November 23, 2014
Text: Matthew 25:31-46
I crawl in this morning, brought low by the surprising strength of a very little thing—the common cold. It is good when working on a sermon to be reminded that in the grand scope of things, I am quite small and powerless. Michael Leunig has a prayer dedicated to the cold in his little book called The Prayer Tree:
God bless those who suffer from the common cold.
Nature has entered into them;
Has led them aside and gently lain them low
To contemplate life from the wayside;
To consider human frailty;
To receive the deep and dreamy messages of fever.
We give thanks for the insights of this humble perspective.
We give thanks for blessings in disguise.
Amen.
“We give thanks for blessings in disguise.” So,I guess this will be a Thanksgiving sermon after all.
Because the truth is, I find this gospel passage to fit better, not in my Thanksgiving file, butin my “thanks, but no thanks” file, along with othersthat can make it sound like God and God’s followers are not very inclusive and loving. Or any scriptures that sound dualistic, setting up one group, one idea against another. Or scriptures that make it sound as though some of us are more enlightened and holier than the rest of us. Any scripture that can be used to add to the divisiveness and violence we already are burdened by—truly suffering under the delusion of—in this dear world, I want to set aside. Not throw them out, just put them on hold for a future time when I might be more enlightened and able to understand them.
So you can imagine the dis-ease, more severe than a cold, which came over me when I saw that this morning’s gospel, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, is takendirectly from my “thanks, but no thanks” file! Here is the too familiar scene in which “good” people are separated from “bad” people;the ones who are so disciplined in doing good, kind things that they don’t even notice all the good they have done, are separated from the ones like me, who don’t notice or respond to all the needs. In this parable, it can sound like mercy takes a back seat to judgment. I might be “washed inthe blood of the lamb,” but I still find myself in a bloody mess. “Jesus, when did I see you in need and ignore you? I like to think I wouldn’t do that.What?! You mean everytime I overlook ‘one of the least of these,’ I have overlooked you?! Wow!”
So there it goes, into my special file.
I do like the ‘works of mercy’ part of this scripture. It can be helpful to have a list—feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the unwelcomed, visit the prisoner. Now that we knowwhat is expectedwe can try our hardest to step up. Unless it’s a bad time, or a busy season, or we’re trying not to be too codependent. Or we get a cold. But“trying our best to step up and do what’s expected” is not-so-good news because I already have given it a shot and I know how much I fail...so that surely can’t be the gospel.
I’m reading a book about the tension between the life we live and all the other lives we don’t live—although they impact us anyway. All the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” lives that especially can haunt us as we age. Wouldn’t you think we would have accomplished more by now? Found our most creative self? Helped more people? Learned more? Maybe this is one of the things that bothers me about this passage of scripture, that it can drag me into the dark places of my own ego that tries to get me to believe the Christian life is about “what we’re not doing”—how much, for how many people, for how long. But this is a bottomless pit that can never be dug deep enough. I will never “be all that I can be,” despite the army’s slogan that says I can. How to deepen into the boundless freedom of God’s grace if we hear a message saying to keep trying(and failing), trying(and failing), again and again?Do I have to just wait for the end of time andhope to be among those allowed in to God’s heaven?
Which leads me to the other reason this scripture is in my “thanks, but no thanks” file—that pesky part at the end of the story when the ones who didn’t see Jesus,and therefore didn’t respond to the hunger and pain of those in need, are “cast into the eternal fire.” Really?? The ones who acted compassionately had not seen Jesus either, so that can’t be the problem. Is salvation, then,about good deeds—what we do,and for whom we do them? I recognize this taps into my struggle to find deeper trust in God’s free and undeserved gifts, which I will never be able toEARN. This scripture sounds like we can, and must, earn salvation. I do want to love Jesus in the poor and downcast—and God knows I need the poor and downcast to love Jesus in me. This scripture passage leaves me feeling afraid that I’ll fail. I’ll be abandoned and sent away. Which would be a shame because then I would never discover all of who God really is, and all of who I really am.
In that serendipity that sometimes occurs when we randomly open a book to see if there might be a word especially for us in our current condition, I dipped into Cry Pain, Cry Hope yesterday. Everyone should have a copy of this book in their home, just for the title alone. On page 136, Elizabeth O’Connor writes this:
Gordon preached a sermon today on fear. He said: ‘When I reflect deeply on my life and what I really want, it is not to be afraid. When I am afraid, I am miserable. I play it safe. I restrict myself. I hide the talent of me in the ground. I am not deeply alive—the depths of me are not being expressed. When I am afraid a tiny part of me holds captive most of me which rebels against the tyranny of the minority. When I am afraid I am a house divided against itself. So more than anything else I want to be delivered from fear, for fear is alien to my own best interest or, to put it positively, I want to give myself generously, magnanimously, freely—out of love. I want to be able to take risks—to express myself, to welcome and embrace the future. I want to see what it is to be most deeply me. I want union with all of life and existence. I want to know and sense a oneness with others—with all humankind. I want to know warmth and closeness, to give acceptance and understanding and support. I want to sacrifice myself freely, for this is when I am most alive, most me. I sense that the art of loving, the art of risk taking, is my thing.’
“I sense that the art of risk taking is my thing.”
I got to thinking—maybe in this story Jesus was calling us to do some risk taking. Maybe he told it to achieve the very thing I spent the weekend doing—wrestling with him, questioning him, encountering him. Maybe I need to take the risk of having some new ideas about what it means to “do good,” why I do it, and for whom.Who is getting overlooked?In whom am I most apt to encounter Jesus? Maybe he wants us to experiment with the art of loving, not as a ‘doing for,’ not as a ‘should,’ but because we are falling so much in love with “expressing and welcoming and embracing”our life that we can’t help ourselves. Love in concrete actions just naturally flows.
But as for the ending of this parable—the eternal punishment for those of us who fail—I still don’t know about that. Not knowing is okay. Probably what matters the most is the encounter, beingopen enough to hear something we haven’t heard before. This time, I see in the story how remarkable it would have been for those listeners to hear Jesus say that all the characters in the story—the so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ alike—stood up to the authoritywho was judging them and questioned what he was saying. “WHEN did we see you—or not see you?” they ask. To stand up to aking in theirday and time would have meant to risk imprisonment or torture or worse.
The fact that Jesus says they took that risk—and that even the ones who were called ‘blessed’ took the risk along with the ones who were called ‘accursed’—makes me wonder if he might be urging us to see that it’s time for a whole new level of risk taking, a whole new order. A new kind of king and a new kind of people. Maybe he is hoping we will take a few more risks ourselves, speaking up, letting it be known that we areone body, and we refuse to be divided any longer into meaningless categories like friends and enemies, saved and lost, insiders and outsiders, sheep and goats. Maybe the story is challenging us to take the risk of disagreeing, even with scripture, no longer dismissing parts of ourselves. Maybe Jesus is longing for us at last to say, ‘If anyone is cast aside, that’s where you’ll find the rest of us, too.’
My nephew’s wife has a pretty serious heart condition, and on one of her hospital visits she picked up that awful infection called Merz. To be able to get the antibiotics directly into her heart whenever the need arises, the doctors implanted a pump just beneath the skinon her chest so the meds can reach the danger zone fast. It’s certainly not a comfortable procedure; it can burn when the medicines go in, but it is life-saving. I think I’ll start looking at scriptures like these, the ones I want to cast aside,as medicine that needs to get under my skin, despite how they sting, because they are meant not to harm, but to heal.May we allowGod’s healing merciesto drip into our heart of hearts. Forall the difficultblessings that come to us in disguise,may we be truly thankful. Amen.