Timing is Everything

I was outside, on the lawn of the church with this small congregation. I was a first-time visitor, having just completed a week of volunteering at Wesley Woods with a high school camp. This church was on the way home, so a few of us stopped at the small United Methodist Church for Sunday worship. And they were staging a heritage day service.

For those of you that don’t know, a heritage day service usually includes the pastor dressing up like a circuit rider. Circuit riders were Methodist preachers in 18th century America who rode on horseback from town to town, visiting the churches in his “circuit” on Sundays throughout the year. Well, on this heritage Sunday I was at, the church’s pastor dressed up like a circuit rider and rode in on a horse. And they staged it just like old times. The congregation was gathered on the lawn, singing hymns a cappella until the preacher came. “So when will the preacher be here?” I asked the woman next to me. “I don’t know. Sometime after 10:00, they say. He’ll get here when he gets here.”

This was really the full experience. We were all kinda in the dark about when the preacher would be here. We had a general idea, but I guess horses are harder to predict time-wise than our fancy cars. So here we were, pretending like we’re in 18th century America, waiting for the preacher to get there so we could have this dang worship service. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. We didn’t know when he’d come. We knew he’d get there…we just didn’t know when. And people used to do this every week. It drove me crazy after 10 minutes of waiting.
I was inside, in a classroom above the chapel. It was already 10 minutes into our contextual education class in seminary, and neither of our professors had shown up. One had already told us he wouldn’t be there this week, but the other one was supposed to lead the class. His name was Raphael Warnock, the pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Dr. Warnock usually was late, but not this late. So the minutes kept ticking away into our class period, and we started the talk that all students have when these things happen. “Where’s the professor? We’ll have to invoke the 15 minute rule soon.” For those of you that don’t know, the 15 minute rule is an unwritten but widely known rule that if your professor doesn’t show up in the first 15 minutes of class, then the students are allowed to leave without getting in trouble. I was there once when we used it in college. It’s a risky thing. Well here we are, seminary students – the most ethical and honest people you can find, right? No, we’re invoking the 15 minute rule on Dr. Warnock. Who cares that he preaches from the same pulpit Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. both preached from? Who cares if he’s an internationally known preacher? He’s 15 minutes late, we don’t know when he’ll be here – if he comes at all. We knew he’d come, we just didn’t know when.

I was sitting in my living room, waiting. I had things to do, but I couldn’t leave because the Comcast guy was supposed to come and hook up our new service between 9 and 1. Oh, the cable guys. Everyone else makes appointments, but they give you a 4 hour range that you have to wait for them to show. You’re a prisoner in your own house, waiting for the cable guy, not knowing when he’ll show up. I knew the Comcast guy was coming to my house, I just didn’t know when.

In this parable of the ten bridesmaids, they knew the groom was coming, they just didn’t know when. They knew he’d come and invite them into the wedding, they just didn’t know when. So they waited with their lamps until he came. And when he came, some were gone because they had run out of oil.

How did this happen? As I read this parable, this first century oil crisis, I try to imagine the argument that broke out before they left with their lamps. Half the women are taking backup oil, just to be safe. We don’t know how long we’ll be waiting, they say as they grab their reserves. The other half of the women aren’t. It’s usually not that long, We’ll have enough. A backup flask of oil is heavy and bulky and we don’t want to carry it with us. We don’t want to look like over-prepared fools, weighed down with more than we need.
Any experienced hiker will tell you to be prepared, but that it’s foolish to be over-prepared. You don’t have the room in your pack to be over-prepared. You have to be lean and mean, or you’ll be the fool who brought a jacket and a sweatshirt, the fool who brought 3 kinds of sunscreen, the fool who brought backup hiking boots just in case they need them. And you’ll be the tired, slow fool that now has to carry all of it.

So who’s foolish and who’s wise? Is it foolish to be over-prepared, or foolish to be under-prepared? You see, the distinction between foolish and wise comes down to bringing extra oil or not. And at first, you can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, bringing extra oil “just in case” may turn out to look wise. But if the bridegroom comes quickly, you might look foolish. And to forego the backup oil can look wise if the bridegroom comes quickly, but if he doesn’t you’ll end up appearing foolish. It’s all about the timing of the bridegroom’s arrival. Basically, no matter when the groom comes, someone’s going to look foolish. So who actually is foolish?

You see, the mistake of the foolish bridesmaids was not falling asleep. Even the wise, over-prepared bridesmaids slept. The foolish bridesmaids were the ones who ran out of oil. Why did they end up foolish? It’s because they didn’t have enough oil of their own, and they had to run around town trying to buy oil at midnight, when obviously no merchants would be open. See what happens when you depend on foreign oil? You end up missing the wedding feast – you end up looking foolish.

