Grace Church in New York

November 12, 2023

Podcast

Towards the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has been trying again and again to explain what’s about to happen to him to his friends, but he’s doing it in this very Jesus-y way: he’s being slightly cryptic, dropping little truth bombs here and there. In the chapter before our story this morning, Jesus drops one of these little bombs as he’s coming out of the temple, “oh, by the way, this whole thing,” he says, pointing to the temple, “is going to come crashing down and just be, like, totally obliterated.”

The disciples are like, “wait what?” And so they ask him, “ok, Jesus: you’ve been saying some crazy stuff. When is this going to happen? And how will we know this is going to happen?”

When is this going to happen and how will we know this is going to happen? These are the questions Jesus is answering when he tells his friends the parable we heard this morning. Jesus answers his friends’ questions by telling lots of different stories about how we should be ready for the end of the world, for the second coming of Christ, for what awaits us in the new perfect place once Jesus comes again, for the future when life is not as we know it, but perfect in the kingdom of heaven.

All of this explanation from Jesus is for his friends, to try to get them ready. And really what he is doing is not so much preparing them for this end of the world, but actually for his death which is about to happen. You see, Jesus knows that once he dies, bad stuff—evil and destruction and wars and people being terrible to each other and destroying each other’s temples—that is not going to end. And Jesus also knows that there is hope. There is hope of a better life for humanity. And he’s trying to figure out how to get his friends to hear that, to be ready to be able to know that—without his help, when he is not walking around with them anymore. And he knows it’s going to be hard for them to get it. So the story that he tells which we read this morning comes in this context, which can help us make sense of it. The kingdom of heaven will be like this, Jesus says:

Ten young women with oil lamps wait outside the entrance to a wedding banquet for the guest of honor to arrive. The bride and groom are in separate houses getting ready for the wedding, the groom goes to get the bride and has a little party there and then they all head to the main banquet, where the young people of the village will wait to get a chance to go in. As they hold their lamps and wait and wait for their time to enter the party, they all fall asleep. The oil in their lamps burns away. 5 of them were smart and brought enough; 5 of them were foolish and weren’t sure their lamps were going to last. The stage is set—what is going to happen? Who is going to get in to the party?

The 5 without enough oil ask to borrow some from the wise 5, but the wise 5 say there is not enough, and advise them to go look for some more, so off they go. Of course, just moments later the groom shows up, and the ones who are there get in to the banquet. When the other 5 come back, not only do they not get in, but the groom says, “I don’t know you.”

At first glance, this is a story all about preparedness — we just need to pack our bags well, to have what we need, and Jesus will reward us and let us in to heaven. But with a closer look, it might not be just about preparedness.

You see, what were the requirements to enter the banquet with the groom? Well, nowhere does it say he checked the oil level of their lamps. It seems the lamps really had nothing to do with being let in to the party. It seems the only requirement to get in to the party was simply to BE THERE when the groom arrived. And why weren’t the foolish 5 there? Not because their lamps had gone out, but because they wanted their lamps to be on, because they were worried they would go out, and because the other 5 wouldn’t share their oil with them. And it’s the “wise” 5 that suggest the foolish 5 leave, instead of helping with another solution, they send them away.

Does Jesus tell this story to the disciples because he wants them to understand the mechanics of oil lamps? Or does Jesus tell this story to the disciples because he wants them to get in to the kingdom of heaven? Jesus wants us all to listen and get in! And if Jesus’ main goal is for us to understand how to get in to the kingdom of heaven, what we see is not that we need to have enough oil to get in to the kingdom of heaven, but rather that we need to BE THERE to get in.

We need to BE THERE. We need to be there with whatever we have. We need not to be distracted by what others are telling us to do, or preoccupied with our own worries about our inadequacy. We just need to be there. What does it mean to BE THERE—to be waiting at the door for the kingdom of heaven? Well, before I answer that, a quick digression on our contemporary culture:

The media right now is very interested in categorizing all of us into tidy and siloed generational boxes. You’ve got the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Boomers, Gen X, the Millennials, Gen Z, and the babies being born right now, the Alphas. And all of these generations are constantly being pitted against each other in some way—angry with what has been left for us from the previous generation or disappointed with what the next is doing with what we’ve given them. I was born in 1985, so I’m what is known as an elder millennial—I remember the first day I logged on to my prodigy account—the dial up hissing and buzzing—and opened up that first chat window. And I’ve lived my whole adult life with a smartphone.

As a Millennial, I’m supposed to be busy being mad at Boomers and Gen X. Whenever someone older resists technological change, I’m supposed to say, “Okay boomer.” Whenever I witness someone commit a microaggression against a woman or a queer person or a person of color, I’m supposed to think, “Okay boomer.” Because, you see, I’m supposed to see my parents’ generation as totally—and this is another word younger generations use against old—“cringe.”

