Matthew 25: 1-13 (links validated 9/28/23)

On a recent trip with some friends, we were reminiscing about some of the Christian music we grew up with—we’re children of the nineties, the heyday of Third Day, DC Talk and the Newsboys. One friend belted out the chorus to the Newsboys song, “Breakfast”: “When the toast has burned / And the milk has turned / And Captain Crunch is waving farewell / When the Big One finds you / May this song remind you / That they don’t serve breakfast in hell!” It’s oddly catchy and off-putting at the same time. The real problem, of course, is that this song, like so many other “Jesus is coming” warnings in modern evangelicalism, focuses on conversion as though the choice to say “Jesus is Lord” is enough. Even the foolish bridesmaids made the choice to go out with their lamps, thinking that was enough preparation.

In April 1988 the evening news reported the sad story of a photographer who was also a skydiver. He had jumped from a plane along with several other skydivers and filmed the group as they individually dove out of the plane and opened their parachutes. As the video was being shown of each member of the crew jumping out and then pulling their rip cord so that their parachute opened to the wind, the final skydiver opened his chute and then the picture went out of control. The announcer reported that the cameraman had fallen to his death, having jumped out of the plane without a parachute. It was not until he reached for the ripcord that he realized he was in free fall, taking pictures without a parachute. — Tragically he was unprepared for the jump. It did not matter how many times he had done it before or what skill he had. By forgetting the parachute, he made a foolish and deadly mistake. Nothing could save him, because his Faith was in a parachute which he had never taken the trouble to buckle on. It is a story not unlike the parable which Jesus tells about the foolish bridesmaids forgetting to bring something very important and necessary to fulfill their responsibilities to the bridal couple.

All of this can be illustrated in a very familiar wisdom journey, The Wizard of Oz. Wisdom is not about facts. It is not learning that some monkeys can fly, that some trees do not want their apples picked or that a brick road is yellow. These are just facts, albeit extraordinary, about the Land of Oz. Instead, wisdom is finding out who your friends are. It is realizing that you do have a brain and a heart, and that courage lies within you. Wisdom is learning that there is no place like home. Calamities come at you. Would that your house did not land on the wrong witch. They sometimes do; it did, and now you have made an enemy of another witch. This stuff happens in life, though a bit more prosaically outside of Oz. But remember, misfortune is wisdom knocking. Then there is the dialogue. If wisdom has a school, this is it...

I got a call recently from my mother around dinner time and I knew it must be pretty urgent because she knows better than to get between me and my meal. As soon as she started talking, I knew something had happened. Her voice was too energetic, too high-pitched. I had to just listen to figure out what it was. She was just leaving work, which for her is a big downtown hospital. She’s making her way through the roundabouts on the campus when she sees a man in a hospital gown walking up a grassy hill right next to the highway. She’s on speaker phone with her coworker at the time and she says, “You know, I think a patient might have run away. I might need security. Do you know what their extension is?” And her friend says, “No! I don’t.” And my mom says, “I don’t know either. I should though. Why don’t I know that? Why don’t I have that saved already?” She didn’t have the oil in her lamp, right? So, my mom has to pull over to the side of the road there, and she looks up security’s number on her phone, and she calls them, and she lets them know there is a patient out here who is awful close to the highway. If only she were prepared, she was thinking, if only she had that number in her phone already, she could have called faster. But she’s still there, and he’s still there, and security is going to take a few minutes in order to get there. Now, she doesn’t know anything about this man, and she was not prepared for this. But she’s there and he’s there. So, my mom rolls down her window and says to the man, “Are you OK? You look like you’re having a hard day.” The man says to her, “No, I’m not OK.” It turns out that the man really wasn’t OK. He’d been in rehab for some time and his life, as he talked to her about it, had been very rough. After some minutes of telling her some of his story, he admits something to her. He says, “Ma’am, I’ve been walking around here for the past 10 minutes or so trying to work up the nerve to jump. I was going to try to end it.” Without really thinking about it or knowing why exactly she said it, my mother said, “God didn’t want you to die today.” And my mom, you don’t really know her, but she doesn’t really say things like that in her day-to-day life. As you might imagine, the man started crying and my mom started crying...

