November 8, 2026 - Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost: Fake It Till You Make It

November 8, 2026  Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Matthew 25:1-13
“Fake It Till You Make It”
Douglas T. King

In the town that I grew up in on the north shore of Long Island there were two basic ways you earned a paycheck, you taught at the local university, or you commuted into New York City every day.  For those who commuted back and forth you had two choices, you braved the Long Island Railroad or you braved the Long Island Expressway.  Either way the commute was about two hours each way, and that was if there were no delays for accidents, or weather, or construction, or mechanical malfunctions.  My personal favorite delay was the time an eighteen-wheeler full of glass jars of mayonnaise overturned on the expressway spilling its contents everywhere.  

This commute meant that for much of the year you left your home in the dark and returned home in the dark.  If you had young children there was a chance that you did not see them awake except on weekends.  And this was pre cell phones and laptops so there was no work or socializing going on during all of this commute time.  If you lived this way you had to learn what it meant to expect and live with delays in your life.  This is why in my times working in Brooklyn and Manhattan I always lived within walking distance from where I worked.  Delays make me itchy.    

But there was one group of train-riding folks who were clearly the masters at living with delays.  Every Friday evening commute these folks would meet up in the last car of their train.  Each week they would take turns bringing hors d’oeuvres and adult beverages to share.  They would get their weekend started before their weekend could actually start. The train may break down delaying them from their weekend, but they were already weekending.
 
At this point, so this qualifies as a sermon, we might pivot to our text from Matthew and Jesus’ story of the ten young women and the not so punctual bridegroom.  To be honest, the story does not seem all that just.  It is the bridegroom who is so late and it is the young women who get denied access to the party.  Is it really the young women’s responsibility to be prepared for the bridegroom not honoring the appointed time?  Feels like an opportunity for a conversation about gender politics but I will sidestep that.  

To be fair we do not know why the bridegroom was delayed.  Besides, we need to label the players in the analogy.  The bridegroom represents God.  And we are the young women, both foolish and wise, living in the midst of what can feel like the apparent absence of the divine.  In the Jewish tradition the oil the young women possessed symbolized two things, good deeds, and the Torah, the embodiment of faithfulness.  The wise women continued to demonstrate their faith regardless of the wait.  

This story of Jesus brings us counsel of how to live our lives when it feels as if God’s presence is delayed or absent in our midst.  In the nascent church of Matthew’s day, the promise of Christ’s return came with urgent possibility.  As the days, weeks, months, and years passed without a big, bold return of Christ ushering eternity in for everyone, there was a great risk of wearisome ennui.  

If you thought Jesus was showing up tomorrow to tangibly blanket you in transforming grace and love, or to judge you, it would be relatively easy to praise God’s name, say your prayers, love your neighbor, and feed the poor, bringing the best of who you are to light.  But when tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow come and there is no sign of Jesus it is easy to lose focus.  I would love to worship God but the golf course beckons.  Praying would be wonderful but I am just so busy.  Love my neighbor?  Sure in theory, but people are kind of annoying.  How about reasonably tolerate?  Feed the poor? Well, there are so many of them, I would not know where to start.

These days the majority of us do not put a lot of thought into Jesus’ imminent return, but we can experience a sense of God’s absence at times in our lives.  We can begin to question how engaged the divine is in our lives.  God can seem distant and even irrelevant in the midst of our day-to-day routines.  And because of that our sense of immediacy and urgency in our relationship with God can become muffled and muted.  Perhaps with no specific intentionality we find ourselves less likely to pray; to come to worship; to volunteer to serve others.  If God does not appear to be at work in our lives, why, in the midst of our hectic lives, place a priority on our relationship with God and living as God has called us to live?  How do we choose to respond when the bridegroom is running late and it feels like he may never arrive?  

We know what those wise women did.  They lived in a bit of a dual reality.  They both believed that the bridegroom could show up at any moment and they were prepared to wait and wait and wait as necessary.  And no matter how long the wait went, they believed the bridegroom could and would come knocking any second.  They lived as if he was present or about to be.  

Our Long Island commuters had a similar perspective in how they lived their lives.  On that ride home every Friday evening they may have been engaged in their arduous commute home, but they lived as if their weekend had begun.  Whatever delays they may have faced, the weekend was present with them by the actions they chose.

No matter the challenge before us, we are called to live as if the kingdom of God has arrived, as if the bridegroom is walking in the door with a bottle of champagne in each hand.  In his tender novel, Time of the Child, the brilliant Irish writer, Niall Williams describes the fictional tiny, hardscrabble village of Faha in this way, “Resolve was the first requisite of life here.” (Williams, p.1) Later he goes on to describe the villagers as “Carrying on with the requisite unperturb and patience of all followers of an intermittent God.”  (Williams, p. 32) Indeed.

There will undoubtedly be days when God will feel distant in our lives.  When the idea of showing up for worship feels like just going through the motions.  When it feels as if our prayers are merely floating into an uncaring ether.  When we cannot recognize any blessings in our midst worthy of gratitude.  When serving others feels like a chore best left to others.

After all, who knows if God even exists, and if God does, how does that relate directly to my life on a daily basis?  The journey of faithfulness will often include a dance between doubt and faith.  And frankly, a faith that does not entertain doubts runs the risk of being superficial.  As Emily Dickinson wrote, “We both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.”  

To quote a well-used bit of folk wisdom, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it.  We are called to pray when we cannot sense anyone is listening; to worship on days when we do not feel all that worshipful; to serve others when we are not feeling all that generous. The author Karen Armstrong writes that in premodern societies “Religion was a matter of doing not thinking.” (p. 25) In the modern world we start from the place of accepting a set of principles about who God is.  Belief begins with intellectual ascent, and when that ascent wavers, we run the risk of a disembodied and disengaged faith.  But in the premodern world the beginning of the journey was engaging in the rituals of the faith before one has developed any particular coherent belief system.  There is wisdom to be found in this practice.  We are called to live as if we are experiencing the presence of God even when we find it challenging to do so.  

Let us pray, even and especially when we are not sure if God can hear us.  Let us worship, even when we are struggling to experience gratitude.  Let us serve others, even when we are not feeling all that generous or charitable.  Let us live as if Jesus the bridegroom is about to be knocking on the door.  It is ever time to get the party started and celebrate the arrival of the kingdom of God. Pass the hors d’oeuvres and pour me a cocktail.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Armstrong, Karen, The Case for God, Knopf, New York, 2009.
Williams, Niall, The Time of the Child, Bloomsbury, New York, 2024.