This sermon was originally preached at Church of the Redeemer in Greensboro, GA on Sunday, November 8, 2026. The lections for the day were from Proper 27A - Track 2 and included Amos 5:18-24; Psalm 70; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13.
Clouds opened up over the state of Florida this week. Waters poured over the sunshine state in epic, biblical proportions.
Brevard County alone received 24 inches of rain in one day. That’s roughly half of what the area receives in a whole year. One meteorologist estimated that Florida’s rainfall on Sunday and Monday exceeded 2.8 trillion gallons of water or enough to fill 4.24 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. As Floridians entered the last month of hurricane season, they were not expecting a once-in-a-millennium rain storm.
There are non-AI videos of cars floating away, sharks swimming through intersections, alligators gliding through residential waters, and entire streets devastated and destroyed. The sister of one of our former parishioners had to be rescued from her house and carried upon someone’s back to escape the rising waters.
In addition to the flooding, we welcomed the long darkness by resetting our clocks and we witnessed the ongoing fight for power in D.C., there was a plane crash in Palm Beach, a mass shooting outside a college football stadium, and a helicopter collision on Mt. Everest.
It has been quite the week. These events have assaulted our sense of security, challenged our trust, and heightened our anxiety.
It feels like we are already in the middle of the storm. Not the eye of the hurricane where it is calm, but the heart of it where we feel everything, everywhere, all at once.
Our passages today paint us a different stormy picture. Instead of the storm’s middle, we are presented with the calm before the storm. If we look to the skies, we see storm clouds, thunderheads, and a growing darkness. We know what’s coming but the air is silently still for a second. As Gandalf the White so poignantly described it, “It’s the deep breath before the plunge.”
The final three Sundays of Year A begin the long runway into Advent. The focus shifts from the Church's previous attention on discipleship to its intensifying attention to the consummation of God's purposes. Amos, specifically, paints a picture of doom and gloom and the flooding waters of justice and righteousness.
In Advent preparation, we find ourselves waiting. The question is not how long, o Lord? Rather, the question is, are we prepared to encounter the Lord for whom we wait?
We join Amos’ prophetic voice in chapter 5.
You may remember Amos. Famous not for his cookies but for identifying himself as neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet but a herdsman and dresser of sycamore figs. He was a southerner called to prophesy in the north. His prophetic ministry took place somewhere around 760-750BC during the reign of evil King Jeroboam II.
Amos provides the earliest mention of the Day of the LORD in the Bible. This is important. Israel longed for the day of the LORD because they believed it would be the day when YHWH would intervene on their behalf against their enemies.
Amos, however, presents this day as very bad news.
In verse 18, Amos begins with the word alas. In Hebrew, this is a word used when mourning and lamenting something that is dead. Amos is prophesying not to a healthy body, but to a dead corpse…they just don’t know it yet.
The day of the LORD described here is one of judgement rather than vindication. Woe to you who desire that day, says the LORD. It is a day of darkness and not light. God likens it to someone who has outrun a lion only to be mauled by a bear. Instead of being the day when foreign enemies are ruined forever, this is the day when Israel’s chickens come home to roost. This day is a day of reckoning for Israel’s sins, idolatry, and waywardness.
The people expected vengeance, vindication, and victory.
Amos announces darkness, doom, and destruction.
God continues by describing his hatred for Israel’s worship, for her rituals and festivals. It’s not that the rituals, festivals, or liturgies were wrong in and of themselves, but rather that worship alone would not save Israel. The northern kingdom believed they were in-like-Flynn by virtue of their birthright and their right worship. Their treatment of others didn’t matter as long as they prayed the right prayers, at the right time, in the right places, and with the right words as the right people.
They were waiting for the Day of the LORD, but they were not prepared to encounter the Lord who was coming.
Their worship wasn’t abhorrent because they were using something other than the BCP. It’s that their morals and ethics did not match their worship. They were devoid of justice and righteousness, which is why the Lord promises to bring those upon them himself.
Worship cannot be detached from how we live in the world. We do not come to church to escape the world, but rather to learn how, in the words of David Fagerberg and Aidan Kavanagh, to do the world the way the world was meant to be done. Our worship informs our daily living and then our daily lives are offered back to God upon the altar.
Brennan Manning describes the disconnect this way: The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
Israel paid lip service to God, but lived according to her own wills, whims, wiles, and wishes.
The day of the LORD would come three decades later in 722 when Assyria conquered the northern kingdom. It was doom and gloom, death and destruction. And it would be repeated in the south in 586BC, this time by the Babylonians. The promised people removed from the promised land; taken from the Temple, from God’s palpable presence, from their homes, and from their future.
As a resurrection people, the Day of the LORD ultimately belongs to the eschatological return of Christ, when God's judgment and the consummation of his kingdom are fully and finally revealed. This is the basis of Jesus’ words in Matthew 25.
The parable of the ten virgins offers an insight into how one should be preparing for the coming of the bridegroom. You may have assumed it was about punishment and judgment, but really it is about decisions and obedience.
Jesus is still teaching in Jerusalem in the final days before his passion. He has silenced the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and elders, leaving them to plot his demise off screen, and now he moves into a series of final parables. This is our Advent runway.
These parables describe three ends all at the same time: the end of Jesus’ life, the end of Jerusalem in 70AD, and the end of all things. These are forward looking parables and they are told in the present that his listeners might hear, obey, and prepare.
Two words in this story are mistranslated: bridesmaids and lamps. Those whom the story calls “bridesmaids” were called “virgins” in earlier translations. They are young women who are part of the bride’s extended family, or even her village, and they were part of the communal celebration. Because there was no concept of a bridesmaid in the ANE as we have in our own society today, I will use the term “women” instead of “bridesmaid.”
