I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 12, 2023 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 25:1-13, the parable of the 10 bridesmaids.
Have you ever experienced something in your life that you only understood a little bit later, when you were looking back at it, maybe with a few more years under your belt, a little bit more wisdom or humility?
One little thing that always amused me a bit, growing up, was my grandma’s excessively large collection of empty Cool Whip containers. You know the kind I’m talking about, those blue and white plastic tubs? Now, I love Cool Whip, it’s sweet and soft, like a cloud melting on your tongue. And we ate a lot of desserts at my grandparents’s house, so there was almost always some Cool Whip in the refrigerator.
But while most of the other bottles and cartons we used were tossed out or recycled, for reasons I could not decipher my grandma seemed determined to save every single Cool Whip tub the family had ever consumed. They were used as containers for Thanksgiving leftovers, for all sorts of leftovers, actually, and they were repurposed to hold all sorts of random odds and ends on cupboards and shelves.
And somewhere, deep in some drawer, I am sure there was a back stock of them, all nested together, ready to be drawn out at a moment’s notice should some unexpected object need to be sealed up and stored away.
When I was young, the notion of why anyone would need so many Cool Whip containers was beyond me. I figured it was just some quirk, an odd little habit in a family with a zealous attachment to whipped dessert topping.
And it was only much later, as I reflected both on my grandma’s life and the circumstances that shaped it, that I realized there was more to it than just a quirky habit.
You see, my grandma grew up with very little money. She was born in the midst of the Great Depression, one of four children, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who died when she was a teenager, leaving her family’s budget even tighter than it had already been.
And once she was married, my grandma raised six children as a stay-at-home mother, tending to her family on my grandpa’s modest, blue-collar wages. For my grandma, love looked like providing enough food for her kids, making a dollar stretch, getting to the end of the month, and if that meant reusing a Cool Whip container to save some money, to preserve food and to make sure there was always something stashed away in the fridge, then that is what she would do.
And it’s only once I got a bit older and had to pay my own bills and navigate some of my own lean financial seasons that I came to appreciate exactly what my grandma and others in her position had to overcome—they had to survive in the face of scarcity, with very little in the way of a safety net. And so even if it just looked like a collection of Cool Whip containers stashed away in a drawer, I feel like she was storing up all her hopes and her unspoken dreams in that drawer, too, all nested together, a stack of prayers that someday her children and her grandchildren would have a better, easier life.
What a gift, when we can look back with empathy and and finally see in a new way all the ways, big and small, that we have been cared for. And when we do so, it can also help us think about other things in a new way, too.
Take, for example, this morning’s parable from Jesus about the foolish and the wise bridesmaids. This is, by all accounts, a parable about the promised return of Christ, and about the ways in which we are encouraged, as partakers of the Kingdom, to be prepared for this return.
The challenge, of course, in the long, long wait for this return, is that we may grow confused or unsure about what wisdom and preparation should actually look like in our day-to-day lives. And Christian tradition, at various stages in its history (and its present), has unfortunately used such parables as instruments of fear, of enforcing moral purity, saying, be prepared, be obedient, be well-behaved, good Christian, or else! The door will be locked to you and you will suffer forever in the darkness.
Nevermind the fact that the whole thrust of Jesus’ message is that the morally lost, the wayward, and the broken will be the first ones invited to the feast of God. Nevermind his radical inclusivity.
No, we are so conditioned by our own notions of insiders and outsiders, of the worthy and the outcast, that we cannot help but imagine that this parable reinforces the predictable judgments and punishments of our own world, where grace is meager and perfection is mandatory, despite its being impossible.
But what if that wasn’t the point of this parable at all? What if this depiction of the Kingdom was getting at something else entirely?
And that brings me back to the Cool Whip containers, and my grandma—back to the scrimpers and the savers of this world, and Jesus’ particular affection and solidarity with the ones who have little—in short, it brings me back to the poor and the marginal. If we want to find the good news, we must alway read the Gospel from the margins. The margins will show us the way to the center of God’s heart.
What I realize, now, is that the bridesmaids who bring extra oil are not stand-ins for the morally perfect and pure…they represent the ones who know about scarcity. Their wisdom is the type that comes from having very little, of needing to make your resources stretch through a long, cold night. It’s the sort of thing that Jesus’ followers, most of them people of low social and economic circumstance, would identify simply as “common sense.” The same thing that my grandma told me, as a child prone to flights of fancy, that I needed a bit more of.
In contrast, the bridesmaids who do not bring enough oil are the type who have never had to make a dollar stretch; they don’t plan ahead because they have never imagined a resource that would run out, and even if it did, they are the type who assumes that someone else will bear the cost and fix the problem. They are probably not the kind who have ever had to worry about the light bill or whether there will be enough food at the feast. They are the type who don’t quite get the value of a Cool Whip container.
Jesus is offering this parable to his ragtag band of followers as they express some concern and fear about when he will come back to them, when he will make things finally and truly right and whole and just for all people. They are maybe even a bit scared that they don’t have what it takes to get by until that unknown day. So maybe he is giving them the type of encouragement that they will understand. Maybe he is saying to them,
You who have had to get by with little, you who know what it means to save up your oil for the lamp, you who know what it is to pray for your daily bread, you who have stored up your tears in your jar and your dreams stacked up in a drawer, you who know what it means to be wise in this world, to survive in this world—you already have what it takes to endure, you already know how to be ready for that day, for you are already living with integrity and care.
And so until then, just keep doing what you are doing. Stay humble, stay aware of the preciousness of every resource, stay grateful for every simple gift, steward the earth and those entrusted to you with wisdom and care and gentleness, and then dream. Dream of what can be. Dream of what will be. Stash those dreams away, all nested together, pull them out when you need them, and one day, I promise, the world will be sweet and soft, like a cloud melting on the tongue, and it will all have been worth it. It will all make sense.
My grandma is gone, and I don’t know what happened to all of her Cool Whip containers. But every time I am in the grocery store and walk past them in the case, I smile and think of her. And I think about all the people in the world who are getting by as best they can, saving back a bit of oil for the lamp, saving back whatever they can for their families until a better day arrives, and I am grateful that now I understand a bit better now than I used to: they are the true face of wisdom. They are the true face of love.
And until the day when the Bridegroom returns at last, they are the closest glimpse we will have of the face of God.
By Another Road 