Pentecost 24, yr A, 2026

There is something unpleasant about the parable in today's Gospel.

Ten bridesmaids are waiting for a wedding to begin. They have their lamps, they have their places, and they are ready to welcome the bridegroom. But as the hours pass, he doesn’t arrive. All ten fall asleep, and when the bridegroom finally arrives, five discover that they have run out of oil. While they’ve gone to get more…the celebration begins, the door closes.. And five people are left outside.

That sounds rather harsh. Five are welcomed in; five are excluded. And the message seems straightforward enough: be ready, because you never know when the moment will come.  But I wonder whether there is more going on here than a simple lesson about being organised. After all, this is Jesus talking, and Jesus has a habit of turning things on their ears.  He tells stories that challenge the comfortable, disturb the powerful, and invite us to look at the world differently. His parables are rarely as simple as they first appear. 

We live in a world of extraordinary contradictions. We have more wealth, more technology, more scientific knowledge and more resources than previous generations could have imagined. And yet poverty persists. Refugees flee violence and persecution. Families struggle to afford housing. Wars still rage. People are still persecuted and killed for circumstances of birth.  With all the world has accomplished, we still don’t have peace.  There’s a lot of room for growth here. 

 

Perhaps this is where the parable of the bridesmaids fits in.

The ten bridesmaids are waiting for the groom to arrive. They are expecting to join a wedding feast, but the bridegroom is delayed, and the waiting becomes quite long.  So long, that the Bridesmaids start to become bored, and tired, and less alert…perhaps even doubting that the he’ll come at all.  I think that is something we can relate to.

We say in liturgy and prayer all the time ‘your kingdom come your will be done’, we hear in scripture that Christ, that Bridegroom, that Prince of Peace will return soon.  But we’ve been saying that for literally thousands of years and after all that time there are moments when we wonder whether anything will really change. Moments when the problems around us seem so enormous that our individual efforts appear insignificant.  Times when we wonder if our prayers are effectual, if faith has a point at all…might as well stay in bed Sunday morning. And so…tired out with waiting, the bridesmaids of the parable fall asleep. Perhaps that is the most human part of the story (certainly the part I can relate to!). They aren’t great saints, or prophets, they are just ordinary people who became tired after a long wait. 

And we, the church, too, have been waiting a long time for the prince of peace.  So long that we can become comfortable with familiar words, familiar prayers and familiar routines. We can speak about love without always practising it. We can celebrate the life of Jesus without always paying attention to the radical demands of his teaching.  We can become so accustomed to war, that we assume it will never end.  But the Gospel calls us to wake up and be prepared, but because the world needs people who are awake to the needs of others.

The five WISE bridesmaids, we read, bring extra oil. Their preparation is what distinguishes them from the others, they knew they needed to be prepared for what could be a long wait. This is a lesson that we should know by now as well.  That we need to be prepared for the interim.  That we need to be prepared for not only Christ’s coming but for the time between.  Like we spoke of last week.  We need to be prepared to live into the Kingdom of Heaven, not simply wait for it’s arrival.  We need to believe in the bridegrooms imminent arrival and be prepared for however long that will take.

We need to trim our lamps with faith.  Faith that keeps the waiting active with compassion, courage, hope. With a commitment to justice and peace when injustice and war has become normalised. with the spiritual nourishment we receive through prayer, worship, scripture, fellowship and service.  And importantly, we have to remember that faith is not something that can simply be borrowed at the last minute.  We cannot borrow someone else's compassion. We cannot borrow someone else's courage. We cannot rely indefinitely on the good work of previous generations while refusing to do the work ourselves.  Each generation must discover what it means to follow Christ in its own time and circumstances, prepare it’s own oil of faith.

Our tradition gives us beautiful liturgy, ancient prayers, wonderful music and a rich inheritance of scripture and theology. These things are precious. They connect us with generations of Christians who have worshipped, struggled, hoped and prayed before us.  But faith is not a museum. Faith is not something we preserve behind glass.  It is something that is alive.

And that brings us to the uncomfortable part of the parable: the closed door. The five bridesmaids who have no oil are shut out of the wedding celebration. It is a difficult image, particularly for those of us who believe that God's love is generous, inclusive and abundant.

Does this mean that God excludes people who make mistakes? That divine love is available only to those who have prepared sufficiently? That there is a limited supply of grace?  Of course not!

After all parables are not instruction manuals. They are stories that provoke thought and invite reflection. The closing door is not a symbol that those who don’t have enough of the oil of faith are doomed, rather it is a reminder that the time to prepare is short.  That, being human, we know that there are times when we grow tired and simply fall asleep at our duty.  That we have to be ready for the moments that catch us by surprise.

The five who run out of oil are not unfaithful or bad. They are people who never though they’d fall asleep, who never imagined they’d have to wait so long.  They are neither evil nor lazy…just people who are tired.  All the bridesmaids had their lamps trimmed and ready to go, all were invited and waiting but things didn’t go as anticipated.

We are all dependent upon grace. We all make mistakes. We all have moments when our lamps burn low. A church that understands this is a place where people find welcome rather than judgment, encouragement rather than condemnation, and companionship rather than exclusion.  We need one another. We need communities that sustain hope when hope becomes difficult. We need the wisdom of those who have walked the road before us and the imagination of those who are just beginning. We need to listen to people whose experiences differ from our own.  The oil in our lamps is nurtured in community and expressed in the way we live together.  We cannot know exactly when the bridegroom will arrive. We cannot predict the future or control the circumstances of our lives. But we can decide how we live while we wait.

We can choose to be people of hope rather than despair, people of compassion rather than indifference, people of welcome rather than exclusion. And we can remember that the light of Christ is not given to us simply to make our own light shine. It is meant to be placed on a lampstand to give light to others and to help their faith grow, their oil become replenished and abundant.

The world needs a church that is alive to the Gospel, courageous in its compassion, generous in its welcome and committed to justice.  Living into the kingdom of heaven…keeping those lamps up high on a lampstand and with oil and faith in abundance.  So let us keep our lamps burning. Let us keep them burning in our communities, in our conversations, in our relationships and in our public life. Let them shine in places where people experience loneliness, poverty, discrimination and despair. Let them illuminate the path towards reconciliation, peace and justice.

And when we grow tired, as we inevitably will, remember that we do not wait alone. We belong to one another, and we belong to a God whose love is greater than our fears and whose grace is deeper than our failures.  May we be a people who are ready not because we are perfect, but because we are committed to love.  May we be a church whose light is visible beyond its own walls.  And may we help make the coming kingdom of God a little more each day, until that day when the prince of peace arrives at last.

Amen.