November 23, 2008
(Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King)
Welcome to the Party
by The Rev. Carol Sanford, Priest Associate
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 • Psalm 95:1-7a •
Ephesians 1:15-23 • Matthew 25:31-46
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Good morning. I would like to invite all of you to a party. I would like to invite you to a party in honor of an event that hasn’t happened. I would like for you to bring presents for someone who hasn’t shown up. I would like for you to contribute to the party by bringing the very best food and decorations and music that you have. No, actually, just bring everything you have. Oh, and bring your friends and family and anyone else you can get to come with you to help out. So: I am inviting you to get the hall ready and bring the food and buy the presents and attend the party in honor of the event that hasn’t happened and the person who hasn’t shown up. Will you come? Too late. You’re already here.
This is the day we celebrate the Reign of Christ. Today we shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation [Psalm 95] and give thanks for the final coming in glory with all his angels of Christ the King. We are celebrating something that Scripture tells us will happen, something that our ancestors in faith believed will happen, something that we want desperately to happen but something that rather obviously hasn’t happened yet. Why on earth would we do such a thing? Why are we celebrating the return of someone who hasn’t actually come back?
What we are waiting for, as people of faith, is the day when all good things are restored within the love of God, when Christ comes again and everything and everyone who is lost or has strayed is searched out and rescued and gathered up into the mighty power of the King of kings; the time when our prayers are fulfilled and life will be on earth as it is in heaven. How do you envision that day?
I picture smiling, healthy people and communities where children play safely in all neighborhoods and hunger and war and disease are no more. I see contented animals who either aren’t destined at all for the dinner table or who arrive there after wholesome lives and non-fearful deaths. I see sparkling streams and oceans with abundant clean water for all God’s creatures alongside flourishing forests and fruitful fields. I hear laughter and music and all the sounds of contented life. I do not, frankly, imagine anyone being cast into eternal punishment. What I imagine is a world based in the love and abundance that I believe God has always intended for us.
My design for the coming of Christ the King is of course ridiculously constrained by the limitations of human imagination, but I think I have a few things right. I am convinced that the Reign of Christ must be about love and forgiveness and peace and joy. I believe it because I have seen it.
There is a general rule of thumb in relationships that goes like this: listen to what people say, but believe what they do. We can trust the promises of God because God has already proved faithful. The foundations of our Holy Scriptures are not just theories of what God is, that mostly came later. Our Holy Scriptures are fundamentally descriptions of what God has done. God created the earth. God brought Israel out of slavery. God led his people through the wilderness even though they cried out against him. God kept God’s promises and then those promises came and dwelt among us in Jesus Christ.
What God says and what God does were joined in the Word made flesh. Lives and hearts and bodies were healed and Jesus demonstrated in his crucifixion and resurrection that we have nothing to fear from sin and death because God keeps to his part of the bargain.
We expect Christ to come in glory because God has been showing up all along. Present with us in the Holy Spirit, God has, in fact, never left. We have reasonable expectation of what God will do because we see what God has done. We believe because God has shown himself to be believable and our hope for the future is based in past hopes fulfilled.
But how are we to feel hopeful in the face of a volatile economy, personal troubles and an unfinished war? Will we go home today to find that God has filled up our bank balances and brought home our troops and healed every disease? Probably not. But God will be with us to calm our fears and nourish our spirits so that we may walk more gently through distressing times and be inspired in our decisions for our own welfare and for the good of all God’s creation.
Witness the recent visit of our Presiding Bishop to the Diocese of Haiti, where schools and clinics, new churches, and both local and international Episcopal effort work to revive the land and the economy as well as the hearts of the people as they face of poverty, disaster and mismanagement of resources. The Reign of Christ in Haiti is not fulfilled, but the relief brought through God’s faithful people is evident. Rejoice that our Dean, along with our Bishop and others, has gone forth in uncertain times into the unfamiliar land of Botswana to continue the work of bridging cultural, geographic and economic divisions among God’s children. The Kingdom is incomplete, but mighty.
And look around you here at the Cathedral. I have seen too much of your faithful work, witnessed and received too many of your kindnesses and known too much of your charity to do anything but believe that God is faithful. I believe that the fullness of God’s Reign will come not just because we have been told that it is , but because it is already visible.
If God says that the Reign of Christ will overcome everything on earth, then I am more than happy to throw a party in advance. This Sunday before Thanksgiving is the perfect time to reflect upon God’s abundant mercy. We make our way out from this celebration of the glorious King of kings and walk across the courtyard to the Advent workshop to begin preparing for the birth of the infant Prince of Peace and hope for all people.
One author has said that, “There is no such thing as a fraction of the loving kindness of God’ [EfM, Year 2 text, Ch. 10]. Like all of us, I am sometimes one of the fat sheep like those in Ezekiel who push and prod their way toward the pasture at the expense of others, and yet I believe that I am invited and welcomed to the feast along with everyone else. And I expect to see even the goats there beside me because God’s abundant love, in Christ, has triumphed over every sin.
But I also believe that the more fully we align ourselves with the will of God for her creation, the more our earthly experience is like the heavenly banquet. So let’s do everything we can to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and take care of the sick and to love and to care for one another and all of God’s creation, for this is our way here and now of sharing in God’s feast of life. It is nourishing and delightful beyond all expectation and a true foretaste of what is to come. Welcome to the Reign of Christ. Welcome to the party.
