Grace for the Night

Jesus tells a difficult parable to his disciples in Matthew 25:1-13—it urges us to wonder how we keep the lamp lights of our hearts flickering through the night.

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78:1-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

© The Rev. Seth Olson, 2026

This sermon was preached on the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles to view the video of this message please click here.

Holy God, may my words be your words, and when my words are your words, may your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen. 

If you’re comfortable, close your eyes for a moment and imagine a beautiful wedding you have witnessed.

Perhaps the flowers, the ambiance, or the music still brings a smile to your face. Maybe you picture two people looking at each other with that extraordinary mixture of joy and nervousness: Here we go. We are really doing this.

Possibly it happened in a church. Maybe in a courthouse, a backyard, or beneath a tree. Perhaps what made it beautiful was seeing two people whose love had not always been welcomed finally surrounded by people ready to celebrate them.

Now open your eyes.

When you pictured that wedding, did you immediately remember something going wrong?

Someone forgot a ring. The weather ignored every prayer offered on its behalf. A microphone stopped working. A small child decided the middle of the vows was the perfect time to announce a personal emergency.

Sometimes those moments become the stories everyone treasures.

And then there are the bridesmaids who forgot the oil for their lamps.

Wait. What?

Jesus gives us a wedding story today, but its ending hardly leaves us ready to raise a glass. Five bridesmaids enter the celebration. Five find themselves outside a closed door. Their plea to be admitted receives a chilling response: “I do not know you.”

I think we need to let that trouble us. Especially if we have ever been told that we do not belong, that our family does not count, or that God’s welcome stops somewhere short of us. We cannot pretend that this is an easy story, but we can listen carefully to whom Jesus is addressing and what he is asking them to consider.

Jesus is speaking privately to his disciples. They have asked him about what is coming. They want to know when things will happen and what signs to watch for. These are people already following him. And Jesus tells them a story about waiting.

The wedding scene includes attendants carrying lights to welcome a bridegroom and join the celebration. Now, we cannot reconstruct every detail of the arrangements, but we know what happens here: the bridegroom takes longer than anyone expects.

The attendants wait, and wait, and wait. Eventually, every one of them falls asleep. That little detail matters. The wise ones sleep. The foolish ones sleep. Nobody makes it through the night by sheer determination. So before we turn this parable into another demand to try harder, pray harder, or somehow become less human, let us notice that Jesus does not single out the tired people for condemnation.

They’re all tired. Some of us can enter this story right there. We know what it is to wait for test results, for reconciliation, for grief to loosen its grip. We know what it is to work for a more just world and wonder why the same cruelties keep finding new life.

We know what it is to pray and then face another morning when the answer that we want has not come. The waiting gets long. And faithful people get tired.

Then, at midnight, someone shouts that the bridegroom has arrived. Everyone wakes and tends to their lamps. Only then does the difference become clear: five have brought additional oil, and five have not. “Give us some of your oil,” the five ask.

The others refuse, fearing there will not be enough for everyone. While those without enough go looking for more, the bridegroom arrives. The celebration begins. The door closes. 

At this point, I want to stop the story. Couldn’t they have walked together in the light they had? Couldn’t someone have gone looking for them? Couldn’t the bridegroom have opened the door?

Those questions reveal something about what we long for—and perhaps about the welcome we have learned to expect from Jesus. But Jesus leaves us with this unsettling ending. The opportunity to join the procession has passed. There is an urgency here that we must take seriously.

Our lives matter. Our responses matter. The love we keep postponing, the repair we keep putting off, the neighbor whose suffering we keep meaning to notice: these belong to the present moment God is giving us.

Then, in closing, Jesus says, “Keep awake.” Which sounds strange, because everyone in the story has just been asleep. Perhaps we hear those words and imagine that Jesus wants us constantly on edge, anticipating him leaping out from behind every turn like a holy jack-in-the-box.

But the wise bridesmaids were able to rest. They had prepared for the possibility that the night would be long. What might that kind of readiness look like in us?

I have often thought of the oil as hope, peace, and love—the gifts that sustain the light of faith. That is an image we can pray with. Jesus himself never tells us exactly what the oil represents. He leaves us room to consider what sustains a life ready to respond to him.

And the teachings surrounding this story give us somewhere to begin.

