Of Sheep and Goats
11/26/06
Rev Jon Smoot
Once you hear this story, you can’t forget it. We immediately scan our lives, looking for some scrap of self-justification, wondering if we’re in or out: thumbs up or thumbs down, sheep or goat. It’s very easy to turn this passage into a simple moralistic strategy and even simpler sermon for ourselves, something quite un-mysterious, that goes likes this: There are good sheep, bad goats, so go be a good sheep. Be a Boy Scout today, do a good deed, be a little more thoughtful. A good deed is just the extra credit we need on our Sheepish report card with God. These are the ways we try to smell less like a goat and look more like a sheep. But as you know, things are not always so reducible with Jesus.
So then, what are we supposed to do? Hoe are we to live before God and others in view of this hardball teaching from Jesus? What ethics guide us for mission in God’s brash new world? For Matthew, God’s brash new world begins with the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in their book Resident Aliens, say it should interest us that in the Beatitudes, Jesus does not ask us to do anything; that comes later. The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative. First, Jesus tells us to really see what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are to do. So the primary faith question is not, “What ought I now to do?” but rather, “How does the world really look, through the eyes of Jesus?”
For starters, imagine a sermon that begins: ‘Blessed are you poor. Blessed are those of you who are hungry. Blessed are those of you who are unemployed. Blessed are those going through a marital separation. Blessed are those who are terminally ill.’ The congregation does a double take. What is this? In the kingdom of this world, if you are unemployed, people treat you like you have some sort of social disease. The terminally ill people become an embarrassment to our health-care system, people to be put way, out of sight. How can they be blessed? The preacher responds: ‘I’m sorry. I should have been more clear. I am not talking about the way of the world’s kingdom. I am talking about God’s kingdom. In God’s realm the poor are royalty, the sick are blessed. I was trying to get you to see something other than that to which you have become accustomed.’” If we can first see whom God blesses, we shall be well on the road to blessedness ourselves. We can only act within a world we can see. Vision is the necessary prerequisite for ethics.” And some will see, and some will not. Some will get it, some will not.
More than anything in our passage today from Matthew, Jesus wants us to see –
This story is really not about the virtues of the sheep and the faults of the goats - it is about the hidden-ness of King Jesus in the least of these, the members of his human family. Remember the sheep were just as near-sighted as the goats - neither see King Jesus in the guise of the misery all around them. Both said: Lord, What’s all this about nakedness, hunger, imprisonment and illness -“When did we see you this way, Lord?” But some are graced with the desire, or by necessity, to slip on different spectacles, and everything changes.
Seeing, really seeing – is not easy. Waking up is hard to do. Maybe that’s why so many people sleep-walk through life. I want to tell you a story, about when I began to see, when I began to wake up, and it was when my world fell apart. I wrote this 5 Thanksgivings ago, but it still powerfully haunts me, at this time of year.
Thanksgiving was an awkward and painful time for me this year. I am recently estranged from the wife of my youth and my three beautiful children. So, where to spend Turkey Day? My family of origin invited me to spend the day with them, but I wasn’t in the mood for their pitying glances and well-meaning words of comfort. I decided to offer my services to an inner-city men’s shelter our church partners with that would be preparing and serving Thanksgiving meals for the city’s displaced and mostly forgotten ones.
After an hour and half of gutting pumpkins for serving later, my hands and shirt were a lovely shade of burnt orange. My partners in grime around me were fascinating people: a Jewish pre-med student who I had delighted with my mistakenly identifying him as of “Black Irish” lineage because of his sky-blue eyes and jet-black hair and who dreamed of someday singing tenor in an opera company; a divorced Pentecostal with her daughter who laughed at our near misses with our flailing knives; a 13 year-old young woman who I learned played the piano, and who for years had enjoyed coming in to serve Thanksgiving dinners at the shelter.
At 11:25 the panicky call came from the volunteer coordinator: “Is there a minister in the house?” The pastor and his choir members who were scheduled to lead the Thanksgiving service in the chapel hadn’t showed. I immediately volunteered myself and my new Jewish/Black Irish/Opera singer friend and piano-playing 13 year-old. On the way to the chapel I picked up a young woman who was an M.A. student at a Catholic seminary, and then bumped into 15 cheerleaders and their teachers from a suburban High School doing their school’s community service requirement. I jokingly asked the teachers, “Do your students know any religious cheers?” They surprisingly replied, “Yes!” I said, “You’re on.”
We climbed onto the stage and looked out over the assembled guests. Feeling pretty homeless and broken myself, I brazenly announced, “Today, there are no poor or rich, black or white, Christian or Jew or Moslem; only grateful children of the one God and Father of us all.” There were “amens” from the pews. We read several Psalms of thanksgiving, and my operatic pre-med guy and I shared a battered green Methodist hymnal singing, “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing, accompanied by the tinny, out-of-tune upright that our young woman attacked with the passion and poise of Van Cliburn.
And then, the alchemy of grace – I impulsively opened up the service to expressions of gratitude, with suddenly warring emotions of expectancy and vulnerability. After a moment, a frail, toothless older woman stood up: “I am a mother and grandmother, and my children have never in all my years not had a roof over the heads or food to eat. I give all the praise and thanks to God.” Next, from a man of indeterminate age whose face wore the ravages of the bottle and too many nights in the street: ‘If it wasn’t for the cross of Jesus, I would be dead. Praise Jesus!” And on it went.
The cheerleaders nervously, but gamely took center stage. With fluid grace and irresistible adolescent energy they danced and belted out, “Jesus, Jesus, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, nobody can!” This went over so well, I had them do it again, and asked the people to stand and shout it out with the cheerleaders. After another rousing cheer they’d learned about Thanksgiving and a football fight song, they left the stage to heartfelt applause, and murmurs from the crowd, “What beautiful children.” I was too overcome to go on, so the M.A. student poignantly and gently recited the prayer of St. Francis; “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace…” The piano introduced and led us into, “Now Thank We All Our God.”
Time stood still. My own pain and confusion melted away in the joyous simplicity of it all – the blessing of sharing this moment with God’s children. With tears of gratitude, peace, and joy, I closed with prayers and a blessing. The glorious smells from the kitchen flooded the chapel, and we filed into the dining hall – the guests there to enjoy steaming, endless plates of turkey and all the trimmings, and the rest of us to serve them.
Something beautiful that day broke through in me, and I suspect in many others. Overwhelmed with gratitude and joy, I picked my way over the litter and broken glass in the parking lot, climbed into my car, and drove back to the ‘burbs, a changed man, by the grace of God.
The most amazing thing about really seeing – is that it does not produce guilt – it instead creates compassion; the startling solidarity with every human soul that ever yearned or hurt or hoped. It is these with whom God in Christ has indissolubly linked, and those whom Christ commands us to see.
Let the grit of this vision and command and invitation of Jesus keep irritating the eyes of your soul, until through the watering you begin to really see – to see Jesus in the least, the last, and the lost. We can only act within a world that we can see. And seeing transforms us. Seeing may outrage us, or convert us, but never leaves us the same. And we don't need to wonder whether or not we’re really seeing Jesus in such encounters. He has already told us the answer: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
