I had the privilege of spending a few days at a very nice cabin on the Little Red River this week with about nine or 10 friends, some old, some new.  It was a guy’s trip away, and it was a hoot, I had a great time.  The weather was fabulous and the views from the ample deck over looked what is one of the world’s great Blue Ribbon trout streams. The view was spectacular. Fall was in full splendor with its parade of colors, and the picture on the front of the bulletin was taken near the cabin.   And I caught fish. 

Now some on the trip paid a lot of money to hire a guide who took them fishing on a party barge, and they caught fish.  The five of them probably caught 40 or 50 trout, maybe more, they brought back 26 of them, and the funny thing is that the guide motored up at the river and anchored the boat right at the feet of the place we were staying.  One of them remarked, “We just paid $400 to have the guide bring us fishing at our back door here.”   I am glad they had fun, one 50 plus year old guy caught the first fish he had ever caught in his life.  However, I am not much on bait fishing for trout.  The guide slaps a wax worm and a marshmallow on your hook, takes you to a hole in the river, drops anchor and you bottom fish and real them up eight feet into the boat, and do it all over again.  And there is no possible escape for the trout once he is hooked, you can horse him in if you like.  It is like bottom fishing for Snapper on the tile reefs in the Gulf; you just drop the line to the bottom and reel them up, albeit a hundred feet in that case.  It is fun the first time you do it, but I am not sure how much sport is involved.

While they were all on the boat, I strapped on my hip boots (I no longer wear chest waders after a couple of near death experiences, I can’t be tempted to wade as deep with the hip boots), grabbed my 30 year old tattered and too small fishing vest and my ultralite rod that was rigged with a bubble float to cast a fly (a size 12 Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear) and made the steep descent to the river from the cabin.  Now I didn’t catch 50 like those five guys, but I caught 10, I hung a few more, and kept five which is the legal limit, and it only cost me the two bucks I spent for the Hare’s Ear fly.  Of course, I should have bought another one as I ended up loosing it, but I caught fish.  It was a good autumn day on the river.

I love to wade in the crystal clear waters of the Little Red, and I love to look for the trout boiling and listening for the sound of a trout rising out of the water.  The weather was perfect, and the colored leaves painted the river as they paraded downstream.  The fight of a 14 inch trout on an ultralite rig with two pound test and a 6x leader was a thrill.  I had to reel a couple of them in from 100 or more feet out, and they put up a fight.  Ordinarily my odds of netting such a fish is about 50-50, but on this day I landed 10 out of 12.

I had forgotten how much I love to trout fish, and I have not been in a long time.  I used to be a regular on the Little Red, in fact I fly fished the river before there were any fly fishing outfitters in this whole dang state.  I used to order my flies or get them when vacationing out west as nobody sold them here, or from my father-in-law who taught me to fish the river and he came here from Colorado.  Well, times have changed.  The river is full of Fly Fisherpersons with $700 Sage Fly Rods and $200 Orvis Neoprene Waders, fishing with hand-tied flies aimed at matching the hatch of may flies on the river on a given day.  Throw in a $200 reel, a hundred bucks for good fly line and $200 for a good technical fly vest and you have well over a grand invested just for the privilege of fishing from the bank– even more if you want that $1,500 Battinkill split bamboo fly rod. And I would hate to get my $150 Orvis Nubuck wading shoes with felt soles stuck in the muck on the river bank, so I will stick with my Shakespeare Ultralite, which I sprung for 18 bucks from Wal-Mart, preloaded with two pound test line.  Throw in some good tippet material for four dollars, a few bucks in flies and I can do the same thing for about 25 greenbacks.

