Are You a Wise Virgin? – Sermon Preached on 8th November 2026 (Third Sunday Before Advent)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings –  1 Thessalonians 4.13–18; Matthew 25.1–13

“…if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.”

How much would you pay for a bottle of oil? In Morrisons you can get a litre of vegetable oil for cooking for just £1.45; the fanciest olive oil they sell costs £12.75 a litre. You wouldn’t want to waste that on frying chips. Truffle oil costs even more, six quid for a little three-ounce bottle, a whopping sixty quid a litre.

Even in these war-affected times oil for heating and lighting is cheaper than oil for cooking and eating. Heating oil is almost exactly a pound a litre at the moment. You don’t need to use the fanciest oil if you’re burning it – the ordinary stuff will do.

I think that throws some light on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins that we’ve just heard as our Gospel reading. The oil in their lamps is unlikely to be the fanciest stuff; it’s a commodity that even quite ordinary people can afford to have in their cupboard.

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins is all about keeping your faith topped up because you never know when you are going to meet God face to face. Because of that, we tend to worry that it is asking us to have some sort of especially fanatical devotion that is beyond us and we wouldn’t want to have anyway. We’re worried that we’re one of the foolish virgins. But that is not what Jesus is commending here – He is calling for us to have ordinary faith as ordinary people, keeping it in good order because some day He will fulfil the extraordinary promises He has made to us.

We’ll come back to those promises in a moment. For first we need to talk about the hard edge to this parable – readiness to meet God cannot, it seems, be borrowed at the last minute. No-one else can tend it for us. The point is not that you need to have anything exceptional, but that you need to have it to hand at any moment. Ordinary, everyday things and tasks still require care and attention.

So how can we renew our faith when the world can be so harsh and our society so indifferent? Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I find it harder and harder to do that because of the almost limitless opportunities for amusement and distraction that my phone and laptop provide. To renew our faith, we need to make time for God to touch us – praying not only for our needs, but also in silence; by reading the Bible in our own time as well as listening to it in church; through Christian art and music. Sometimes, we do need to make that our priority rather than another cat video or article about politics.

God is always communicating with us. It is us who need to take the time to sense His presence and His will for us – you will have picked up that I don’t think that is always a matter of words and commands; what God is saying through a painting, or a piece of music, or a sunset, or through the silence can be how He communicates His most powerful and life-changing messages to us.

And if it seems like we’re one of only a few people to prioritise God like that – well, we have the consolation of knowing that we’re one of the wise virgins – not a phrase that has often been used about me over the course of my life, it has to be said!

And what are those promises of Christ? St Paul writes about some of them in the epistle: as we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so we also believe that God will raise those who have died in Christ, and that we too will be raised with Him if we keep faith in His promises – if we keep oil in our lamps. St Paul reminds us that the Christian hope is not only about a better way of living here on Earth, but in our resurrection to eternal life – to an existence which isn’t just a particularly nice and long-lasting version of our lives in the present, but our transformation into something more wonderful than we can even imagine from here – our metamorphosis into a new form of existence.

Think of how glorious a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly is. If God does that for the caterpillars, what will He do for us?

Then St Paul writes something very interesting about grief. Now, I think we all here have suffered grievous bereavements in our lives – spouses, children, siblings, parents, the closest of friends. None of us escapes this, and it is a terrible thing. Christians certainly don’t hurt less after bereavement. But Paul tells us not to share the sorrow of those who are without hope. We have hope for ourselves because of our faith in Christ. And we have hope for our loved ones because we know that God’s love for them is greater than anything we can imagine. We loved them in their imperfections, as they loved us in our failings. How much more perfectly does God love them – and us?

God will indeed judge those we love, as He will judge us. But we can pray in hope for their souls because God, the creator and ruler of time, is beyond the limitations of time, and hears our prayers for the souls of those we love and have lost – souls loved by Him as well. We cannot tell Him how to judge – but we can always be a character witness with our prayers.

St Paul also writes some things about going into the clouds, with the risen dead, to meet Jesus in mid-air when He returns – rather beautiful and mystical words that have long suffered from being overinterpreted. Now, you never know – we might even be the generation that sees Christ return after all those long centuries. Looking around us at the state of the world, that might be a good thing; humanity has ever more power but no more wisdom, and that must go badly wrong eventually. Christ’s just and gentle rule would be far better than any form of government we can conjure for ourselves.

But people have been waiting for this for two thousand years – it probably won’t be us. Any of us, however, could be called by God back to Him to give account of our lives this very night. So be ready. You do not know the hour. Keep your lamps filled with oil by praying and listening for God’s call to you. Keep faith with Christ and His promises and He will show you an eternity whose glory is beyond your imagining.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.