The Sin of Sleep

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November 9, 2014

Matthew 25:1-13

¹“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. ²Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. ³When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; ⁴but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. ⁵As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. ⁶But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ ⁷Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. ⁸The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ ⁹But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ ¹⁰And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. ¹¹Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ ¹²But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ ¹³Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

Sermon: The Sin of Sleep

I’ve chosen to rename this parable.  “The Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids” conjures up images filled with pink taffeta dresses and teased hair, and so I’ve decided to improve upon it.  I hereby dub this parable “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps.”

You see, it’s really rather simple.  There were ten bridesmaids.  Five of them were prepared for a wedding, five weren’t.  The planners among them showed their preparedness by the amount of oil they brought – bringing enough to last all night long.  The other five didn’t bring enough.  No one knew when the bridegroom would come and the wedding celebration would start.  But some were ready, and for those who weren’t, well, it was just too bad. 

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  Be prepared.  Don’t share what you have brought, because there’s not enough to go around. Hoard your oil (and your water, land, food, security and faith, for that matter).  It’s not your fault that other people don’t have the resources you do.  It’s their fault, and they get what they deserve, the door shut in their face.  The kingdom of heaven is one big test of who plans ahead and who doesn’t. 

The key is in that oil – in having that one quantifiable possession that makes you worthy of the bridegroom inviting you into the party.  (Think about what this is for you – this “thing” that you believe earns you God’s approval.)

Except that it’s not just about the oil.  You see, if this parable is really all about the oil, then all ten of those bridesmaids would have blown out their lamps before falling asleep, and not wasted any oil in the first place.  And if it is really about that one possession that makes you appear vigilant and awake, worthy, the oil in a burning lamp, then surely the bridegroom would have forgiven the late-comers and rewarded them for their middle-of-the-night resourcefulness in getting more.  So it wasn’t the oil that bought entrance into that wedding party. 

Then maybe the key is in the self-sufficiency of the wise bridesmaids.  Perhaps there really isn’t enough of anything to go around, and Jesus appreciates those who are very wise with their resources, investing them in the most secure of markets and never, ever giving them away to those who have proven they are not deserving.  Yes, perhaps putting your own needs first is what sets apart the wise from the foolish.  This would certainly be a popular idea.

Except that, once they did get in to that wedding celebration, these so-called wise women were not fed only what they brought with them – they feasted at the generosity of the bridegroom.  A generosity that was much more aligned with grace than greed. 

So what sets apart the wise from the foolish, if not the oil or the self-sufficiency?  The best I can figure is this: the wise stayed.  They didn’t leave.  Sure, they didn’t leave because they had enough oil in the first place, but I think that, whatever the reason, their staying was what mattered in the end.  They were present, even if they were drowsy.

We hear in this parable the call to “keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”  This doesn’t mean to never fall asleep, because all ten of those bridesmaids snoozed, lamps burning wastefully all the while.  Keeping awake to witness the inconvenient, middle-of-the-night appearance of the bridegroom means staying.  Being fully present in your own life and the life of the world, even when sleep tugs at the corners of your eyes and weariness seeps into your bones.  Being fully awake to this precious and precarious life even when that means being awake to pain and sorrow, to nights of not enough oil or hope or light.

Sleep is seductive.  All of those bridesmaids succumbed to it.  I think that was the greatest sin in this parable – not the lack of oil.  Because, if they hadn’t fallen asleep, they would have turned off their lamps as they waited and there would have been enough oil in the first place. 

They slept because the bridegroom was taking entirely too long to get the party started.  They slept because they didn’t want to wait any longer.  This same word was used when Jesus’ disciples slept in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prayed.  Even in moments of great importance, when the Messiah is doing powerful things, sleep entices us.  This is why I’m calling sleep a sin. 

No, I must correct my renaming of this parable.  This parable is not about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps at all.  It is about not allowing the seduction of sleepiness to get in the way of the surprising arrival of the Messiah.  The moments when the kingdom of God invites everyone who bothers to show up into the party.  And usually what puts us to sleep is exactly what we see in this parable: a preoccupation with things (like oil).  A simplification of the extravagance of a wedding feast into a works-righteousness, member’s only club.  The oil was simply a diversion – the sleep was the real problem.  (As was, it could be argued, the slowness of that tardy bridegroom!  What wedding do you know that starts at midnight?!)

Yes, we miss the point entirely if we make this parable only about oil. 

But we also miss the point if we try to make this parable another timetable for the end times, of the kingdom of heaven coming like some sort of sensationalist Nicholas Cage movie.  Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven coming like many things: like a field sowed thoughtfully, like a mustard seed that provides shelter to birds as it grows, like yeast yielding bread that nourishes others, like a treasure hidden in a field, like a pearl of great worth and here, like a great love feast.  Nowhere does Jesus describe the kingdom of heaven as an apocalyptic military battle between the forces of good and evil.  The kingdom of heaven grows, yields, nourishes, shelters, hides and is found and celebrates love where it discovers it, even at the most inconvenient of times.

Robert Farrar Capon captures this well in his writing on the Parable of the Bridesmaids:

 "Watch therefore," Jesus says at the end of the parable, "for you know neither the day nor the hour." When all is said and done—when we have scared ourselves silly with the now-or-never urgency of faith and the once-and-always finality of judgment—we need to take a deep breath and let it out with a laugh. Because what we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. God is a funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.  (The Parables of Judgment [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989] 166).

We do not know the day or time when the bridegroom – the Messiah – will return, but we were never meant to.  What we do know is that this kingdom is already coming, and it is worth being fully present, awake, for.

The wise are not those who are worthy.  For none of us are, in the end.  The wise are those who stayed, who fell asleep, yes, but who woke up again and didn’t leave.  We do not know why God takes God’s time in showing up sometimes, but we do know this: no matter how late, no matter how inconvenient, God does show up.  A Messiah comes, waking us up to the celebration of love that is seeping into our lives, even now.

Thanks be to the Creator who rouses us again and again, to the Messiah who comes whether we’re prepared or not, and to the Spirit who kindles a flame of expectant hope within us that will never go out, amen.