Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Proper 29A, November 26, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Ephesians 1:15-23 So that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.
Matthew 25:31-46 Just as you did it to the least of these…you did it to me.
O God of endings and new beginnings, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Today we mark the end of the liturgical calendar year for Christians. This is our New Year’s Eve day – a time for reflection and review, for celebration, and for renewed hope for the future. Our year end coincides this year with Thanksgiving weekend, and I hope you’ve all found reasons to be thankful. But if this week has been particularly hard, and you haven’t found a reason yet, I hope you will find it this morning in this place! I am so thankful that you are here.
Last Sunday evening my wife Joy and I attended a vigil at our Cathedral for Transgender people who have been murdered in the past year from all around the world. That might sound like a surprising way to begin my sermon this morning, but I want to tell you about it because of how beautiful and uplifting the service was. The Cathedral was full. Each of us held a candle to light – to mourn and to give thanks for and to celebrate the lives of those lost. As we passed the flame from one to another, we were invited to say “my liberation is bound with yours.” The person on my right, a perfect stranger, lit my candle and said it to me and I said it to the person on my left, a perfect friend, as I lit her candle. Then she turned and lit the candle of another perfect stranger. That beautiful ritual has echoed in my head and my heart all week as I’ve anticipated this day of endings and new beginnings. It reminds me that I need someone to light my candle. I am then obligated to light another’s candle. My liberation is bound with yours. Your liberation is bound with mine. It’s a reference to something that Indigenous Australian artist, activist and academic, Lilla Watson once said, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Watson reportedly doesn’t like getting credit for that idea because, she says, it was born out of a collective process.
Life well-lived is a collective process, and our lives are all so intertwined, that our liberation is bound up with one another’s. It seems to me that all three of our scripture lessons this morning are testifying to that idea. Our participation in the sacrament of baptism this morning also testifies to that idea.
Our first reading is from Ezekiel, which is a collection of oracles – oracles of warning, oracles against enemy nations, and oracles of restoration. Our reading today is an oracle of restoration. Ezekiel reports that the sheep have been mistreated and are suffering. Those in charge, the shepherds, have not been watching over the most vulnerable; those that are weak have been getting pushed around. So Godself (also known as Love) is going to take over the shepherding to seek the lost and bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak. Then Ezekiel says the fat and strong are going to get destroyed. Except. Except, there’s an important textual discrepancy in the ancient Biblical manuscripts right at this point. (And this is why I study Biblical Hebrew.) One ancient manuscript has the Hebrew word for destroy (ashmid). But several, even older manuscripts of Ezekiel have the word for safeguard (ashmir). Oy. One tiny little difference in the final letter of a word – a pointy corner or a rounded corner of a letter, results in two opposite words. Let’s read “safeguard” and not “destroy,” [1] because in ancient Hebrew, to shepherd means to associate with as a friend, and God is talking about being a Good Shepherd. Let’s understand this lesson as Godself guarding the fat and strong sheep and keeping them from overpowering the underfed and enfeebled sheep, keeping them separate until the underfed sheep get stronger.
In the letter to the community of Jesus-followers in Ephesus, the writer is praying that the people come to know the hope to which they have been called. It only makes sense to pray for hope if the community is experiencing despair. Theologian and artist, Jan Richardson wrote this about hope: “Hope is not always comforting or comfortable. Hope asks us to open ourselves to what we do not know, to imagine what is beyond our imagining, to bear what seems unbearable. It calls us to keep breathing when beloved lives have left us, to turn toward one another when we might prefer to turn away. Hope draws our eyes and hearts toward a more whole future but propels us also into the present, where Christ waits for us to work with [love] toward a more whole world now.” [2] The promise is that Jesus Christ, king of glory, is indeed waiting for us with outstretched hands.
What the Son of Man, our homeless king, has against goats, I do not know. The Gospel of Matthew, up to this point, has repeatedly encouraged people not to worry about separating the good from the bad – insisting that God – or Love — will take care of that. Love will take separate the wheat from the chaff, the wheat from the weeds, the edible fish from inedible fish, but the sheep from the goats? What’s the matter with goats? They’re perfectly kosher. None of the theories I’ve read seem at all compelling to me. For whatever reason, sheep in this teaching represent those who engaged in acts of mercy, and goats represent those who did not, and apparently, it will be fairly easy for Love to tell which is which in the end, and maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe sheep are better followers. Goats are notoriously stubborn.