John Jewitt, a very respected pastor and noted preacher wrote: “When I arrived at the emergency room where the young lad from our Sunday school was in x-ray, a resident was asking the mother if she ‘needed something’ to help her cope. She was shaken -- almost hysterical -- and her husband had not yet arrived from a very late day at work. The lad's injuries were not life threatening, but they suspected he did have several broken bones. “When the father arrived, he went through all the usual ‘Who -- how -- when – why’ kind of questions, held his weeping wife close and then settled into a litany. ‘I never took him camping.’ His wife began to comfort him. ‘It's okay honey. You've been busy. We'll go camping as soon as you have time.’ But the father was inconsolable. ‘I never took him camping.’ Off and on -- over and over during that evening, he kept coming back to this one theme, ‘I never took him camping.’ “That experience passed, the boy recovered from his three broken ribs, broken leg and collar bone and the family life changed. The father turned down a promotion that would have required a cross country relocation and accepted a salary cut. They do a lot of camping these days and the father reflected on the whole experience with these words. ‘I was simply not prepared for the fact that I could lose a child at any time. I told myself there would always be time for camping once I got my career on track. Now I think in terms of the fact that tomorrow is a wonderful promise, but never a guarantee.’”...

("The second important point in this parable is the oil itself. The oil becomes a character, a figure in its own right. Do we have enough oil? Will we be able to get more oil if ours runs out? The oil, even more so than the bridegroom, is driving this story. At one level the oil represents the oil in the lights burning in the temple. The oil represents the presence, work, and love of God; in our lives and the lives of those attending this wedding...")

includes lots of Greek exegesis!!

always good insights!

(always good insights!)

(excellent exegesis)

An important story to me in grade school was about a teenager named Kate Shelley, who lived near my hometown of Boone, Iowa, in the 19th century. Kate had a hard life after immigrating with her family from Ireland. Her Father died when she was young, and her mother worked at the railway depot to help make ends meet. The most important moment in her life occurred when she was 17. A strong thunderstorm struck central Iowa, and the Des Moines River overflowed its banks. The Chicago Northwestern Railroad sent out a work train to ensure the train tracks were passable, but a section of the bridge was washed out, and the train plunged into the river. Kate heard the crash, and she knew the train schedule. A passenger train from Omaha would reach the bridge in an hour, and there was no way to alert anyone that the bridge was out. Kate took her lantern out into the storm, found two survivors of the wreaked crew, and then made her way across the precariously damaged bridge. After crossing the bridge, Kate still had a mile to go through the storm to the train station. Legend has it that the lantern went out at some point, and she had to crawl and feel the rails to make it the last mile. But she arrived in time and delivered the message that the bridge was out before passing out from exhaustion. Kate’s heroism saved the lives of 200 passengers. A new bridge was constructed in 1901 across the Des Moines River. This bridge was crucial for trade across the country, and to keep it above the periodic floods, it was the longest and tallest double-track railroad bridge in the world at that time. It was named the Kate Shelley Bridge...

There’s just one problem with the bridesmaids—five are wise and five are foolish. The Greek word here is moros, which is where we get our English word “morons.” So, half are wise and half are morons. In this story, there is an easy way to tell who is wise and who is a moron—the wise bring extra oil and the morons don’t...

Did you ever see the movie Bridesmaids? It’s a comedy about two girls who compete with each other over who can make the glitzier, more elegant, and more fabulous contribution to their girlfriend’s wedding experience The competition gets pretty fierce (and funny, too!) at times, and there’s a not-too-subtle streak of catty meanness running through the story line. If you were to take a literal reading of the parable Jesus tells in the appointed Gospel for Pentecost 23, Year A (Matthew 25:1-13), some of these bridesmaids[i] seem pretty mean-spirited...

Have you ever known a “prepper”? Preppers are people who prepare for emergencies or disasters by storing large quantities of items they might need. With some stockpiling dehydrated food, water, flashlights, extra batteries, and even ammunition, prepping has become a growing industry in the United States during the past few years. It has seen an enormous uptick during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In lots of ways, this makes sense. At the onset of the virus, there were shortages of everyday items such as toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and PPE (personal protection equipment). Fortunately, many of the supply chains have caught up to the extreme demand placed on them earlier this year...

