Sermon — November 12, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
If there’s one thing I’ve learned while homeschooling a kindergartner whose tastes lean toward the spookier elements of the spooky season, it’s that if you’re going to teach out of an early-elementary curriculum on ancient history, you need to have a strong stomach and a good sense of humor; a graduate education in religious studies doesn’t hurt.
Take, for instance, the case of Ammit the Devourer. The ancient Egyptians, our textbook tells us, believed that after they died, people journeyed to the underworld, in a process that inspired the practices of mummification and pyramid-building that most of us have heard of. At the climax of the journey, they reached the Hall of the Two Truths, where the dog-headed god Anubis would bring them to a set of scales. The heart of the person who had died would be weighed against a feather as a measure of their purity and righteousness. If their heart weighed less than the feather, they passed on into blessed eternal life. If their heart weighed more than the feather, then it would be handed over to be eaten by Ammit the Devourer, a ferocious demon with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the rear end of a hippopotamus.
(Like I said: equal parts strong stomach and sense of humor required.)
Most religions contain a balance between the inspirational and the gruesome, and it seems to me that our readings today contain more than a hint of that Ammit-the-Devourer side of religiosity. Did you hear it in the readings? Can you hear it in the music? Daylight Saving Time ends, and suddenly the hymns are in minor keys, it’s dark in the middle of the afternoon, and our lectionary readings are full of doom and gloom! It’s as though the season of Advent has already started, even though it’s still a few weeks away. The liturgical themes of this time are unsettling and sometimes surprising: in the weeks leading up to Christmas, our readings anticipate not the “First Coming” of the cute baby Lord Jesus to lie in a manger, but the much more ominous “Second Coming,” in which he “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
It’s this day of the coming of the Lord that unites our readings today. We began with the prophet Amos warning the people of Israel against looking forward too eagerly to the coming day of judgment. You want God to return and save you from your enemies, Amos asks the people, judging the world and destroying the unjust? “Alas for you!” You’re trading a fearsome enemy for a God who’s even more frightening! “Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear,” (Amos 5:18-20)— with the head of a crocodile, you might be moved to add, and the bottom of a hippopotamus! Amos certainly has that Ammit-the-Devourer vibe. And he goes on to explain. He condemns the people for their injustice. God doesn’t want their sacrifices and songs; God wants justice and righteousness, and they are sorely lacking. And that’s why the day of the coming of the Lord will be gloom for them: an unjust people, Amos says, should not be so eager for God to come and judge their enemies, because they will be judged as well, and found sorely lacking.
The apostle Paul offers a more uplifting take on the “coming of the Lord.” By the time that Paul writes to the Christians of Thessalonica, it’s been a couple decades since Jesus died and rose again. They believed that Jesus was going to come again soon, to achieve his final victory in this world, and yet it hadn’t happened yet. And even worse, some of that first generation of Christians had themselves died before the Lord’s return. Paul reassures the Thessalonians that their hope has not been in vain. Jesus hasn’t come back yet, but he will come, Paul says; and those who have died will not be left out of the kingdom. They too will be raised. It may be hard for us to wrap our heads around, two thousand years later and still waiting for Jesus to return, but this was a very real concern for the first Christians. But Paul foretells a trumpet’s blast and an archangel’s call, the dead descending from the heavens and the living rising up to meet them in the clouds. The day of the Lord, for Paul, will be a day of reunion and celebration, and we do not need to worry if it seems like it isn’t coming soon enough.
And then Jesus gives us a middle way between the frightening vision of Amos and the hopeful vision of Saint Paul, with a parable about ten bridesmaids: five foolish, five wise; all staying up late into the night to wait for the groom, and all eventually falling asleep. At midnight when the groom arrives, the foolish have no oil for the lamps; the wise have oil but will not share. And so while the foolish run down to 7-Eleven to stock up, the wise bridesmaids and the groom go into the wedding feast together, and shut the door behind them. (Matthew 25:1-12) The five foolish bridesmaids are left out in the darkness, where—as Jesus says often in the Gospel of Matthew, although not in this passage—“there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matt. 8:12, 22:13, 25:30, et al) At least they’re not the teeth of Ammit the Devourer. But this is a rather grim vision from Jesus, nevertheless, and it closes with a warning: “Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13)
Amos warns the people not to pray for God’s judgment, because they’re going to be judged by it. Paul encourages the people to remain faithful, because the day of the Lord going to be even better than they thought. And Jesus tells us that it all depends: Did you have oil for your lamp?
I wonder, though, whether Jesus’ parable is as stark as it may seem.
Why is it that the five foolish bridesmaids are left out in the dark? Is it because they’re bad people and the wise bridesmaids are good people? There’s no indication of that. If the wise bridesmaids were particularly virtuous, maybe they would’ve shared. Is this a parable of decadence and luxury—did the five foolish bridesmaids burn up all their oil partying late into the night? No, not at all. In fact, they never brought any oil to begin with. Foolishness, in the parable, consists of showing up to wait for the groom, and thinking that he’ll arrive before sunset. Wisdom is being prepared to wait.
It’s foolishness, in other words, to expect that this great day of the coming of the Lord is going to arrive any time soon; and wisdom to expect God to show up when you’ve already gone to sleep. It’s foolishness to act as the Israelites did in Amos’s day, and allow injustice to fester because God was coming soon to make it right. But it’s also foolishness to worry, as the Thessalonians did in Paul’s day, that God won’t be able to make things right for us in the end, whatever’s happened and however long it’s been. Jesus tells us that we know neither the day nor the hour, and that saying encompasses this tension: we ought to live every day as if it might be our last; and yet to say it might be means that it might not.
Maybe you have a strained relationship with someone, and that relationship needs to heal. And maybe you’ve been putting off that difficult conversation, because it’s hard, and there will always be time for it later. But you know neither the day nor the hour! You may never have the chance to say the things that need to be said. Or maybe you’re in a “grass is greener” mode, where you’re putting in your time now doing something hard, and hoping and yearning for better days ahead. But you know neither the day nor the hour! Those days of greener grass may never come, and it’s a reminder, to me, to try to live in a way that’s satisfying now, and not to push happiness off to a future that may never arrive.
But in the end, here’s the thing: we live in the world of Paul, not Amos. We live in the hope of the Resurrection, not in the fear of judgment. If the world ends tomorrow, and you haven’t made amends—if your father or sister or friend died long ago, and you were never reconciled—you’ll be okay. Because we do not believe in Ammit the Devourer. We do not believe that God is coming to judge you harshly. In fact, in Jesus, God already came to us, and we judged God, and God was devoured by death—and found to be indigestible, and gave Death a stomachache so bad that one day we will rise with him again, and be reunited with Christ and one another, and that there will be time for all the things we never had the chance to say.
So “keep awake,” remembering that you know neither the day nor the hour. And “let justice roll down like waters,” remembering that there’s no time to lose. But be encouraged, always, with the Resurrection hope that you do not have to make it all right, in this life: that all things will be made well, in this world or the next, because God loves you with a love that’s stronger than any crocodile’s jaws. Amen.