Sermon on Matthew 25:1-13

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

A lot seems off about today’s parable. Despite labeling some bridesmaids as “wise” and some as “foolish,” their behavior wasn’t that different. All of them brought full lamps that would be sufficient if the groom arrived when expected. And all of them fell asleep while they waited—not very vigilant of them.

And when their moment arrived, some of them had thought to bring extra oil in case the groom was delayed, but others hadn’t. Those who were prepared refuse to share, which doesn’t seem to go along with many of Jesus’ other teachings. What happened to “love your neighbor as yourself”? Or “do to others as you would have them do to you”?

And then, the tardy groom not only refused to let in those bridesmaids whose only mistake was not having enough oil to last until the groom’s late arrival—he didn’t even acknowledge that he knew them! If this parable is alluding to the wedding feast of the Lamb, what happened to the images of abundance, grace, and hospitality that go with God’s table right before us?

This parable just seems so unfair!It’s a tough story that reeks of selfishness, judgment, and exclusion.

But let’s remind ourselves of another image of the Reign of God that we heard in the first reading last Sunday. These are selections from Revelation chapter 7:

9After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. ….

17for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,
  and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
 and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

This is a picture of the abundance, inclusion, mercy, and joy that’s coming at the end of time. It’s by God’s grace that we participate in the wedding feast of the Lamb—now and in the future. It’s not anything we do that earns us our place—it’s what God does.

It’s hard not to fixate on the ending of our parable when some of the bridesmaids got locked out. But if you read the end of this parable and think to yourself, “what if that’s me?” remember this: God knows you and loves you.

In baptism, God made you part of God’s family forever. In communion, we’re united with the family of faith from all times and places. God’s table now and forever is open and abundant. There’s a place set for you. Do not fear.

So, when we release our fear, what can we receive from this parable?

There’s a common thread between this parable and the parables that bookend it. All three have to do with what people were doing while the person in charge was away: whether it was how they treated their coworkers, whether they prepared sufficiently for a delayed arrival, or whether they used the resources entrusted to them wisely.

Jesus was preparing his followers for a long wait. It’s been 2000 years, and he hasn’t come back yet. That’s a long time to wait. There’s a variety of possibilities for how to approach that waiting.

One wayis to try to expect Jesus to arrive at any moment. There are good things about this approach: there’s an urgency and a sense of hope. You can’t let yourself get complacent because he could come back any time. It’s taking seriously the commands to “keep awake.”

But there are some drawbacks. If you’re expecting Jesus to return next week, you’re probably not thinking about making lasting change in the world. A lot of the good Christians have done over the centuries has involved infrastructure and systems, as unglamorous as that sounds. If Jesus is coming back tomorrow, there’s no point in building hospitals or schools or creating programs that empower people to get out of poverty. With this approach, it can be possible to forget that there’s long-term work to be done while we wait.

The other end of that spectrum is getting complacent and acting like Jesus will never return. It does lend itself to long-term work, because if this is all there is, it’s up to us to make it better. But it’s hard to maintain momentum and urgency with this approach. Plus, it ignores large swathes of scripture and disregards the hope of the Reign of God being made complete.

In this parable, Jesus seems to be addressing the whole spectrum. On the one hand, his followers were going to need to bring extra oil. They were going to need to be prepared for the long haul.

On the other hand, he knew we would fall asleep—it’s hard to keep up momentum when what you were preparing for is delayed. So, he warned us to stay awake, to be prepared, that the moment of his return could be any time.

It’s good to be watchful, but what this parable emphasizes is how you prepare.

It’s not necessarily wrong to let our guard down sometimes. None of us can be prepared all the time, no matter what we tell ourselves.

So, we have to depend on each other. Have you ever sung in a choir or played a wind instrument in a group? To sustain a note longer than any one person could, you stagger breathe. One person takes a breath while everyone else holds the note. Then, the next person breathes. And the next, and the next. And the note continues. The work continues, even as we help each other take the rest we need.

2,000 years is far too long for anyone person to keep the work of the Reign of God going. But we keep the body of Christ going by supporting each other, encouraging each other, continuing on when someone needs a break.

If one or two bridesmaids had run out to the market to get more oil while the others rested, instead of them all falling asleep at once, perhaps they could have greeted the bridegroom together. The celebration could have been complete.

