Advent 3B - "More Than a Bump on the Road"

 Saint John 1:6–8, 19-28

Don’t look now but he is still here.  The human speed bump on the road to Christmas is still with us.  

I tried to deftly avoid him last week by talking about his parents, John’s parents, Zachariah and Elizabeth, and Jesus’ parents Mary and Joseph, in the hopes of giving him a wide enough berth to avoid him entirely.  But apparently, I didn’t swerve far enough because John the Baptist is still here.  He seems to be unavoidable and also, according to Tom Are, Jr., the new interim pastor at Fourth Presbyterian, (And doesn’t there seem to be a lot of interim pastors these days?) John the Baptist “comes with some anger issues.”

Are points out that in Matthew’s gospel the first words out of his mouth are, ““Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"1 Both Dr. Are and I can’t remember in all our years of preaching ever starting a sermon by calling our congregations a brood of vipers. We’ve thought about it but thinking and doing are two different matters.

In Luke’s gospel the Baptist gets a little more wound up telling his listeners: “Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”2

Not exactly Christmas card material.

In Mark's gospel we are treated to a kinder, gentler John the Baptist.  He's strange. He wears clothes that haven't been in style since the days of Elijah the Tishbite. And he wants everyone to know that the one coming after him will usher in a new day.  In that sense John was the original interim pastor.3

No matter the strange outfits and the blustery preaching John could pack the place, even if the place was the wilderness.  We’re talking Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift, quantity numbers here.

As Dr. Fred Craddock said once of John’s ability to draw a crowd:

His preaching was extraordinary; it’s just riveting.  Crowds came from everywhere ... they came from the towns and from Jerusalem.  Plows were left in the furrows, bread was left in the oven, shops were left unattended, school was let out early because the crowds were moving out into the desert to hear this extraordinary preacher.

I’m sure that many people who went were just curious, curious about the way he looked and the way he talked.

He was not beautiful candle burning softly in the sanctuary. He was a prairie fire, the very fire of God scorching the earth.4

 Today he is calming down a little.  He’s turning down the hell-fire-and-brimstone business and becoming a little more theologically reflective.  In fact, he’s turning into such a good theologian that his answers are becoming a bit cryptic.

“Who do you think you are, anyway?”

 “Well,” he laughed. “I’m not the Messiah, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“So, who are you then?” they sneered. “Elijah?”

“Nope.”

“The Prophet?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, who are you then? Give us some kind of answer.”

“Okay. You can tell your friends that I’m the one Isaiah was talking about, the voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord!’”

“But why are you baptizing then, if you’re not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the Prophet?”

“Look, Fellas,” John said, running out of patience, “I baptize with water!” And then John reveals who he is, what his real mission is, what he has been put on earth to accomplish.  “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.  I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”5

 The water John was using was just water.  Cool, maybe not so clear, but just water. 

Jim Somerville tells the wonderful story about a fellow Baptist preacher who used to counsel with young people before their baptisms. They always wanted to know what baptism would do for them and their pastor would always tell them, “All I can guarantee is that it will get you wet.”6

When the people emerged wet from the water John didn’t just pat them on the head and say “Now you’re all clean be on your way!  And try not to get so dirty next time.”  No, he pointed them in a different direction .

Maybe even before he knew it, his message was changing.  Maybe he was beginning to lighten up on retribution business.  Drop the “brood of vipers part” from his stump speech.  Bank the fires of punishment and point the people to something other than fear and trembling. Now he seems to have found a focus and a greater purpose. Now he is pointing them to someone.  Someone’s coming. Someone good. There is someone due any day. It will be just a little while before he shows up. 

While, at this point he did not know him, he hadn’t even seen him, he knew that someone was coming who was going to offer people far more than John the Baptist ever could.

While John offered the people a chance for repentance. The one who was coming, the one we know as Jesus, was offering reconciliation.  Jesus wasn’t about pushing people away from God but personally introducing them to a love that came to them in the flesh.

