20 November 2011 “Little Things Count” Matthew 25:31-46

20 November 2011 “Little Things Count” Matthew 25:31-46

You may remember we enjoy reading mysteries at our house. One of my favorites is “Murder in the National Cathedral” by Margaret Truman. The setting for her book is the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. By all accounts it is a stunning place. It was built on the highest hill in town. It is adorned by towers that seem to reach to the heavens. The Cathedral has beautiful scrollwork, fancy finials, and wild looking gargoyles. It seems any church worth is salt has wild-looking gargoyles. One must keep the evil spirits away!

I have read there are three doors at the entrance with creation scenes carved into the arches above them: the birth of the moon is on the right side, the sun on the left, and in the middle, the first human beings emerge from the swirling waters of creation. Inside, the stained glass windows reach so high you may hurt your neck craning to see their top. And when the sun is bright you can walk under them through streams of sapphire, ruby, and emerald light that cover you as if you were walking through a rainbow.

At the high altar in the far back of the cathedral is where Jesus sits on his throne at the end of time. He is surrounded by the whole company of heaven as he balances the round earth on the palm of his hand like a piece of ripe fruit. Well, actually, it is not the real Jesus. It is an image of Christ the King, preparing to judge the world.
This is where we enter Matthew’s gospel this last Sunday of the Christian year. The feast of Christ the King. On this day Jesus is preparing to judge the world. Our judge happens to be the one who knows everything we have ever done. We might pray Jesus never writes a mystery novel with us as the main character.
I am told the National Cathedral has a sign over the cash register that says, “We may not have seen you take it, but God did”. Let there be no doubt whose house this is! We are so guilty!

Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, with Christmas not to far behind. So, we just as well begin today to try and make that turn from hiding our true nature to our full acceptance into the heart of the gospel. For this season of new birth is about to begin.
Jesus has been telling us these past few weeks we need to be prepared because we do not know when our bridegroom, our king, our savior will come again. He has told us the importance of recognizing our inability to invest in this world on our own. And we hear this morning of our pending judgment before Christ our King.
Ezekiel brings us to this place by reminding us of our dependence on God for all things. We are so lost that God must take the trouble to find us and then rescue us. God said, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, for I will judge the strong and the weak.”

This talk of judging, of sorting out the sheep, sounds frightening and worrisome. We have this flawed human belief that judgment is our job alone. The thought of being judged, especially by our God who sees all things and knows all things about us, should frighten us more than knowing Santa is always watching to see who has been naughty and nice.

Ezekiel calls us on this. Judgment belongs to God alone and God’s concerns are not our own. When God begins the sorting of the flock it is not to divide the good from the bad. God sees what we have refused to see. God is seeking out the weak.

Judgment in Matthew’s gospel, on the other hand, is a sobering account of the second coming. While Ezekiel warns us against claiming for ourselves tasks that belong to God, Mathew tells us that we are to take on other tasks on God’s behalf.

The judgment in Matthew speaks to what we are to do in the present, if we truly believe that Christ is among us. To really push us beyond our comfort zone, we are to act as if Christ is in other people, even the stranger, the prisoner, the sick and the hungry.

All too often this truth, that Christ is among us in that other person we come in contact with, produces a disappointing harshness in us. Fred Craddock, a gifted preacher, describes it as “the ability to look at a starving child…and say, ‘Well, it’s not my child.’ To look at a recent widow or widower and say, ‘it’s not my mom, it’s not my dad.’ It is within the capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don’t care.”

It’s is really more than that. We cannot be complacent and think just because we have never said words like these we will be judged righteous. Remember, our action or inaction speaks louder than our words.
In our defense, we echo the gospel, “When was it that we saw you, Lord?” The beauty of this question is that it is asked by both the blessed and by the accursed. Being unaware of the good we have done or equally unaware that we have done something wrong, our question is the same. When was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick or in prison and did or did not take care of you?

We need not spend too much time trying to figure if we are sheep or goats. Matthew uses these animals to make a point. The sheepherder, Jesus, separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep are blessed and inherit the kingdom and eternal life. The goats are accursed and inherit the eternal fire and eternal punishment.
It really does not matter what image Matthew uses; wheat and tares, good seed and bad, wise maidens and foolish ones. What matters is we hear and know the gospel message that relationship with God is not a matter of having faith alone, but of doing faith.

What is difficult about Matthews point is life is never as clear cut as he makes it out to be. It is as if God waits for a moment like this and really turns up the heat.