William Willimon has written that when he was a young pastor in rural Georgia, a dear uncle of one of his congregation’s members died suddenly, and though this uncle was not a member of Willimon’s church, he and his wife decided to attend the funeral. So Willimon and his wife drove to a back-woods, off-brand Baptist church for the funeral one sunny afternoon. It was, Willimon said, unlike anything he had ever seen. They wheeled the casket in and soon thereafter the pastor began to preach. With great fire and flaying his arms all over the place, this preacher thundered, “It’s too late for Joe! He might have wanted to do this or that in his life, but it’s too late for him now! He’s dead. It’s all over. He might have wanted to straighten out his life, but he can’t now. It’s finished!” As Willimon sat there, he thought to himself, “Well, this is certainly a great comfort for this grieving family!”

To be wise, then, is not to calculate the time of departure. It is to spend the present moment—the waiting—well. We rush through time to get things done. When we are not getting things done, we think we are wasting time. But the real waste of time is the way we rush through it. We may think we are active, but we are really inattentive. In hurrying to prepare ourselves for things not yet upon us, we are unprepared for what is here. And sooner or later, our gas runs out...

Time running out is a feature of understanding prophecy in the Bible. Often times the word prophecy is confused with fortune-telling in the sense of seeing future events. Prophecy, especially in the Bible, is NOT fortune-telling. Fortune-telling means that you actually see a future event that locks those involved into a certain fate. Prophecy is something more gracious than that. Prophecy is seeing where a path leads to in order that one might still choose a different path. My favorite example of this is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future visit Ebenezer Scrooge in order to show him the path he’s been on in his life and where it is taking him. The purpose of that is NOT to show him a fate that he’s locked into, but to give him a chance to choose a different path before it’s too late — before time runs out. As Scrooge kneels over his gravestone with the ghost of Christmas Future, he ask for clarity on precisely this point: “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!” . . . “Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope! . . . Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” To his credit, Ebenezer Scrooge chooses another course in life and radically alters his life. He acts to change the consequences of his actions before time runs out...

I was maybe 5 or 6 years old and was too excited to sleep. My parents had informed me that my Uncle Bob was coming to visit, sometime during the night. It was a special visit. Bob was bringing his new wife, Kayoko, from Japan to meet the family for the first time. Uncle Bob was the stuff of legend for a young boy. He was in the Air Force, stationed in Japan, and he got to fly airplanes for a living. This was back in the day when air travel was less pedestrian than it is today. Not only was flying a big deal, but Japan was exotic and mysterious and the idea of an Aunt from Japan was something great beyond my imagination. But since they would be flying on military aircraft, the travel was unpredictable and we didn’t know exactly when they might arrive. We only knew the visit would be brief, by morning they would be gone. My parents had warned me to go to bed and go to sleep right away so that I could wake up for the visit. But I couldn’t sleep. It was too much to anticipate and too much for my little brain to comprehend to allow me to quickly fall to sleep. I lay awake listening for the door, ready to bound down the stairs. I fought sleep as long as I could before succumbing to peaceful slumber. I awoke the next morning to the bitter news that Uncle Bob and Aunt Kay had come and gone. My parents had tried to rouse me, but I was so deep in slumber that they couldn’t get me to wake up. The only consolation I had was the present of a toy air force jet that was left behind. I was inconsolable...

I read messages on Facebook and Twitter this past week that suggested that prayers are irrelevant. After all, this massacre took place in a church. The people who died were gathered for prayer and worship. What about the people who were murdered in a Charleston, South Carolina church, while they gathered for prayer? I agree that action is needed, but is prayer really irrelevant? The voices I heard after Charleston and after Sutherland Springs were words of faith and trust and hope. Yes, the people grieve, but they also put their trust in God. They had oil in their lamps...

In fact, this came to me again just a few days back that my lamp was ‘dry.’ It had, quite simply, been a heartbreaking few days. (One would think that after nearly three decades in this work, one would no longer be surprised, but I was.) I am not at liberty to share the details, except for what it did to me. I walked away and I wept at the brokenness which had been visited on one innocent one and at my seeming inability to do anything but listen and pray and speak a reminder of God’s constant presence. And yet, it surely seemed like not nearly enough...

