Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 22, 2020.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of Restoration, grant us the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today marks the end of our liturgical year in terms of Sundays, and the end of our year of readings from the Gospel of Matthew. We have reached the end of the teachings of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel narrative. This passage is the conclusive teaching before the Passion. It’s combined in our lectionary with another great sorting description from the prophet Ezekiel, and an interlude from the letter to the Ephesians. In each of our readings for the day we have bad news and good news. In my family, we always wanted (and usually got) the bad news first.

Ezekiel is a collection of oracles – oracles of warning, oracles against enemy nations, and oracles of restoration. Our reading today is taken from the latter. The bad news is that the sheep have been mistreated and are suffering – the shepherds have not been watching over the least, the last and the lost; those that are weak have been getting pushed around. The good news is that the great shepherd of the sheep, Godself, aka 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.

Oh, and then there’s some more bad news. The fat and strong are going to get destroyed. Except. Here’s some more good news. There’s an important textual discrepancy in the ancient Biblical manuscripts. One ancient manuscript has the word for destroy. Other, even older manuscripts have the word for safeguard or keep. Oy. Somewhere along the way, one tiny little difference in the final letter of a word turned safeguard into destroy in verse 16. [1] Maybe the fat and strong are going to be guarded or kept from threatening the well-being of the rest of the herd.

Since the sorting in the Gospel of Matthew is related, I’m going to take the readings out of order and address Ephesians last. Last week some of you heard me preach in defense of the third servant in the Parable of the Talents. I believe that the hero in this story is the slave who was cast into the outer darkness in retribution for taking the rich man’s money out of circulation. [2] Part of why I believe that the hero is the one thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, is that what comes next is “but when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.” In our English translation, the word “but” isn’t translated. I guess it doesn’t make sense if the heroes are understood to be the investors (and words that don’t fit often get eliminated in translating) Yet, it is there in the Greek to demonstrate the contrast between being cast out and being in the center of splendor, between a place of weeping and teeth-gnashing, and a throng of angels surrounding a throne of glory. I believe that the one cast out is the same one later lifted up.

What the Son of Man, our homeless king, has against goats, I’ve never been entirely sure. But I have learned just this past week that in poorer grazing lands, or smaller fields, sheep and goats are herded together. Shepherds need both: sheep for their wool, goats for their milk. Sheep have more delicate digestive systems and goats eat anything. Sheep reproduce more slowly than goats. It’s a shepherding balancing act to maintain the right ratio in the herd so that the goats don’t starve the sheep. In Rabbinic literature, sheep and goats are equally valuable, equally kosher, but it is also true that sheep are neither as smart or as stubborn as goats and sheep need to be protected from appetites of the goats. The weaker animals need to be strengthened and the stronger animals need to be restrained (and they probably won’t be happy about it).

It’s interesting to me that Matthew describes a gathering of all the nations. That says to me that within every nation some will receive the blessing and some won’t. The ones 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 ones who will not receive the blessing will be those who, when confronted with the needs of another, did not respond with food or water or welcome or clothing or shelter or care or a visit. It seems worth noting that, while Matthew’s Jesus specifies how many times one must forgive an offender (77 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. It’s a collective response that is required to hunger, thirst, alienation, nakedness, sickness and imprisonment.

How does our understanding of this story shift when we understand ourselves, or imagine ourselves, to be hungry, thirsty, alienated, insufficiently clothed or inadequately sheltered, sick, or in prison. My guess is that most of us are able to remember or we don’t have to work too hard to picture a time when we were in desperate need of food, of water, of companionship, of clothing, of care, of release. Maybe we can remember the angels who ministered to us. Maybe we also remember those who kept their distance, who backed away, who averted their gaze or just disappeared. This is a version of reading the Good Samaritan story from the perspective of the one in the ditch, or the prodigal son story from perspective of the one completely ashamed. We make a grave error in our Book of Common Prayer when we refer to “the poor, the sick, the suffering, the prisoners” as if we are not they, as if we can somehow keep a distance that has to do with largesse or charity and not deep relationship with one another and acknowledgement of our own impoverishments. It would be better to pray for “our” people who are poor or sick or suffering, our people in prison, and not only ours but all.

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 being born again or being baptized, nothing to do with credentials or creeds. It has nothing to do with prophesying, or casting out demons or even doing great deeds of power in Jesus’ name. [3] It has everything to do with hospitality and generosity, with caring actions, with scandalous compassion for people who are most vulnerable. Matthew makes it clear that, the invitation into, the experience of the glory of God is for those who stand with outsiders, who are too often those we see as intruders in our communities. The restoration project of who we call Christ our King – Whose Name is Love – isn’t proprietary; it isn’t owned by any religious group or nation [4] – whether Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox Christian or none of the above. God’s redemptive work is not the property of any one nation or ethnicity or religious identification.

In this last teaching of Jesus in Matthew, he is offering encouragement and pastoral care to his disciples – those closest to him who have asked, in private, when things are going to turn around – when it’s 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, and who were suffering deprivation. Their lives would depend on the hospitality being described 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 writer of the book of Hebrews put 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, or they’ve been told, but they’re not doing it 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, according to Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, is about deeds of loving kindness to those who are the neediest, regardless of their affiliation. But it’s not a to-do list, it’s a response of thanksgiving. It’s not a to-do-um, it’s a Te Deum! A song of praise enacted.

While Matthew’s community might have struggled in their wait for Jesus to come again in great glory, this Gospel writer is offering assurance that Jesus has never been absent. Jesus is fully present in the neediest people: the hungriest, thirstiest, strangest, sickest, the most exposed, those who are incarcerated, and blessing upon blessing will be bestowed on all who act to alleviate their suffering. The bad news, as 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 who can give you one.

What about the possibility of eternal punishment for those who did not take care of one of the least of these? Honestly, I think it is what people do to themselves when they reject the giving and receiving of care, the giving and receiving of gifts, the mutual acknowledgement of need and of plenty that can be shared. It isn’t that the Holy One isn’t loving. It is our rejection of love that punishes us and others, eternal rejection results in eternal punishment. Eternal acceptance and distribution of acts of love results in eternal life. If you’re worrying about the bad news of the never-ending punishment part, here’s a piece of good news: the word that gets translated eternal is literally “pertaining to an age, an indeterminate amount of time.” It can be as short as the time Jonah spent in the belly of a fish [6] (I’m sure that felt like forever, but it was “only” a few days) to the length of a person’s life, to as long as an age. It’s not literally unending, whether we are talking about life or torture. And the word translated “punishment” means chastening, correction, pruning so that a tree produces more fruit. The process of restoration is ongoing even after the age of correction and pruning.
Finally, in the letter to the Ephesians, the bad news is a little hard to spot. The bad news is that if the writer is praying for the people to come to know the hope to which they have been called, it’s because they’re 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.” [7] The good news is that Jesus Christ is indeed waiting for us all with outstretched hands.

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