This past Tuesday, I was going about my usual routine: Morning Prayer followed by our ESL coffee hour, both as always filled with pleasant chatter. There I was introduced to a new participant, who at first seemed no different from anyone else. She spoke next to no English, but I was able to speak to her in her native language. And as I welcomed her and asked the usual question, “What brought you to Canada?” her matter-of-fact response stopped me in my tracks: “Three years ago, I was doing the dishes in my kitchen and a bomb flew in through the window. It was red. We cried, we had nothing to eat, and then we came here. Everything I am wearing right now is not my own.”

After work that same day, as I was driving to pick up my children from school, I noticed a synagogue. It is a white building with a prominent archway at the front, and all that brightness, in that moment, framed an armed guard dressed entirely in black. I couldn’t help connecting this visual contrast with the deeper one between the message of a religious life and the need to protect it that exists in various times and places.

When we encounter such things personally, rather than learning about conflicts of the past or watching them unfold in the news, they affect us differently. War is no longer a historical event or a collection of images and videos, but this particular woman, who was once doing the dishes in her kitchen and now has nothing left of that life. At such times, I find myself thinking: surely this world cannot go on like this. And that is actually very close to what Jesus and Paul thought about the world of their time, as Jewish thinkers within the tradition we now call apocalyptic Judaism. This tradition centred on the anticipation of God’s decisive intervention to end the age of suffering and injustice and establish a renewed creation. But human beings being human, both then and now, we are preoccupied with the question: who will be included in this new world, and who will be left out? Among the answers we have inherited are Gospel passages about narrow doors that eventually close, and about sheep and goats separated into different herds.

In November, as the days grow darker, the church year ends with such dark readings about the world’s end. Today, Matthew 25 [click here to read the text] imagines the coming of God’s kingdom as a wedding feast for which ten women wait. Five have enough oil to light their way when the celebration finally begins, while the other five must go looking for more, by which time the doors have been locked. But in the context of Remembrance Sunday, when we honour lives lost on the front lines and in civilian kitchens, the last thing I would want to do is speculate about who might be locked out of eternal life with God. Fortunately, I am not the first theologian to envision another interpretation. For example, the façade of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Rome features a medieval mosaic of ten women holding lamps, traditionally associated with the wise and foolish bridesmaids. Yet all ten women are wearing halos, even those whose lamps are not lit!

My belief is that, as this mosaic suggests, we will all receive our halos. So will the soldiers on every side of every battle, and so will the women and children whose lives wars destroy. All ten bridesmaids were waiting for a bridegroom who was not even their own, and all ten became tired and fell asleep. Yes, some had brought additional oil to last them past midnight, while others had not. But when the latter discovered that their lamps were going out, they were quite willing to obtain more. At times, we too have enough strength, hope, patience, and generosity to remain prepared and equipped to do the right thing in a given situation. But not infrequently, when we are exhausted and running on fumes, our response is less prompt or gracious than it might otherwise be.

Yet God’s grace is infinitely greater than all our failures, limitations, and capacity to destroy and distort what is good. So perhaps what cannot pass through the locked door is not the human soul, but the burdens it carries today: selfishness, cruelty, greed, the desire to dominate, and the injuries that make us incapable of loving as we were created to love. Indeed, these things cannot belong in the renewed creation, but neither do they define us forever. God will heal what is wounded, reconcile what is divided, and make everything in creation good again, just as God declared it good in the beginning.

Even the Last Post and Reveille can be heard as symbols of death as a temporary sleep, and resurrection as an awakening to God’s presence and renewed eternal life. In that life to come, “every tear will be wiped away”. Yet in this life, our choices matter. This is the life in which we learn to recognize and participate in the kind of world God is making new. And each time we miss an opportunity to care, reconcile, and protect, we shut ourselves out of the wedding celebration, so to speak, that is here and now. So the most important question is not how we can remain awake indefinitely, because none of us can, but what wakes us up to action, and how our own light, over the course of our short lives, might dispel at least some of the darkness that makes us long for the world to end.