That is what good churches do.  They point to Jesus.  They introduce people to Jesus. They invite people to fall in love with Jesus.  They invite people to model their lives around Jesus.

And not just the cute little baby Jesus who we will be singing about in less than a week but the full-grown, adult Jesus that John was pointing to.

As Katie Kirk wrote so wonderfully in this week’s issue of The Christian Century.

[John the Baptist] “is the weird part of the weird part of the gospel. As a person, John is very out there. But John is not seeking attention ... for himself but for Christ, who is to come after him.

John the Baptist reminds me that God loves an outlier. God does not reserve all narratives in the story of Jesus for those who are socially acceptable to the elite, those with perfect table manners and families who taught them to network. In Jesus’ story, blessed are the wacky. John the Baptist’s story teaches us to love the ones who unsettle our norms, the ones on the edges of new ideas, the ones wandering the wilderness telling us to prepare the way of the Lord.7

John isn’t going to go away.  He’s going to come around same time, same place, every year to point us to Jesus and remind us that pointing others to Jesus is the single most important job any of us will ever have.

Jesus is there in the holly and the ivy.  Jesus is there “the rising of the sun and the running of the deer.  Jesus is there in ‘the playing of the merry organ and the sweet singing in the choir.”

But Jesus is also there in “the hurting, grief-filled, lonely, vulnerable, fearful places in life. He is found in the hospital rooms, in the shelter for LGBTQ+ teens, in the unemployment line, on the corner after another gunshot, around the dinner table with that empty chair.”

The Jesus John points us to is all the places of life, the good places, the bad places, and all the places in between.

Jesus is at work in all of those places just as John the Baptist said he would be. Jesus is at work in our weary, war-torn world now just as John the Baptist said he would be.  Jesus is at work in your life and mine, at Christmas time and all time, ever and always, just as John said he would be.

So maybe John the Baptist isn’t to be ignored, or to be avoided as just another speed bump on the road to Christmas?  Maybe he is not the one who is making our road bumpier but making our roads smooth and leading us straight to Jesus, our salvation, our hope, our love.

________________

1. Saint Matthew 2:7.  (NKJV) [NKJV= The New King James Version]

2. Saint Luke 3:8-10. (NKJV)

3. Tom Are, Jr. “The Metanoia Man.”  Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 10 December 2023

4. Fred B. Craddock, “Have You Heard John Preach?,” in Craddock Stories, ed. Richard F. Ward and Mike Graves (Nashville, TN: Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 109-115

5. James Somerville, “‘Stronger Stuff.’ Advent 3,” A Sermon for Every Sunday, December 8, 2020, https://www.asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jim-Somerville-Advent-3B.pdf.

6.     ibid.

7. Katie Kirk, “John the Avant-Garde (John 1:6-8, 19-28),” The Christian Century, December 15, 2023, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/sunday-s-coming/sunday-s-coming-advent3b-kirk.

Advent 2B - "Finishing the Sentence"

 Saint Mark 1:1-8

Every great story deserves a great opening sentence.  Think about it.

If I were to say to you, “Call me Ishmael.”1You would probably say, Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

If I were to say to you, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...”2 you would no doubt remember from your high school English class that this was Charles Dicken’s, Tale of Two Cities.

Some first lines are cryptic and therefore hard to identify, such as, “Mr. and Mrs. of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”3  

Tough?  Maybe?  But every young person, and old person, who got caught up in the adventures of the wizarding world and sometimes waited all night in front of bookstores as if concert ticket for Taylor Swift were on sale, will know that this is the first line of the first installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter  & the Sorcerer's Stone. 

And some first lines give us huge hints of who the players are.  Think of this one that was to my college years what Harry Potter was to the next generation. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole ... it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."4 That is the first line of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins that gave way to further adventures of his cousin Frodo in the mammoth Lord of the Rings trilogy.

What all of these first lines have in common is that they send their characters and their readers on adventures not of their own choosing.

And today we have before us another famous opening sentence even though some of my linguistic purist friends tell me that it is not a complete sentence.  Saint Mark gives us: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.”5  And suddenly, immediately as Saint Mark would say over and over again in his Gospel, we are off on our adventure.