Consider the case of Senator John Hemphill of Texas, a Confederate politician, who died in 1862. Careful, do you really want to draw your moral picture of the man on the basis of one sentence? Maybe sometimes—but not most times. John Hemphill was the son of a Presbyterian minister—and a Scottish Covenanter minister at that, which means that his family did not even accept the U.S. Constitution because it failed to acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ. For these early fundamentalists, how could a government be called good if it failed to acknowledge the savior’s rule?...

After stints in Rome and Bologna, the artist Francesco “Parmigianino” Mazzola (1503–1540) returned to his native Parma to paint the vault and apse of Santa Maria della Steccata in 1530–31. Progress on the project was slow, and the commission was eventually given to another artist. Parmigianino did finally manage to paint The Wise Virgins and The Foolish Virgins, based on Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25:1–13.

The ancient writer Pliny, in The Natural History (Book X. Chapter 30), writes: "During the night, also, they (cranes) place sentinels on guard, each of which holds a little stone in its claw: if the bird should happen to fall asleep, the claw becomes relaxed, and the stone falls to the ground, and so convicts it of neglect. The rest sleep in the meanwhile, with the head beneath the wing, standing first on one leg and then on the other: the leader looks out, with neck erect, and gives warning when required."

In his autobiography, Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis recounts a conversation he once had with an old monk. Kazantzakis, a young man at the time, was visiting a monastery and was very taken by a famed ascetic, Father Makarios, who lived there. But a series of visits with the old monk left him with some ambivalent feelings as well. The monk’s austere lifestyle stirred a certain religious romanticism in Kazantzakis, but it repelled him too; he wanted the romanticism, but in a more-palatable way. Here’s their conversation as Kazantzakis records it: Yours is a hard life, Father. I too want to be saved. Is there no other way? More agreeable? asked the ascetic, smiling compassionately. More human, Father...

The scientific community got a terrible shock a while back. Turns out that Einstein may have gotten it wrong… big time. The speed of light may not be the universal constant he thought it was. Scientists have successfully fired sub-atomic particles faster than the speed of light. So, in one shot, the brilliant theory on which all modern physics has been built is exposed as potentially flawed. Change is unsettling. Profound change is profoundly unsettling...

On January 25, 1978, the temperature in Columbus, Ohio, was in the 40s and it was sprinkling rain. The possibility of snow the next day was mentioned on the late news, but not with any real concern. Not until about 4 a.m. on the 26th did the barometric pressure drop to below 29 inches and the National Weather Service realize that something big and bad was about to happen. The air pressure drops that low only for hurricanes, and there was no time to warn anyone. We were all caught off-guard. The ensuing storm would be called by some the “White Hurricane” -- but its official name became the “Great Blizzard of 1978,” the worst in the history of the state of Ohio. Fifty-one people died in Ohio alone, thousands were without power, and the entire state became frozen in place for more than three days...

When we know something is about to happen, we have a tendency to prepare for it. A U.S. Army officer was once asked about the contrast in his pupils during two different eras of teaching at the artillery training school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (home of the Field Artillery). He noted that in 1958-60 the attitude was so lax that the instructors had a problem getting the men to stay awake to hear the lectures. During the 1965-67 classes, however, the men, hearing the same basic lectures, were alert and took tons of notes. What made the difference in the class of ’65? They knew that in less than six weeks they would be facing the enemy in Vietnam...

Ever listened to REM’s 1987 classic, “It’s the End of the World?” Playing it now prompts listeners to ponder recent disasters. Texas was battered by Harvey. Irma devastated the Caribbean Islands and rolled across Florida. Hurricane Nate made landfall in Mississippi. Puerto Rico is coping with the overwhelming effects of hurricanes Irma and Maria. Forest fires burned more than a million acres in Montana and scorched California’s Napa Valley. The Vegas gunmen opened fire from his hotel suite. World leaders threaten annihilation, and you cannot even talk about football without starting a fight. Are we watching the end of the world? What’s next? Elvis is still dead, right? Will The Walking Dead become a reality show?...

("Lily was expecting Scott to pick her up for a date. She was dressed up and waiting patiently. However, after an hour had gone by, she figured she had been stood up, so she took off her makeup, put on her pyjamas, gathered all the junk food in the pantry and sat down to watch TV with the dog. As her favourite show was just coming on, the doorbell rang. It was Scott. He stared at her wide-eyed, 'I'm two hours late, and you're still not ready?'...")

