The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Rhonda Lee
Christ the King Sunday – Proper 29,
Year A
Matthew 25:31-46
“Barnyard Stories”
In our church calendar, today is New
Year’s Eve. It’s Christ the King
Sunday, the last Sunday after Pentecost and before Advent, the end of our
liturgical year. Today we pause to
celebrate Jesus Christ as Lord of all, before we move on to Advent to prepare
for his birth in December. At Christmas
we will celebrate a baby lying in a manger.
Often when we picture that baby he is surrounded not only by his parents
and the shepherds, but also by the animals who crowd around to warm the
newborn’s body, instinctively protecting him from the cold, dark night. All those Christmas visions are beautiful,
and I love the fact that when we think of Christmas, we think of barnyard
animals being present to welcome Jesus as he draws his first breaths. But we haven't gotten to Christmas yet, or
to Advent, the seasons of new beginnings.
Today we’re at the end of our liturgical year and the baby is all grown
up. Not only is he all grown up, he has
been crucified and resurrected, he has ascended to heaven, and now he has
returned as Christ the King to judge all people. As one of our resident theologians here at Calvary said to me
this week, today’s lesson is a very different kind of barnyard story.
Today we’re talking about sheep and
goats. The sheep, of course, are the
righteous ones who end up with Jesus forever, and the goats are the accursed,
who end up separated from him. From the
way that Jesus talks about goats in today’s gospel, you might think that they
had a bad name in ancient Israel. But I
did some research, and I found that this parable is the only place in the Bible
where goats are described in a negative way.
Most of the biblical writers seem to have thought about sheep and goats
in much the same way as my Scottish family did: sheep and goats each have their
place in the barnyard. My grandfather
used to keep a couple of goats, who were more intelligent and interesting than
sheep, needed less pasture, and gave more and better milk. But when he wanted
his lawn mowed the natural way, he would go and borrow a couple of sheep from
the neighbours. (In the Scottish
countryside you can count on the neighbours having sheep.) My grandfather needed to borrow sheep
because goats don’t mow lawns; they pull instead of nibble, and if you let them
loose on a lawn they will leave a lot of it bare. Sheep, on the other hand, will move quietly along, nibbling away,
until they’ve cut down the grass to a decent length. They’re more reliable than goats. Not as interesting, maybe, but more reliable.
So if goats and sheep each have
their place, why does Jesus talk about sheep and goats so differently in
today’s parable? Well, I think it’s
really just a metaphor, one that could be easily understood by Israelites and
others. Anyone who knows both sheep and
goats knows that, as much as they may like goats, if your garbage has been
gotten into and thrown around the yard, if an empty tin can has gone missing,
if your prettiest flowers have been uprooted, you probably shouldn’t look for
the culprit among the sheep. So Jesus
uses sheep and goats to illustrate his points, and I think he has two.
The first point is that Jesus is
clear about what he wants his followers to do.
He spells it out: feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome
the stranger, clothe the naked, visit prisoners. We're not told to do this
because the hungry, thirsty, naked, or prisoners are really good people, or
because doing these things will make us feel good – although either of those things might be true. We’re told to do
those things because when we do them, we meet Jesus. To paraphrase a popular TV chef, Jesus is kicking it up a notch.
He's not saying, like the author of the letter to the Hebrews did, that we
should welcome strangers because in doing so we may entertain angels without
knowing it. He's not saying, like much of the Bible does, that we should act
lovingly toward outcasts and those in need because God loves them best. He's
saying that we should act lovingly toward the poor, the hungry, the needy
because when we do, we are acting lovingly toward Jesus himself. The idea that Jesus, the Lord of all
creation, the final judge of all humanity, is present in street people,
prostitutes on the corner, prisoners, can be a challenge for us more-or-less
respectable people. We may feel
compassion, pity, or scorn for those people, but we don’t want to change places
with them.
