Sermon for Sunday, November 8, 2026 || Proper 27A || Matthew 25:1-13
This sermon is about keeping watch for the presence of Christ in our lives, especially in the midst of debilitating exhaustion. And I got a great reminder of this last Sunday morning when I went into my office after services. From your pew, you probably can’t see this tiny Jesus figurine I’m holding. Well, a crafty parishioner had hidden about twenty of these all around my office. The kids and I brought some of them home, and ever since, members of my family have been finding tiny Jesuses all over the house: atop the milk in the fridge, on the piano’s keys, on the framed school pictures, in my shoe.
It was just the thing I needed right now, this tangible reminder that the presence of Christ “shows up when we least expect it but need it most.”1 This time of year I am always so exhausted. I went back and looked in my sermon archive, and I found a lot of sermons about exhaustion and burnout cropping up in the fall over the years. And today’s is no exception. I don’t know about you, but for me there are many reasons for my exhaustion. I don’t sleep well as a general rule and the time change always messes with me for days after. The last few weeks have been quite full at the church, full of good and holy opportunities for ministry, but there were a lot of opportunities. Then, of course, there is the state of the world that always seems to be one disaster away from total collapse, even as all the ongoing disasters hurt innocent people all around the globe.
For all these reasons and more, I remain in a constant state of exhaustion. And it’s nigh on impossible to give more than baseline functionality in such a state. As I wrote this sermon on Tuesday, I kept nodding off at my computer. (So I won’t blame you if you need a few minutes of shuteye and decide now is the perfect time.) But baseline functionality is not what God desires for us. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life and have it in abundance!” Can you imagine him saying, “I came that they may have existence and barely scrape by?” No! Our God is a God of abundance, of life in all its blossoming and burgeoning and flourishing.
At the end of today’s Gospel parable our translation has Jesus command, “Keep awake!” This is pretty confusing when in the middle of the story all ten bridesmaids fall asleep. But the “keep awake” translation could also be “keep alert” (CEB) or, more simply, “keep watch” (NIV). Let’s choose this last one to ponder for the rest of this sermon. How do we “keep watch” for the presence of Christ, the abundance of God, and the inbreaking of God’s reign while we are in the throes of extreme exhaustion?
First, we must recognize the exhaustion for what it is: a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual lethargy that diminishes all the ways we interact with others in this world. Physical exhaustion is probably the easiest to recognize. Our bodies tell us things all the time, but we are very, very good at ignoring them. We push and we push and we push until our bodies say, “No more!” Every one of us has a threshold, past which we can do no more, and we usually do not see the line until we’ve passed it. So we get sick or we get angry or we limp along, cursing our bodies for not being up to the unrealistic demands we placed on them.
Then there’s emotional exhaustion. We carry the burdens of so many others on our hearts. We worry. We fret. We feel vicarious pain. And all those burdens deplete us. So we respond by shutting off our emotions entirely, isolating ourselves from the messy lives of others, or we respond by plastering on a happy smile and pretending everything is okay.
Which brings us to spiritual exhaustion. This is the exhaustion that happens when our interior world does not match our exterior one. We desire to live by certain values like kindness, fairness, solidarity, generosity, and hospitality. But our broken world seems built to counteract such values. So we either adopt an “if you can’t be ’em, join ’em” attitude and replace our values with more “worldly and realistic” ones, or we fall back into surface-level platitudinous versions of our values where we let “kindness” dilute into “niceness” and so forth.
With the compounding effects of physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion, we find the easiest path is to check out, to shut our eyes against the world and other people. We stop keeping watch for God’s inbreaking reign. Rather than keeping our lamps lit with a supply of oil, we choose to blow them out, thus blinding ourselves to God’s movement.
But Jesus calls us to keep watch. He is the Light of the World, a light that the darkness can neither understand nor extinguish. And not only that but Jesus said that we, too, are the light of the world. We believe we have the Light of Christ within us. This light cannot be exhausted because it doesn’t come from us, from our limited human resources. This light comes from God, who said at the very beginning of Creation: “Fiat Lux!” “Let there be light!” (Sounds better in Latin.)
When I notice this light shining all the time, I remember that Jesus never gives a command without also giving the gifts necessary to see that command fulfilled. In this case, the command is to keep watch. And the gift is the Light by which to see, a Light of abundance that far outshines the bridesmaids’ lamps. We need not try to shine this Light by our own power. We need only to recognize that it is always shining.
That is the gift God gave me in writing this sermon – a reminder of the Light of the World shining upon my exhaustion, illuminating it, helping me to see how I can address the feelings of burnout, starting with the truth that the light itself doesn’t come from me. The Light is always shining, just as the sun is always shining even when the sky is dark or cloudy.
This week, I invite you to dwell upon how your own various and personal exhaustions are stopping you from keeping watch for God’s inbreaking reign. How have you blinded yourselves from seeing the Light of the World that is always shining? And how can you embrace anew the light that shines forth from you, independent of your own limited resources? These are the questions on my heart at this time of deep exhaustion. But there is also shining there the eternal answer that God gives to every question: “I will be with you. I am the Light shining in the darkness, the light that can never be extinguished.” Sometimes we need a tiny Jesus figurine hidden our shoe to help us remember.
- My dad says this all the time. 🙂 ↩︎
