November 8, 2020 Sermon Matthew 25: 1-13
In the gospels, the individual
teachings of Jesus are powerful enough.
I hope that is seen each week.
But at a deeper level, they interlock, referring back and forth to each
other, offering potential for even deeper understanding of the love in the
teachings of Christ. This week’s passage
builds on last week’s. Last week, we
read how Jesus preached to the people how they should listen to the teachings
of the scribes and the Pharisees, because they ‘sat in the seat of Moses’,
their teachings were legitimate. But the
warning was not to do as they did, as they used their positions of authority
for self-aggrandizement in the community of faith. Our passage this week picks up with a
consideration of the consequences.
Jesus tells a parable. Ten maidens await the bridegroom. Five have enough oil, five do not. They go and buy more, but it is too
late. The doors are closed, the party is
full. Jesus is the bridegroom, the
wedding party is the end of time. All of
these people are apparently believers.
Half have the juice to make it to the end and five do not. On its own, this is tough. We have spoken of how sanctification, of how
holiness, is given to us by the Father in Heaven. Now, Jesus seems to be telling us that we
need to have enough holiness to get us over the finish line.
But if we look to last week’s
passage, we can see clearly what Jesus is trying to illustrate. The scribes and Pharisees would stand among
the ten maidens who are waiting for the bridegroom. They preach the right words, they say the
right things. The way of sanctification,
rendering unto God, loving God, these are proper words that come out of their
mouths. But their lives do not
demonstrate what they are teaching. They
are not accepting the faith they have been given to pass along with
humility. In fact, they are not living
that faith at all. Rather, they promote
themselves because of who they are, claiming God’s authority to make themselves
important in the community.
This is the other side of
sanctification. God provides the means
of sanctification, will lead us in lives where we can be more like our Lord
Jesus, where we can choose the good and proper and loving thing over the sinful
things of the world. But God has put in
specific limitation to God’s power, that God will operate within the gift of
free will that God has created within us.
What we believe, as Presbyterians,
about God and the world, they are based on certain presuppositions. The first, God is all-powerful. That means nothing happens without God’s will. Second, God is all-loving. Thus our salvation is won through the
ultimate demonstration of love, Jesus giving up his life for his friends, for
all of us. Third, God created us with
free will to choose to worship God.
Which leads to point 3.5, we used that free will badly. I refer back to Adam and Eve, who turned away
from the command of God to follow their own choice-not to defy God, because
they’d been tricked into thinking they’d done a good thing. They brought sin into the world.
The consequences of that third point
are the hardest for me to accept. That I
am a sinful person. It is true of
course. I am not always happy and loving
all the time. We all have those moments
when we are angry, frustrated, irritated, irrational, irksome, ticked off,
touchy, grouchy, just plain mean, projecting thoughts, words, deeds, and
attitudes that we come to regret. These
are the things of life that we do not want to do, but they are woven into our
very fabric. I guess what bothers me
most is that in the eyes of God, this is absolute, black and white. As sinners, we have a scale of sinning, from
the relatively harmless internal feelings we have through the evil of those who
seek to hurt and kill others.
Modern culture has played into this
suppression of the reality of sin, trying to replace God Us, we humans, as
divine. The commercials we are bombarded
with all try to sell us things to make our lives better. I will look better, I will feel better, I
will be healthier, I will be happier if I use the right dish soap, or drive the
proper car, or whatever-all this is a faint copy of real sanctification. It is so focused on the exterior of who we
are, presuming that to look good is to BE good.
So athletes and actors and musicians
are the heroes of the day. They play sports
with ever higher degrees of skill, they give amazing performances on the stage
and film, they make awesome music. This
external excellence is equated to moral excellence, until the football player
is revealed to be a wife beater, or the actor is revealed to be an extreme
narcissist, or the musician is revealed to be addicted to narcotics. And while we are getting more sensitive to
things with the Me Too movement and similar things, all too often, we focus
only on the external things.
True sanctification brings the love
and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ into our lives, to overturn the sin that
invests our entire existence. But when
we live in an age that pushes so hard on how things look, instead of how things
are, the entire concept of sin is rendered out of date in the attitudes of the
present age.
Sanctification is not simply about
talking more holy, certainly not about ‘looking holy’ but, in modern cliché,
talking the right talk, and about walking the right walk.
This is what the plan of God in the
death and resurrection is to accomplish in the lives of God’s children, it is
to accomplish our reunion with our Parent in heaven. It is like those first days in the Garden of
Eden when all our cares were satisfied and we could walk with God in the cool
of the day. Our very creation is
premised on our ability and desire to know God and enjoy God forever, to
glorify God and embody God’s love.