Mark rushes us headlong into the story.  There are no birth accounts that we love so much.  There is no Mary and Joseph.  The shepherds are gone and so are the Wisemen.  There is no sound of cattle lowing.  There is no angel chorus.  We are whipsawed out into the desert where we meet a decidedly unkempt fellow named John the Baptist “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and pointing to “The one who is more powerful than I [that] is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals.”6

If Mark’s gospel does indeed start with an incomplete sentence clearly it is left to others to complete the sentence and what we find, when we look very carefully, that at the very beginning, none of them were willing participants in the great drama in which they were being asked to play a part.  

They all may have echoed the words of Bilbo Baggins when he said: “...in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Makes you late for dinner!”

When the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God began to sweep through the land there were a lot of sleepless nights and late dinners.

There is a whole cast of unwilling characters who are not so sure they want to play their part in completing the sentence or even participating in the story of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

The first may have been John the Baptist’s very own father who, in his old age (which doesn’t seem so old to me now) gets the news in, of all places, the temple, at worship, that he and his wife Elizabeth are about to have their long awaited baby boy. And what does he say about taking on this challenge?   “Zachariah said to the angel, ‘Do you expect me to believe this? I’m an old man and my wife is an old woman.’”7

But there is no way out for the unbelieving priest and Gabriel is in no mood for excuses.  He strikes him dumb until the baby is born.  He is going to play a part in the story of completing the Good News sentence whether he likes it or not.

Gabriel is confronted with the same and highly justifiable reticence when he tries to sell the story to Mary.  At first, she will have none of it.  She isn’t buying into the idea at all. She cuts the angel off in mid-sentence.  “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”8

At least Mary is willing to hear Gabriel out and finally go along with the plan except there is still one more character to add to the story. 

 When Joseph went to bed on the fateful evening that he told he was to play his part in finishing the good news sentence the questions that caused him to toss and turns were bigger than we could have ever imagined. 

Would he dishonour his family by marrying this woman who told him directly that the child was not  his?  Does he believe her story that not only that he was not the father but that nobody on earth was?  Should he really believe Mary when she tells him that the child she was carrying was not just of God, but from God.  Should he believe her or just conclude that she was unstable and get on with the rest of his life?  He also goes to bed knowing that if he exposed her for being unfaithful to the marriage contract he would be condemning  her to death?

Yet, all of the people I have mentioned – Zachariah, Mary, Joseph – have been asked to do very difficult things and they did them.  They didn’t have all the facts before hand.  In fact, nothing that is put before them is remotely feasible. They had to take risks. They had to upset their families, their communities, their entire way of life.  

And the absolutely crazy thing about the Christmas story to me is that they all did it.  They all completed Mark’s sentence about the Good News of Jesus Christ and helped the story come into being.  

As scholars Brian Blount and Gary Charles note,

 Mark was written principally for a people caught up in, and spiritually burdened by, social and political storms. Mark’s Gospel offers much more than a Jesus intended to soothe and mend the troubled soul; here is a Jesus caught up in the troubles and turmoil of a tormented world.9

I think we know a bit about that kind of a world, don’t you?

Our world is racked by wars on two fronts that bring all manner of inhuman atrocities into our lives from both sides.  And, in the midst of preparing for Christmas we have received the devastating news that the person who we had hoped would join us in our ministry, won’t.   The news was heartbreaking!  

Yet, amid the unfulfilled dreams there is still a sentence to complete.  There is more to the Good News than gloom and doom, there is hope.  Mary and Joseph, Zachariah and Elizabeth, never gave up the hope that the task that was given them to do was not impossible. 

These texts give us hope for a better future. They inspire us to look for better days and have faith ... that such things are possible. During this season, as Christmas approaches, we might call this Advent hope. It’s a vision of the world as God desires it to be.  