So, being prepared for Jesus’ return means loving our neighbors now—both in immediate acts of mercy and long-term systemic ways—and also resting so that we can continue this work for however long it takes for the Beloved Community to be made complete.

One ancestor in faith whoembodied this was Dorothy Day, and it’s her birthday today. She cofounded the Catholic Worker Movement, which has done immeasurable acts of mercy and justice in the world.

Here’s the postscript from her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. It illustrates so beautifully the way God inspired the movement with one small act of love after another, fueled by community.

“We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form,
saying, ‘We need bread.’ We could not say, ‘Go, be thou filled.’ If there were six small loavesand a few fishes, we had to divide them.
There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us.
Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, ‘Let’s all go live on a farm.’It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened…

It is not always easy to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.The most significant thing is community, others say.
We are not alone anymore.

But the final word is love.
At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread,
and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet
and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”

God can work that way with us, too, if we let one small act of mercy follow another small act of compassion, feeding our neighbors, supporting each other’s rest so that God’s love is acted out through history.

Let God’s love fuel your lamp as we love our neighbors together in big and small ways until the Beloved Community is complete.

Sermon on Matthew 5:1-12

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

All Saints Day is a mixed bag when it comes to church holy days.

Most holy days are celebratory: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. We belted out “A Mighty Fortress” last week for Reformation. Some churches do a blessing of the animals to mark St. Francis Day. Even quieter festivals like Holy Trinity and Baptism of our Lord evoke a hopeful reverence.

And though Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are solemn, at least they’re decidedly so. There’s no question that they’resomber, weighty holy days.

But All Saints Day is, at the same time,joyful as we remember the great cloud of witnesses cheering us on and sad as we grieve those who are no longer with us physically. It’s a bittersweet holy day when we hold grief and hope together.

It comes right after the significant secular holiday Halloween. Amid the costumes and candy, there’s also an undercurrent of discomfort. It’s as much as the dominant culture in the US is willing toacknowledge death.

As we’ve moved tonursing our sick at the hospital instead of at home and having our deceased loved ones at funeral parlors instead of in our houses’parlors, our society has become increasingly uncomfortable with the realities of mortality.

There are good reasons why we outsource these parts of our lives and deaths, but now we can ignore the inevitable until the last possible moment, which makes it harder to process and accept.

We glorify youth, reject any sign of aging, and hide away sickness and death. At best, we dress up as zombies and ghouls once a year, making truth into make-believe.

But All Saints confronts us with the reality that we will all dieand we are never fully parted from our loved ones and all our ancestors in faith.

Those are challenging truths to confront at the same time.

The Beatitudes also are comprised of difficult truths to hold at the same time.

Based on how the world generally works—now and back then—we would expect Jesus’ blessings to go to rich people, powerful people, lucky people, ruthless people who are willing to take decisive action at others’ expense, and warriors who show strength through violence.

But that’s not what Jesus said. After Jesus had been going around curing people of all kinds of illnesses and pains and freeing them from demons, he felt compassion for those who were following him, and he sat down on a mountain to teach.

And instead of describing the hierarchy of society the way they understood it, he turned everything on its head, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are those who mourn…blessed are the meek…” and so on.

These are, of course, the types of people who were following Jesus around. People who were rich, powerful, fortunate, and ruthless aren’t as likely to feel the need for healing.

But the least, the last, and the lost? Those left behind by society—marginalized, stigmatized, ostracized? That’s exactly who felt compelled by Jesus’ message. That’s who Jesus was collecting—the nobodies.

But why would Jesus want to collect people like that?

He couldn’t become influential among the religious leaders with followers like that. He couldn’t gain political power with followers like that. He couldn’t build an army with followers like that.

But that’s exactly who he collected throughout his ministry. He got criticized for eating with tax collectors and sex workers and sinners—the nobodies of the first century.

He didn’t seek the favor of the influential or the charismatic or the well-resourced. He sought out the hurting, the heart-broken, the oppressed, and the down-trodden.

He didn’t make grand promises that they would get rich by following his investment plan or that they could manifest a better life by paying for his twelve-week course or that they could win friends and influence people if they read his book.

He welcomed people as they were and named them as blessed.