Jesus speaks about servants caring for a household, people using what has been entrusted to them, and people feeding the hungry, welcoming strangers, tending the sick, and visiting those in prison.

Readiness takes shape in the way we live. It grows as we learn to recognize whose needs we have overlooked. It grows when we listen to neighbors whose experiences of bigotry have been dismissed. It grows when persecuted people find that our welcome includes their whole lives, their relationships, and their gifts. It grows through prayer, generosity, repentance, and the ordinary work of keeping our promises.

These practices help form people who can answer when love calls. And we need one another in that formation. Our psalm speaks of telling the next generation what God has done for us. Faith is nourished through stories passed from one person to another.

Saint Paul tells a grieving community to encourage one another with resurrection hope. He makes room for their sorrow while reminding them that death will not separate them from Christ.

There is oil to be found in that kind of community. In someone who prays beside us when words will not come. In a meal delivered without fanfare. In a hard truth spoken with love. In the person who remembers our name, makes room at the table, or helps us to begin again.

There are responses no one can make for us. Each of us is invited to practice love, to receive grace, to turn toward God. Yet so much of what sustains us comes through other people. Sometimes we carry the light. Sometimes we need someone to sit beside us until we can see it again.

And beneath all of this is God’s grace.

Our collect begins with what God has done in Jesus: making us God’s children and heirs of eternal life. Then it asks that this hope might shape us.

We begin as people whom God loves. Within that love, we learn how to live. So, perhaps the invitation from this challenging parable is simply this: tend what sustains us and what helps us respond to God’s presence.

Make room for prayer. Receive the rest your body needs. Seek reconciliation. Share a meal. Listen to someone whose life is different from yours. Let someone encourage you. Offer encouragement in return.

And when you find yourself weary, remember: all ten bridesmaids slept.

Our waiting may be long. We will need grace for the night. We will need practices that deepen our love. We will need one another.

This story begins with a wedding feast and points toward an eternal feast at this very Table. May the hope of joyfully feasting at the Divine Banquet shape how we live today. May we tend the light entrusted to us. And when Christ calls, may we be ready to rise and meet him.

Amen.

The Love of God

Near the end of seminary, on my path toward ordination, I took the General Ordination Examinations, affectionately known as the GOEs. These are considerably less exciting than the Ordinary Wizarding Levels—the OWLs—in the Harry Potter book series. Although, after spending the better part of four days trying to demonstrate what I had learned in three years of seminary, I would have welcomed a magic wand.

I was grateful to receive proficient scores in every area. But looking back, I recognize how much those examinations could not tell me or anyone else. There is a considerable difference between explaining the Good News of God in Christ and allowing that Good News to shape the pattern of your life. You can write a convincing answer about forgiveness and still hold a grudge against a classmate.

Of course, those sorts of blindspots follow us all well beyond formal schooling. We know something about patience, generosity, and compassion. We recognize wisdom when we hear it, recommend it to someone else, even put it into a pithy social media post. Then, someone interrupts us at precisely the wrong moment, and we discover how much we are still learning.

This morning, in our Gospel lesson, we near the end of a long series of tense conversations between Jesus and the religious authorities. We are in Jerusalem, during the days we now call Holy Week. Questions about authority, taxes, and resurrection have become occasions to test Jesus. He has answered with searching inquiries and unsettling stories, inviting his hearers to reconsider their lives before God.

Now comes a question whose answer many of us could give without looking it up. 

A lawyer walks up to a rabbi, this is not a joke, this is simply what our text says. A lawyer walks up to a rabbi and asks, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers with words from the Scriptures that have nourished his people for generations: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 

And then, having been asked for one commandment, Jesus gives another. “A second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” He joins them together and says that all the law and the prophets hang upon these two commandments from Holy Scripture. Everything else depends upon this love.

We hear these words so often that we can almost miss them. Love God. Love your neighbor. Yes, of course. We know the answer. But Jesus is describing something that reaches into every corner of a human life.

Love God with the mind that solves problems and the heart that carries old wounds. Love God with the body that gets tired, the imagination that dreams, and the attention that wanders. Love God with your relationships, your resources, and the hours you would rather keep entirely to yourself. And this love of God takes shape in how you treat the people whose lives touch yours.