Advent hope tells us that things might be tough right now but they’ll get better. Advent hope tells us that someday the world will be turned on its head: those at the bottom will rise to the top, and those at the top will fall to the bottom. Advent hope tells us that peace is possible. Advent hope has faith in a child.10

The best definition of hope I read this week did not come from a theologian but rather a political pundit and a famous television show.

Charlie Sikes writes a daily column for an online publication called The Bulwork which I doubt that many of you read but occasionally contains hidden gems.  Ted Lasso is an award-winning comedy show.  Last week Sikes wrote:

Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope.

Ted Lasso reminds us: “So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you."11

 With the Gospel of Jesus as our guide we can have hope that what is will not always be.  We have hope that  are a part of the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ and not the end.  We are a part of the beginning of the good news, not the totality of it, but a part of it.  And our greatest hope of all is that  Jesus has not left us; hope is on the way. 

Our job is to help finish the sentence. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ” is a story that will continue and be finished by us.  It’s our story now. It’s ours to proclaim.  And our proclamation is that the beginning, and middle, and end of the story is that Jesus is with us and that we would end our sentence, indeed, we would continue and conclude our story with one word ... hope. 

________________

1.        Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. (New York, , NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023), p. 1.

2. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London, ENG: Puffin, 2016). p. 1.

3. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Thorndike, ME: Thorndike Press, 2003), p. 1.

4.     J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (New York, NY: Del Rey, 2020), 1.

5. St. Mark 1:1 (NRSVUE) [NRSVUE= The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

6. Saint Mark 1:4 (NRSVUE)

7. St. Luke 1:18. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, in The Message: The New Testament Psalms and Proverbs (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1998)

8. St. Luke 1:34. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

9. Brian K. Blount and Gary Charles, Preaching Mark in Two Voices (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003).

10. John Vest, “What Are We Waiting For? Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 7 December 2008.

11. Charlie Sykes, “The Case Against Despair.” The Bulwork. 6 December 2023

Advent 1B - "Seeing It From Here"

Isaiah 64:1-9

Saint Mark 13:24-37

When I was growing up on those occasions in which I had made a mess of things and it looked like my life was about to fall apart my Uncle Herb would take his little charge, and sometimes his big charge, aside and remind me: “It’s not the end of the world.  You can’t even see it from here.”

Those were reassuring words to a youngster and then an adolescent trying to make his way in the world, attempting to figure out life, and relationships, and who I was, while at the same time looking like I had everything all together.

Now in adulthood, and some might say old age, very old, sometimes I have to keep telling myself when something has gone radically wrong that “It’s not the end of the world.  You can’t even see it from here.”

On this first Sunday of Advent when we want to turn our attention to decorating and shopping, concert going and travel planning, cookie baking and party preparations, the lectionary god’s send us readings that slap us upside of the head with their almost concussive quality.

“With apocalyptic poetry – because prose cannot capture the mystery and power – Jesus spoke of falling stars and a darkened sun, of angels gathering God’s people, and the wide expanse of God’s grasp from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven."1

That is what his listeners needed to hear and it what may be what we need to hear too before we rush headlong into the birth of a baby business.

Biblical scholars tell us that Jesus’ dire prediction takes place outside of the temple which for the disciples was a sign of stability.  He and his disciples were  looking at the beautiful building, in much the same way we look at St. Luke, and thought it would be there forever.  For them, the temple, like St. Luke is for us, was a sign of normalcy, stability, consistency.  But Jesus throws a wet blanket  over the moment of architectural appreciation when he says: “You see these great buildings? Not a single stone will be left standing on another; every one will be thrown down!”2

They could hardly believe what Jesus was saying.  “No, no, Jesus,” you can hear them saying, “You may have been right about a lot of things but you can’t be right about this.  The temple will always be there, right?”  “No, no, Jesus,” you can almost hear us saying, “You may have been right about a lot of things but you can’t be right about this. St. Luke will always be there. Right Jesus?”  And Jesus says, “Well, maybe.”

His original hearers knew he was right because some forty years after Jesus spoke and shortly after Mark penned his gospel, in 70 A.D. the Romans came to town and totally demolished the temple that his disciples so admired.  “Whatever the strange ... language ... it must be understood as a direct address and in relation to the reality of the Temple’s destruction.”

