Nov 20, 2005: Straight Priorities (Reign of Christ Sunday)
Matthew 25:31-46, Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24, Psalm 100
Eileen Parfrey          Springwater Presbyterian Church

Today, in the midst of a four-day silent retreat, I move from silence to speaking, having learned in a new way how valuable words are-so valuable, that I see the value of not spending them too freely. Ezekiel's passage today points out that the shepherds have been robbing the sheep. The very people who should have been protecting the sheep have been the ones abusing them. And unaccountably, in the midst of judgment, Ezekiel talks about what life will be like after judgment. That picture of after-judgment life is based on the Hebrew theological premise that, without judgment there is no mercy. The upshot is that God will take over on the shepherding (as if God had ever really given it up in the first place!). There is a deep justice to God's shepherding of Israel. The weak will be protected, the greedy punished. And it anticipates Jesus as the New David, the Eternal Messiah.

Which brings us to the Matthew passage. We have moved at this point from parables of the kingdom to the criterion of judgment, in which Jesus maintains that service to himself is required, but Jesus in the most needy. "The least of these" is not fellow Christians. Like the leper Francis kissed, "the least of these" is people so radically unlike "us" that they are revoltingly unlike us. Even worse, in Jesus' story, neither the good guys nor the bad guys realize what they were doing.

It's not the things we believe or the church we belong to. It's what we do that sets us apart. Let me tell you a couple of real-life stories. You decide if they are beyond the possible in your realm of living.

One of my lectionary buddies was having a fancy lobster dinner with his wife-they were celebrating some major event in their lives-and they were sitting in that outdoor dining area on the Willamette River, next to the tony restaurant. It's an unusual situation, because diners are on the opposite side of the sidewalk from the restaurant, and people are coming and going in the middle of what functions as a dining room. A panhandler came up to my friend, and my friend blew him off. He and his wife were having an intimate dinner! They continued eating, until my friend remembered this passage and thought, "I've just dissed Jesus!" So he took off running and chased down the panhandler for two blocks until he caught up with the very surprised man, apologizing and handing him some money.

Another of my lectionary buddies doesn't want to be caught unawares like that. In Portland, there are always homeless people begging at highway ramps, so my friend always carries in the door pocket of his car several dollar bills (if you only have a twenty, you're not going to give a panhandler anything, but if you've got a couple bucks you're more willing to hand over something!), a couple of meal tickets to the Sisters of the Road Café (where they can get some help along with some food), and two bus tickets.

Or my friend, Michael, in Madison, who was at the lowest point in his life. He'd been thrown out of the house, his wife and kids wouldn't see him. He was still working, but he was wandering on one of the streets by the university where people gather, when he saw a street kid being harassed by a bunch of bullies. The street kid's worldly possessions were being pulled out of his garbage bag while the bullies were laughing at him and poking at him. Now, it takes one guy on the bottom to recognize another guy on the bottom, so Michael hustled right over, chased the bullies off, and helped the kid put things back in the bag. My friend could see that the kid was hungry, so he was walking him to a restaurant to get him some food, thinking "I can't just leave this kid on his own!" As he pulled some money out of his wallet to pay for some food, he took out his business card and handed it to the kid, urging him to call. The kid took the card and started rummaging in his bag and said, "Here's my card." The card he handed to my friend was the King of Hearts. The King of Hearts! My friend had just helped Jesus!

One of the men at the Hermitage retreat where I am this weekend is a wonderful story teller. He works as a chaplain in prisons, and he tells of working at Folsom Prison-the place where the lowest criminals go. It's for the criminally insane, he says, the really scary people. But they go to chapel. As he would prepare to go into the area of tightest security, the place where the really crazy and dangerous people are, the place where they are so medicated just to function, he always prays, "Dear God, just give me twenty minutes of clarity. Keep them clear enough for twenty minutes!" One day everyone was singing. Except for one man. Everyone was singing some kind of song, some way of offering praise to God, except for one man. The chaplain urged him to sing to Jesus, but the man said he didn't know any. "Oh sure," the chaplain said. "Don't you know any songs? Jesus would just love to hear anything." The man had brutally murdered his whole family in a fit of insanity. He was in bad shape, and he said he only knew one song, so the chaplain urged him to sing it. It would be such a break-through. The man hesitated, gathered together his courage, everyone paused to hear him. "Jingle bells, jingle bells . . ."

The mystery, friends, is that humans are the language God uses in the here and now. The mystery is that our very lives, our very ways of being in the world, are God-concrete in the ordinary. The extraordinary lived out and lived into in ordinary things. "Oh no," you may say. "Saints are all about miracles and visions and praying day and night. That's nothing I could never do." But remember that both the good guys and the bad guys in Jesus' story knew nothing about doing what Jesus expected-the "least of these" thing.

When that Judging Shepherd comes in glory and the judgments are given out, will it be good news to you that God intended all along that you would be God's language in the world? What will your life have said on God's behalf? Will you have acknowledged your job description to become God-concrete in the lives of people around you?