Last Sunday, we considered what belongs to God. The answer was everything. This Sunday, Jesus invites us to consider what a life might become when we begin to trust that truth. If everything belongs to God, then everything can become a place where love takes root.

But before we get very far with that invitation, Jesus asks a question of his own. “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They answer, “The son of David.” It is a recognizable, faithful answer: the Messiah belongs to the line of Israel’s great king.

Then Jesus quotes a psalm in which David calls this coming figure his Lord. How, Jesus asks, can the Messiah be David’s son if David himself calls him Lord? We do not need to untangle every thread of that ancient argument to feel its force. Their answer leaves something unexplained; the Messiah is greater than the category they have supplied.

And perhaps that is where their conversation begins to reach us. We have words for Jesus, too. Messiah. Savior. Son of God. Lord. We confess them faithfully, and still the living Christ can surprise us, challenge us, and draw us beyond what we thought we understood.

We can recognize Jesus in a Gospel story and struggle to recognize him in the person standing before us. We can admire his patience with difficult people while quietly hoping he will understand why we have run out of patience when in the same spot. We can celebrate his welcome and then hesitate when someone needs room in our own lives.

Our baptismal promise gives us a practice for that hesitation: seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. Seek means there is looking to do. There is attention to offer, a story to hear, a judgment to reconsider. The neighbor bears a dignity we did not give them and therefore cannot take away.

That neighbor might be the person beside us in this church. It might be someone whose needs interrupt our plans, someone whose politics bewilder us, or someone we have already decided is impossible. We may encounter Christ through a kindness they offer us, too. Sometimes our difficulty is admitting that the person we have dismissed has something holy to give.

And somewhere in all this talk about loving everyone, there is a person we can easily overlook. “Love your neighbor,” Jesus says, “as yourself.” Yourself. The person whose limitations you know so well, whose mistakes you can replay without prompting, whose needs you keep moving to the bottom of the list.

If everything belongs to God, you belong to God, too. Your tired body belongs to God. Your anxious mind belongs to God. The part of you that believes you ought to be handling everything better is already held within God’s love.

That does not mean we have to achieve perfect self-love before we can care for anyone else. Thank goodness. It does mean we cannot assume that everyone deserves tenderness except us. The love Jesus commands includes the person we are.

So here is a question worth carrying into this week: What would it look like to love myself as someone God loves? Sometimes that might mean making a difficult change or asking for help. Sometimes it might mean going to bed, sometimes it might mean soaking up one more moment of joy. It may mean taking a walk, making something for the sheer joy of it, or allowing a friend to listen. 

Rest has a place in a life offered to God. So does delight. We do not have to justify every good gift by explaining how it will make us more productive tomorrow. God loves the person who receives the gift. FULL STOP.

The psalmist here in Psalm 90 gives us a prayer for that receiving: “Satisfy us by your loving-kindness in the morning.” Before we consider what we can even accomplish today, we recognize fulfillment in God’s love. We bring our hunger, our limitations, and our hope that the work of our hands might become fruitful.

That is a prayer we can bring into all parts of our life, including our financial stewardship season. Here at Holy Apostles, our theme is “Plenty Good Room.” Our pledges matter. They help sustain the worship, care, formation, and service through which this community makes room for people to encounter Christ.

God’s invitation to love reaches through those pledges into the whole of our lives. What are we doing with the gifts entrusted to us? What patterns help us become generous? Where might our time, our money, our abilities, and our attention serve the love of God and neighbor?

God’s claim upon our whole lives can sound overwhelming, especially when so much is already being asked of us. But look at the Jesus who speaks these words. Within days, he will embody them through his Passion. His love for God and neighbor will carry him into the heart of the suffering of the world, and through his death and resurrection God will open a future that human violence cannot close.

The one calling us into love is already giving himself to us. We are learning to receive his life and participate in it. Around this table, we come with empty hands. Christ feeds us, gathers us into his body, and sends us to love. 

I am grateful I passed those ordination examinations at the end of seminary. I am more grateful that God has kept teaching me since. Often the lesson comes through someone I did not expect, in a moment I would not have chosen, with an invitation I am still learning to accept.

We know the answer to the lawyer’s question: love God with everything, and love your neighbor as yourself. This week, may we receive that love deeply enough to practice it. May someone encounter its tenderness through us. And may we have the grace to recognize it when someone offers it to us. Amen.