Things don’t last forever.  We wish they would but sometimes they don’t.  And when they don’t it feels like it’s the end of the world.  This may cause us to cry out in fear “Lord, tear open the heavens and come down.  

There are moments in every life, yours, mine, everybody’s, where we have messed up so badly that it looks like it’s the end of the world.  

We may have made a decision that, at first looked, so enticing, so wonderful, looking like everything we had ever dreamed of, and discovered the truth of the old saying, “all that glitters is not gold”   Remember then, “it isn’t the end of the world, your world, you can’t even see it from where you are.”

We may have made one bad financial decision after another to the point where we are not only down to your last dime but past it.  We know that it is financial worries that wake people up at night and keep them tossing-and-turning for a very long time.  Somewhere around 3 o’clock in the morning no matter how dark things seem, literally and figuratively, it is well to remind ourselves that “it’s not the end of the world.  You can’t even see it from here.”

We may have discovered that a relationship of many years has become irretrievably broken.   We may have lost to death someone we loved or loved dearly. Or we may be discovering that our body which has behaved fairly well up until now is beginning to fall apart little by little, one day at a time.  All these events might be a good time to remind ourselves, “lt’s not the end of the world, you can’t even see it from here.”

Even so, at moments like these, and countless others, we may be tempted to cry out: Lord, this looks like the end of the world, my world. “Oh, that You would rend the heavens! That You would come down!"3

In the theatre there is a term for such a longing. It is called the deus ex machina and is still used in literary criticism for those cases where an author uses some improbable (and often clumsy) plot device to work his or her way out of a difficult situation. The poor family suddenly inherits a large fortune. The cavalry comes charging over the hill like in the opera, “The Daughter of the Regiment” where they roll in just at the nick of time, complete with an onstage cannon. It is the stuff of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas when before you know it a sister becomes someone’s aunt, a long-lost relative appears with a major announcement and, before you can say, “I am the very model of a modern major general” a bouncy tune is playing, and all is well with the world. 

George Bernard Shaw disapproved of such contrived and artificial endings. He said that it was much more tragic (and therefore much more realistic) to leave characters to “wither in their bonds.”4

Advent and Christmas remind us that Jesus never leaves us to wither all he asks us to do is stay awake amid all the times and seasons for signs of his presence. 

Dr. Fred B. Craddock tells us that those signs may come at unexpected times and unusual places.  Dr. Craddock says:

Before Jesus the people used to tell stories about when the Messiah came and like we would begin our stories with “once upon a time” theirs’s would begin with the words, “when the messiah comes.”

To the beggar sitting on the side of the road they might pat the poor fellow on the back and say, “When the Messiah comes there will be no more poverty.”

To the battered individual, broken and bruised, they might say, “When the Messiah comes, no more violence.”

To the marginalized and outcast they might say, “When the Messiah comes, you’ll be included.”

To the ones who faced an empty chair at their holiday table because of either estrangement, sickness, or worse yet the loss of someone they loved, “When the Messiah comes, no more misery.”

Then, I remember Dr. Craddock saying, the Messiah came and there still was violence, and poverty, and exclusion, and misery.

It was then, he pointed out, that the disciples had to do what he called, “a magnificent flip-flop” where they realized that wherever there was misery of any kind, any kind of misery at all, there was the Messiah.

The message of Advent and Christmas is that Jesus is with us.  In everything that we might face.

Driving home one afternoon last week out of the corner of my eye I noticed a sign on a church that I had driven by countless times.   It looked to me like another faltering protestant church had been bought out and the new sign trumpeted that the new name was Winner’s Chapel Chicago. 

I wonder if anybody at the Winner’s Chapel ever were free to admit that there were time when they begged God to open the heavens and come down. I wonder if their sun never darkened, or their stars ever fell from the sky. I wondered if every Sunday wasn’t Christmas and if every year, they all got the perfect presents.