("I was in the 3rd grade. Our class room was on the second floor. There were two entries --- the one we normally used and the one we used for recess. The one we used for recess was actually an old iron fire escape. Without a key, the door only opened from the inside. It was afternoon in the fall of the year and we were outside for recess. Normally, I would have been playing with friends from my own class, but the second grade class was enjoying recess at the same time. My sister, Martha, was in that class and I got to playing with her. When I looked up again, my class was gone...")

("recent research on economic success suggests that delayed gratification may lead to more sustainable innovation and success. The study is based on parking habits: Do you park head-in to a parking space, or do you back in, making it easier to pull out when you leave? Brain research has long concluded that hard work and persistent effort helps to 'grow the brain'. That is, we can make ourselves smarter and more successful through hard work...")

("Share your oil. Spread your light around. Don't put it under a bushel basket. Matthew was right. It's vitally important. It's our living, and our good deeds, which show God to people. As Paul said, we "are the body of Christ." It is through us that people can find the freedom of God and the unconditional love of God...")

("Yet that nagging dread of missing the boat remains. I pray that heaven, in its sudden openings in our lives, will have room for the foolish, whose too-human stories bring us all together, and always help me to feel at home and loved...")

"I remember the wedding of a Liberian couple. The groom, because of work and the slowness of the jeweler, had left to the morning of the wedding the drive into NYC to get the ring and return. It was a hot Saturday; the bride arrived in a white limo and colorful traditional Liberian dress. But the groom was stuck in New York gridlock. The temperature in the 1856 Church rose to the eighties and nineties. Three hours later the groom arrived..."

Here in Austin, Texas, we have a special claim to understanding this story because here William Sydney Porter (O'Henry) lived before writing the great short story, The Gift of the Magi. The author concludes with these words: 'Here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are magi!...

("Have you ever wondered why films like Captain Spaulding, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera seem to revolve around Groucho Marx unleashing a string of insults at a stuffy society matron? It was not merely because such a character was the perfect foil for the Marx Brothers' anarchic brand of humour; or, indeed, because they were getting a cheap laugh at the expense of someone else...")

Two old school Quaker elders were traveling once under a religious concern to a small rural meeting. On the way back it began to snow heavily and their carriage became stuck in a snowbank. The two elders finally made it to a farmhouse just as it became dark, and were welcomed for the night. But the house was cold, and their attic room was like an icebox. The older of the elders stripped to his underwear and jumped into a feather bed, pulling the blankets over him. The younger elder, feeling a bit embarrassed said, “Excuse me, Friend, but does not thou think we ought to say our prayers before retiring?” The other elder stuck one eye out from under the covers. “Son,” he said, “I keep prayed up ahead for just such situations as this, and so should thee.”...

("I think that's one of the hardest things about this parable....The time will come when you have to draw on the oil you have, right there, on your body, in your flask....")

("Once upon a time there was a candidate traveling franticly around his constituency at the end of a long and difficult campaign. He was under constant, as he saw it, unfair attack from his opponent who was an unscrupulous man and from hostile media who reported false stories about him and his family every day...")

I’ll close with this with my favourite person in Wah Fu Chuen. there used to be a lady, when I walked down the stairs on my way to say Mass in the schoolyard, and her job was to take care of the garbage. You can imagine the garbage in this place. They used to bring all the garbage in the evening and they’d put it in this one place and just dump it all around. And her job was to tidy up the garbage. That was her job. And it came from all the housing estate. And I’d look at her, and she’d be busy there, and I’d say to her, “Ah Tai. How are you?” “Oh great, Father, great! Yes, it’s wonderful. Isn’t it a nice day, no rain today.” And here she’s just putting garbage into garbage and piling it up. And I had this funny feeling. Day after day, I’d go down there and have this little chat. And every time I left her, my heart was full of joy, because this lady could make garbage safe. She did it with such … She knew that … Now, I’ll tell you, this is also true, the only person in all of Wah Fu Chuen that was necessary, totally necessary to everybody in Wah Fu Chuen, was the lady who tidied up the garbage and put it away, because, if she went, the whole of Wah Fu Chuen would be covered with garbage. So her job was vital and she was vital, because she did everything with great feeling in her heart that she, at her old age (this lady’s in her sixties or seventies), could serve the community and had a place in the community, and she was quite happy. And I’ll always remember her as my favourite garbage lady...