And, to continue on the road of
cliches this morning, it takes two to tango.
God provides us the means of our sanctification, the means of our
holiness, but it falls upon our shoulders to embrace that opportunity to live
lives in the love of God.
So there were ten maidens waiting
for the bridegroom. Their lamps were lit
but some did not have enough oil to last until the bridegroom arrived. There are people who claim Jesus as Lord and
Savior who are looking for the day when Jesus will return on the clouds from
heaven, coming back the way he went up.
Among those people are those who have paid lip service to being a
Christian and those for whom life has been changed, been made more holy, been
sanctified as they have embraced God’s gift to them.
I remember a story told in a sermon
when I was in college to illustrate this.
There was a small town where most of the houses were fueled by wood
stoves and fireplaces. There was the man
who provided the wood to most of the town, and wood is sold by the cord. So a cord of wood is a well stacked pile that
is 8 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot. For your
average fireplace or wood stove, the cord of wood is a pair of well stacked
piles of wood, each 8 by 4 by 2. So the
man who provided the wood, he was always a little short. It was never overt, but each piece was a few
inches shorter than it should have been.
It was a small town, it was one of those things that people lived
with. In the course of time in this
small town, this man, who had not been in church since childhood, renewed his
faith and became active in his local church.
Then his cords of wood assumed their proper dimensions, which was the
thing that convinced people his faith was now genuine.
Paul goes so far as to tell us that
we must not use our faith as an excuse to keep on sinning. We can use all the right words, but when our
lives do not change, the sanctification offered to us by God has not entered
into our lives. And, to follow the logic
of the parable, we have a multiplicity of opportunities to start again in this
life, but there will be a time when the doors will be shut, when this life will
be done, and we will no longer be admitted into the household of faith.
So
what have we seen in sanctification thus far?
It is something that is rendered unto God. It is living out the law of loving God with
our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits.
It is done humbly and without pride or used an attempt to demonstrate
our ‘holiness’ to the world. And it is
something that is still subject to our free will. In other words, we can say that we love Jesus
but it does not mean a thing if we are not living like we love Jesus. This is how God has bound God’s own power,
because if God did not, we would be over awed by the power of the divine. To show us God’s true self, there would be
nothing that we could do but worship.
But this is not the plan of
God. God gives us every opportunity to
know and believe in our Father who art in heaven while still laying the
responsibility for embracing that opportunity squarely on our shoulders. At one level, there are people who claim to
love Jesus but it never makes a difference in how they live their lives. At another level, there are those who claim
to love Jesus and then seek to leverage that power to their own advantage.
I am a fan of law enforcement dramas
and cop shows. I have yet to see one that
has not worked into its plot the preacher who has gone over the line because of
how they twist the words of faith. The
latest was an episode of Criminal Minds where the crazy preacher used to be the
street savvy kid on Beverly Hills 90210.
That is the other way that our modern culture twists God’s
sanctification. If being made holy is
not fixated on how we look, if it actually touches our moral selves, then it is
portrayed as if a crazy man of God is twisting God’s love in the hearts of his
believers for his own purposes. And I
say He because a female cult leader does not stick in my mind from TV. It seems to reinforce the ideal that we, Us,
humans, are the divine by making those who ‘follow’ God look crazy.
From these two sides, our
sanctification, our being made holy by God, is under attack. It has either been commoditized, turned into
a commodity, a product we should buy and use to make our lives more fully
realized, more holy. Or it has been
satirized, it has been turned into a joke that God’s authority is used by crazy
fanatics on the gullible and weak minded, that holiness is really just
exploitation.
Sin began when the serpent convinced
Adam and Eve that eating the forbidden fruit would make them ‘more like
God’. The sinful world has been trying
to convince us of our own divinity, our own holiness, that it is Us, and not
God, since the very beginning. The
effort is not to discredit holiness, but rather to misdirect its intent and
focus.
Sanctification is so much
simpler. But a simple idea can be
difficult to implement. In the death and
resurrection of Jesus, we have been saved, forgiven by the grace of God for the
sin we have been born into. It is a free
gift, but one that claims our very existence.
It begins in gratitude, a way to say thank you for that which we have
received. We live our lives differently,
showing love, forgiveness, grace, mercy, the traits that Jesus showed in his
life among us. He is pretty good model
to follow for the Christian life. It is
through these actions that we are sanctified, that we are made more holy. This is what it means to love God, what it
means to render unto God, simply to come humbly to our Lord and seek to live as
the God of Love would have us live. This
is the sanctification that God has laid before us, the holiness that we are
called upon to embrace that we may be more like our beloved Lord Jesus
Christ. Amen.
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