Reign of Christ Sunday
November 26, 2023

Don't Be a Goat!

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Psalm 95:1–7
Matthew 25:31–45

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I love Thanksgiving. I love gathering in the kitchen to cook together, albeit my role there is modest. I love gathering at the table to eat together, albeit my role there is a bit enlarged. I love how stories are told there, often stories that have been told before. But most of all, I love who gathers there. It’s family, even if not by blood. Gathering at that table is like being family, and I love that.

I’ll admit, the lectionary gods who place Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats following the thanksgiving feast are doing no favors for the preacher. As Matthew’s Gospel draws to a close, the parables get more and more difficult, as nothing less than our salvation hangs in the balance, which is probably not what you were hoping for these few days after thanking.

When I was a child, my mother, from time to time, would open the back door and call out, “Tom, put that down. You will poke someone’s eye out with that.” I was, no doubt, engaged in some roughhousing that made her nervous, so she exclaimed, “Stop that right now. You could poke someone’s eye out with that.” I heard it more than once. It’s an interesting phrase. I haven’t researched this, but I don’t think she said this because there was a rash of children in central Alabama with eye patches. It is a mother’s way of saying, “Listen, this is important.”

I believe Jesus is talking like a mother from central Alabama here. It’s his way of saying, “This is important.” And it is.

It’s an unsettling passage. The Son of Man divides the nations. Interestingly there is no mention of belief in Jesus keeping one out of eternal punishment. Also, neither sheep nor goats actually see Jesus. “When did we see you?” they asked. What distinguishes sheep from goats is that sheep actually see people. Goats never do. Don’t be a goat.

Jesus calls his followers to pay attention to those on the bottom. To see them. When I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me drink. You treated me like a human being, even when life circumstances treated me otherwise.

Barbara Kingsolver’s masterful novel The Poisonwood Bible tells of Nathan Price, a fundamentalist preacher who goes to Africa to save the lost. His ministry is a failure, mostly because he wants to save the people of Africa, but he does not love them. In the process, he destroys his family, arguably for the same reason.

Nathan and his wife, Orleanna, have four daughters. Adah and Leah are twins. Leah is beautiful and smart. Adah was born with a twisted body and walks with a limp, forever shaped by having to share life with a sister who demanded too much of the womb, she says.

One night, they are awakened as ants march into the village, consuming everything in their path. Everyone races to the river. Adah, at a distinct disadvantage, is scooped up by her mother. Thirty years later, Adah, haunted by that memory, calls her mother. She asks, “That night at the river, why did you choose me? Of all of us, why did you carry me to the river?”

Orleanna responded, “When push comes to shove, Adah, a mother loves her children from the bottom up” (Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, p. 444).

We are that way. We love our children, but the one who is sick gets our attention at the time. The one struggling with algebra gets our attention at the time. The one going through a divorce or who has lost her job, that’s the one that gets our attention. We love our children from the bottom up.

I think God does too.

That’s why Jesus calls our attention to the least of these.

There is something essentially Christian about paying attention to those on the bottom.

But why? What happens when we see the least of these?

One answer comes from what is called liberation theology. Liberation theology has grown up from broken places in the world where people’s suffering has interacted with the gospel and raised important questions. A central teaching of liberation theology is that God has a preferential option for the poor, for those for whom the world’s powers have been apathetic or injurious. God loves those for whom suffering is inescapable as systems are unjust. God loves her children from the bottom up.

I think that is true. There are more than a few places in scripture where it reads just that way. I think this is true, but I think it is also complicated.

For when we start deciding whom God loves the most, it has often resulted in the oppression of those deemed less lovable by God. When our love for God is for any reason bad news for our neighbor, we have missed something.

But still — Jesus says, “See, really see those on the bottom.” The goats didn’t see them. Don’t be a goat.

Why? What is supposed to happen when we really see the least of these? Did you notice, the salvation at stake is not the salvation of the hungry, thirsty, and imprisoned? At stake is the salvation of those who see them, or don’t.

If I understand the text, there is a part of our own humanity that is at stake. There is a part of ourselves, the self that God intends us to be, that can’t come to life until we see the least of these for who they are. There’s a lot of preaching on Matthew 25 as a text of mission, but it’s really more than mission. It’s about salvation, about seeing one another as we truly are.

I think the key to the passage is in verse 40: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine…”

Members of my family. That’s who Jesus says they are.

