Procrastination and Transformation

Joshua 24: 1-3a, 14-25
Matthew 25: 1-13
There is a fable which tells of three apprentice devils who were coming to this earth to finish their apprenticeship. They were talking to Satan, the chief of the devils, about their plans to tempt and to ruin humanity. The first said, "I will tell them that there is no God."
Satan said, "That won’t delude many, for they know that there is a God." The second said, "I will tell humans that there is no hell."
Satan answered, "You will deceive no one that way; humans know even now that there is a hell for sin." The third said, "I will tell humans that there is no hurry."
"Go," said Satan, "and you will ruin humans by the thousands." The most dangerous of all our delusions is that there is plenty of time.
In the passage on Matthew today, we read about 10 virgins who were all the same. They each had a lamp filled with oil, they were all dressed as part of the bridal party, and they were waiting outside for the bridegroom to arrive. Back in that time, it was customary for the bridal party to wait for and greet and then follow in the bridegroom rather than the bride. But as sometimes happens in weddings, something went wrong and the bridegroom was late.
The ten virgins all fell asleep while waiting only to be awoken by a shout, “He’s coming!” and they immediately wake up and began to trim their lamps. However, out of the ten women, five of them had run out of oil and had no reserves with them. The other five women, not knowing when the bridegroom might come and this not being their first long wait, knew to bring extra oil just in case. The five ladies who did not have oil asked them to share, but they refused and so they went out looking for more oil and missed the bridal procession into the house, only to be turned away by the bridegroom when they finally came back.
This parable Jesus tells the disciples is about how the kingdom of heaven will be at the end of the age when Jesus comes back. He is telling us that we need to be prepared for that time and there are things we can do to be prepared for when he arrives. No one knows the day or the hour, not even Jesus himself, but we are to be prepared anyway.
What does that mean for us as individuals and as a church?
As a people we need to know the signs to look for and we need to know what God is expecting of us. That means reading the bible more often than on a Sunday morning during church. We should be praying and listening for God’s voice. Every one of us has a connection to God that strengthens the more we pray and read the bible. If we want to know God, then we have to be speaking and listening to God. It also means we should not be afraid to be who we are as God’s child. It means we are to embrace opportunities to speak of our faith and how our lives have changed since we have become faithful disciples of Christ.
As a church, it means we constantly need to be working toward God’s goals and not our own. We need to look around our community and our towns and our country and this world and asking, “Where is Jesus? What is Jesus doing? What does he expect from us and what would he tell us to do if he was here? Who would Christ be ministering to?”
In football they have a huddle, the goal of the huddle is to give you thirty seconds to call the play. Sixty thousand people watching you huddle, and they don’t mind you taking thirty seconds to call the play. They understand that you have to get organized, that each player needs to know where they should be and where they are going to go after the snap.
A huddle is a necessary part of playing the game. But let me inform you if you do not already know, sixty thousand people do not pay $80 a ticket to watch you huddle. See, people don’t come to football games to watch the huddle. They want to see if their team can overcome the opposition who is daring them to snap the ball and move down the field to score. What they want to know is does your practice work?
Now what Christians often do is get high on their huddles. We gather together on Sunday morning and Sunday nights and Wednesday nights and we go nuts over the huddle! We say, “Boy did we have a huddle!! My quarterback can call plays better than your quarterback.” And boy do we go off on the huddle. But what people don’t seem to understand is, that the huddle is so that we can play the game. The effectiveness of our church cannot be measured by how well we do on Sunday morning. The test of the church is what it does in the marketplace. What we need today is churches that are representatives of Jesus Christ not only when gathered but when scattered.
Sometimes as a church, we get caught up in maintaining the status quo. The programs we’ve done for years, the committees that have existed since the church opened, the same materials for Sunday school and the same special programs every year. All great things, but sometimes we get so caught up in doing them we stop looking around and stop asking those vital questions that Jesus wants us to ask. We stop wondering what new things we may try and what new experiences we can have when we pause and look around.
As disciples of Christ and as a church, we are called to transform our lives into a holy experience. We need to not just be saying the right words, but doing the right things to help this world to know Jesus Christ in word and deed and spirit. The ten virgins all started out on equal footing, but when the bridegroom took longer than normal, the cream rose to the top. The wisdom of the five women showed over the foolishness of the others. They knew to be prepared, just as we are to be prepared for the long wait. Jesus may take another 5 years to come back or another 5,000 years and in the meantime, we are still called to transform our lives and the lives of those around us by spreading God’s word and sharing God’s love with everyone we meet. But that means a lot of work on our parts. That means thinking ahead and staying diligent. It’s not something many of us enjoy doing. Tim Hansel in his book "When I Relax I feel Guilty," writes some insights of what most people want from God.
"I would like to buy $3.00 worth of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough of Him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3.00 worth of God, please."
If we would be totally honest, the idea of transformation really scares us. That is because we know that such a radical change would be quite uncomfortable. We realize that with transformation comes a major overhaul of our lives and priorities. But that is what we are called to do. Transform our lives by being intentional about the things we do as a people and as a church. We are called not to stay too long in the huddle, procrastinating and thinking we have all the time in the world to make changes. Instead we are called to always be the person God sees when looking at us and the only way to do that is by knowing the scriptures, praying to God, and sharing what we have learned with those around us. Then, when the time comes for the bridegroom to appear we will all be ready and able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Amen.