Plenty Good Room To Grow

It's not our vineyard, but we are called to steward it for a season.

Proper 22, Year A

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

Psalm 19

Philippians 3:4b-14

Matthew 21:33-46

©2026 The Rev. Seth Olson

This sermon was delivered on the 19th Sunday after Pentecost at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover, AL. A video of the sermon may be found here.

Holy God, may my words be your words, and when my words are not your words, may your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.

There is something I want you to notice about Jesus’ vineyard. Before a single tenant arrives, the vineyard is already there. The landowner plants it. He puts a fence around it. He digs the wine press. He builds the watchtower. By the time anybody shows up to work, somebody else has already done the work necessary to make this place fruitful.

And then the landowner does something extraordinary. He entrusts it to tenants. Here is this vineyard—planted, prepared, protected—and he places it into their hands. He leaves them room to work it, room to tend it, room to discover what might grow there. They didn’t create the vineyard. They received a place within it.

Which makes what happens next so strange. Somewhere along the way, the tenants seem to forget something basic: this is not their vineyard.

When harvest time comes, the landowner sends people to receive the fruit that belongs to him, and the tenants beat one, kill another, and stone another. More servants come, and the tenants do the same thing. Finally, the landowner sends his son, and the tenants see him coming and say, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.”

Did you hear what happened?

They have been given an entire vineyard, and somehow they have become convinced that there isn’t enough.

If the landowner receives his fruit, there will be less for us. If the heir receives his inheritance, there will be less for us. If somebody else has something, perhaps that means I won’t. So what began as a gift becomes something to possess. What began as stewardship becomes ownership. What began in abundance becomes scarcity.

I wonder if that isn’t one of the oldest human temptations.

My life. My time. My money. My abilities. My family. My church. My seat. My table.

And those things really are ours in meaningful ways. Our lives matter. Our time is precious. Our gifts are particular. We are responsible for how we use what has been placed into our hands. But Jesus’ parable asks us to remember something deeper: before any of it belonged to us, it was gift.

That same rhythm runs underneath all of our readings this morning. Listen to how the Ten Commandments begin. Before God says, “You shall” or “You shall not,” God says, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

God does not say, “Keep these commandments, and then I might rescue you.” God says: I already did. Before commandment comes liberation. Before obligation comes grace. Before Israel does anything for God, God has already heard their cries, confronted Pharaoh, opened the sea, fed them in the wilderness, and given water to the thirsty.

And now God begins teaching them how free people live.

Do not worship the gods that enslave you. Do not use God’s name to accomplish your own purposes. Stop working sometimes. Let your children rest. Let your servants rest. Let the immigrant among you rest. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not lie about your neighbor. Do not spend your life consumed by the desire to possess what somebody else has.

The underlying message from God is: You know what Egypt is like. You know what happens when human beings become commodities and production matters more than people. You know what happens when somebody at the top decides there is not enough to go around.

I brought you out of Egypt—out of that way of being. Now, with my help, don’t build another society like that! Gift first. Response second.

Paul discovers something similar. In Philippians he gives us his extraordinary religious résumé: his ancestry, his credentials, his zeal, his righteousness. If anybody ought to be able to prove that he belongs, Paul can.

And then he lets it go. Not because those pieces of his life are meaningless. Not because his body is bad and his spirit is good. Not because his Jewish identity was something shameful that Christianity rescued him from. He lets go of the idea that any of those things can earn what Christ has already freely given him.

And then comes one of my favorite lines from Paul: “I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” Did you hear the order again?! Christ has made me his own. Therefore, I press on. 

Gift first. Response second. 

Which brings us back into the vineyard. Here, I wonder whether one of the great spiritual questions of our lives is not simply, “What do I have?” but “What has been entrusted to me?”

What if my life is a vineyard I have been invited to tend? What if my time is? My money? My abilities? My relationships? What if even this community we call Holy Apostles is not something we possess, but something entrusted to us for a season?

And if that is true, then perhaps the question isn’t how tightly we can hold onto it.

Perhaps the question is: What is growing here?

That is the question I want us to begin asking together today because this morning we are moving into our financial stewardship season at Holy Apostles. Now, we don’t think of just this time as “Stewardship Season” because stewardship is a spiritual practice that we engage year-round. But, the theme of our financial stewardship season this year comes from a wonderful, spiritual song: “Plenty Good Room.”