("William Willimon has written that when he was a young pastor in rural Georgia, a dear uncle of one of his congregation's members died suddenly, and though this uncle was not a member of Willimon's church, he and his wife decided to attend the funeral...")

includes several quotes

In his book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, Bryan Sykes tells about a nine thousand-year-old skeleton found in Cheddar, England. The skeleton is affectionately known as the Cheddar Man. Dr Sykes and his team were able to extract DNA from the dentine powder of the nine thousand-year-old Cheddar Man. A local television station got wind of the project. So they held a contest to see whether any of the locals were a DNA match and thus related to the Cheddar Man. Guess what? They found an identical match! A local high school history teacher by the name of Adrian Targett turned out to be a DNA match to the nine thousand-year-old Cheddar Man.

("The narrative world of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away is full of overpoweringly visceral, sudden inbreakings. Old Tarwater is a backwoods prophet who had been called in his early youth and had set out for the city to proclaim the destruction awaiting a world that had abandoned its Savior...")

In his great novel Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut Jr has his main character, Billy Pilgrim, abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions, and the fourth dimension is time. The Tralfamadorians describe the human perspective of time as being like travelling on a train through the Rocky Mountains while strapped immovably to flat wagon, unable to move your head, and with your only view being through a long length of fixed pipe. Thus your only view of the Rocky mountains is a continuous line seen one centimetre circle at a time, and you can never move your gaze forward or back. The Tralfamadorians on the other hand, could see the whole mountain range at once and look at any point of it, forward or back, any time they liked. So if your only view of time is through the pipe, and you pass the point where someone dies, you can never see them alive again, but the Tralfamadorians can see them dead here and alive just back there anytime they choose...

(includes several quotes)

("I once heard Jim Wallis tell a story about a colleague living in a village in Central America. She worked in a community that was marginalized in all kinds of ways. She poured herself into her work for social justice...")

("I don't know who invented the word 'burnout', but it seems to be a good term for describing a condition that many of us feel at times. Burnout is emotional exhaustion or what some have called compassion fatigue...")

("Back in Arkansas, we have many of what my grandmother called 'old sayings'. In fact, my grandmother began most of her sentences with the preface, 'As the old saying goes…' One of my favorites from my Arkansas days was 'Every tub sits on it's own bottom'...")

("Mystery tales can be told in either of two ways. One way is to leave the reader in suspense until the very end. Perhaps only on the last page does one learn the answer to the mystery thriller that has unfolded through many pages...")

In September, 1985, the camera-equipped Argo robot submarine of the USA-France expedition photographed and confirmed the wreckage of the luxury liner Titanic resting 13,120 feet down on the Atlantic ocean floor. In its day, the Titanic was the world's largest ship, weighing 46,328 tons, 882 ½ feet long with 3 anchors weighing more than 10 tons each...

("I am putting all of my talents at the Lord's disposal these days, all of them. It is something I realized I must do after a brush with death a couple of years ago...")

("many years ago, George Bush, as Vice President, represented our country at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev's widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed...")

("A preacher was telling the story, a parable, of the wise and foolish girls to a group of teenage boys. He concluded his address with a rhetorical question saying: 'Young men, I ask you, where would you rather be? Here, in the light, at the feast for the bridegroom, or there, out in the dark with a group of foolish young girls?...")

("Would that you were hot or cold, but since you are lukewarm I will vomit you out of my mouth. The unwise bridesmaids are slackers, giddy, silly young women who wanted to be part of the dining and music and dancing at the wedding party but as many young people of either gender do...")

("Once upon a time, class of high school juniors were preparing to take the tests that would determine which college might be interested in having them as its students. The brightest student in the class didn’t worry about their chances...")

("Once upon a time there were two girls who had been friends for as long as they could remember. They went to the same grammar school and the same high school. One of the girls, Janie, was always at the top of her class. The other, Beth, usually made it to just above or just below the middle in ranking...")

("Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a terrible basketball team called the Bulls. They were a dull and uninteresting team, a perennial loser in a town which knew only perennial losers. The arena in which they played was at the most one-quarter filled when they played home games...")

("Two Quaker elders of the old school were traveling once under a religious concern to a small rural meeting. On the way back it began to snow heavily and their carriage became stuck in a snowbank. The two elders finally made it to a farmhouse just as it became dark, and were welcomed for the night. But the house was cold, and their attic room was like an icebox....")

("Harlin was an older single man who had a lot of ideas about how to use his modest wealth to help other people. He kept trying new things. He paid for flying lessons for troubled boys because he believed focusing on something as demanding as flying would be good discipline for them...")

"One of my favorite people and his wife went to play golf one afternoon -- two hours later he was in the hospital near death. Almost at the same time, a young father in this congregation went to his job as a loading dock manager for a local trucking firm and was crushed to death between a truck and the loading dock when a parking brake failed..."

"The game Monopoly is a popular board game in which players attempt to amass as much property and money as they can. Those who play it discover that once you get a little ahead it is a whole lot easier to stay there and once you get behind it is very difficult to catch up..." and other illustrations

("Have you ever been tested to see if you were ready for something? The ceilings in our house have little devices called 'smoke detectors'. There are little buttons on them that are faintly lighted that you can push and hear the device make a loud screeching ear-piercing noise...")

I remember one powerful episode of MASH where Hawkeye Pierce is called out to the front lines due to a surgeon’s shortage there. When he arrives, there are bombs and bullets flying all around. He suddenly realizes that his own life is in great danger. So in the few spare moments he has there, he takes time to write out his last will and testament. Eventually, another doctor arrives at the front and Hawkeye is able to return to the 4077th. He arrives back at the base camp late in the evening, enters the office, sits down at the desk and works on the conclusion of his will. Klinger comes in and sees him and asks what he’s doing. Hawkeye tells him he’s writing his Last Will and Testament. Klinger responds without hesitation: "No paper work is so important that it can’t wait until tomorrow." Hawkeye looks at him thoughtfully and says, "I used to think that way too, but not anymore." It was not until Hawkeye had experienced his close encounter with death on the front lines that he had come to realize the great importance of being prepared for death and living each day to the fullest...

("Some years ago I took a leave of absence from the pastorate for health reasons. I opened my own investment office where I had the ability to sell Mutual Funds and other investments. Whenever someone would call my office to inquire about making an investment they were always interested in how much of a profit they would experience because of their investment...")

("Carol and I were reminded of this on a hike with another couple into the Enchantments. Our route took us over Asgard Pass with an elevation of 7600 ft. We knew that the weather in the mountains could be severe in the fall and so planned to take extra food and clothing...")

("An example comes to mind from the writings of Joy Davidman, who married the English scholar and author C.S. Lewis. Davidson was at her typewriter busy at writing an article about loving one’s neighbour. The telephone rang. Muttering words that were censorable, she broke off in mid sentence...")

("The late Frederick Speakman, noted Presbyterian minister, told the story of shaking hands at the door one Sunday when the service was over. As he came back down the aisle the lights were already turned out. He sensed that strange aliveness of an empty church just after worship...")

("Have you ever been unprepared? I'll never forget the afternoon I had conducted a funeral for one of the members of our congregation. As we drove into the cemetery, I noticed two tents set up and people gathered at both. I was riding with the funeral director so I asked him which tent was ours. When we got there, I conducted the graveside services...")

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("In the movie Gone With the Wind, there is a famous scene where Scarlett O'Hara says, I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.'...")

("Planners are people who do preventative maintenance. They prioritize their lives, schedule time for important things, and think in the long term. On the other hand, Procrastinators are those who put things off...")

("In a television MASH episode that I remember watching some time ago; Hawkeye is called out to the battlefront due to a shortage of doctors there. When he arrives, there are bombs and bullets flying all over...")

("Once upon a time there was a small kingdom whose only industry was its agriculture. Everyone was happy and everyone had plenty to eat -- until one year, when it was discovered to everyone's horror, that something terrible had gone wrong with that year's crops...")

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Even the wise bridesmaids have limited vision...

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(Scroll down the page for this sermon.)

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