writing to this church because of their anxiety. They believed that the day of the Lord was imminent and so they were worried when some of their members died before this event happened. What would happen to the people who died? St. Paul wrote within the logic of believing that God was just and kind. St. Paul said that they should know that the people who died before the day of the Lord would rise from the grave and meet their companions in the air.
What is true of the ancient world is also true of our world. We believe in the reality of our interior world as much as we believe in what is happening outside of us. We believe in our interpretations and perceptions as often being indistinguishable from what is happening outside of us.
Our interior life is the life of interpretation and it often has to accomplish great compensation for the experiences of pain and loss in our world. Just as we have the resurrection from the dead as the narrative of compensatory hope for our personal deaths and the deaths of our loved one, the coming of future justice for all is the narrative of hope for the entire human community. We should not judge the people of the past for their interpretations of hope and justice through their apocalyptic narratives and eschatological stories of hope. We do the very same thing today except we have pushed our stories outside of religion and moved them into politics, economics, and all of the vast array of compensatory entertainments. I heard someone say that the Giants winning the Series provided them great comfort in the midst of their current illness and pain. We are no better than ancient people in the way in which we use the wisdom of our interior lives to compensate for the great range of losses which come to anyone in this life.
Even though many people in the time of Jesus and Paul were concerned about an imminent end of the world, I think that the wisdom of the parable is valid for an entire range of life events. Wisdom is learning to live in a state of preparedness so that we can respond effectively to an entire range of life events from the disastrous to the sublime and wonderful.
In the Bay Area what are we all preparing for? We are waiting for what is called "The Big One." We waiting of the mother of all earthquakes to occur, and we gradually improve our construction techniques and our disaster training and we try not to let the thought of the "Big One" upset our everyday lives.
Having wisdom is like knowing gaming statistics. We know that every game has rules but what makes a game interesting is that even though we know that there are a range of predictable outcomes, we cannot know the exact outcome in advance. People who have learned wisdom have studied the range of probable outcomes in life events and prepared in some way for the best and worst. And part of preparing for the best and the worst is doing it together as a community.
Wisdom is about being prepared to share losses and mourn together but also to share the joyful events and rejoice together. Wisdom is about the great invitation to a future and about knowing that neither personal death nor the end of human life as we know it will take away the invitation to another future because we believe in a greater all-embracing and all inclusive life, the life of God.
But in the meantime, let us have wisdom to prepare for the worst as just one of the things which could happen to us even while we prepare in hope for the new and wonderful things which we will be able to discover precisely because we are prepared. One of the reason that we need to keep our parish up and running because we don't know yet what wonderful things could occur here in our midst.
Today, let us choose to follow in the path of wisdom. Let us learn from past experiences and act with probabilistic wisdom in our future. It is the invitation to the future which makes our lives excitingly wonderful, because life itself is the really big World Series. It is the big game. And I pray that each of us today is prepared to know and receive the truly Wonderful. Amen.
