This is the manuscript to a "Spoken Meditation" I shared with my church, First Baptist-Morganton, NC, on the first Sunday after Christmas, which also happened to be New Year's Day, as well as the celebration of The Circumcision and Holy Name of Jesus, The Holy Family, as well as the Solemnity of Mary, God-Bearer.
The Scipture lessons for the service that morning were:
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Revelation 21:1-6a
Matthew 25:31-46
O God, you make us glad by the yearly festival of the birth of your only Son Jesus Christ. Grant that we, who joyfully receive him as our Redeemer, may with sure confidence behold him when he comes to be our Judge; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (from The Book of Common Prayer, a collect for Christmas)
As I was listening to the passage from the Gospel of Matthew yesterday, something caught my attention that has never caught my attention before. Not only did it change the direction of this homily slightly, but it also changed the way I understand, or do not understand, this story.
“What? There’s nothing puzzling about this story!”, one might say. “You feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit those in prison. If you do, you get to be called ‘righteous’ and are sent to eternal life. If you don’t, well, you just get sent to ‘eternal punishment.’”
I do not think this assessment shows evidence of a fair hearing of this story. That summary might be what we expect to hear. It is a pretty popular image: the sheep and goats divided at the end of time when the Son of man comes in glory, the righteous and unrighteous dealt out their just, eternal rewards. And of course, we are the righteous ones in the story.
Now, what I had planned to do was try to drive home the point that we are failing to live up to the standards Jesus speaks of: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison. Because of course, we all—or at least most of us—fall short. We fail to do the most basic of things that this story tell us Jesus will be checking off his list at the end of time. And I was going to try to encourage us to recommit ourselves to doing those most basic of things, looking to the baby in the manger as the perfect example of how Jesus really was God’s self made into a vulnerable, hungry, thirsty, alien, naked, frail, outcast of a human being: “the least of these.” The least of all.
So hopefully, we would have gone out from this place ready to seek out those in need of ministry and minister to them as ministering to Christ. Seeing Jesus in every full, hydrated, welcomed, clothed, cared for, visited person to whom we ministered.
But the funny thing is, (and this is what I realized yesterday) if we would do exactly that: go out--strategically, intentionally “on mission,”—serving Jesus in the least of these, all of a sudden, we are nowhere to be seen in this story.
Because when Jesus tells the righteous—the sheep—that they have indeed been ministering to him when they minister to the least-of-these, their response is one of cluelessness: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?” They are just as clueless as the ones who failed to minister to the least-of-these, who say: “Lord, when was it that we did not take care of you?”
They are all clueless. And that’s what I realized yesterday.
So I also realized that I could not encourage us all to make our lists of what to do, entitled ‘how to serve Jesus in the least-of-these’, and then go about strategically building the Kingdom of God. At least not on the basis of the scriptures we have read this morning. So. What do we do with this Gospel reading?
***
About those other scriptures.
In Isaiah, the prophet exults, rejoices in God and in God’s promises of hope. Even though the fulfillment is not here yet. In fact, he admits that things are not yet what they should be, but also says that he will not keep quiet, he will not rest, until things are made right and salvation shines like a burning torch.
And if you go back and look at that prophecy, the righteousness and praise are not manufactured or performed out of duty by the faithful. Rather, they organically spring up…like a garden causes the seeds planted to spring up. You also see evangelism in this text: all the nations see the righteousness and praise of God. There is also clothing going on in the Isaiah text. But this time, it is God who is clothing God’s people with righteousness. Isaiah doesn’t make his own robe of righteousness. He also doesn’t lose hope because God’s promises haven’t all been fulfilled yet. Rather, he rejoices in the hope that consummation is coming…
That’s what I see in the Revelation passage: the consummation of God’s promises. Jesus, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, of the Father’s love begotten, brings what was started in the manger and on the cross to completion. No tears, no death, no mourning, crying, nor pain, “for the first things have passed away.”
But we’re not there yet. We’re somewhere in the middle: between Isaiah and Revelation. We’re here with this story from the Gospel of Matthew. I think this story is telling us, among other things, how God is inviting us to be involved as God moves all of Creation from Isaiah’s prophecy to Revelation’s fulfillment. Point A to point B. But the text is more descriptive than prescriptive. It doesn’t really tell us how to get from point A to point B. It tells us that at the end, there are those called “righteous” who enter into eternal life, and those who are not, who enter into eternal punishment. But it also tells us that the righteous (just as much as the unrighteous) were clueless about the fact that in serving the least, they were serving Jesus Christ. They were clueless to the fact that they were being righteous.
So, what are we supposed to do with that? How do we minister to the least-of-these, and in so doing, serve Jesus, all the while without knowing it?
I don’t think I have an exact answer.
But I guess what I’ve learned by meditating on these Scriptures is that I don’t think you can treat the Gospel and the life inside God’s kingdom like a system where you check off your list and certain things happen. The Christian life is not a business, not a system to be governed by a board…of any kind.
I guess Mary figured something like that out too…that with God, you can’t expect the expected…sometimes you have to let the Spirit overshadow you and say “yes” to what God is doing inside of you.
It’s a good thing that our spiritual life doesn’t end when we walk out these doors. Because I think we all need to be wrestling with what these Scriptures call us to do, and who these Scriptures call us to be. And just maybe, while we’re wrestling with these Scriptures, celebrating the inconceivable mystery of the Incarnation, and the Holy Spirit is shaping us to be people who love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, just maybe, we will end up being righteous…and we won’t even know it.
Amen.
Come dearest Child into our hearts and leave your crib behind you.
Let this be where the new Life starts for all who seek and find you.
To you be honor, thanks, and praise for all your gifts this time of grace!
Come conquer and deliver this world and us forever! Amen!
-Fred Pratt Green, 1986
