Wisdom 6.12-16
St Matthew’s Gospel 25.1-13
Sermon notes (not a full text this week)
Keep awake. The wise virgins in today’s Gospel.
The Gospel given for this Sunday is not particularly for Remembrance, but carries a resonance of vigilance, of presence of mind, also carried in the idea of Remembering.
Not threatening like the rhyme ‘ remember remember the 5th November’ remembering, but remembrance as a solemn and life-giving act. On Armistice Day this coming week and Remembrance Sunday, today. We remember the war dead, of WW1 and WW2, and subsequent conflicts. We remember The Armed Forces of the Crown, enemy dead and civilian dead.
I have spoken before how Remembrance is more than calling to mind. To Re-member is to do the opposite of dis-member. to take remember as opposed to taking apart/splitting/making less than whole. To re-member is to make whole and present, as is the sense in the Greek word for remember: anamnesis. To make present and whole. This is the remembering we do in the Eucharist, of course: make Jesus present and whole, and become whole and present and alive as the Body of Christ (us gathered here), as we become what we eat (The Body of Christ, the Church) by this life-changing act of remembrance.
Not surprising that Jesus chooses an act of remembrance to be what makes us/defines us/gives us our DNA. As a Jew, for Jesus the Exodus an archetypal remembering, living, continuum. Story telling not as entertainment or nostalgia, but by which we become who we are now, and who we will be.
Dislocated, dismembered, communities become untethered, un-anchored; prone to extremist politics, shallow fascinations, tricksters.
To remember (by contrast) is to get real. To become more real, that is exactly the spirit of the Eucharist. We become more human week by week as we gather as the Ekklesia to hear the words of Scripture, to become what we are as what we eat, the Body of Christ. To embrace and ‘do on purpose’ our vulnerability as creatures to God, and each other and ourselves. To deliberately take our place in this story of salvation, of God and us, which we are telling, and in which we are living.
Like wise virgins, awake to this reality, living expectantly for His call, ready for His knock. Both at the day of judgment and in all the million tiny ways Christ meets us in our every day lives and invites us to choose love over hate, peace over discord, generosity over fear, faithfulness over cold self-reliance, to choose to meet Him, rather than hide from Him or block Him out. To hear the Wisdom of Solomon today.
So, as with Jesus our Jewish Saviour who gives us the new Exodus in His Passover in His blood, as with the Christian family story to which we belong which we both live in, and speak with our lives, as to our own small corner of the world, we gather on purpose to remember. With sadness and gratitude, with hope and realism, with faithfulness; remembering, as we become who God is calling us to be.