I can’t promise you that kind of life this morning but what I can promise you is that wherever you are Jesus will be with you and so nothing you endure will be the end of the world.  In fact, with him at your side you won’t even be able to see it from there.

________________

1. Shannon Kershner, “Honest Hope.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, November 30, 2014

2. St. Mark 13:2. (PHILLIPS) (PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (New York: Simon Schuster, 1995).

3. Isaiah 64:1. (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]

4.     James Sommerville, “Too Big A Mess." A Sermon for Every Sunday, Advent 1b Isaiah 64:1-9: Mark ...,” A Sermon for Every Sunday, November 28, 2023, https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Jim-Somerville-Advent-1B-Isaiah-64.pdf.

Pentecost 26A - “Seeing and Seen by the King”

 Saint Matthew 25:31–46

If you ever visit Washington, D.C., along with the myriads of other sights, there are two places you really should see.

The first you will probably be able to see from the aeroplane because it sits atop Mount Saint Alban, arguably the most commanding spot in the entire Washington area.

The other is a little tougher to find.  You have to take the Metro to the Brookland - Catholic University of America stop but you will be able to see it from the platform. It is the majestic Romanesque-Byzantine Revival dome Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic Church in America.

Once inside this magnificent building the first thing you will notice as is you walk down the centre aisle is the Mosaic above the high altar. It is an impressive work  called “Christ in Majesty”, or “The Apocalyptic  Christ,” or to some only “The Angry Jesus.”

If one could picture the Son of Man coming in glory to judge the nations this would be it.  He doesn’t appear happy. He is muscular, strong, and severe. If he were to judge the goats would probably outnumber the sheep 1,000 to one and most of us would be sure that, under his stern gaze, we would be a goat.

It is this process of separation of which Jesus speaks` and it is his final parable in Saint Matthew’s gospel.

Jesus has been fending off the scribes and Pharisees for several chapters now: answering their questions, calling their bluff, and warning them and his disciples of the devastation that is about to come on all the earth. But now he shifts our gaze to the time just after the End, when the smoke has cleared, and all the nations of the world are standing there blinking in the bright sunshine of eternity. That’s when the Son of Man will come in all his glory, Jesus says, and all his angels with him.1

The notion that he would be wearing an angry expression on his face is enough to make even the least pious person tremble.

Strangely enough, one of my intellectual heros, the conservative columnist, the late Dr. Charles Krauthammer, said once “‘I don’t believe in God, but I fear him greatly.”

Believer or non-believer the “fear factor” looms large.

We don’t need an angry Jesus to help us to recall those times when we could have helped but didn’t.  We don’t need the penetrating gaze of “Christ in Majesty” to remind us that we have often not loved our neighbours as ourselves.  We don’t need a judge to remind us of all the times we should have plead guilty but got off the hook.

We are hard enough judges of ourselves. We don’t need a Christ of the Apocalypse to remind us of all those times we look back on in our lives and cringe.  Very few of us go through life believing that we never have, nor have had to, ask for forgiveness.  

It is the first thing we do when we come to church we confess that we are in “bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  So we may only shrug our shoulders and quietly take our place with the goats waiting for whatever will happen to happen.Then this parable of sorting and condemnation takes a sudden and abrupt turn.  

It is important to notice the element of surprise on the part of both groups.  “When did we see you in need and help you?” the sheep ask. “When did we see you and not help?” the goats ask. And in their question the importance of the word seeing begins to emerge.

A very fine Baptist pastor, James Somerville, tells of the time in seminary when he and a friend participated in a seminary class exercise called “The Plunge” where they immersed themselves in an urban experience in which they were called upon to spend 24 hours on the streets as homeless guys.  They panhandled, spent a night in a Salvation Army shelter, and in general just hung around looking destitute. 