So these bridesmaids looked foolish running around in search of more oil, but it wasn’t just their lack of oil that made them foolish. It was the motivation behind their lack of oil. It was foolish of them to think they knew when the bridegroom was coming. It was foolish to try to predict something so unpredictable and out of their control. The wise bridesmaids were the ones smart enough to know what they didn’t know. They were the ones that admitted, “We know he’s coming, we just don’t know when.” Meanwhile the foolish ones acted in their preparation as if they could predict that he wouldn’t be delayed that long. In an act of arrogance, they acted as if they knew what would happen, as if they knew when that bridegroom would show up. But they didn’t know. They couldn’t be certain. It wasn’t a guarantee that he’d show up quickly.
In telling the parable, Jesus says that the bridegroom was delayed. Whether it was a flat tire, or having to change shirts because he got a stain on it, or what, he arrived later than expected. And the foolish women were revealed – the ones who weren’t ready for the unexpected. The ones who were too arrogant to admit that they didn’t know for sure what would happen. The ones who pretended like they knew when he was coming, when in reality they didn’t. When they set out without extra oil, it was an act of arrogance – an act of presuming to know what they did not actually know. And this is what made them foolish.

Just as I was on that church lawn, in that classroom, and in my living room, all the bridesmaids knew the groom was coming, they just didn’t know when. Half of them admitted that, but the other half were too foolish to admit they didn’t know everything.

You see, the foolish women were the ones who just didn’t take the event seriously enough. Here is a wedding feast, one of the grandest occasions there is, and they’re not treating it like it’s any big deal. So while you can make an argument for either group of bridesmaids being the foolish ones, we see that the truly foolish are those who do not take the event of the bridegroom’s coming seriously.

And what of the wise bridesmaids? As I said, they probably looked pretty foolish at the outset lugging around all this extra oil. What are you doing? Why are you wasting your time and money on spare oil? It’s similar to those who ask, why are you wasting your time at church when you can sleep in, or watch football preview shows? Why are you wasting your money by giving 10% of it away to the church, when you could use that 10% to buy more of the things you want? There is often criticism of being over-prepared, but some things are worth taking with the utmost seriousness. The bridegroom’s arrival is to be taken very seriously, and the wise bridesmaids know that. They know that he’s coming, they just don’t know when. And they are not going to miss this banquet for anything. They are going to make sure they are ready when the invitation comes. The foolish cannot say the same.

Jesus uses the example of preparing extra oil for the lamps as a symbol for preparation, but it was the attitude of those bridesmaids that made them foolish. You see, it’s not a story about what we prepare or store up, or what we bring to the event. This isn’t a call to “be prepared,” to make sure you’re covering yourself with good, holy thoughts and deeds. It’s not a warning to make sure that you’re not caught with your hand in the cookie jar when Christ comes again. It’s not just about the preparation itself, the works we do or the things we say.

This parable is about an attitude of expectancy. It’s a parable about admitting our own limitations. It’s a parable about humility, about not being so arrogant as to think we have the bridegroom’s schedule figured out. It’s a parable about taking Christ’s second coming seriously. What requires more preparation than feasting at Christ’s heavenly banquet?

Christ is our bridegroom, and we cannot predict when Christ will come again. We have no way of knowing. We are not in control of the bridegroom’s schedule, so we can’t pretend like we’ve solved a mystery that is not meant to be solved. And we can’t act like it’s no big deal. All we know is that Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead,” as our Apostles’ Creed says. We do not know when that time will come. We don’t know when Christ will come, we just know he’ll be here sometime. We can’t predict it, we can’t know for sure, and we mustn’t pretend like we have it figured out. We must be willing to admit that we don’t know everything – that God only knows when the church’s bridegroom, Christ, will come again.

We must await with eager anticipation, our lamps trimmed and burning. We must have enough oil of faith stored up that we can wait as long as it takes. We must be prepared for the long haul, even if Christ comes before this service is over. We must be prepared for everything, because when it comes down to it, we don’t really know anything. May Christ come again when the time is right, and may we be prepared when that day comes, without being so arrogant as to think we know when that day will come, or that Christ will have mercy on those who do not take it seriously. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Not What You Would Expect

This week’s lectionary text is actually just the last part of what I read, the story of the Canaanite woman. But this is one week in which I disagree with the way the lectionary selected the passage, as I think the story of the Canaanite woman is best understood when paired with what happens in verses 1-20. Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees and Scribes, as well as his encounter with the Canaanite woman, are stories full of expectations not met.