It’s interesting to me that Jesus says that all the nations will be gathered. The nations who will receive the blessing will be those who responded to hunger with food, to thirst with water, to strangeness with welcome, to over-exposure with clothing and shelter, to sickness with care, and to imprisonment with a visit. The nations who will not receive the blessing will be those who, when confronted with the neediness of others, did not respond appropriately. It seems worth noting that, while Matthew’s Jesus specifies how many times one must forgive an offender (70 + 7 or 70 x 7), the minimum requirement for entrance into the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world seems to be one – or six if you’re really a stickler, and significantly, the “you” here is plural, not singular. This is not a personal checklist. It’s a collective response to hunger, thirst, alienation, nakedness, sickness and imprisonment. Hospitality, generosity, inclusion, protection, healing and compassion are a collective process, a collective practice that testifies: our liberation is bound together.
I want you to notice that, according to Matthew, what matters in the end is a collective response of beloving. Receiving the final blessing, according to Matthew, has nothing to do with credentials or creeds. Those who receive the blessing are just as agnostic as those who do not. It has everything to do with sincere engagement, with caring actions, with scandalous compassion for people who are most vulnerable. [3] Matthew makes it clear that, the invitation into the glory of God is for nations who stand with and for outsiders, who are too often those we see as intruders in our communities. The restoration project of the One we call Christ our King – Whose Name is Love – isn’t proprietary; it isn’t owned by any religious group [4] – whether Protestant or Catholic, Restorationist or Orthodox Christian or none of the above. God’s redemptive work is not the property of any one ethnicity or religious identification. This vision of the future is right-relationship where your liberation is bound with mine. My liberation is bound with yours.
In this last teaching of Jesus, he is offering encouragement and pastoral care to his disciples – those closest to him who have asked, in private, when things are going to get better. What we imagine is that Matthew is using this teaching to comfort and encourage the early Christian community, who were being sent out to spread the good news of God in Jesus Christ. Their lives would depend on the hospitality of others and Jesus is assuring them that they were embodying him. And Matthew is using this teaching to encourage people everywhere – in all of the nations — to act courageously in extending hospitality, because in doing so, some entertain angels unaware, as the book of Hebrews puts it. [5] Matthew takes it a step further – not just angels, but Jesus Christ himself.
In this ethical teaching, Jesus is reminding his disciples of what they already know. The most frequently occurring commandment in Jewish teaching is to care for vulnerable strangers with deeds of loving kindness. But all the nations might not know that yet. While Matthew might have intended this message to be applied to a particular group in particular settings, his expansive visionary inclusion of all the nations leads me to believe that a universal interpretation or application is perfectly right – perfectly righteous! Righteousness, or right-relationship, according to Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, is about deeds of loving kindness to those who are the neediest, regardless of their affiliation.
It is into this vision of right-relationship, this hope for the future, that we are welcoming Tabatha Anne Crespi this morning. She is receiving the sacrament of baptism, a welcome into this particular, peculiar branch of God’s family. She is one month old today. She is quite vulnerable and she is receiving our blessing. She is also quite powerfully blessing us. She will need her family and friends and her church to tell her about this day. (I hope you will take pictures.) She will need us all to encourage her and help her grow into the person that she will become. We will need to assure her that Jesus, whom she is called to serve, is fully present in the neediest people: the hungriest, thirstiest, strangest, sickest, the most exposed, the most incarcerated, and that blessing upon blessing will be bestowed on all who act to alleviate the suffering of others. Some of the water I will use to baptize Tabatha will come from the Jordan River, the same river in which Jesus was baptized. The shell that I will use to pour the water on Tabatha’s head is a gift to her from her grandparents. It is a symbol of the pilgrimage on which Tabatha embarks today. Tabatha will be given a candle from Emmanuel, lit from the flame of our paschal candle, that I hope her parents will light every year on the anniversary of her baptism, to remind her about how our liberation is bound together with friends and strangers. James Forbes, once pastor of Riverside Church in New York City famously said, is “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.” The good news is if you don’t have such a letter of reference, you will not have to look hard to find a person to help you get one. When you do, I invite you to say aloud or in your heart, “My liberation is bound with yours.”