Readings (Track 1)

As a setup for today’s readings it’s hard to beat Bob Dylan’s song from 1979:

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

It’s the issue Joshua poses to the people at the end of his career: “choose this day whom you will serve.” With one voice they respond “we will serve the Lord.” But as Joshua suspects and subsequent history confirms, that response, like the oil in the foolish bridesmaids’ lamps, doesn’t last. This project of serving the Lord: a long-term project, and whatever else Jesus’ parable might want us to understand, it’s that.

In our second reading Paul reassures the Thessalonians: those Christians who have died will not be left behind at the Lord’s coming. “…the dead in Christ will rise first. Then 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.”

“To meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.” That merits a somewhat long digression. It’s often understood as being with the Lord in some place other than earth. Christians who talk about a “rapture” in which all the Christians suddenly disappear take the verse this way—and their views were popularized in The Scofield Bible, The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind series.

Many rousing Gospel songs play off this: “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through.” “I want to go to heaven when I die.” But… God created this world, saying over and over “this is good,” “this is good,” “this is good,” and, at the end, the whole thing “very good.” Do we really think that the God of Abraham and Sarah, Mary and Joseph is going to abandon this world? The Bible pictures something far more interesting than these songs imagine.

Let’s go back to Paul’s image of meeting the Lord in the air. In Paul’s time, when a new king was coming to a city, the citizens would leave the city to go out to meet the king and escort him back into the city with all the pageantry they could muster. Paul assumes that image: the Lord is coming to earth, and where else could we meet him but in the air? Not so we’d stay in the air, but so that together we could return in celebration to earth to inaugurate his reign.

But those Christians who have died will miss out on the party? No, says Paul, they will be raised, and they’ll be at the front of the parade, a parade headed toward this earth.

The king coming to the city is one image; another is the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. Notice what John sees: the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven.” It ends up on earth: “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations” (21:24-26).

One of the reasons this leave-earth-behind model is attractive is that we’re often ambivalent toward matter in general and our bodies in particular. Our bodies at best a sort of first stage on a rocket that will be discarded when their work is done? That’s a venerable philosophy, but it’s not Christian. God raised Jesus from the dead, and Jesus appeared to his disciples still bearing his wounds in his body. Paul tells us “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” because we need much more substantial bodies to experience the joy and glory of God’s presence.

With Paul, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor 5:8). That’s the part we get right. What we can forget is that the New Testament regards “absent from the body” as a temporary measure, and looks in expectant hope to being re-clothed in transformed bodies that will last. Verse 4 of “Light’s abode, celestial Salem” (Hymnal 621) gets it right:

O how glorious and resplendent, fragile body, shalt thou be,
when endued with heavenly beauty, full of health, and strong, and free,
full of vigor, full of pleasure that shall last eternally!

Paraphrasing N.T. Wright’s Surprised by hope, what God did for Jesus at Easter God is going to do for the whole cosmos.

Jesus’ parable assumes the same scenario Paul assumed: joyfully meeting the Lord/the Bridegroom. But while Paul’s words suggest something immediate, Jesus’ words assume some delay. Paul’s words console; Jesus’ words warn: the wise/foolish contrast remains important.

“When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.” As you can imagine, there’s a long and inconclusive conversation among commentators regarding what that “oil” signifies. It’s more helpful, I think, to notice the echoes of the ending of the Sermon on the Mount. The wise building on the rock, the foolish building on the sand: the difference is whether one has acted on Jesus’ words. And that “Truly I tell you, I do not know you” recall the words just before that rock/sand parable:

“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. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers’” (Matt. 7:21-23).

So we’re back to Joshua’s “choose this day whom you will serve,” now with the wisdom that it’s about more than waving the right banner. Whether I’m acting on Jesus’ words, doing the will of our heavenly Father, that shows whom I’m serving. The wise understand this; the foolish have lost sight of it. And the more time passes, the easier it is to lose sight of it.

Where does that leave each of us, in which both wisdom and folly are in play? Well, praying with today’s collect: “Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him.” Purity—single mindedness, consistency in whom we’re serving—is an ongoing project. “When he comes again…we may be made like him”—so we don’t expect that project to be completed in this life. But we keep working on it, for God’s burning desire is that we enter with joy into the wedding banquet.