We may be even more disturbed by
what Jesus says to the goats who refuse to feed the hungry, give water to the
thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit prisoners. “You that are accursed, depart from me into
the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels...these will go away
into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Those are, to
say the least, harsh words. They are the words of Christ the King, a king who
has real power over people’s lives – more like the power of a King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia than a Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. Those words are a warning to anyone who is tempted to tame the
King Jesus, to downplay the demands he makes of his followers. Jesus’ anger is the flip side of his love,
and that anger reminds us that our actions really do matter.
So we can't get away from the
ethical demands of our Christian faith. That's the first reality that jumps out
at me from today's reading.
The second reality is the curious fact that the sheep and the goats
in today's parable don't know that they're sheep, or goats as the case may be.
They're clueless. The sheep ask, “When was it, again, that we saw you? I was
feeding a hungry person, an alcoholic who came up to me on the street. I just
wanted to make sure he had something besides Listerine in his stomach that
night. I'm pretty sure he wasn't you.
You’re the king, after all.” And the goats say something similar, only
they're on the defensive: “When did I see you hungry and not feed you? I walked
by those bums who are too lazy to get a job, not Christ himself. And I
certainly didn't expect to see you in prison with the murderers and the drug
dealers. What do you mean, I would have met you if I’d gotten to know them?”
This parable doesn’t tell us if the
sheep and the goats are self-professed Christians. They may or may not be
baptized. We don't know if they've ever
even heard of Jesus before this day.
All we’re told is that “All the nations will be gathered before him, and
he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from
the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the
left.” In this vision, how close we are to Jesus has a lot more to do with the
inclinations of our heart and the work of our hands, than with the words of our
lips.
I have a friend named Vernon who is
a retired United Methodist minister in North Carolina. He told me a story one time about a man who
lived in his neighbourhood. I’ll call
that man Cletus. Cletus was what people
used to call a reprobate: he never turned to Jesus, he never darkened the door
of a church, and maybe – just maybe – he drank too much. Vernon used to visit him from time to time,
because Vernon has always had a soft spot in his heart for stubborn old
goats. One day Cletus died, and a
couple of days later he did wind up in church – for his own funeral. When Vernon and his wife Martha sat down to
dinner together after that funeral, Martha asked Vernon, “So where do you think
Cletus is tonight?” And Vernon
answered, “I think he’s up in heaven with God, just basking in God’s
love.” Martha is a very good Christian
woman and she knew that Cletus was an old reprobate, so she said, “That’s not
what the New Testament says.” And
Vernon answered, “Well, Martha, you didn’t ask
me what the New Testament says, you asked me what I think. And that’s what I think.”
We can speculate all we want about
where this person or that person may be going after they die, or about how
close their relationship with God is, really,
in this life, but the parable of the sheep and the goats tells us that we can’t
know for sure. We are not the judge of
anyone; we don't know what's in a person's heart; and anyway, most of us are
some kind of strange cross-breed of sheep and goat. Today’s parable may be about the end of time, when Christ will
return to judge the living and the dead, or it may have more to do with the
present, with how close a relationship to Jesus Christ we enjoy today. Either way, I believe we are challenged to
hold two separate ideas together in our minds and hearts, and to live them both
out. We are challenged to take
seriously the ethical demands that Jesus makes of us, and we are challenged to
take equally seriously the fact that God, not us, is the final judge of each
person. I don’t think we have to read
today’s parable as a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon. Instead, I think it tells us the simple truth that the writer of
the first letter of John preached to his community: “We love because God first
loved us. Those who say 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are
liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).
In a few minutes, we will celebrate
the baptism of Lee Lenkoff. We will
welcome Lee into our Christian community and we will pledge to support her and
her family as she grows in faith. I
have two prayers for you, Lee, and for myself and all God's children. I pray that each day we will find new ways
to show our love for God and for other people, and I pray that all of us sheep
and goats will never give up on each other, as long as we live in God’s
barnyard.