But this trip was great, the river, the trout, the colors, the quiet were all what the doctor ordered. My stress level was low; I could literally and physically feel it drop.  I couldn’t help but reflect in my Zen-like trance on previous adventures on the river, and I have many memories.  In 1980, I took a friend who was preaching at a revival at my church trout fishing, not far from the cabin I stayed in this time.  OK, I know what you are thinking; I pastored a church where they actually had revivals?  Yeah, I did, and it has taken me 28 years to get over it.  The church demanded it and I got the lousiest evangelist I could find, who happened to be a friend.  The guy was a lousy revivalist and during the week only three decisions were made: The first was all the decisions people made to never come back to my church.  Second, I decided to never have another revival, and thirdly, he and I decided to go trout fishing.  Cecil (that was his name) was a dreadful preacher, but he was an extraordinary trout fisherman, and was a part time guide on the Little Red River.  Our 1980 trip was also in November, and I remember the leaves floating on the water, just like they were this trip.  Cecil anchored the boat next to a fallen tree, and then before I had a chance to ask what the heck he was doing, he jumped out of the boat and told me to watch the four poles he had just cast into the river as he departed the boat and took his shotgun.  I thought what the heck?  I started catching fish on all four poles at once and it was all I could do to keep them baited and in the water as I kept hauling in the fish.  Thirty minutes later, I had a boat full of fish and heard a sound that went “thunk.” Cecil threw five freshly slain squirrels in the bottom of the boat.  It was a great day on the river.  I went fishing with him once before on Lake Conway where he also guided, and we caught over 400 Brim.  He threw them out on the driveway and scaled them all at once with a water hose.  

Cecil loved the outdoors, and he was very skilled in all things hunting and fishing.  But there were times when it got him in trouble.  Like on his wedding day, he was running late for the wedding as he was always late. It was then that it happened.  A deer crossed in front of him and no, he didn’t hit it (but he tried to hit it).  He then did what anyone of us would do if we were late to our wedding, he stopped the truck, grabbed his rifle, he jumped a barbwire fence and shot Bambi’s sister. He drug the carcass to the truck, tied it to the rack on top, and realized that he would be about 30 minutes late to his own wedding– but what the hell, he shot a good deer.  He finally showed up to the church, everyone was waiting on him and he simply said that he just got lost and he apologized profusely.  It was in the middle of his humble apology that that the congregation realized that something was amiss as the whole backside of his suit was ripped open and blood was streaming down his leg.  It seems that in the midst of all the excitement he got too close to the barbwire.  That my friends, was a wedding that did not go well because of the foolishness of my friend. 

            Cecil might have been a foolish bridegroom, but he is not alone.  In our lectionary text today we have the parable of the ten bridesmaids, and as it turns out, five of them were wise and five of them were described as foolish.  It is a strange parable, part of what is known in Matthew 25 as the Olivet Discourse. The parables are often associated with final judgment and the like, and the return of Jesus in the coming Parousia.   In today’s text, five of the virgins or bridesmaids had enough oil for their lamps, and other five clearly weren’t prepared for the bridegroom and were off trying find oil for their lamps and missed out on the wedding party altogether.  Or at least arrived too late to get in.  The good and bad part of this story comes in at the end of the story: 

But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. “Later the others also came.’Sir! Sir!’ they said. ‘Open the door for us!’ “But he replied, ‘I tell you the truth, I don’t know you.’

The bad part is the part that the bridegroom ignored these foolish virgins and wouldn’t let them in.  That is the part that bothers me.  Not the bad girls, but the seemingly bad bridegroom who snubbed them for only being mistaken and foolish. He wouldn’t let them in, even though they had made mistakes.  It was too late. They had missed their chance even though they had been slapped in the face with their own foolishness. And being one who makes mistakes on a regular basis, this bothers me as being very unfair.  It is a disturbing story on several levels.

            This parable gives me flashbacks to my youth when I remember high powered evangelists who were nothing like my friend Cecil preaching that if I didn’t “walk the isle and accept Jesus” this very day I might never have another chance.  And that was usually followed by a story presented as true where the evangelist offered such an invitation, and a young boy or girl refused to come forward thinking, “I will do it next Sunday” but instead they were tragically killed in a car wreck on the way home from church and now will burn forever and ever and ever in the deepest pits of hell because they didn’t walk down that isle when they had the chance.  And like many people, I was probably scared into the Kingdom of Heaven, joining the throngs of Christians who were now OK to be killed in a wreck or something because of the simple fact that they walked down a red carpeted isle in a church and took the preachers hand.  And in that instant, one is transformed from one worth fire and brimstone forever and ever amen into one who will be loved and rewarded with big mansions on streets of gold for the sole reason of reciting a prayer and spitting out a formula.

