Sermon – Wisdom in Watching
Proverbs 8:1-21; Matthew 25:1-13
Farmville Presbyterian Church
December 24, 2023
– The gift of anticipation of Christ
I am not as excited about Christmas as I used to be. No amount of Christmas decorating, song singing, foods eating, show watching, lights beholding, or gift wrapping will get me to that place where I was as a young person, myself, or even as the father of young children. Am I alone in that feeling? Is that something that just happens as we age or am I succumbing to Grinchiness somewhere deep in the recesses in my heart? My guess is that it is perfectly natural. I am not a little person anymore, and I no longer have little persons at home. My guess is that if grandchildren show up one day, some extra joy might show up, again, at Christmas with the spirit of newness in anticipation. It is a lot of fun to see young ones behold Christmas excitement for the first time.
My issue may be bigger than Christmas, though. In fact, it might even be hard to get excited about anything in the way that I used to before the cares of the world began piling up a bit more in life. Events often cost money. Trips cost money. Holidays cost money. Special occasions cost money. That does not even take into account the time and trouble. Am I preaching to myself, or can anyone else relate to these feelings? So much of the world is demanding.
To top it all off, I may be looking at a wedding or two in the coming years. What should be one of the happiest occasions in our lives is also something that, what was it?….. Oh yeah, costs money. I just conducted a wedding last weekend up in King William County at a special wedding venue that had probably the nicest tent I have ever seen. I say “tent,” but it technically had a grand, wooden ceiling, a chandelier, an attached kitchen, a nice bathroom, and only cost $8,000 to rent, if I heard correctly. I do get the preacher for free….
Oh, if we could only go back to ancient times when weddings were so much simpler. Yes, I am being a bit facetious. Weddings back in the days of Jesus were a whole different kind of event. And they were not simple. A wedding celebration was literally the highpoint of someone’s life and a very big deal. When the wedding time drew near, there were bridesmaids who waited with the bride to march with her in celebration back to the groom’s house whenever he arrived to collect her. That’s when the party really began with a week’s worth of fun and community festivities. It was not uncommon to have the bridegroom show up at night. He made a point to take the long route from his house to his bride’s house, and all along the way, someone went announcing his coming so that all could come out and congratulate him. He would get delayed, of course, with all of this ceremony, and it was kind of a “thing” to surprise the bride and her bridal party. It is a shame we lost some of this. Surprise weddings! They had to be ready to go whenever he arrived – day or night. All that fed the excitement.
Once they returned to his house, the door could very well be locked after the guests arrived. This is the idea: if they cared enough about the couple and this new marriage, then they would have been ready to rejoice with them. If they valued this new married life, they would have been ready to receive it. The groom had no interest in people just stopping by to mooch. Things weren’t cheap back then, either. A wedding was for the excited. A wedding was for the prepared. A wedding was for the wise.
But that’s weddings. Here we are at Christmas Eve and that time of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus and shepherds and angels and maybe magi. After all, that’s what everyone has come to hear about, right?
Maybe I am not quite as excited about Christmas as I used to be, but Christmas is still an excellent and exciting thing. It is different now, though, because our family is different. Compared to my youth, I don’t care nearly as much about “stuff” as I do spending some good time with loved ones. Christmas is hard because it is also tainted by losses and history and heartache. Barbara Smith and her family will always feel the loss of Carolyn right here at Christmas. We all will. She’s not the only one. Just over a year ago, we lost David Farmer and Lousie McKissick from our church family. Of course, we cannot begrudge either of them the joy and glory that they all now know, but the loss is real. We truly feel sorry for ourselves missing our loved ones, so Christmas is not always easy, but hopefully, there is still plenty in there that we can look forward to. Hopefully, there is still something out here for us to get excited about. We do have love to spare; we do have love to share; we do have love to grow right here. That is always a message for Christmas.
Love is something that Jesus also tends to consider. In this area of Matthew, he does a lot of wedding conversation. He talks about marriages and weddings because life is about relationships. God is about relationships. The Bible begins and ends with a wedding. Jesus here shows how wisdom works in a wedding as people wait for love. Everyone then and there would understand how exciting it would be to wait for the wedding, to wait for the groom, to wait for the wonder and beauty of love to change lives, but would they wait – could they wait in wisdom? No one likes to wait. But the excitement was worth the wait.
And there it is. The wise know how to wait for what is good, what is right, and what is loving. The foolish do not. The wise know that you don’t jump on the first train that comes by. It may or may not be the right one. Be watchful and ready. The foolish grab whatever comes. I know of people who married the first person they met who was willing to marry them because they were afraid that might be their only shot. Maybe it worked; maybe it didn’t. Either way, doesn’t sound very wise, though.
Imagine for a moment that you are up to take your huge final exam in school. The exam is 100% of your final grade, and the class is one that you have to pass in order to graduate. The problem is that you do not know what day you have to take it. You study hard and are ready to go, but the test doesn’t come and doesn’t come. After a while, do you keep studying? After a while, maybe years, do you forget the test at all? That is Christ Jesus to so many of us. He promised to return. They expected it to be a long time ago. We still live in the promise of his return today to set all things straight, but that promise has grown old and stale. It is too hard to stay excited for Christ the King, so instead, we manufacture excitement about Christ the baby.
Is anyone really excited about a birth that happened 2000 years ago? How wise is it to prepare for something that happened once long ago in the past? Jesus has to mean more than a plastic, ceramic, or wooden figure. He has to mean more than a live nativity or a made for tv movie. Absolutely, we should all be excited that he did come, and there’s nothing wrong with those things, but there is so much more going on today.
One of the most foolish things that followers of Jesus can do is to forget our excitement in meeting Jesus. Christians are not backward looking. We really aren’t. We are all forward looking. Every day is another day to experience the living presence of our living God. Every day is another day to discover Jesus in a new way in our lives. Every day is another day to find the Spirit of God at work around us. Some people are content to wait around until the Spirit shakes us awake. Others are more prepared to wait and watch. Others are wiser and look for signs of the joy of God. Others are ready to receive the blessing of God when it comes. The best of us are watching for God’s grace.
In fact, I am going to go so far as to assert that if you are not looking forward to God doing something really good in your life, then your idea of God is way too small. You might not even really know God, if you accept the world as it is without God’s healing, redeeming, reconciling, and changing power. If the best notion for excitement in God that you can muster is a baby born in a manger, then you are living in the past. As human beings, we do need something to look forward to, and it is too easy to replace God’s transforming presence for Christmas things. We need something to get excited for, so we count on what is easy, what is familiar, what we know is coming – the Christmas “usuals” being at the top of that list. The “usuals” are powerless to change the world for God’s good, however.
Even in that marvelous WW1 story of Christmas 1914 when the Germans and English stopped fighting at Christmas, it was anything but the old usuals. The Germans decorated their trenches for Christmas right there in the war as things ground to a halt. They were singing Christmas carols, and the English heard them and began responding. Before too long, they were meeting, exchanging presents, actually exchanging prisoners, honoring the dead, and just spending time as God’s children rather than as enemy armies. This happened along the battlefront. No one ordered it. It was the Spirit of Christ. It gave them a new sense of what the coming of Christ could mean if we welcomed him into today.
Jesus is not done with us. He is still coming. Our Lord and Savior, the Messiah of the world, is still coming anytime. Even if we do not live long enough to see that glorious day with these eyes, the Spirit of our Lord is still at work getting things ready and paving the road for God’s glory. It is happening today, and we can see it if we are willing to watch in faith. It is the wise thing to do, and it is the loving thing to do. And it is good to get excited, again. To God be the glory. Amen.