Proper 27
Three certainly is the magic number. Last week we had three kinds of saints. There are three aspects of God. There are three sides of a triangle. This week there are three kinds of apocalypse. This is going to be important. Not only for this week's Gospel story, but also for the whole season of Advent, just a couple of weeks away. They say this story about the Ten Bridesmaids is an apocalyptic story. However, when most of us think of apocalypse, we tend to think of it in two ways. Either in the sense of natural disasters ending the world, the first type of apocalypse, or in the sense of man-made destruction ending the world, the second type of apocalypse. You know the movies, 2012, Deep Impact, 28 Days Later, Armageddon... Hollywood loves making these movies. We have a unparalleled fascination with the end of the world. Yet, The story of the Ten Bridesmaids is about neither kind of apocalypse. There isn't a natural disaster or a man-m...