Let’s set this story up first. We begin with Jesus and the disciples in Gennesaret, on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. You may remember that this was the disciples destination when Jesus came walking to them on the water. They’re ministering here in Gennesaret, and at this point they are pretty far from Jerusalem, about 80 miles north. Jesus’ ministry is stirring up some problems among the religious leaders of the day, who find Jesus here and begin on another smear campaign against him. According to the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, the Pharisees and Scribes were typically more interested in discrediting opponents than fairly representing their own views. So here come the big, bad, religious leaders, all the way up from Jerusalem to set this renegade group straight. These so called “disciples” of this so called “Messiah” are not following temple law of washing their hands before they eat. They are not going through purification rituals that the church has set up. They’re really not happy with Jesus claiming to be the Messiah, because the Messiah predicted in Hebrew Scripture would surely be a strict adherent to religious law. The Messiah that these religious leaders were expecting was not one who would ignore such important purification rituals. Surely, the Messiah would be the most concerned about ritual purification, because, well, he’s the Messiah, the most pure of them all! So this Jesus guy must not be the Messiah, because he’s not at all what they expect.

But Jesus is the Messiah, regardless of whether he meets the expectations of the religious leaders. And when we turn the camera around and see Jesus’ side of this encounter, we find he is also expecting something different from these religious leaders. He expects the Pharisees and Scribes, as religious leaders, to have their hearts turned toward God. It’s really not that unrealistic of an expectation, one might think. He is God incarnate, walking around the world only to discover that the people who are supposedly the “closest to God”, i.e. the religious leaders, are merely paying lip service to the one who sent him. They follow the religious traditions and laws, but Jesus clearly sees that they are not as pure as he expects. They do not have their hearts turned toward God, and they do not truly worship God, because they are more concerned with tradition than they are with worshiping God. In fact, Jesus argues that they take God’s word and twist it around to meet their agendas. This is not what Jesus expects from religious leaders. This is not what he expects from those who are within the walls of the religious community, those who are the insiders.

Clearly, he expects the insiders to truly have their hearts turned toward God rather than merely paying lip service to God. He doesn’t expect them to be hypocrites. But sadly, he’s encountered too many people who don’t practice what they preach. And I think Jesus as we see him in this passage is a Jesus getting close to the boiling point. He’s obviously getting frustrated at people speaking as insiders but not backing it up with their actions.

And at this point, he leaves and heads even further from Jerusalem, where there’s little chance of finding another hypocritical insider. He’s in Tyre and Sidon, another 30 miles or so further from Jerusalem than where he was, and he’s in a primarily Gentile area. And it must be noted that at this point, Jesus is further from Jerusalem than in any other point in his ministry. For whatever reason, he has come to the most remote place in his ministry from the center of Judaism. He is among the outsiders, the far outsiders, here in Tyre and Sidon.

So then we have an outsider, a Canaanite woman, approaching him. And get this – she’s using insider language! She addresses him as “Lord, Son of David”! New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson notes that in Matthew’s gospel, such an address would be found only on the lips of insiders – disciples, particularly. In fact, “Lord” is never found on the lips of Judas, the betrayer. For Matthew, it’s a clear way to distinguish who are insiders and who are outsiders.

So Jesus hears an outsider, a way-outsider, speaking as an insider. And this immediately follows frustration with hypocritical religious leaders who speak as insiders but act as outsiders. So naturally, Jesus is suspicious of this woman. She has come to plead for the healing of her daughter, but does this outsider truly believe that Jesus has the power to do so? Does she truly have faith that he can perform a miracle of healing? Jesus is obviously a bit skeptical of her faith, and his frustration with hypocrites comes to a head as he ignores her, then compares her to a dog. Essentially, he says, “I was sent to the children of Israel, and you are merely a dog trying to steal food from these children. How dare you try to manipulate me,” he seems to be saying. He is very frustrated, and very skeptical that this woman has any interest in him beyond what she can get out of him. Honestly, how much would someone all the way up here know about Jesus anyway? How could this outsider, in this place, have faith in him?

But unexpectedly, she fights back against Jesus with a great response. She doesn’t deny she’s a dog, but shows that even dogs deserve the children’s scraps. She proves that whether an outsider or insider, all are worthy of God’s love. Some say she even outwits Jesus here. I wouldn’t call it that, necessarily, but she is definitely proving her faith to Jesus. She’s proving that she has her heart turned toward God, and that has to mean something.

Jesus did not expect this outsider to have such faith. Heck, even the disciples, the most inside of all insiders, had just disappointed Jesus by not having faith in him when he was walking on the Sea of Galilee. He expressed to Peter, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” And here, he finds that the Canaanite woman has great faith. Great faith! Unlike the religious leaders, she does not merely pay lip service to God, but has her heart turned toward God. Unlike the disciples, she has great faith. And this is not what Jesus expected from her. He did not expect an outsider to have more faith than an insider.