He did warn them, though, that if they followed him, they might be treated even worse by those in power. They might be persecuted, reviled, and spoken about negatively and untruthfully.

But, so were the prophets—ancestors in faith who God chose to speak difficult truths to God’s people, inviting them back into the way of life God gave them after freeing them from Egypt.

God doesn’t abide by the hierarchies we humanshonor. Instead, God turns them on their heads. After all, the “first will be last, and the last will be first.”

And those least, last, and lost people make up the great cloud of witnesses the writer of Hebrews talks about.

We celebrate All Saints Day today, and the word “saints” can evoke the “great” people of faith, the biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses and David and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Peter and Paul.

It can evoke the people the Roman Catholic Church has actually named  as saints,like St. Francis, St. Patrick, St. Oscar Romero, St. Joan of Arc, St. Theresa of Avila, and St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Or even non-official saints who we might view as personal heroes who accomplished great things or suffered unjust untimely deaths: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, Matthew Shepard, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many others.

And those are great people to look up to and learn about and be inspired by.But the great cloud of witnesses is mostly comprised of the least, the last, and the lost—the nobodies of every age—the flawed and human people like us—those who feel poor in spirit, who are meek, who, on this All Saints Day, mourn.

Grief is another thing our culture doesn’t make much room for. We’re expected to get on with our lives, to move on, even after the most significant people in our lives die. It’s not fair. It’s not realistic. It’s not compassionate or kind. It’s downright inhumane and inhuman not to make space for grief, as uncomfortable as it can be.

On this mixed bag of a holy day, we’re allowed to mourn, and we’re blessed for it. We’re encouraged to remember also that our loved ones and all our ancestors in faith—the greats and the nobodies—are cheering us on as the cloud of witnesses.

I’d like to close with a reminder from one of those who have gone before us: Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish author who died in Auschwitz, who left us this beautiful reminder about grief and its capacity to heal:

“Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.

“But if you do instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge — from which new sorrows will be born for others — then sorrow will never cease in this world. And if you have given sorrow the space it demands, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich.”

Today and always, may you be encouraged by the great cloud of blessed nobodiesas they cheer us on until we join them.

Sermon on Matthew 22:34-46

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

We’ve been reading for the past four weeks about the conflicts between Jesus and various religious leaders between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Today, we’ll wrap up our informal sermon series by looking back at these readings and what questions they invite us to consider on this Reformation Sunday.

At the end of September, we read the parable of the two sons: the one who said he would do what his father asked but never got around to it, and the one who said, “no, thank you,” but eventually did it anyway. Jesus was calling out the religious leaders for not believing John the Baptistor Jesus’ prophetic messages and acting on them. We asked ourselves what prophets we’re ignoring now.

On Reformation Sunday, we remember Martin Luther in 1517 posting his 95 Theses, his lengthy list of things he thought the church should be doing better.

This got Luther into a lot of trouble, and when he wouldn’t apologize for what he said, he was excommunicated.Violence and bloodshed followed, and the Church had a lengthy time of reckoning.

Though violence and church schisms are worthy of grief, we do need prophets and reformers to help us examine where we as the Church fall short of God’s call to the fullness of Beloved Community.

What prophets and reformers like John the Baptist and Martin Luther should we pay attention to today?

In our Gospel reading the next week, Jesus continued with the parable of the wicked tenants, who not only didn’t hand the harvest over to their employer, but killed his messengers and even his son.

God has called each of us to bear good fruit in the world, and yet sometimes we view people as enemies and treat them with fear and anger. Maybe God is speaking to us through people we treat as enemies.

There was violence on both sides of the Reformation. Siblings in Christ were killing each other over their differing views on how God works and how the church should operate, as well as the political dynamics that played out alongside theological disagreements.

How can we stand up for what we believe in while still honoring the humanity and personhood of people who disagree with us? How can we love our enemies as siblings made in the image of God?

If that parable wasn’t violent enough, the next one which we read on the 11this the one I find most troubling in our recent readings.

In this parable, all of the invitations to a king’s wedding banquet were turned down and the messengers hurt or even killed, so the king had all the people on the guest list killed and burned their city.

After that, he invited anyone and everyone to fill the seats, which in itself is a nice image of God’s inclusive wedding feast. Except that one guest wasn’t wearing the right clothes, so he was thrown out of the feast, and the imagery is ominous and alarming.

