Reign of Christ Sunday, November 23, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

“When Did We See You?”

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 100
Ezekiel 34:11–16
Matthew 25:31—26:4

Jesus is the king who puts on the clothing of compassion in order that humankind might know him. In the Incarnation, the King of kings . . . comes that we might know him more fully and live more abundantly to bridge the divide between his kingdom and our world.

Christy Lohr Sapp

I am not sure how many of you were around last night for our caroling and the lighting up of Michigan Avenue, but it was quite an event for this newcomer. All kinds of people joined us in our singing. It was moving to see their expressions. And then, at the beginning of the parade, Mickey Mouse waved his wand and block after block lit up with sparkling light, including our own sparkly sheep. And as if the lights were not enough, though it is not even Thanksgiving for another few days, the radio station 93.9 has already made the switch to all-Christmas music, all the time. So yes, sisters and brothers, the holidays have begun.

That’s why these texts from Ezekiel and Matthew are so good for us, even though biblical texts about judgment are always a challenge. Texts about judgment force us to move through the layers of falsely sweet holiday sentimentality. Texts about judgment compel us to stop the frantic “you are what you buy” pace. At least for a moment, biblical texts such as these in Ezekiel and Matthew have the chance to stop us dead in our tracks to make us lift our heads.

But first, allow me to begin at the end. Both passages—Ezekiel and Matthew—though bracingly harsh when first encountered, are inviting us to more deeply experience the justice-making love of God. In the words of William Sloane Coffin, “Of God’s love we can say two things: [first,] it is poured out universally for everyone from the pope to the loneliest [person] on the planet; second, God’s love doesn’t seek value; it creates value” (William Sloane Coffin, Credo, p. 6). Indeed, in both Ezekiel and Matthew we see a holy insistence that it is not because we have earned value that we are loved by God, but rather, because we are loved by God, we have value. Our value as children of God is a gift and not an earned credit. And that, just by itself, is a countercultural claim to hold on to, especially during the holidays.

We first see a glimpse of God’s holy insistence in the passage from Ezekiel. The prophet paints an image of God as the One who makes the first move by seeking us out, not the other way around: “For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.” According to Ezekiel, we have become so lost and wandering that God must take the trouble to find and rescue us. And astonishingly, God is more than willing.

The first brush strokes of Ezekiel’s picture paint good news. It is good news that God wants to find the sheep, feed them, wipe away their tears, and bind up their wounds. It is good news that God wants to gather in the sheep when they are lost and scattered. It is good news that God wants to take the sheep to a place where they can relax and be calm rather than fretfully run to and fro in a state of panic and fear. Ezekiel’s first brush strokes paint a picture of deeply good news.

But then, as Ezekiel keeps painting his picture, we begin to see a more complex image of God’s holy insistence emerge. As a part of God’s gracious shepherding, God also sorts the sheep. God separates the fat and strong sheep from the weak ones. Apparently as God seeks and finds, God also judges as God the Shepherd sorts out one from another.

Does that stop you in your little sheep tracks? This is that judgment part of the text about which some of us, your preacher included, don’t like to talk or think. And perhaps the reason we don’t like to talk or think about God’s judgment is because we are scared we might be found on the wrong side of things. Or, like my experience with a childhood neighbor who, at ten years old, condemned me to hell after I told her I did not believe in it, perhaps we have been told in no uncertain terms we will be on the wrong side of things when judgment occurs. So maybe it is our fear that keeps us from pondering this scene. But I wonder, though, if the beating heart of the matter might be something else.

What if our distaste about God’s judgment stems not so much from a fear of being found on the wrong side, but rather, what if our distaste comes from an undercurrent in our culture—an undercurrent that claims when God judges, God is really just stepping onto our turf. Listen to the news. Pay attention to Twitter or to your Facebook feed. Watch the back-and-forth debates now raging regarding everything from the grand jury deliberations in Ferguson to the executive orders on immigration reform. Read the signs at all the protests. All of the rhetoric just screams that we consider it our human prerogative, our human right, to be the ones to label and to condemn (Kathleen Norris, “Imagining Christ,” Christian Century, 15 November 2005, page 18), to sort and to judge.