This story is a story for the church. For Matthew’s church, and for this one. And those of us who gather around this story rightfully understand ourselves to be children of God. That’s who we are. We are members of Christ family.

So you understand, if we are members of Christ’s family and they are members of Christ’s family, then we are family together. And when we see those on the bottom not simply as those in need, as the recipients of our mission, but rather as our siblings, there is a brokenness in us that begins to heal.

When our kids were young I used to love to read books to them. Goodnight Moon. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. And I would read them some old books by Dr. Seuss.

One of their favorites was Yertle the Turtle.

Can I read you a bit? Do you mind? (I’m going to, so pretend to enjoy it.)

“On a faraway Island of Sola-ma-sond,
Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond.
A nice little pond. It was clean. It was neat.
The water was warm. There was plenty to eat.

“… until Yertle, the king of them all,
decided the kingdom he ruled was too small.
‘I’m ruler,’ said Yertle, ‘of all that I see.
But I don’t see enough. That’s the trouble with me.’ …

“So, Yertle, the Turtle King, lifted his hand,
and Yertle, the Turtle King, gave a command.
He ordered nine turtles to swim to his stone,
and using these turtles, he built a new throne.
He made each turtle stand on another one’s back,
and he piled them all up in a nine-turtle stack.
And then Yertle climbed up. He sat down on the pile.
What a wonderful view! He could see ’most a mile.

Well, as the story goes, Yertle grows more and more covetous of an expanding view. He demands more turtles to lift him higher and higher …

“Until,
At the bottom, a turtle named Mack.
Just a part of this throne. And this plain little turtle
looked up and he said, ‘Beg your pardon, King Turtle.
I’ve pains in my back and my shoulders and knees.
How long must we stand here, Your Majesty, please?’
‘Silence!’ The King of the Turtles barked back.
‘I’m king, and you’re only a turtle named Mack.’”

But then the throne begins to shake and rumble and roll, and King Yertle falls thud down in the mud.

“And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,
is king of the mud. That is all he can see.
And the turtles, of course, all the turtles are free
as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.” (Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories)

If I understand the text, the problem with Yertle is that he failed to see that his “turtleness” is connected to a turtle named Mack. Am I making sense?

Yertle the King Turtle can forget that his life is connected to a turtle named Mack, but our King reminds us of the truth: our humanity is caught up in the humanness of others. Our humanity does not fully come to life until we understand that when there is hunger, when there is thirst, when there is violence, when there is injustice, our family, our being family, is threatened.

In February of 1997, President Bill Clinton entered the House Chamber to give the State of the Union Address. His cabinet was led into the room by Madeline Albright, Secretary of State. She said, “For the first time, a woman led the cabinet down the aisle between the applauding congressmen and senators. … It should have been a moment of unmitigated joy. It wasn’t” (Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary, p. 235).

You may remember that, in her growing fame in being named Secretary of State, she learned something about herself she had not known: she was Jewish. Her family fled Europe to escape the threats of Nazi-Socialism, and to protect her, her parents never told her of her heritage. She also learned that twelve members of her family had perished during the Holocaust.

In July of that same year, Secretary Albright traveled to the Czech Republic. While there she visited the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. She described it this way:

“Entering, you observe what appears to be fine wallpaper covering the wall, but as you get closer, you can see that the pattern is actually made up of neat black writing listing the 77,297 Czechoslovak Jews who died in the Holocaust. …
“The Jewish officials accompanying me pointed out the names of Arnost and Olga Korbel.”

They were her grandparents. She wrote,

“I had not foreseen that I would start visualizing my grandparents in striped concentration camp uniforms, seeing their hollow faces staring back at me. … I thought about how they must have suffered, their struggle to survive, the torture of their last hours.”

She then said,

“A year earlier I had visited the synagogue. … It looked the same now as it had then. It was I who had changed.” (Albright, Madam Secretary, p. 246)

The names on the wall now were family.

What do you suppose would happen if we started seeing people as family: we are all part of God’s family.

I don’t know how to get there, but I am trusting Jesus that the first step is to see them — to really see those who suffer. And if we see one another as family, then maybe someday, some beautiful day, we will gather at the table together, there will be room for all and enough to go around, and we will tell stories, stories that we have told before, and we will see that as children of God we are all family with one another — if not family by blood, family by the blood of our king. It would almost be like gathering for some global thanksgiving.

I don’t know what we might call that day, but it is clear that Jesus called it salvation.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church