But back to the wedding.  I suppose on one level one would be truly foolish to miss such an event. These verses seem to have the same scare factor, and even though both the foolish and the wise virgins slept, there is nothing about being vigilant or alert here, only the wise virgins were ready or fully prepared for the bridegroom’s coming.  The foolish virgins wanted to be a part, they wanted in, and they ran out to try to be prepared, but were harshly told by the bridegroom that he never ever knew them, so get lost.

            This parable is very difficult for scholars as to discerning its meaning. It is a parable and not an allegory, and the temptation is to treat it as an allegory.  As a parable, one cannot press its details too far, the point of the story must be the message, and that is all.  The details are problematic. For example, Martin Luther thought that the oil represented faith, but can you run out of faith?   Can you go and purchase more faith?  Others suggest that the oil is good deeds.  Again, can one run out and buy the deeds they need to be ready?  Almost all the imagery in this passage is confusing.  But for me, the issue is bigger than that this morning.

            I will have to confess this morning that there are many parts of the Bible that I don’t do well with.  The parts that one writer has referred to as the “terror parts.”  And there are plenty of them, and as far as I can tell have nothing to do with the Good News.  The question is put very aptly by Barbara Brown Taylor in her sermon “Tales of Terror, Times of Wonder:”

How do we accept a loving God who does such unloving things? How do we accept the terrors? One way we accept them is by making them seem less terrible. We say: Of course God sent a ram to take Isaac’s place at the last moment; of course God raised Jesus from the dead and made him Lord of all. So the stories are really about how obedience results in rescue and resurrection.  But that loses the very real terror of obeying God without the least idea of how things will turn out in the end. Things will turn out according to God’s will, and in faith we confess that to be enough for us. But insofar as God’s will is so radically different from our own, there is plenty of room for terror in our lives.  For Brown-Taylor, two kinds of biblical stories evoke this terror. First, those in which God sanctions violence: killing every firstborn in the land of Egypt (Exod. 11:5) or ordering Saul to slaughter the Amalekites down to the last woman, child, and donkey (1 Sam. 15:3). The second are those in which God exercises final judgment—such as in this very passage, refusing to open the door to the foolish bridesmaids (Matt. 25:12) or banishing the ill-clad wedding guest to outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 22:13) that we preached on a few weeks ago.  Taylor says that these passages are terrible to us because they expose our vulnerability. If God can condemn Amalekite babies for the sins of their parents, then there is no hope for any of us. Nor can we find safety following Jesus. We may find myself on the wrong side of the door when the time comes, hearing my muffled sentence pronounced through the latch: “Truly, I tell you, I do not know you.”[1] 

            These are terrible passages, because they remind us how helpless we are, how frail and powerless. While there are clearly things we can do to improve our lives and things we can do to cheapen it, our fate is ultimately out of our hands. I cannot control God’s disposition toward me–and that is terrifying. Or can we?

            One way to hide from such knowledge is to take refuge in righteousness, suggesting that those who behave properly are terror-exempt. Obey God and avoid the sword. Give generously and avoid misfortune. Be good sheep and dodge the outer darkness.  In fact, not only dodge outer darkness, but conversely be invited to one heck of a wedding feast.

            We are relieved to hear such explanations because they offer some solace in an otherwise frightening universe. But ultimately, they fail to meet the test of either human experience or biblical witness. Job and Jesus confirm our fear that righteousness does nothing to dissuade God from trying the faithful by fire and by ice.

            So where is the Good News in this passage?  I personally believe that Jesus has already come again, it was called Easter, and that he came again after that, its called Pentecost, and He comes to us again and again.  We after all, do have a personal relationship with a living Lord.  I personally refused to see a final judgment where Jesus will come back warring on a white horse with a big sword and break the knee-caps or worse of all those who failed to properly stroke his ego.   How does that fit with the Jesus Christ we see in the gospels?  This imagery is nowhere in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  The only terror that we see in these narratives is the terror of an innocent man dying a horrific and violent death at the hands of human evil and injustice at its worst, and it is exactly that human evil that he came to combat.  Not by carrying a bigger stick than us and forcing us to submit, but by offering the other cheek, by humility, by taking our place; by being our substitute because of love, not hate; because of justice, not injustice; because of forgiveness, not revenge; because of peace not of war. He gave his life a ransom for many and it was voluntary not out of coercion, it was out of meekness, not out of might or militancy–  because God’s way was a better way, and in fact it was the only way.  To not fight back, but to stand firm.  To change the world not by revolution but by revelation of the radical love of God.  The revelation that God is love, period.  No ifs, ands or buts.  And I will tell you something else this morning, God has always been about love, history has always even in the darkest of Biblical accounts, been about one thing and one thing only:  The redemption of our souls.

