Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Proper 29A, 1B, November 30, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of New Beginnings, may we have the wisdom, the strength, 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. Today marks the end of our reading of the Gospel of Matthew (I know some of you are thanking God for that). 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 prediction from the prophet Ezekiel, and an interlude from the letter to the Ephesians.

When I was growing up, my parents were fond of prefacing announcements with: “I’ve got good news and bad news.” There was a household expectation of asking for the bad news first. Whatever the bad news, presumably, it would be balanced out by the good news (it didn’t always work). That trope kept coming back to me as I reflected on our readings for today. It’s probably not coincidental that I was anticipating my brother Rob and sister-in-law Anna being in church today!

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 Godself – Loveself 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. One tiny little difference in the final letter of a word has turned safeguard into destroy in verse 16. [1]

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 master’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 get eliminated in translating – this is why I wanted to learn to translate for myself). Nevertheless, 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 do not know. Up to this point, Matthew repeatedly encourages folks 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 out there 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 stubborn.

It’s interesting that all the nations will be gathered. 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.

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, with caring actions, with scandalous compassion for people who are most vulnerable. Matthew makes it clear that, the invitation into 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, 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. 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. 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.

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 to help you get one. We have, at this very moment more than 700 people who six weeks ago were displaced from addiction treatment, mental health care, and homeless shelters, with no notice. They still don’t have their belongings. Most of them still don’t have places to stay. Congregations in central Boston are finally beginning to organize in response to this humanitarian crisis.

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 that the people come to know the hope to which they have been called, it’s because they’re experiencing despair. In her blog post this week, 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.” [6] The good news is that Christ is indeed waiting for us with an outstretched hand.

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