Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | November 12, 2023

Matthew 25:1-13

I was visiting my son’s house years ago and while he was at work, I was cooking dinner. While cooking, I was also keeping my eye on the two boys, ages 4 and 1. They were helping. The one year old helped by crawling around on the floor and getting into the cupboards and pulling out all the pots and pans. He crawled into the other room and I went to see what he was up to. When I came back into the kitchen, the four-year-old had pushed a chair up to the counter, climbed up and grabbed a large carving knife. As he was waving the knife around, he said, “Look grandad! I can help!”

I took the knife from him and said, “You’d better let me handle that. There’s better ways for you to help. Why don’t you stand here and when I cut up these veggies, you can put them in the pot.” He did something dangerous, but at the age of four he reasoned like a child. The best course of action was to redirect his attention to something that he could safely handle.

We tell children, “Don’t touch the stove; it’s very hot.” Sometimes they take heed of our warning. Sometimes they don’t and they have to find out for themselves that the stove is hot. The lesson is learned, and the result is that wisdom is gained. We could say that wisdom is the ability to learn from experience and to apply that knowledge to living. The experience can be our own, or our observation of others. Some people are good at gaining wisdom; some are better at it than others. Some people are foolish.

The fool says, “I know the stove is hot. It was hot the last time I touched it. But maybe this time it will be different. Besides, no one’s going to tell me I can’t touch the stove. Let’s find out.”

Jesus told a story about what he called the “Kingdom of Heaven.” The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but an idea. The idea is that there is a way of life that God makes possible. It’s not so much about following a set of rules; rather it is about building character and integrity. It’s about gaining wisdom, living peaceably as much as that’s possible, being kind and generally trying to be the best person that we can be. The rewards of such a life, if we can call them rewards, have to do with the bonds of love that we create and somehow making the world a better place for our being in it.

Jesus told a story about ten bridesmaids. One of their responsibilities was to meet the groom’s party when they came to the bride’s house to escort her to the wedding banquet. It was at night, so the bridesmaids took their oil lamps with them in order to light the way. Five of them brought oil and five didn’t. That would be like taking a flashlight with no batteries. When the groom’s party showed up, the five without oil were simply not prepared for the task at hand. It wasn’t as if they were caught unaware; it’s what they were there for. The banquet proceeded and by the time the five without oil got their act together, it was too late for them. They missed out on the party.

There was a woman in a church I served. She and her family came to worship after an absence of many years, so when I first met her, she said, “I lost my faith.” That was fine; people say things like that, and I don’t judge. But she kept going on about it; “When I lost my faith, before I lost my faith, since I lost my faith.”

It got the point where I wanted to say, “Where was the last place you remember seeing it?” or, “Have you checked all your pockets?”

Instead, I thought about it. What does it mean to lose one’s faith? It’s hard to define faith as an item that we possess. Faith is an attitude; an attitude of trust. Jesus sometimes challenged his followers by saying things like, “O ye of little faith.” But he also said things such as, “It is your faith that has made you well.” One writer said, “Faith is the assurance of what we hope for, and the certainty of what we do not see.”

If what we define as our faith is something that we can lose, then maybe that loss is a good thing. Good because a faith that can be lost is perhaps built on false assumptions. Such as, if I’m a good Christian then nothing bad should happen to me or to my loved ones. False assumptions such as, when something bad happens, and it’s always when not if, God must be punishing me. Why is God punishing me? I must not be good enough and my suffering is the atonement for my sins. In other stories Jesus compared such faith to building a house on a foundation of sand. When the storms of life come, the house is washed away.

A question that comes to mind is, “how does being spiritually prepared help us to face life’s challenges?” Part of the answer to that question lies in the idea that if we know to the core of our being that God loves us, then no matter what happens, we know that we are held in God’s love. As St. Paul wrote, “There is nothing in all creation that can separate us from God’s love.” We are able to understand that God is with us in all circumstances. That can serve as a building block to our foundation of faith.

Some months ago, I was with my four-year-old granddaughter. We were walking down a school hallway and she tripped and fell onto the hard linoleum floor. She launched into a four-year old’s siren wail. I picked her up and held her. I said, “Oh poor Violet, that must really hurt.” It didn’t ease the pain, but maybe it did. Knowing that she was held by someone who loves her made it better.

There could be times when we go through an experience and think, “I should have been better prepared.” That thought in itself is wisdom talking. Learning from experience is wisdom that allows to say, “Next time I will be.”

I tried to encourage the woman who spoke of losing her faith to think about building faith on a solid foundation. However, her “loss” was such an important part of her identity, that she was unwilling to give that up. After a while she and her family left the church again.

In the story that Jesus told, we might wonder why the bridesmaids who had oil didn’t share with the others. Didn’t Jesus talk about the importance of generosity and sharing? He did, yet in this story the lesson seems to be that we can’t do for others what they are supposed to do for themselves. We can share, but we can’t do for others what they have to do for themselves.

Jesus may not have been savvy to the contemporary term, “Co-dependent,” but he understood the concept. It’s as if he is saying, “You have to climb that mountain. I can’t climb it for you. But I am with you every step of the way. If it is too much, lean on me.”

Some other questions that come to mind are, is there anything more that needs to happen in your life in order for you to fully participate in life as God intends you to do? What are the barriers and resistances to that participation? Figuring out both the answers and the questions is part of how we work out our sense of faith.

When I was on the fire department in Iowa, we received a new piece of equipment, the Jaws of Life. The Jaws of Life we received was a powerful gas engine attached to a hydraulic system. Two people could carry it from the truck to where it was needed. There were attachments for different needs. It could inflate a series of airbags to lift the weight of a semi-truck; one attachment could cut through steel posts; one could crush or expand.

We would take the jaws of life out to a junkyard where we would practice cutting up old cars, as if someone’s life depended on it. Over time, we must have gone through a dozen cars, figuring out all the different ways that someone might be trapped in one.

Then one day, a call came that the Jaws of Life were needed at the scene of a car crash. We arrived on the scene and went to work. We were able to get an injured person out of the car so that the paramedics could save his life. Afterward, back at the station where we talked about the situation over our supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, we all realized that in the moment, no one had to tell us what to do. Wherever we were on the scene, whatever piece of the equipment we grabbed onto, that’s what we did. We commented that it happened like clockwork. We had practiced so much that when it came time for actual application of our knowledge and skills, it was like second nature.

I think of faith like that. We practice our truth and when we need it, it’s there. Amen.