Choosing the One who Chose Us First
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
One of my guilty pleasures on Tuesday evenings is to watch a Discovery Channel show called Dirty Jobs. The host, Mike Rowe, travels around the country, trying his hand at all manner of repugnant jobs, sharing his humorous, self-deprecating insights at his incompetence in doing manual labor. Several weeks ago, the show featured Mike on the high plains of Colorado with a sheep herding outfit. The job that day was to catch the lambs, dock their tails, neuter most of the males, and sort the females according to potential breeding qualities. The fate of the neutered males and the unworthy females was then noted by a code stamped on their hindquarters. Those whose physical traits marked them as worthy of perpetuating the species received a different code. True to the title of the show, it was hot, dusty, messy, bloody work that, in terms of technology, probably hasn’t changed much in 3000 years’ time. Raising sheep always includes sorting the flock for its ultimate destiny – be it wool gathering, breeding stock, or Sunday dinner.
So the image that Jesus uses in his final Judgment parable would likely have been a familiar one to Matthew’s audience. Shepherds routinely sorted their flocks, and if their flocks comprised both sheep and goats, the sorting was an even more regular occurrence. Goats, for example, will eat things that sheep refuse to, but by the same token, will overgraze a pasture without careful management. But even if the imagery would likely have seemed familiar, the referent of the imagery would likely have been as scandalous to them as it is to us. For in this parable, the sorting takes place not according to innate characteristics but rather on the actions taken or not taken by the flock.
Today is the Feast of the Reign of Christ, or for the Royalists among us, the Feast of Christ the King. The apocalyptic imagery in today’s gospel, wherein the King separates the flocks, seems to borrow imagery from the prophet Ezekiel, from which our first lesson was taken. The prophetic tradition routinely imagined kings as shepherds, and in fact, the 10 verses which precede our reading from Ezekiel are sharply critical of bad kings, stylized by the prophet as bad shepherds, the kind of kings who led the people of Judah astray. Ezekiel of course prophesied during the siege of Jerusalem and immediately thereafter, presumably as one of the captives in exile in Babylon. Little wonder, when all seemed lost, that he envisioned a time when God would restore David, or at least Davidic leadership, to the throne. And little wonder that Matthew, writing to Jewish converts centuries later, would obliquely refer to this passage in Jesus’s last public teaching. Matthew, after all, is the gospeler most interested in showing Jesus to be the fulfillment of prophecy, the Son of David.
So we’re set up for Jesus to be Christ the King, the one who will feed his people and be their shepherd. But here’s the thing. As the collect from Holy Week reminds us, Jesus went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified. He will be the shepherd king who sorts the flock, but he will also be the paschal lamb, the sacrificial victim whose blood will bring freedom from bondage. This is a king who will not utter a word in his own defense, standing instead in radical solidarity with the anawim – the voiceless ones – the ones who are hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, or in prison. The Torah commands that the anawim be cared for, but Jesus ups the ante by becoming one of them in the ultimate act of powerlessness – crucifixion. So we are to understand that to minister to the voiceless powerless ones is not merely what faithful observance of the Law commends. To minister to the hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, and imprisoned ones IS to minister to Jesus as well.
As I mentioned last week in my morning sermon, the parables of judgment should not be read as an indictment so much as an affirmation that who we are and what we do matter. What we do matters in the future, but it most especially matters in the present moment – the time in between resurrection and parousia. The parable of the sheep and the goats, in this way, is not so much predictive of what will happen in the future as it is descriptive of what it is to be a disciple of Christ the Shepherd/King in the present. Those who understand that to minister to the anawim is to minister to Christ himself are blessed. They’re able to grasp the Kingdom because they see it clearly and in their actions live fully into the kingdom. Those who do not make that connection between Christ the Good Shepherd/King and the voiceless ones of society have cast their lot with a different kind of kingdom – a kingdom that not only tolerates but encourages certain people to be throw-aways; a kingdom where powerful competing groups find common ground in identifying the “Other” and excluding them from basic human rights; a kingdom where ignoring the needs of the voiceless ones makes sound economic and political sense.
In the old church calendar wording, today was known as the Sunday Next Before Advent. And Advent, of course, is the liturgical season in which we anticipate the coming of Christ – both as the Babe of Bethlehem but more especially as the One coming again in power and great triumph to judge the world. Of course we are meant to connect this final teaching of Jesus with the Second Coming. But in another very real sense, the reign of Christ is not simply a future promise (or threat, depending on one’s perspective!) but a present reality. In fact, there are ample opportunities in our day to day lives to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being. There are ample opportunities to reject a culture of mimetic violence – a culture in which political or economic stability is maintained through scapegoating.
Which brings me back to Dirty Jobs. In the world of sheepherding, it is the shepherds alone who know the criteria for sorting the flocks. The sheep do not have a clue; at best they can only react to whatever sorting action is imposed upon them. Their fate is, in many ways, a foregone conclusion from the moment of their birth. It is here that the parabolic imagery completely breaks down. We are not clueless sheep, and our Calvinist brothers and sisters notwithstanding, we are neither fated nor predestined from birth for salvation or damnation. We are capable of choosing the one who chose us first. May we choose eternal life over death. May we choose to put our baptismal vows to work in service of the King, the Shepherd, our crucified and risen Lord.
