Year A / Proper 27 / Ordinary 32 / Pentecost +26

I’ve written another reflection on this reading, you can find it over here: Alternative reflection for Year A / Proper 27 / Ordinary 32 / Pentecost +26

Reflection:

I spoke at a youth service tonight, the readings were from Amos 5:18-24 and Matthew 25:1-13. Prior to putting together my thoughts as usual I checked out what Sarah Dylan had to say, I really enjoyed the discussion around who we’re expecting in the parousia, the concept that some people have in mind a different sort of Jesus than we have come to know as described in the scriptures. Sarah spoke about the Jesus portrayed in the Left Behind series (in my era it was the “Like a Thief in the Night” series) as having a complete personality transplant between the time of resurrection and the parousia.

Anyhow, tonight I posed two questions to the congregation…

The first question was inspired by Sarah’s post, I’ve had similar conversations at this congregation before, but this particular reading opened the theme again and allowed us to talk about the personality of Christ and why our images become skewed by the thought of the second coming.

I wanted to focus on the second question more than the first, I started by asking the group how they might prepare themselves for exams, then how they might prepare themselves for a picnic, for an interview and for an overseas trip. Two of the group had just been overseas, arriving home only a week ago, so they were able to share some of what they had to do for their short term trips.

I asked what they’d have to do if the trip was a long term one, perhaps a year or more and then we started having an interesting conversation about how we might want to learn more about the language of the culture we’re going to, how it would be good to know what was legal and illegal (one of the girls who had recently been to Germany spoke about how in some places the flushing of one’s toilets between certain times was illegal), we might want to prepare ourselves for the jet lag that we’ll experience, we also talked about exploring what was culturally acceptable, food types, gender roles and currency conversion.

We jumped back a bit to the reading from Matthew where all the women had to do to be prepared for the party was to make sure that they had enough oil in their lamps, yet a number of the women weren’t able to do that.

I asked again, what we might be expected to do to be prepared for the kingdom of God, I feel that sometimes we’re told that “oil in my lamp” equals to my own personal spiritual life, where getting myself in order will leave me prepared. If I pray regularly, read the scriptures every day, try and convert my friends, go to church every week then I’ll be prepared, I’ll have oil in my lamp.

Yet, if this story is asking us what we need to do to be prepared for the kingdom of God, then perhaps it’s asking for more than that, perhaps we may need to dig deeper into what we’re expected to do to be prepared. Thinking then of the Kingdom as an overseas trip I wondered out loud if we’d then need to learn about the language of the kingdom, what was culturally acceptable, what is expected of people in the Kingdom… Perhaps this is what we mean when we pray “on Earth as in Heaven.”

The Amos reading was helpful in this case, it calls us towards a place where justice flows like a river, then we’re reminded of a number of Jesus’ stories that tell us that in the kingdom of God the first shall be last, the poor will be rich, the grieving will be celebrating, the lost will be sought out and found… all this tells us a lot about the Kingdom of God.

So, how do we prepare ourselves for that? Perhaps we’re called to a task that’s much bigger than keeping enough oil in our lamps, perhaps we need to switch our clocks to Kingdom time, we need to become used to seeking out the lost, the first being last, justice flowing like streams…

And then I asked a few questions about our role if our government is insisting upon an Industrial Relations bill that is obviously going to affect those who are young and unemployed, how do we, as people living in Kingdom time respond? If our government ok’s an anti-terrorism legislation that is unjust and undermines civil liberties, if our government detains people seeking refugee status, if our government imprisons people without due course, if our government singles out a person to send home because their philosophy differs with that of the political power what is our response as people who are preparing for the Kingdom of God?

If we are people who are genuinely preparing for the coming of the Kingdom, if we can genuinely pray “Thy Kingdom come” then these questions should stir something in our bellies that urges us to seek answers, to respond, to scream out and say “this is not right” and to act upon it.

Our responsibility is possibly more difficult than keeping oil in a lamp, because we aren’t just preparing for a wedding, we’re preparing for a different world. The prayer I shared with the community as I closed with the question “How are you preparing for the Kingdom of God?” was that they now turn their clocks to Kingdom-time, that they now work, learn and explore to be prepared for the Kingdom of God and that they can speak out against injustice so that when the time comes Jesus says “you fed me when I was sick, you clothed me when I was naked and you spoke for me when I had no voice” instead of “Who are you? I don’t know you.”