The truth is that we all do it—even those of us who claim to be nonjudgmental. Before we really see someone, and before we decide to hear his or her story, we want to first figure out if he or she is liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, able-bodied or not, Southern or Midwestern, gay or straight, Christian or other. Only then, after we have properly judged and sorted the other based on whatever categories we deem important, do we decide to either invest our time in seeing and listening or not.

Brother Ezekiel calls us on this folly. He says we are ridiculous with all this. Just ridiculous because we are all lost sheep, running to and fro, panicky in the dark storm. Furthermore, Ezekiel insists the acts of judging and sorting belong only to God, and apparently God’s concerns are not always our own. We see this as God starts sorting the flock, and it becomes clear that God is not trying to divide the pure sheep from the sinful sheep. God is not insisting on a litmus test based on political convictions or theological viewpoints or where one is from or family structure.

No, according to the picture Ezekiel paints, at the time of judgment, the only thing God is interested in seeing is what the rest of the sheep seemingly refused to see: who are the ones being left out? As God moves about the mountains, gathering all the sheep to bring them home, God gets very particular about seeking out the weak ones, the ones who have lived their lives being butted and battered, being forgotten and shoved aside.

Ezekiel’s picture of God’s judgment is a picture of a Holy Shepherd who insists on being fiercely compassionate for all those who have been wounded by the selfish actions of others. A Holy Shepherd who insists on being fiercely protective of those deemed weak and insignificant by the strong and influential. A Holy Shepherd who insists on being fiercely determined to reveal the true value of those who had been humanly judged and sorted out as not being worth anyone’s time or energy. This is the strange sorting of the sheep in Ezekiel’s story of God. This is what Ezekiel claims judgment looks like. It looks like a picture of God’ holy insistence that all the sheep receive love and justice, while pointing out that some of us, lost sheep ourselves, continually get judgment all wrong.

Matthew paints a similar kind of picture in his Gospel. Like in Ezekiel, we see the paint strokes of holy insistence in Matthew’s scene of judgment. In this scene, Jesus is king, sovereign—victorious over all creation. And like the Holy Shepherd did in Ezekiel, Jesus is also going about the business of gathering, sorting, and judging. If we listened carefully, we realized that, as with Ezekiel’s Holy Shepherd, judgment is once again not related to the things we might choose. Christ’s judgment is not at all like the kinds of sorting and judging we do with each other and with ourselves every day.

Though one would not know it based on popular Christianity, in this passage we again see that divine judgment is not related to one’s theology, political affiliations, or even to one’s profession of faith. Both the sheep and the goats call Jesus “Lord.” Christ the King is not concentrating on those things as he does his sorting and judging work. And though it might feel strange to us Reformed Presbyterians, we don’t even see the word sin in this entire picture of judgment.

Rather, Matthew adds another layer to brother Ezekiel’s emphasis on holy insistence. Here in Matthew 25, God’s holy insistence becomes more sharply focused on the use of holy imagination. In this passage, God insists on asking the question, Did you live so imaginatively that when you saw the face of a weak sheep, you saw Christ present in that face? Did you use the gift of holy imagination so that you saw that person, perhaps one who had been butted and battered most of his or her life, as a child of God, equal of value to you, a member of God’s family, regardless of who they were or what they believed? And did you treat them as such?

Or were you spiritually lazy like the strong sheep in Ezekiel, those who gave in to the temptation of slothful living by failing to exercise the hard work of God’s imagination? To paraphrase Fred Craddock, “Did you see the face of another child who was shot here in Chicago and say, ‘Well, it’s not my kid’? Did you look at a recent widower, sitting by himself on the pew . . . and say, ‘Well, it’s not my dad’? Or did you pass by an [addict] sitting up against a lamppost in front of the Disney store or down by one of the bridges across the river and say, ‘Well, that’s not my mom [or my brother or my sister or my friend]’” (a paraphrase of a story from Fred Craddock, quoted in Kathleen Norris’s article “Imagining Christ”)?

