This sermon was preached for the Feast Day of Christ the King, Sunday, November 26 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow, MA. The readings for this sermon were: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24, Psalm 100, and Matthew 25:31-46.
My sister got me onto this podcast, Heavyweight, a while ago. In it, Jonathan Goldstein puts two people in conversation with one another about something important and meaningful they haven’t ever had the chance to talk about, the words they never said. Some of the most exciting episodes involve a person who had one brief encounter with a kind or compassionate stranger that completely changed their life. Armed with just a few sparse details, Goldstein the host goes on a wild chase to bring the two back together so that the stranger could learn how impactful their small gesture of kindness had been.
This past week’s podcast starts out that way. It’s the story of a man, Nick, who was accidentally shot by a coworker fooling around with a loaded gun. In chaos of the aftermath of the shooting, one stranger he had just met showed him great care and concerned. Even though he never learned his name, Jonathan and Nick track him down using 30 year old police statements. So Nick does indeed get to thank that guy, who turns out was named Jared, over an out-of-the-blue Facebook message. Great story, but it doesn’t linger there. Instead of focusing on Nick’s touching reconnection with Jared, the episode pivots to the real conversation Nick needed to have: not with the one who showed him a brief flash of kindness, but with the ex-girlfriend, Maggie, who was there by his side through months of traumatic recovery. Still friends thirty years later, they had never actually talked about what his rage and pain had put her through. She has been there for him, the safest person to unload on, the person able to absorb his anger about his shooting, about his alcoholic, neglectful father. It’s only now, thirty years later, weeks after his dad’s death, and with the help of the podcast host, that Nick is finally able to turn to Maggie and say I’m sorry, I’m honored by your friendship. To say to her, “You are the hero of this story.”
When people asked Jesus what the essence of faithful living is, he said two commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. If someone wants to know more about what he meant by that I usually point them to two passages: 1) the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke and 2) the passage from Matthew we just heard. In it, Jesus lays out just how to love and serve God: by feeding the hungry, sating the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, nursing the sick, and visiting the prisoner. In this parable, Jesus reveals that the two commandments, love God and love your neighbor, are actually one in the same.
One of the most beautiful aspects of Christianity done right is how those two stories from Jesus have inspired Christians throughout the centuries to feed, clothe, house, nurse, and protect the most vulnerable and the socially ostracized - the least of these. It’s easy to forget that Christians invented the social institutions that serve the underprivileged - that it was the Church who ran the first hospitals, orphanages, halfway houses, and schools for the poor. Churches like St. Mark’s have continued in that tradition, with great impact on the wider community through our outreach - all that is to be celebrated. But I want us never to forget the most arresting detail of Jesus’ parable. The sheep and the goats are both surprised to learn who Christ had been in their lives. They are surprised to learn when they had served Christ, and they are surprised to learn when they had passed him by.
Although everyone addresses Jesus as Lord, the righteous don’t know they are righteous. And the goats don’t know they are goats.
In Barbara Brown Taylor’s interpretation of the parable of the sheep and the goats in her book Holy Envy, Rev. Taylor quotes Russian Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Every human relationship I’ve had has driven this home for me: that we are all capable of kindness and cruelty - sometimes in the same breath - and that we are all lacking in some degree of self-awareness - particularly about our impact on those who we overlook. So when I approach this parable it’s not to anxiously ask whether I’ll be declared a sheep or a goat forever and forever amen, but rather to examine, really examine, the ways I fluctuate between being a goat or a sheep unknowingly throughout my life. Facing the truth of God’s judgment is less about looking out and trying to guess who’s a sheep and who’s a goat. Facing the truth of God’s judgment means being willing to subject pieces of my own heart to the refining fire.
Nick’s Heavyweight episode could have been a nice heartwarming story of how he got to tell a stranger how they had been a sheep to him - how they had cared for him in just the right way at the moment of sudden trauma. “When was it Lord, that we served you?” Jared would ask. Then, Nick would say, then in the motel room with the towel when you waited with me for the ambulance to arrive. But instead, the episode became Nick’s realization of how he himself had been a goat - how he had been neglectful and hurtful to the one he loved and depended on during his long, frustrating recovery. The one right by his side. “When was it, Lord, that we did not see you, did not welcome you, did not love you?” And Maggie takes a deep breath and tells her story.
Who is hardest for us to see as Christ? Who is, right now for us, hardest to love?
These days, it’s relatively easy to be deliberately charitable. With a push of a button, you can send money all over the world to the places it’s needed most. This past Thursday, there were dozens of opportunities all over the commonwealth to serve Thanksgiving dinner to the hungry and lonely. Those are great and wonderful ways to practice our Christianity - ways we meet and serve Christ in the least of these. They are also contained, controlled, and over there. We set aside time and money to do them, maybe even travel to another state or country. We smile and shake hands, and then we go home.
But on the drive back there’s that man standing at the stoplight with a cardboard sign in his hand, you’ve seen him before, the one whose eye contact you avoid every time there’s a red. And there’s missed calls on your phone from that cousin who’s down on his luck, again, and could he crash with you?
God is not contained, controlled, over there. Never has been, never will be. Christ is also in the people we encounter when we aren’t thinking about being a good Christian. Christ is in the people we live with. Christ is the people who work with us. The hungry, lost, and lonely people are not always the most obvious. There is so much hidden hurt in so many people. So close it might surprise us. So close it might be painful to acknowledge.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the surprise is that the neighbor is the one who looks different, worships differently, speaks a different language, and even adheres to a different moral code. But could our surprise actually be that our neighbor is literally our neighbor? Our adult child? Our ex-wife?
Being Christian means continually taking a hard and transformative look at how we treat every human being in our life. No matter how we tell our story, I believe we will all be surprised by God in the end. Surprised by our capacity for callousness, surprised by our capacity for kindness. But most of all, we will be surprised by God’s grace.
It can be sobering to reflect that all God cares about, really, in the end, is how well we loved and cared for each human being we encountered. That being in relationship with Christ means being in relationship with the very people who are hardest to love. But there is freedom and good news, too, in the banishing of the goats, and in the promise that every story will get to be told and known in the end. When I read this passage now, I close my eyes and imagine all the selfish, inconsiderate, skeptical, and miserly parts of myself being sent away until all that’s left is my capacity for love, and goodness, and grace. May it be so.
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