Let me tell you about two people who illuminate the world through the music we will hear today. The first is the person from whom I learned about those ten haloed bridesmaids. He is the director of the community choir I recently joined. As we began rehearsing J. S. Bach’s Cantata 140, Wachet auf, or “Wake up,” composed for this very Gospel passage, he not only told us the biblical story but connected it to his own visit to Rome and his delight in discovering an image in which all ten bridesmaids had halos. He regularly speaks with similar delight about the music, and occasionally about the theology behind it. Now, this is a community choir. We perform sacred music, but many members have no religious affiliation and likely know very little about the Creed we sing, or the purpose of a Mass setting, or the Gospel stories reflected in Bach’s cantatas, or the Lutheran hymns that became transformed into these compositions. Our director has never once suggested that Christianity is the only possible source of joy, beauty, or meaning. He simply shares, without embarrassment or apology, the joy and meaning that he himself finds in sacred music. Through his enthusiasm, people who might never encounter these biblical texts in church come to appreciate something of their richness.

Do you have such opportunities in your life to share your hope, joy, and delight without judging anyone or imposing anything on them? I suggest that one way to live out our faith and to brighten up our world is to look for such moments in things we already do, rather than looking for big projects or trying to create initiatives for people whose needs we know only in theory.

And the second example is Bach himself. When Bach took up his position in Leipzig, he undertook the astonishing task of providing a new cantata for worship almost every week. These were substantial compositions, often half an hour long, functioning as musical sermons alongside the spoken one, in services that could last several hours. Imagine the weekly process: Monday and Tuesday to compose, Wednesday to try the music out with a skilled singer, Thursday to copy the parts by hand for all the singers and instrumentalists and allow the ink to dry, and Friday and Saturday to rehearse. And then do it all again the following week! Of course, Bach did not do it alone. His wife, Anna Magdalena, had been a professional court singer. As a woman, she was not permitted to sing at church, but she could contribute her skills at home, including trying out arias, copying scores, and organizing the choirs. She too contributed to the light their family shone. And then there were the choirs of all those schoolboys, many of them impoverished, with varying degrees of talent and experience, whose lives were regimented and demanding, yet whose work made worship possible for so many.

The particular cantata we hear today was composed for a Sunday that, in Bach’s time, occurred only when Easter fell unusually early. We follow a different lectionary now and hear this Gospel every three years. The cantata was first performed in November 1731 and, as far as we know, never again during Bach’s lifetime, yet it became one of his most beloved works. Bach took a hymn written more than a century earlier by Philipp Nicolai, familiar to his congregation. Its melody runs through the cantata, surrounded by intricate musical lines, until the final movement returns it to a chorale in which everyone can join. It was rather like hearing one of your favourite pop or rock songs transformed into a magnificent work: you recognize its melody throughout, even as the composer plays with it in incredible ways, and at the end, you get to sing along! [Click here to hear a recording of BWV140].

Today our choir will sing the opening movement. Listen for the way the music seems to awaken us. The lower voices enter with urgent calls, while the sopranos carry the familiar hymn melody above them in long, sustained notes. The different musical lines call and answer one another, until they come together in a joyful Alleluia that spans many bars. What strikes me about this music is that this awakening is not a threat but an invitation: something wonderful is approaching, and the whole community is being called to take part. Later in the cantata, a soprano-tenor duet portrays the bride, representing the soul or the Church, talking with the bridegroom, representing Christ. Drawing on the Song of Songs, they sing with joy that “my beloved is mine.”

And I wonder whether our own relationship with God unfolds over the course of our lives rather like a cantata. Throughout this life, we hear fragments of God’s great song, recognize its recurring theme, and learn it as best we can. Sometimes we hear the melody clearly; sometimes we can barely discern it beneath the complexity of life. We recognize it in an act of kindness, in a moment of reconciliation, in the beauty of creation, in someone else’s courage, or in an unexpected encounter that awakens us. Each time, we have an opportunity to harmonize with our own voice, adding our own contribution to the work that God is composing in the world. Sometimes our voices are strong, like lamps that burn brightly; at other times, they falter, like lamps that go out.

Remembrance, and honouring the self-giving of others, is one way of learning to recognize that theme. Another is to keep noticing, in the present, the moments when we can ease someone’s burden, bring light into their world, and offer a little care and hope. The woman I met on Tuesday needed to be welcomed and heard, and to have a place where she could learn the language of her new home. The people worshipping in that synagogue need neighbours who recognize their safety as a shared responsibility. These are all ordinary ways of recognizing and joining in the divine song, in which every voice matters, even though the music does not depend on any one of us to continue. And when our own earthly work is finished, when we lay down our lamps and fall asleep, God’s grace will awaken us into a world in which every tear has been wiped away, every broken harmony restored, and every voice finally finds its place. And then, like the congregation at the end of Bach’s cantata, we will join in the everlasting song.