Sermon preached by Rev. Wesley King on Sunday, November 8, 2026
Good morning. Listen, I got to tell you, church work is funny sometimes. I want to tell you a couple stories from this week.
So, a couple months ago, I met this young woman who’s a pastor at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church. We were meeting with Mayor Freddie about some justice issues around the city. I then saw her again at the YMCA, and so I was like, “We need to get coffee. Let’s find a time to get together. I’d love to hear more about you and about your ministry at Mount Zion.” She’s like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” So she puts me in touch with her assistant, Nina.
And if you don’t know, Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church is a rather large, I’d say about 30,000-member, predominantly Black church a little north of Nashville. And so she puts me in touch with her assistant, Nina. So Nina’s calling me. I’m in Memphis. I’m in DC. We’re just not connecting, unfortunately. And so I tell her, “I’m so sorry. I’m not ignoring you. I just have not had a chance.” And so Nina says, “Oh, that’s fine. Just put me in touch with your assistant.”
I was like, “Oh, you think I have an assistant?” I was like, “I’ll get right on that.” His name is Noah Tenant.
And then this Thursday, as Noah mentioned, we kicked off Room in the Inn here at Vine Street. And if you’re not aware, it is our homelessness ministry here and in the entire city of Nashville. It’s this ministry where churches and mosques and synagogues and other groups open their buildings to about a dozen unhoused folks each night of the week. And we give them warm shelter and a warm meal and a roof over their head. And they can find solace and safety, at least for one night. Last year, Room in the Inn provided over 15,000 beds in the winter months.
So I was waiting until a little bit later in the day to come in, because I knew I was going to be staying the night here at the church. And so I was waiting a little bit, and Jim Carl had told me in an email earlier that week that we were out of some things. He said he didn’t see any plates or cups or napkins and utensils. So I went to Kroger and grabbed some on the way in. At the same time, Pastor Margie had also heard this from Jim and told Sarah Tarley, “Hey, will you pick up some supplies on the way into the church?” So Sarah showed up, I showed up, all bringing just a huge load of plates and cups and napkins and all of these things. And we found that there were some already there. And not only that, Meredith Syler had clearly labeled them “Room in the Inn supplies.” So we have enough plates and napkins and cups to survive the Armageddon. We just simply got our wires crossed.
But Thursday night went smoothly. We fed the guys. We cleaned up. We go to bed around 8 or 8:30 or so. We turn the lights off. And it takes me a little bit to go to sleep when I stay the night here. There’s 12 guys sleeping downstairs, so there’s certain sounds and smells that come along with that. So it takes me a little while to fall asleep. We do need some more overnight guests. I know I’m not selling it really well, but we do need people to stay overnight. So if you’re interested, just ignore everything I just said.
But anyway, I’m laying there, and I was kind of frustrated that, oh, we just wasted money. We just bought all this stuff we don’t need. And then it hit me. Maybe the real lesson here was just how willing Vine Street was to provide. Maybe the lesson here was how willing our folks were to jump when there was a need named. Maybe the lesson is that we’ve got enough plates and cups and napkins to last until 2028, so that whoever needs to be fed here, our members, guests, strangers, we can make them a plate. We were prepared. We were prepared.
Today’s gospel lesson is this well-known parable, one that I often heard when I was growing up. I often heard it in the context of being ready for when Jesus comes back, often as more of a threat than a promise. But the thing about parables is that you have to hear them in succession. They were meant to be understood as a whole, not just by themselves as one parable. So this parable speaks to wisdom, right? But the prior parable speaks about action. And the parable that follows is about not hoarding your time and talents and treasure. So these have to be understood together as a whole. Because what good is wisdom if you don’t act? And likewise, what good is action if you don’t think it through? Right?
And when we say wisdom in this case, we’re talking about a very specific thing, right? It’s more than just intellect. We’re drawing from the Jewish wisdom tradition. So in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, there’s the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. There’s the Prophets, the major and minor prophets. And then there’s the Writings section. And in this last section, the Writings includes the wisdom books: Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, etc.
But what do we mean by wisdom? Biblical scholar Robert Young Scott says that at one level, wisdom is intelligence. At the next level, it’s good sense, sound judgment, and moral understanding. “A clever man’s wisdom makes him behave intelligently.” That’s Proverbs 14:8. A third level is the capacity to consider profound truth in human life and destiny. So wisdom thus becomes the fruit of the unending quest for the meaning of one’s experience in this life. “Where shall wisdom be found?” the book of Job asks. “Man does not know the way to it. It is hidden from the eyes of all living things. Only God understands the way to it.” In other words, the type of wisdom that can only be found in that which is holy, that which is divine.
So all the while, this young, kind of rogue rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, is preaching these terrible parables, and he’s using these examples and these references from these Jewish wisdom writings, things that these people would have understood, references and examples that they would have heard before.
