Last Sunday after Pentecost--Christ the King Sunday

Last Sunday after Pentecost (Christ the King)Proper 29A
November 20, 2011
Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost, the day upon which we contemplate the reign of Christ, and much of our readings and music today depict our lord as Christ the King.
We Americans have a love/hate relationship with royalty that goes back to our very beginnings; we covet our independence from monarchs, even as we keep an eye upon what those glamorous royals in other parts of the world are up to.
Kingship is an ambiguous image for us. My friend Sylvia Czarnetsky tells the story of how she planned a children’s Sunday school in her church once on Christ the King Sunday and the craft for the lesson was that all the children and the grown up helpers got to make their own crowns (made out of Burger King crowns and lots of glitter); and then they all got to wear them around during the Sunday school hour. She says that experience taught her one of the core tenants of kingship that every child seems to know: that is that if a person is king, he (or she) gets to boss everyone else around!
We get a completely different image of kingship in our gospel reading for today. In today’s gospel from Matthew, we get the only depiction of the Last Judgment in the New Testament. It comes at the end of a series of exhortations and parables through which Jesus is teaching his followers about right behavior, right action until he comes again.
In today’s parable, Jesus tells us about the coming of the Son of Man. He says that on that day, all nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And the question that will determine which people are sheep and which people are goats will basically be the question, “What have you done for me lately?” The blessed, or the sheep, will be the ones who have, by feeding, clothing, sharing with and befriending the less fortunate, in fact have been serving the Son of Man. The goats will be the ones who haven’t done this.
So, I have three questions for you today. Now, I’m going to do something a little unorthodox and ask you to actually raise your hands. Who here has ever in your life done what Jesus has asked of us in the beginning of the passage and fed a hungry person, clothed a naked person or visited a person in prison? You have! That’s wonderful! You are the sheep. Now, who here has, even once in your life, walked past a hungry person, failed to clothe a naked person, or not visited someone in prison? Well, that’s too bad. You’re all goats. How many of you raised your hand both times? You know what that means? It means that we are a bunch of good goats.

That little exercise is from a book called Good Goats: Healing our Image of God. And in it, the authors explain more about this concept of what it means to be a good goat. “All of us who have felt alienated, unloved, overwhelmed by shame or helplessly caught in an addiction know what it’s like to be in hell. And all of us who have been welcomed home, who have seen our goodness reflected in the affirming eyes of another or who have been loved into recovery know what it’s like to be in heaven. We all have wheat and weeds within us, sheep and goats. The kingdom of God is within us, and we’re all good goats.”i
What Jesus is teaching his disciples and us in the passage, is that salvation is not something that we can achieve if we work hard enough. Salvation is, like the love of God, something that steals upon us. It is something that we discover, often in the places where we least expect it. Salvation is what we find in those moments when we can manage to glimpse the face of God in the face of the other. Jesus’s kingship is an invitation to us to live more fully into the best of our own humanity. We may not be able to end hunger, to visit all who are sick, to include every stranger. But when we open our hearts to the King’s compassion, then we can look at least one or two of the suffering in the eyes and see them as God sees them: beautiful and lovely and worthy of love. We may not be able to change the world, but we can offer comfort and solace to those who are trampled down by life, in whatever small ways we can, along the way.
So although we’d all like to live more fully into a kingship in which we are the boss and we get to boss everyone around and run the world according to our own way (because face it, we know we could do it…), we follow a king of a different sort. We follow a king who is not too proud or too lofty to dwell with people in their worst moments. We follow a king who does not flinch from touching people right where they are sickest, most broken. We follow a king who dwells in the darkest of places, in the hearts of all of us who are poor, sick, stranger, imprisoned, and naked. We follow a king who invites us to see his face in the face of the other and to find our salvation and the Kingdom of God there.

i. Linn, Dennis, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn. Good Goats: Healing Our Image of God. Paulist: Mahwah, 1994, p49.