The judgment of Matthew 25 centers on God’s holy insistence that we use God’s remarkable gift of holy imagination—a gift of faith that allows us to see Christ in each other, in ourselves, even in the weakest sheep around. This passage asks us how we use that gift. Do we use it? Does it affect the decisions we make or the causes in which we become involved? Or do we give into spiritual laziness, look out upon the world and everything God has made and say, “I don’t have time to care” or “It’s not my problem”? Do we lethargically conclude, “I don’t see how I could do anything about it,” as we hum the strains of the latest radio Christmas carol and watch the swiping of our credit cards, trying to continually save our nation by spending our money?

Jonathan Kozol, the writer who has devoted most of his career to studying and writing about children in poverty, says he is now embarrassed to remember some of the ways by which he himself would talk about the need for better social safety nets. He says he used to march up to Capitol Hill in Washington and advocate for programs like Head Start. And he would say things like, “Every dollar you invest in Head Start today will save the country six dollars later or in lower prison costs.” Kozol now confesses he is ashamed he ever phrased it that way—with dollars and cents as the bottom line. Now he says, “Why not invest in them just because they’re babies and they deserve to have some joy in life before they die?” (www.bit.ly/1rgmDMa). To use our language, it sounds to me like Kozol wishes he had expressed God’s insistence on holy imagination.

By the way, it is interesting to note that both the sheep and the goats were surprised in this parable. No one expected King Jesus to go about the business of sorting and judging the way he did. The goats sure didn’t. They were completely surprised to learn that by actively ignoring or just numbly overlooking the strangers, the sick, the imprisoned, they had indeed ignored and overlooked Christ himself. I’m sure they were thinking, if we had just known who those people were, we would have acted very differently.

The goats’ shock reminds me of another story Craddock tells. He had preached four nights at a big church with a good crowd. There was a moment in each service when, like in our 4:00 p.m. service, they had a time of passing the peace. Craddock claims he had never seen such hugging and carrying on in his life—people going across the room, up and down the aisles, shaking hands, hugging, laughing. He thought it was really something. On the last night, after the last service, the pastor of that church took Fred and his wife for coffee. The pastor said to them, “Did you ever see such a family church? Did you ever see such love in your life in a church?” Fred’s wife said, “Yeah, well, yeah. I have.” The pastor said, “What do you mean?” She responded, “I was there for all four services, and nobody ever spoke to me.” And do you know what the pastor said in response? He said, “Well, that was because they didn’t know who you were” (Fred Craddock, Mike Graces and Richard Ward, ed., Craddock Stories, p. 45). In other words, if they had just known you were someone important, they would have acted very differently.

What is even more interesting to me, though, than the goats’ shock, is that even the sheep were surprised by the way King Jesus went about this sorting and judging business. Clearly they were not going through their lives calculating their actions based on some notion of future reward. They were not trying to earn their way into eternal life by what they did. They were just living life, actively using their God-given holy imaginations, regularly remembering and rehearsing God’s holy insistence that all are of value to God, for all are loved by God, and that God is the judge, not the sheep.

One final note: We might want to notice that as soon as Jesus painted this picture for the crowd—this picture of God’s holy insistence that all are valued because all are loved, this picture of challenge for the sheep to use God’s holy imagination, this picture that declares the only one in charge of gathering and sorting is the Holy Shepherd—well, as soon as Jesus finished saying all of that out loud, people in positions of power started plotting. The people who were offended that God was stepping on to their turf of judgment started crafting the plans for his arrest and execution. Jesus’ preaching on God’s holy insistence and call to live with holy imagination agitated the “powers that be” so much that they began the construction of his cross. Baptismal living with holy insistence and holy imagination can be dangerous—and it is also what gives us life.

Notes

Kathleen Norris’s thesis about spiritual imagination is woven throughout this sermon. I am greatly indebted for having her article “Imagining Christ.” Christian Century, November 15, 2005. page 18 as a conversation partner with these texts!