If we can set aside Jesus’ attention-getting storytelling tactics, we can focus on the abundance and inclusivity of God’s banquet table. There’s a feast, where we’re invited—all of us, regardless of class or background or worthiness—to come as we are, clothed in Jesus’ love.

In Jesus’ life story, we are the ones who rejected his invitation to life abundant and inflicted violence upon him.

And he didn’t burn down cities or kill anyone. Instead, he broke the power of death and invites everyone, everyone, everyone to his banquet—now and for all time.

Martin Luther, who was an expert at beating himself up and trying to be perfectly pleasing to God, had a life-changing shift in his understanding of God. He directed his attention to passages like our reading from Romans that describe God’s grace: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

He insisted that we don’t and, indeed, can’t earn salvation or God’s love. God’s grace saves us—not anything we do or don’t do.

Your invitation is secure. A place card with your name is on the table. You are clothed in Jesus’ love and grace.

And though our salvation is secure in Christ, there are times in our lives where God extends other invitations. Invitations to life choices, relationships, opportunities to serve, compassion to offer, joys to celebrate. And we might miss them if we’re not paying attention.

We have choices to make about whether to accept those invitations or stay in our comfort zones or nurse our egos.

What invitations from the Holy Spirit are we ignoring? What are we refusing to celebrate?How can we learn to trust God and offer an enthusiastic “yes”?

Then, last week, we read Jesus’ famous non-answer to the religious leaders’ clever verbal trap regarding paying taxes: “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

We talked about this being a question not just about taxes but about how to live out one’s faith when one’s government doesn’t fully align with one’s religious beliefs. No matter what party is in power, we’re not going to agree with everything our government does—it’s just a question of to what degree our government and our faith conflict.

Similar questions came up during the Reformation, when government and religion were more drastically intertwined in Germany and in Europe in general. The Reformation was a time of reckoning not just for the church but for all of life, including government.

Fortunately, we don’t have to change our religion based on who’s in power like the kings in 16th-century Germany. But our faith still has something to say about how we operate in this life, not just the next.

God is still calling us to reform—in the church, in the world, in our everyday lives. Though we’re human and miss the mark every day—every hour—God’s still calling us to learn and grow and change and imitate Christ.

How is God calling you and us to reform today? What parts of scripture do you turn to for grounding amid hard decisions and change in the world? How can we say “yes” to what God has in store for our next chapter?

And finally, this week Jesus summed up all of God’s teachings in two principles: love God and love your neighbor.

Instead of offering a perplexing parable or answering a question with a question like he did in the previous readings, Jesus answered this one directly and succinctly, quoting parts of the Lawas a summary of the whole.

We know what will happen after this series of Gospel readings. Jesus will have Passover dinner with his friends, wash their feet, offer them himself in bread and wine, pray desperately in a garden, be arrested, tried, beaten, and killed as an enemy of the State.

And we also know that the story doesn’t end there. He rose again. Even with all of humanity’s violence and evil intentions, we couldn’t keep him down. He broke death itself to bring us God’s grace—a gift we can never earn and, thankfully, don’t have to.

Jesus loved God and loved us: his neighbors, his beloved, made in God’s image.

And through God’s grace and love, we are freed to love God and our neighbors too, without the fear of trying to be worthy of any of it. God’s already taken care of it. You are right with God just as you are. And you reflect God’s love for you in how you live in the world.

Just as we can get caught up looking at our lives and only see the ways we fall short, we can look back on the Reformation and only see the division, the violence, the name-calling (which Luther did plenty of). Many things happened during the Reformation and throughout Church history that do not live up to loving God and our neighbor. We’re human. We get caught up in our egos and biases and defensiveness and dehumanization of others.

And God calls us to more. Not as a requirement for salvation—Jesus took care of that. But out of love for God and the freedom we’ve received, we can cocreate with God a more loving world here and now.

The Holy Spirit calls us to reform, not out of anger or disapproval, but out of love and compassion, desiring that every person feel their God-given worth and connection with everything God has created.

So, beloved children of God, freed in Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, how are we being called to reform the ways we love God and our neighbor today? What is the Spirit calling us to next?

Listen, answer, and act bravely and full of God’s love.