If we travel to the National Cathedral in Washington we will be confronted with a lot of homeless people. We have people here in Austin who are homeless. That is not news to us. We have actually lived here long enough to begin to recognize them on their street corner. Perhaps you have helped them. Perhaps not. Either way, you may have asked yourself. Was that the right thing to do?

Matthew sounds like he knows. He seems so sure about what is right and what is wrong, about who is blessed and who is cursed. And in our anxiety about doing what is right, about being on God’s good side, we risk finding our motivation rooted in personal judgment. So we do a mental assessment. I need to help at least one person who is hungry, one who is thirsty, a stranger, one who is naked, one who is sick, and a prisoner. Now, isn’t that a bit much?

The truth is, we cannot make law out of the gospel. There is always a problem thinking we only need to do what the memo says in order to satisfy the boss; nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes doing the right thing has little to do with following the rules alone. Only God knows what is in our heart and what will be on the final exam.
In Matthew’s gospel both groups were totally baffled by their final grade. They did not even remember being tested! “When was it that we saw you” and acted or did not act. What had we done that was right, what had we done that was wrong? And when? We have not seen you. That is what we want to know too.

William Willmon, former Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and currently Bishop of the North Alabama conference of the United Methodist Church tells a story of having traveled to Haiti.
He says, “Haiti is a desperate country. It is one of the poorest nations in the world. The average life span is just over 40 years. Unemployment runs somewhere over 80 percent.
During my visit to the city of Port-au-Prince I met a little woman, in her sixties. Her name was Ruth. She had come from her native Wisconsin and went to work as a nurse in Haiti among the poor. Eventually, Ruth began collecting children off the street, children who had been abandoned because they were severely physically or mentally handicapped. Ruth, and her fellow workers, now have about 30 of these children in a home in the city. Most of them will live with her until they die, for there is no way they can ever live on their own.
They are organized into small families, where they are lovingly taken care of. Ruth finances her operation with funds from wherever she can get them, mostly from churches in the United States.
Smilingly, even enthusiastically, Ruth moves about her work, taking time to hug each child, praising them, calling each by name, many who can only lie in bed all of their lives. After their visit with Ruth and her home for children, one of the members of our team said, “I think I’ve been in the presence of a living saint.”
Ruth may not describe herself that way. She minimizes herself in her work. She said, “I just saw a need and tried to do what I could.” One person in the group asked her if she felt that her work was effective?
Ruth replied, “I try not to ask myself about effectiveness. I try to disciple myself to just do what I can do today, one child at a time, and let the Lord worry about tomorrow.”

It is important we notice, at the last judgment, Jesus did not say a word about effectiveness. His only question will be, did you feed those who were hungry? Did you visit those in jail?

We should all take comfort in this good news. In the end, we will not be judged on whether or not we were able to effect justice or to change the world. In our arrogance we forget, the world is not going to be changed by us, but by God.

If we go to a place like Haiti worrying about effectiveness, we probably won’t be there very long. If we find ourselves in front of a person gripped by addiction or pervasive poverty and we worry about effectiveness, we probably won’t be there very long either.

It is God’s job to worry about issues of effectiveness, long-term worth, and eternal value. It is our job to be faithful, to be, in our lives and deeds, an outpost of the kingdom, a guiding light in the storm of life, a credit to the king.
To this end, our job to be faithful is within our control. We can do our part for the gospel message, for the kingdom here and now and the kingdom to come. Thankfully, we need not look to change the world overnight. Small baby steps will do. The time spent visiting one afternoon, the card sent in sympathy to someone who is afraid or grieving, and yes, perhaps even a dollar or two to the homeless man or woman are the baby steps. The biggest surprise just may be that when we take these steps with these unsuspecting folk, Jesus counts everything done for them as if it had been done for him.

Supposing then that Jesus really is present in every single person whose path crosses ours, how do we live? What difference might that make? I don’t know, but I do know that we are being asked to wrestle with these questions, to let them challenge us and unsettle us. To perhaps for the first time actually see the person before us and look them in the eye knowing God may be returning our gaze. Then we will know what to do.
God sees what we may refuse to see, for God seeks the weak and lowly. And when the time comes to sort us out, those are the eyes that will meet our eyes, the eyes of the judge who sees, who knows and who loves us so much he lays down his life for us all. Our Christ IS King.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen

Resources:
“The Christian Century,” November 15, 2005, pg. 18.
“Lectionary Homiletics,” Volume XVI, Number 6.
“Pulpit Resource,” Volume 36, Number 4.
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