SERMON FOR NOVEMBER 8, 2020          TEXT: MATTHEW 25:1-13

          This week Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers provided America with a fitting theme song. It was originally the lead single from their 1981 album Hard Promises. You still hear it a lot on classic rock stations, that unmistakable plaintive, nasal twang: “The waiting is the hardest part/Every day you get one more yard/ You take it on faith, you take it to the heart/The waiting is the hardest part.” The Heartbreakers were singing about the delay until the right woman comes into your life and celebrating the fact that apparently she has arrived, that, in fact, the waiting is over: “Well yeah, I might have chased a couple women around/All it ever got me was down/then there were those that made me feel good/But never as good as I feel right now/Baby, you’re the only one that’s ever known how/To make me wanna live like I wanna live now.” The chorus might well read, “The waiting was the hardest part.” The implication is that, at least in affairs of the heart, the waiting pays off.

          When the tally of votes is finalized, the waiting does pay off for one team of candidates and their supporters. They can rejoice like the Heartbreakers whose own hearts aren’t broken, “Oh baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now?/Don’t it feel like something from a dream?” For those disappointed by the results, it may not feel like the hardest part is behind them, but for all of us the waiting is over. We can exchange anxiety for clarity, and that is a blessed relief.

          Today’s Gospel is the second of four parables in Matthew that portray the awaited second coming of the Lord to judge humankind. They follow one immediately after another in chapters 24-25 with stern warnings of the sorting to come — the faithful slave from the unfaithful one, the foolish bridesmaids from the wise, the various investors of the talents entrusted to them by their master, the sheep from the goats — and of the eternal consequences of the decision. Here are the verdicts in order: “He will cut him in pieces and put him with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (24:51). “But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do no know you’” (25:12). “So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents . . . . As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (25: 28, 30). “Then he will answer them, ’Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (25:45-6).

          All four parables urge us to live now in the light of what is to come. The waiting is to be a time of preparation and fulfillment. We act out the hope that is ours in Christ Jesus —    for peace to reconcile those estranged, for justice restored to those sinned against, for mercy to bring sinners to new life.

          These parables make it clear that you cannot shirk your duties, try to pull a fast one while your master is not looking, bury the talents entrusted to you, or claim ignorance when called out, and called out we all will be in the end. The waiting is the hardest part because it is so demanding. Jesus requires faithful disciples here and now. As St. Paul writes, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation . . . . As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18, 6:1). Not to accept the grace of God in vain — that is the bottom line in these parables. Because if you do, then when the Lord comes again and God’s promise of a new creation is fulfilled, you will have forfeited your place in it.

          Earlier in his Gospel Matthew warns his readers against self-deception: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (7:21). Just like the foolish bridesmaids who come too late to the wedding banquet and beg the bridegroom to let them in: “Lord, lord, open to us,”    they cry. But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.”

          What is distinctive about this parable is its focus on the delay of the bridegroom’s return. The foolish bridesmaids were prepared for the short term; they had enough oil for their lamps to greet his prompt arrival but failed to consider the possibility of an extended period of waiting. The early generations of Christians looked for the Lord’s imminent return. Consider today’s second reading from 1 Thessalonians. Paul is writing some 30 years before Matthew, and even at that point in time he is offering reassurance to believers who are troubled by the delay. They have watched loved ones die, and still no triumphant second coming. Where is Jesus? Paul tells them that the Lord will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. “Then,” he writes, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.” By the time Matthew was writing, Paul and his peers, who expected to be alive to greet the returning Lord, were dead. If there had been questions among them about the Second Coming, how much more uncertainty must Matthew’s community have felt?

          That is why the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids focuses on the bridegroom’s delay and the need to be ready to endure it. But now, when countless generations have come and gone, the urgency has faded. While the church regularly confesses the belief that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead, we have also regularly replenished the store of oil for our lamps for more than two millennia. We strive to live here and now in the light of the kingdom that is coming. We remain vigilant, watching for opportunities to embody God’s reign in the present and seizing them, imperfect though our witness may be. The waiting is the hardest part, but for everything there is a season: a time to plant, a time to heal, a time to build up, a time for peace (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). And that time has come. Amen.