The epitome of cringe boomer culture is the coffee house-style home decor you can get at places like Home Goods or World Market, the loose script words you put on your kitchen wall where you drink your morning coffee in your oversized mug: LIVE LAUGH LOVE. To my generation, this is the perfect encapsulation of the inauthenticity of these older generations, who got what they wanted from broken systems, and can’t understand why the ones trying to fix the broken systems can’t just “live, laugh, love” —live, laugh, love while armed conflicts ramp up in so many different corners of the world; live, laugh, love while we just experienced the hottest 12 months ever recorded in human history; live, laugh, love while no one seems to have figured out how we can make schools filled with children safe from guns. We say to the moms drinking coffee saying live, laugh, love, “ok boomer!”

But guess what? My generation hasn’t really figured all that much out. Because as it turns out, Gen Zers have already come up with their own way to make fun of us Millennials—instead of live, laugh, love, they’ve layered a joke on top of a joke—and say to us Millennials: “Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss!”

Have you seen this string of words? Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, is a meme on top of a meme—an insult within a joke within a disappointment, aimed at my generation. To gaslight—taken from the Ingrid Bergman film of the same name where a husband lies to his wife to make her think she’s crazy, saying the gas lamps outside aren’t dimming when indeed they are—means to pretend that what is true isn’t true. To gatekeep is to create rules about people’s legitimacy, about who is in and who is out. And to girlboss—well, that was a phrase that we Millennials thought was good for awhile, back in the days of Sheryl Sandberg Leaning In at Facebook, when we thought that if only women could just be CEOs then the fact that these huge companies were basically out to destroy society would be totally chill because the people leading them are women. Slay, Queen! (That’s another thing that Gen Z says.)

So—digression over—why am I telling you all this about our generational silos? I may be being a little cryptic, like Jesus—but I’m trying to answer the question: What does it mean to BE THERE—to be waiting at the door to the kingdom of heaven so that we can get in? What does it mean to BE THERE where Jesus wants us to be? When the reality of what we have known so far, for nearly 2000 years, is that we are waiting and waiting while all the bad stuff keeps happening. Losing faith like Jesus knew we would, finally running off to get more oil instead of BEING THERE.

Well, to the “wise 5” I say: sorry ladies, but you just gaslit, gatekeeped, and girlbossed. Gaslit because—why are you acting so sure you don’t have enough oil to give a little bit to your friends? They can see you have oil in your lamps. Share it! Gatekeep because—why didn’t you help your friends get ready in the first place so that you knew you could all get in together? And girlboss because—why are you telling them that they need to lean in and get their own fresh oil when you know that’s going to take them away from where they need to be? Why are the women divided against each other instead of building each other up?

I think these “wise 5” are a good allegory for Millennial (non-intersectional) feminism—only interested in their own wisdom, their own goodness, their competitive self-help—they got what they needed because they worked hard. Never mind that they had to push others away to do it. They’re at the door and they’re ready to go in!

In an interview with Yahoo.com (and by the way it’s soooo elder millennial of me that I’m quoting an article from Yahoo.com), the generational researcher Stefan Pollack explains the layered irony of a Gen Z meme like “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss”: “Gen Z is cynical about the status-quo, perhaps more so even than millennials or Gen X; however, they are optimistic about their ability to change it.”

I don’t know for sure that this is true—that Gen Zers are so optimistic. But I hope it is, I really hope so. Because that is what it means to BE THERE. That is what Jesus is telling us in this parable when he’s trying to prepare his friends for his death. He’s trying to tell us that it’s going to be up to us—the kingdom of heaven is not a place that Jesus gatekeeps, it’s a place that he wants us to get to! And that means he doesn’t want us to gatekeep each other. He wants us to help each other BE THERE. And this takes optimism: hope that things can change. Hope that the oil we have will be enough. Faith that even if it runs out, if we’re there, we’ll get in. And above all this takes love, love for the people who wait alongside us. The kind of love that keeps the lamps burning, that drives out the evil that threatens to overtake us. Faith, hope, and love! I’m offering a new yet very old three! “These three” as St. Paul famously called them in his letter to the Corinthians. The original “live, laugh, love,” —thank you, Paul, you can be cringe sometimes but that one is good. Faith, hope, and love—these three have the power to break our generational silos, so some of that Gen Z hope can rub off on the rest of us. Faith, hope, and love—these three will allow us to be there, at the door, ready to go in together. Because what can happen if we are all there, sharing our oil, building each other up, is that life on this side of the gate can get better. We just have to be there.