Now, don’t panic. Nobody is handing you a pledge card this morning. You can unclench.

Before we talk about what any of us might give, I want us to spend some time noticing what we have already received. Look around the vineyard.

Look at the people God has gathered here. Think about the people who made room for you before you ever knew you needed it. Think about the generations who prayed before us, those who gave before us, served before us, worshiped before us. Think about all the people who planted vines whose fruit we now enjoy.

And look at what is growing! 

Children are learning that they are beloveds of God. People bring their deepest questions here and discover that questions do not disqualify them from faith. Bread is broken and wine is shared. People are baptized. People fall in love and make promises. People die and are carried from this place surrounded by a community proclaiming that death does not get the final word. People grieve, and someone sits beside them without trying to make the grief disappear. People are fed. People serve. People discover gifts they did not know they had. People who might never otherwise have known one another become part of one Body.

There is fruit growing in this vineyard. Not perfect genetically-modified fruit. Lord knows, we’re not perfect tenants, nor do we always bear prized produce, but fruit nonetheless. And there is still plenty good room here!

Room for the person who hasn’t walked through those doors yet. Room for the child who cannot sit still. Room for the person who knows every word of the Creed and the person who isn't sure what they believe right now. Room for the grieving and the joyful. Room for the person who has much to give and the person who needs, for a season, simply to receive. Room for people who look like us and people who don’t. Room for people whose lives and stories and experiences might stretch our understanding of just how large God’s vineyard really is. Because it is not our vineyard, it’s God’s.

That may be what the tenants in Jesus’ parable forgot. They began to believe that someone else receiving meant something was being taken away from them. They began to believe that the vineyard belonged to them. And scarcity eventually made them violent.

But grace tells a different story. Grace says there is enough. Grace says you do not have to earn your place here. Grace says the person beside you does not have to earn theirs either. Grace says this vineyard was planted before we arrived and, God willing, will continue bearing fruit long after we are gone.

So stewardship cannot simply mean raising enough money to pay the bills. Yes, we need money to do ministry. Buildings require roofs, staff members deserve salaries, ministries require resources, and budgets are real. 

We will talk about those things. But stewardship begins much deeper than a budget. Stewardship begins with wonder.

Look at what we have been given!

And then comes the question: God, what would you have us do with it?

In a few moments, we will come again to this Table, God’s Table. And maybe there is no better place to begin a stewardship season than there.

Because nobody comes to this Table carrying a résumé.

Nobody purchases a place.

Nobody earns a better piece of bread.

And even before we walk up we hear these astonishing words: “The Gifts of God for the People of God.”

Then, all we do is come to this table, with empty and open hands where we see God’s pattern again: Gift first. Response second.

There is a prayer for after Communion in our Prayer Book that asks God to help us “so to venerate [or make real] the sacred mysteries” of Christ’s Body and Blood that we may “ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption.”

The fruit of thy redemption. Perhaps that is what we are being invited to seek in this vineyard. Not fruit that proves we deserved the gift. Not fruit that makes us worthy of grace. Not fruit we can compare with whatever is growing on somebody else’s vine. The fruit of a redemption that has already been given.

So come to the Table. Receive again what you could never earn. Look around and notice all the people for whom God has made room.

And then go back into the vineyard—not as owners, but as beloved stewards. Tend what has been entrusted to you. Make room for somebody else. Give some of what you have received away. Trust that there is enough. And with God’s help, let this life we share together bear the fruit of God’s redemption.

A wise one of our Faith (Saint Augustine) once said of this holy meal, “Be what you see; receive what you are.” So receive the Body of Christ. Become the Body of Christ. And together, let us discover just how much fruit can grow when we trust that, in the vineyard of God, there is always plenty good room. Amen?

Trinitarian blessing based on today’s sermon:

May God the Father, who has planted the vineyard and made plenty good room for us all, give you grace to tend faithfully all that has been entrusted to you;

May God the Son, who has made you his own and given himself for the life of the world, make you fruitful in love, generosity, and service;

May God the Holy Spirit, who brings forth within us the fruit of redemption, send you out to make room, bear fruit, and share freely what you have received;

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.