            It is sad and true that religion is all too often about terror, it is all too often about fear and trembling and that is a chief motivator to conformity.  Friends, that is not what God is all about, and I think that message is in this passage as well if we look for it.  They were only foolish because they were not ready for the party, who would want to miss a party?  Only a fool would.  On my fishing trip this week, we had an interesting assortment of people.  We had doctors, and  those whose religion was there job and those who probably could care less.  We were there for a guy’s time, and we partied heartily.  I won’t give you all the details as the sign in the cabin said, “What happens in the cabin stays in the cabin,” but we celebrated the election and stayed up late and ate a ton of food.  I am afraid to check my blood sugar for at least two more days. But on Wednesday night something unpredictable happened.  One guy brought an iPod with 12,000 songs on it and a speaker to hook it up too.  We listened to all kinds of music for hours on end on that deck in the dark.  We were in the dark because our fire building skills sucked.  And then the master of the ipod switch the music to some old fashioned gospel hymns, you know, like quartet music.  We listened to hymns for hours.  Then one guy started singing quietly, and the rest of us joined in, to a person.  We had a gospel hymn sing on the deck under the stars, and let me tell you that was a surprising twist in the week.  And it was a good one.  Despite our differences, despite our backgrounds and lots in life, we were of one spirit, and that is what faith is all about.  Not about doctrine, not about differences, not about structure, not about power, not about conformity, not about rules.  But it is about fellowship, it is about communion, it is about our common destinies and journey, it is about what unites us, it is about the party.  And one would be foolish to miss such a party, you would kick yourself silly to miss out on such a feast.

            To not understand that is to miss the point, it is to miss out on a lot.  It is not to live our lives trying to be “holy” whatever that is—we can’t.  It is not to live as Johnny Cash said on his last album, like there is a man who is taking names, and he will avenge us and punish all those who disagree with us with death and hell.  It is not to believe that in our arrogance that God cares more about us than anyone else, because God doesn’t – God loves the whole world, enough to die himself in order to save us, and he doesn’t desire to kill any one of us, but that all should come to redemption.   

            You see, when we understand reconciliation, when we understand the love of Christ, we in fact add a little oil to our lamps and we are ready for the party.  What made these women more foolish than Cecil who shot a deer on the way to the wedding was the fact that they were not prepared for the party, at least not the right party.  I might miss work or school, but who would not be prepared for a great big party.  Someone rather foolish, I think. We plan weeks in advance for such an event.  We planned a year for Emily’s wedding.  Are we are looking for a war, an Armageddon?  If so, we will be ill-prepared for what God really has in mind, which is a feast, a huge party.  And you don’t come to a party with a sword, or an agenda, or anything else, except maybe enough oil to light the way, to find your way in.

            So where is the Good News?   It is in this parable.  It is not about being good or bad, that imagery is not here.  And that is the Good News.  It is about being wise, not foolish, it is about being prepared.  The question is for us today, what are we prepared for?  A God who will do our fighting, the satisfaction of a God who will wipe out millions of lives because they are different from us, a God who can only accomplish his means through the human instruments of violence and force, a God who message and death was pointless and will have to come back and intervene with force, or instead will we be ready for the biggest party in the history of the planet?  

            It all depends.  Whether you’re a bad girl or boy or whether you’re a good girl or boy is secondary to whether you’re a wise girl or boy.  And one becomes wise by being prepared, and being prepared for the right thing.  If Jesus is indeed coming back physically to this earth, it is easy to be prepared – just read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to find out who he is and how to recognize him.  He was never about fright or might; he was about love and service. And I can assure you that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and always come to us in truth and love. So get out your party clothes, because the Good News is that God is all about the redemption of our very souls. And that my friends, is something to celebrate.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.