A lamp suggests a slow-burning implement but the word here actually describes something like a torch which would have burned oil very quickly. These torches would have burned “brighter and quicker” than an interior lamp. It isn’t hard to imagine why the women were dismayed by their lack of oil.
This parable is about a wedding. This is not the first time that Jesus has used the imagery of a wedding to make his point about the kingdom of God. As with his other Kingdom parables, he begins with the words, “The Kingdom of heaven will be like this…” That is our clue to pay particular attention.
Ten women wait for the groom with their torches in hand. They are to form a ceremonial procession to take the groom to the bride and they need the torches to light the way. We are not told where they are waiting, but it is likely that they were waiting at a house rather than in the streets or countryside.
Notice that all of the women were drowsy and fell asleep. When the shout comes that the groom is about to appear, five women are prepared with oil. Sadly, however, the other five had not.
Jesus does say, “Keep awake, therefore,” but this parable extends beyond watchfulness. It is the quality of our wakefulness that matters.
Ellis is our best sleeper, and it is easy to spot him turning into a pumpkin each night. He can hold his eyes open with his fingers, forcing himself to stay awake, but that is not the same thing as being truly awake, alert, and ready.
All ten women fell asleep. The difference is that five were prepared for the bridegroom's arrival and five were not. Eschatological vigilance is not about keeping our eyes open; it is about keeping our lives ready.
The ill-prepared women ask those with oil to share some. Is it harsh that the first five don’t share with the second? No. The groom’s delay means that all of their torches have been burning longer than expected. Those with oil had truly enough for their own torches, they were not early capitalists hoarding their stockpile of oil for themselves.
The point of this parable is not what you do in the middle of a crisis, but rather what was done before the crisis arrived. Five women determined it was important to prepare in advance; they made the decision to be ready. Five women did not. They had joined the wedding party, yes, but they had not readied themselves in advance.
What is the oil in this parable? It is faithful practice rather than faith itself. Anyone can say, “I am going to serve the LORD” or “I am going to attend the wedding,” but it is an entirely different and altogether more involved task to practice that faith day in and day out. If we truly believe that Jesus is raised from the dead, then our lives must reflect that truth as much as our words.
Matthew 25 isn’t just about watching or waiting for the Bridegroom, but about being prepared for his eventual, inevitable arrival.
When Rebecca and I were newly married, we lived in the same town as her parents. It was very normal for one of them, or even someone from the large church where I worked to stop by, unannounced, for a “popcorn visit.” We learned the hard way that this meant that we needed to keep the townhouse as clean as humanly possible because we were caught unprepared for one of those first visits. Sometimes you have to throw clothes into the closet, fluff the pillows, or even put dirty dishes into the oven because you haven’t the time to wash them.
You know what I’m talking about!
Throwing the dishes into the oven is not being prepared. It’s keeping the house in a state of cleanliness that even the King of England can stop by for a cup of tea. When we aren’t prepared, we are living in our own tea-cup tempest of frantically racing to get ready rather than a lifestyle of being ready.
This is why the idea of the calm before the storm or the deep breath before the plunge is so useful.
We are not trying to fix the mess that we are in as though we can act our way into salvation.
We are not trying to do better, be better, or perform better as though we can heal ourselves.
We are not trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps with a DIY spirituality or a pseudo-religious work ethic.
Rather, we are invited to prepare our hearts for the coming of the King by allowing him to purify us.
Only the Son can make us children of light;
Only the Son can punch holes in the darkness;
Only the Son can destroy the works of the devil;
Only the Son can calm the storm.
Our work isn’t to try and do it for him. Busyness is not the same thing as holiness. Our gracious opportunity is to let him do his work, to receive the grace of his work, and to join him in his work in the world he loves.
Beloved, what we need is hope.
Hope not in daylight savings, the College Football Playoffs, or political tsunamis, but hope in the risen, ever-living and ever-reigning Christ. This is the point Paul is driving home to the Thessalonian Christians. After waxing for three chapters about how they are to live in the present, Paul undergirds his argument with the fact that our hope is based in the sure and certain knowledge that Christ will return.
The Lord is coming, in power and might, to judge and to redeem. As the old hymn goes, The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend. It is well, it is well with my soul.
But can we honestly say that it is well with us?
Are we truly prepared for Christ’s return or have we stacked dishes in the oven because we’d rather procrastinate than revivicate?
Israel thought she was ready, even expectant of that great day, but Amos proclaimed otherwise. Our hope cannot be in ourselves.
Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. When we place our hope in earthly powers, current events, or partisan justice, we lose sight of the kingdom of God. We trade the King of kings and Lord of lords for false idols, graven images, and leaders who will fail us.
We express the hope we have in Christ when we embody, enflesh, and enact it with our daily lives, with how we treat others, with our words and our actions.
The concern for those hearing Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 and Paul’s comments about Christ’s return in 1 Thessalonians 4 are the exact same as the underlying tone in Amos 5: we have hope because Christ is alive and he has bought us and brought us into new life! There is no alas or woe for those who are in Christ Jesus!
My friends, the Lord is coming back, that is certain. He is returning as the bridegroom to claim his bride and to trample down death, darkness, and the devil once and for all. When he comes, his justice and righteousness will flow and ever-flow. He is returning to reign and rule over all things and to usher in his Kingdom and we must be found ready!
May we be prepared.
May our worship match our actions.
May our witness be filled with hope.
And may there be no dishes in the oven. Amen.