So in today’s parable, there are these five young women who are foolish and these five young women who are wise. Some translations call them virgins. Sometimes they call them bridesmaids. The foolish ones take their lamps and they go to meet the bridegroom. And the wise women take their lamps and a flask of oil. And the bridegroom is delayed. It takes him a while to get there. And the foolish women’s lamps begin to die out. The wise women tell them that they cannot have any of their oil and they need to go buy more. So they go to do so. And while they’re gone buying more oil, the bridegroom returns. They all go into the wedding party, and the foolish women are left out.
When I think back on what Christ was trying to teach in this moment, I think Christ wanted his disciples to not lose path, not lose sight, not lose the way that he’s been teaching them and guiding them. And he knows he’s about to leave them. As we see in the gospel text, the disciples often lose their way. They often lose the path, and Christ has to pull them back. Later, Paul writes so many letters to the early church because they lost their way, and he has to kind of guide them back to the way. Jesus wanted his disciples, these people that he loved, to be ready for what was ahead.
But what does this parable mean for us today? What are we supposed to learn from this parable in 2026? Theologian Amy Miroso writes that this tale can conjure up two kinds of dynamics in this day and age that feel kind of antithetical to the abundant life that Jesus calls us to.
And the first is that this parable can evoke a sense of scarcity. So even when these foolish young women run out of oil, it feels kind of harsh that the wise women won’t share their oil with them. Even if they were hasty, and even if they were unprepared, something about that rubs me the wrong way still. But I try to remind myself that these are really complex stories and that Jesus perhaps intended them that way. So certainly, if they ran out of oil, yes, they could have shared their lamps with the foolish women. Perhaps that too is a lesson: that even in our best attempts to be faithful, to be righteous, to be ready, we often still fail. We often choose to save ourselves at the expense of others. But still, this parable is not about generosity or distribution. This is about preparedness. There are other parables about those things. Another reason to read these parables as a whole. This parable is about being ready, being prepared.
Another pitfall of hearing this parable is that it can evoke fear. Fear of not being ready and therefore being left out. I mentioned that as I heard this story growing up, it was always about waiting for Christ’s return and being left behind. Anybody remember the movie Joe Dirt?
Good, good church movie. Anybody remember that one? There’s a part in this movie where Joe keeps asking people, “Is that where you want to be when Jesus comes back?”
The disciples, the audience, these oral gospels and these later written gospels, the Apostle Paul, and even Joe Dirt all thought that Jesus’s return would be imminent. They thought it was any minute now. Fast-forward thousands of years, and we’re still waiting, even though he says, “You know not the hour or the day.”
Still, sometimes the preparedness manifests itself as fear. We buy car insurance in preparation for an unforeseen accident, right? We take vitamins and medicine to prevent health problems. A 2016 study of U.S. gun ownership by researchers at Harvard and Northwestern showed that not hunting, not sport, but fear of other people drove the U.S. to record gun sales, despite the fact that violent crime had gone down and plummeted that year.
Preparedness can evoke scarcity. Preparedness can evoke fear. But maybe that’s where we have to make a very important distinction: that there’s a kind of preparedness that is rooted in fear and scarcity, but there’s also a kind of preparedness that is rooted in hope.
Fear says, “I better stock up because there won’t be enough.” Fear says, “I have to protect what’s mine.” Fear says, “If I don’t look out for myself, nobody will.” But wisdom, wisdom says something very different. Wisdom says, “Be ready because God is still working.” Wisdom says, “Be ready because God is still at work now.” Wisdom says, “Keep your lamp trimmed, because opportunities to love your neighbor can appear at any moment.” Wisdom says, “Store up what you need, not so you can hide it away or hoard it away, but so that you can be available when the moment arrives.”
Thursday night, as I was looking at the shelves overflowing with paper plates and cups and plastic forks and all these things, I realized that what we had was not a sign of scarcity. It was a sign of readiness. Not readiness for disaster, but readiness for hospitality. Readiness for welcome. Readiness to serve our neighbors. Readiness for the possibility that somebody might be hungry and we have the chance to feed them.
Maybe that’s what the oil in the lamps represents. Not secret knowledge, not this ticket into heaven, not fear that we’ll miss out if Jesus returns tonight. But maybe it represents habits and practices that keep our faith alive even when the world grows dark.
You cannot borrow a lifetime of compassion in the last minute. You cannot suddenly create a community of welcome when the stranger is already at your door. You cannot instantly cultivate courage and mercy and justice in the moment that they are needed. Those things are forged and formed over time. One prayer at a time, one act of generosity at a time, one Room in the Inn overnight shift at a time, one meal served, one stranger welcomed, one injustice confronted, and one lamp tended.
The wise women in this story are not commended because they were afraid. They are commended because they were attentive. They lived as though the bridegroom could arrive at any moment. They were ready. They were prepared.
And I think that that’s Jesus’s invitation to us. Live attentively. Live expectantly. Live prepared. Not because we fear being locked out of the wedding party, but because we do not want to miss the moments when Christ shows up among us. Because if scripture teaches us anything, it’s that he rarely comes when we expect it. He arrives hungry. He arrives thirsty. He arrives as the stranger. He arrives needing shelter for the night.
And blessed are those who keep their lamps burning. Blessed are those who keep their hearts open and have their tables ready, set, and prepared.
Amen.