And I can’t say that the Canaanite woman expected the Messiah to ignore her and then insult her. Just as the Pharisees and Scribes had their own expectations of the Messiah, one who would follow their traditions, the Canaanite woman expected the Messiah to be a warm and fuzzy Jesus, the Jesus that we prefer. Look around at the most popular images of Jesus in our churches today. Are we really all that different from her? We all love the images of Jesus smiling, the images of Jesus playing with children, the images of Jesus hugging everyone. Yes, we love us some soft, cuddly Jesus. And sometimes he’s like that. But other times he’s turning over tables in the temple or calling people dogs. And it’s these images of Jesus, the non-warm, non-fuzzy Jesus, that are not often depicted in art.

But as unappealing as this image of Jesus is, the Canaanite woman does not back down. She does not walk away from him just because Jesus is not exactly as she expected him to be. She persists in pleading for her daughter to be healed, and in this persistence shows her faith. Her faith acts as a foil to the Pharisees’ lack of faith. Because Jesus was not as the Pharisees expected, they did not believe he was the Messiah. But Jesus was also not as the Canaanite woman expected, and she reacted the opposite way: she continued to believe. And Jesus takes notice.

Some of you may be familiar with the movie Good Will Hunting. In the movie, the main character Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT who rides the subway into work from South Boston every morning. His lifestyle, his clothing, and his manner of speech are completely opposite of what is typically found among the students whose halls he cleans. These are intelligent, wealthy, successful students – the brightest scientific minds. At the beginning of the movie, an acclaimed MIT professor, one of the greatest mathematicians in the world, puts a practically unsolvable equation on the chalkboard outside his classroom. He expects that perhaps one student will be bright enough to figure it out by the end of the semester. Yet Will, the janitor, solves it in one night, and when the professor sees it the next day, he can muster no response except “This is brilliant.”

He immediately suspects it is a student, and when he discovers that the one who met his mathematical challenge is an uneducated janitor, he spends the rest of the movie struggling to come to grips with it. He and his colleagues become frustrated that someone without their academic training could actually be more intelligent than them. In short, Will Hunting is not what they expect to find as the one who solved the problem, and a brilliant mind is not what they expect to find in the head of a rough, foul mouthed janitor.

How often do we find people to be the opposite of what we expect them to be? These two stories in Matthew chapter 15 call us to question our expectations of other people, as well as our expectations of Jesus. In Matthew, there are “insiders” and “outsiders.” Nowadays, we call these two groups the “churched” and the “un-churched.” And what we typically expect is that the “churched” are the ones with great faith in Jesus Christ. The “un-churched” don’t really believe anything, we think, because if they did, they’d be hanging out with the “churched.” But just as Jesus encountered hypocrites in the church, we too find people in the midst of the group called the “churched” who really possess little to no faith. They are like Peter, who disappoints Jesus because of “little faith” and “doubting.” We don’t expect people within our own community of faith to have very little faith. We expect that anyone involved in a church has great faith in Christ.

Similarly, we rarely expect to find people with great faith among the un-churched. But they are there, and they are plentiful. I have encountered many people who have great faith in Christ, but refuse to go to church for a number of reasons. One such reason is – not coincidentally – the hypocrisy of churchgoers. But there are other reasons as well: they don’t know what being part of a church can do for them, they’ve never been invited, they were turned off by the atmosphere, they haven’t found a church they like, and so on. Regardless, what we must recognize is that churched and un-churched are not synonyms of faithful and lacking faith, respectively. The faith or lack of faith in people is very often not what we expect based on their level of involvement in a religious community. We must examine our expectations of others and really think about whether they are fair expectations. And we must not let the unexpected get in the way of our ministry. Jesus found the Canaanite woman to be not what he expected, yet he still performed the miracle of healing her daughter, still ministered to the woman of great faith. Jesus did not let the unexpected get in the way of his ministry, and neither can we.

We also find that the Canaanite woman met a Jesus that she was not expecting. She expected the warm and fuzzy, soft and cuddly Jesus, and what she met was the frustrated and angry, disappointed and skeptical, ignoring and insulting Jesus. By reading this text, we too meet this Jesus, and it is not what we expect from the Messiah either. We squirm in our seats as we hear our loving Savior ignoring people and then calling them dogs, questioning whether they really have faith. It’s just plain uncomfortable to hear. My first reaction when looking at this text was, “How am I going to preach on this? This is not my Father’s Jesus!”

We often have expectations of Jesus Christ that turn out to be misguided. But just as the Canaanite woman persevered and refused to let a hostile, skeptical Jesus deter her from believing in his power, we too must persevere and refuse to let unexpected images of Jesus deter us from having faith in whatever manifestation of God we encounter. No expectations are to get in the way of our ministry, or in the way of our faith in God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer, the Holy Spirit the Sustainer. It is only by the power of this Trinity that this truth is brought before us on this day. Amen.