While You're Waiting by Brian Coatney

 from  Brian's blog

Posted on November 17, 2010 by briancoatney

photo by Tandy of Diane Gillooly with delicious rolls to serve
Tandy took this photo of Diane with the rolls Diane baked in her kitchen for Thanksgiving dinner she hosted several years ago. Diane is Sylvia and Scott Pearce’s daughter, and Diane keeps serving others all the time, non stop. We love her enduring spirit of faith, and the photo fits with a Gospel lesson.

I like to keep a Gospel going at all times in my reading. The past couple of days, I’ve found Matthew 24-25 intriguing in that this section of scripture reminds me of a sandwich. Jesus tells of future apocalyptic events with powerful description of the heavens’ violent shaking, and then later mentions His glorious coming with attending hosts to sit on His throne. In between comes an interlude similar in reckless tone to the times of Noah, a time of living as if things will always continue as they have, with feasting, marriage, work, etc.

This interlude is the middle of the sandwich, and Jesus tells three parables. The first is about the servant whose master delays returning from a journey, and so the servant, responsible for the well being of the estate personnel, begins to abuse them and to consort with the inebriated crowd. The lesson here is that the servant was only conditioned to be for others if supervised to do so; he did not know the spirit of his master.

The second parable is about the ten virgins, and who can find fault with five virgins? Yet the parable does, because they didn’t know the bridegroom well enough to know his ways and that he rarely does things on the timing that we prefer. This is a familiar script to anyone who’s ever believed God for anything: expect to wait and toss your time tables in the trash – maybe more than once.

God, however, is always a God of supply, even in the direst times, but not necessarily in external ways. An external remedy of supply would have meant the bridegroom’s arrival according to the schedule of a lamp filled with oil once. An internal remedy of supply means a mentality of enough oil to last around the clock. Without that mentality, one thinks, “I’ll not bother beyond a certain time.” Faith, however, says, “I believe for oil to get all the way through no matter what!”

The third parable is the parable of the talents, and the point is intolerance of waste. All of life is directional; we move forward or we move backwards. Things tend to reproduction or they tend to atrophy. Ultimate atrophy means giving up and dying. Life is energy and expansion, not corruption and death. Some say, “Woo hoo, here’s my chance”; other say, “I’ll never get anything out of this for just myself, so forget it.”

Life is “like vine, like branch: like master, like servant.” So when Jesus returns, he says to the faithful one in waiting, “I couldn’t have done better Myself.” The one in waiting says, “No Lord, you sure couldn’t have.”