It was sometime that morning that I noticed people weren’t looking at me. I was sitting on a bench outside a big department store, enjoying the sunshine, when a mother and her daughter came walking toward me. I smiled and said hello but the mother at least looked right through me as if I had become invisible. And once I noticed it in her I noticed that everyone was doing it. They were looking around me, or past me, or through me, but they weren’t looking at me. If they had looked at me they might have seen me, and if they had seen me they might have had to acknowledge my presence, and if they acknowledged my presence then they might have had to do something for me. It was so much easier just to pretend they didn’t see, just to look around, or past, or through. Just to walk briskly by with their heads held high while I disappeared a little piece at a time.3

 It is important to see.  And, when we do, another image of Jesus appears.  This time he is welcoming but we must see who he is welcoming and why.

Across Washington, a bus ride up Massachusetts Avenue, it the Cathedral that could have been seen from the plane.  It is the Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul, otherwise known as the National Cathedral.  

Presidents get buried from there, as do other notable persons of state, celebrities, and it is even the final resting place for the remains of Matthew Shepherd, “the young gay man [who in] October 1998 ... was beaten unconscious by two men he had encountered in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. After robbing him, the men left 21-year-old Shepard tied to a fence on the outskirts of town. Eighteen hours passed before he was found by passing bicyclists. He died from his injuries five days later without regaining consciousness.”4 His ashes are in the Cathedral too.

So, they live up to their mission statement of being a house of prayer for all people.

The Rev’d Barbara Brown Taylor describes what is like to walk down the centre aisle of that great place as only she can:

[T]o enter the is to enter a sacred cave, filled with whispers and footsteps ... to see the high altar you have to travel past all the monuments of the faith, past all the memorials to human achievement and long-gone saints ... only after you have taken that walk do you arrive at the high altar, where Jesus sits on his throne at the end of time, surrounded by the whole company of heaven as he balances the round earth on the palm of his hand like a ripe fruit.5

 On either side of him, the Cathedral website tells us, the “110 carved figures surrounding the sculpture of Christ are composed of saints and angels, but the six prominent figures on either side are actually anonymous.”6

Through them the stone mason is preaching a little sermon because the figures closest to Christ are not Saints Peter or Paul after whom the Cathedral was named.  The figures closest are not Matthew, Mark, Luke,  John, or any other of the big-name players.  Through these anonymous figures the sculpture is telling us that the those closest to Christ are the ones who gave food to the hungry, clothed the naked, visited those who were in prison, gave a cup of cold water to a stranger, and took someone they did not know into their homes.  Those are the ones who are closest to Jesus.

Sometimes we fear that when we meet Jesus he’ll look angry like the “Christ in Majesty” mosaic at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.  And for some he will because they have looked at the poor, and hungry, and downtrodden, the least, the lost, and the last, and said: “So what.  What is that?  What are they to me?”  And they, who have been rewarded in this life with riches beyond measure, the angry Jesus tells us, will certainly be surprised by the reward they get in the next.

But those of us who have heard Christ’s word in this place and places like it and just went about trying to follow him as best we could.  And even those who have never heard about him or even given a second thought to him in years but yet went about doing his will hear the one who holds the whole world in his hands, say: “Truly I tell you, just as you helped one of the least of these who are members of my family you helped me.”

And when that happens, whenever that will be, even the “angry Jesus” there at the shrine in Washington just might smile at our surprise.

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1. James Somerville, “I'd Have Baked a Cake,’” A Sermon For Every Sunday (ASermonforEverySunday.com, November 17, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/sermons/a53-christ-king-sunday-year/.

2. William Kristol, “Charles Krauthammer: In His Own Words,” Washington Examiner, June 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/charles-krauthammer-in-his-own-words.

3. Somerville, loc.cit.

4. Tom Gjelten and Amita Kelly, “‘You Are Safe Now’: Matthew Shepard Laid to Rest at National Cathedral,” NPR, October 26, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/10/26/659835903/watch-matthew-shepard-laid-to-rest-at-national-cathedral.

5. Barbara  Brown Taylor, Sermon preached at the Duke University Chapel Durham, S.C. (November 25, 1987).'=

6.    ”Washington National Cathedral - High Altar.” (The Washington National Cathedral), accessed November 21, 2020, https://cathedral.org/what-to-see/interior/high-altar-3/