This time of year, we are surrounded on every side by distracting reminders. As soon as the supermarket intercom reminds us to use that coupon to buy our Thanksgiving turkey, we turn around and see a display of Christmas candycanes. On Halloween, for instance, I walked into a drugstore in Jacksonville to buy candy for that evening and found Santa displays. The sun hadn't set. No one was even out trick-or-treating yet, and I was being treated to a display of red-nosed reindeer and snow-covered sleighs.

The strange thing about marketing is that it is intended to focus the consumer on one product, and on one reaction to that product (buy it!)-but with the barrage of bids for our attention, the end result is that marketing distracts us, not just from competing brands, but from what is most important in life. Distracting reminders abound.

It is in this context that I would like to take a moment to remind you of the last line of this morning's gospel lesson. "Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour."

As Advent fast approaches, we will hear more and more reminders to keep awake, be watchful, be vigilant, be ready. In the midst of these very sober admonitions, will the reminders to buy Hormel turkey and GE Christmas lights distract us, make us less able to focus on what matters? And what does matter, anyway, particularly as we gear up to the holidays? As always, in reply to such questions, the gospel presents us with a parable.

In this morning's gospel, we meet ten bridesmaids, five of whom are real girl scouts and five of whom are one oil flask short of a lit lamp. I wonder what happened to those five foolish bridesmaids-why weren't they prepared? I can imagine one hurrying into Jerusalem's supermarket, Try N' Save, the day before, having found the perfect bridesmaid's dress at the Wailing Wall-Mart, looking at all the different brand name oil lamps and comparing them to the store brand, very conscientiously buying everything she needs for the wedding banquet. As this bridesmaid rushes to the check-out aisle, she's about to reach for the oil flasks hanging next to the testa-mints and the kosher chewing gum when a headline from the Zion Enquirer catches her eye "Mary Admits: I Was an Unwed Teenage Mother." "Can it be true?" she wonders, so she grabs a copy, pays for her purchases, and leaves the store without the oil.

Such distractions are a common occurrence, I'm sure, with most of us (though personally I never buy the tabloids). I don't really blame the foolish bridesmaids so much for forgetting the oil as I wonder how I can avoid being a foolish bridesmaid in my own spiritual life. For let's face it: it's easy to be distracted from the important things (particularly the crucially important but easily overlooked little things, like oil)-especially when we don't exactly know what those important things might be.

Let's turn again to the parable to see if we can discern the characteristics of the important things-what makes them important, and what are the consequences of overlooking them? In the parable itself, the oil is the important commodity; having it ready at hand so that the bridesmaids can trim their lamps makes all the difference in the world between going into the wedding banquet and being left out in the cold. So I asked myself: were the five wise bridesmaids being cruel or uncaring when they refused to share their oil with the five foolish bridesmaids? Well, let's put it this way: if instead of oil lamps, all ten brought flashlights but only five of the flashlights had fresh batteries in them, and the others held either dead batteries or none at all, would it help matters for the wise to give one of their batteries to the foolish? "Sharing," in this case would result in ten useless flashlights-similarly with the oil lamps. Some things in life are simply our responsibility, and while grace abounds, no one can give me what I must get myself.

I also noticed that the foolish bridesmaids make a demand upon the wise ones that implies that another should be responsible for their own bad judgement and poor planning. As a middle school teacher, I hear such implicit demands all the time: I assign a book report, and on the day it is due, a student says "I thought it was due next week. May I have an extension?" My answer in the past, as a beginning teacher, was to say yes, until I realized that such extensions robbed the student of his or her own responsibility. Now I simply let the natural and/or logical consequences follow. I generally say "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm confident you will be more conscientious next time. I look forward to reading your report when you turn it in, but unfortunately, you can't expect that I can give it the grade it would normally deserve, since you will have had more time to work on your report than your classmates. That said, I'm sure you'll do a fine job, and if you work hard your term grade should not be adversely affected too much, though it will still be lower than what you would have gotten had you turned it in to me today." This puts the ball back in the student's court, where it belongs.

So, too, with the bridesmaids. Like good teachers, the wise bridesmaids point out a simple, if unfortunate, fact: "there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves." It's what happens next, though, that is the really disturbing part to me. For unlike a student who turns in a report late and gets a B- rather than an A-, the foolish bridesmaids essentially flunk out of school altogether. Or, to use the language of the parable itself, they miss out on the wedding banquet, and when they knock on the door, the lord tells them "Truly I tell you, I do not know you."

When I went to my usual sources for commentary on this parable, I was surprised by the tendency of the commentators to be in denial of the hard truth I believe this parable points to: that sometimes, we find ourselves in situations when the door is closed. The commentators were more inclined to take it as a rhetorical warning, like the mother who tells her recalcitrant child in the candy shop "I guess I'll just have to leave without you, then." The threat of abandonment in the candy shop is meant to shock the child into obedience, and the threat of being shut out of the wedding feast is meant to jolt the hearers into attentiveness. While that's a convenient rhetorical analysis, it's essentially in denial of a hard truth about human limitations: sometimes, we get somewhere, and the door is shut. We don't have the options we wanted, and there's nothing we can do in that moment to rectify the situation.

I don't like to hear such messages, because I would like to believe in cheap grace-that however I screw things up, I'll always get off the hook in the end. But I forget that while God's forgiveness and grace always abounds, that does not mean that if I inflict harm on others or myself, all the hurt and pain will magically disappear when I say "I'm sorry." Unfortunately, I can think of far too many examples that are too close for comfort: the parent who dies before being reconciled to the child; the husband and wife who find that it is too late to save the marriage; the foolish bridesmaid who forgets to buy the oil.

When I reflected upon these painful, "door-shutting" situations, which I know we've all experienced in one form or another, I wondered: what can I do that will keep me from such death, such pain, or from just plain missing out on the banquet? What's the secret, here? What am I missing?

Well, folks, there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that there isn't one secret answer, some key to attentiveness, to keeping awake all the time. After all, even the wise bridesmaids grew drowsy and slept; they may have been girl scouts, but they weren't perfect, either. But they were prepared enough so that when the shout came "Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him," they were able to trim their lamps and let their light shine. They were sufficiently ready because they'd done the simple things that needed to be done. And that's the good news: attentiveness, readiness, preparing to enter through the open door rather than getting caught off guard and finding the door fast shut, is a matter of living life by practicing with consistency those good things we as Christians are called to do every day. As Charlie put it to me, "Character is what you do when no one's looking."

Just last Sunday, on All Saints', we welcomed the newly baptized and renewed our own baptismal covenant. We promised to continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. We promised to persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fell into sin, to repent and return to the Lord. We promised to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ. We promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. Finally, we promised to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.

Worship. Repent. Proclaim. Serve. Respect. These are the basic food groups in a balanced diet of faithful daily living. These are our daily bread. They are also our oil and our lamps, our hope and our future. They are ever present and too often absent. Worship. Repent. Proclaim. Serve. Respect. If we can just keep these things by our side, on our minds and in our hearts, we will not end up like the foolish bridesmaids. We will awaken from our slumbers, light our lamps, and enter the Lord's wedding banquet. Amen.