Today St. Stephen South Plainfield and Cross of Life Plainfield did a pulpit swap. From what I hear from my folks things went well at St. Stephen. Below is the sermon I preached at Cross of Life:
Greetings
to you on behalf of St. Stephen, South Plainfield, the congregation I
serve.
Greetings
on behalf of the three Lutheran Churches in Edison, who along with St. Stephen
currently make up the South Plainfield/Edison United Parish.
Greetings as
well from Bishop Bartholomew and her whole staff, whom I was on retreat with
the last two days—she gives her warm regards to all of you.
Greetings,
most importantly, in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Today is
the last day of the Church year, which means two things:
First, it
means it is Christ the King Sunday.
Second, it
means it is the last Sunday in a good long while that we’ll be regularly
reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
Now, these
two facts are pretty important for the Church. They cause us to ask time and
time again, at new situations and new places in our life together, the
following two questions:
“What is
Matthew’s message to the Church?”
and
“What does
it mean that Jesus is King?”
It was
these questions that sent Luther back to read the early Church Fathers,
especially St. Augustine. St. Augustine who in turn had meditated on Matthew.
Matthew who of course was writing about the words, and acts, of Jesus.
…Reflecting
on the influences these four men had on one another, it’s worth mentioning that
what is going on right here in front of you in a multi-cultural moment…
No,
really! Let me explain, you’ve got a North
American preacher, influenced by a German
Scholar-monk, enthralled by a North
African bishop, reflecting on the testimony of a gospel writer living in Syria, remembering his Galilean Lord.
If we
could get a South American, an
Australian, and a Penguin involved, we’d have all seven continents
represented right here from this
pulpit in Plainfield.
—Mining
these ongoing questions about Church
and about Jesus’ kingship, lead us
almost inevitably to two foundational ideas of the faith:
The Church is filled with both Saints and Sinners and that’s okay.
And
We’ll always find Jesus in the last place we look.
1. Church is filled with
sinners and saints, and 2. We’ll always find Jesus in the last place we look.
Let us pray
The Church is filled with sinners and saints, and that’s okay.
They sometimes call the Gospel of Matthew the Church’s Gospel, because it is the
only Gospel that explicitly mentions “The Church.”
Matthew,
more than anyone other than Paul, wrestles with what Christian community looks
like…
Matthew
looks the church head on, and takes us
as we are.
He
consistently points out that there will always be those inside the church who
are angels, and also those inside
the church who are devils. We’re a
mixed body.
He writes
about ONE wedding party with 10 brides maids—all 10 have lamps and all 10 are
gathered in the same place, but 5 are wise and 5 are foolish.
He writes about
ONE field, filled with both wheat and weeds.
And,
today, he writes about ONE flock, filled with both sheep, and goats.
Now last
month I went on pilgrimage in Israel & Palestine, and was in Jericho.
There I saw
this flock in the distance, and I said, “Hey, look at those sheep,” and a guy next
to me responded, “That’s a flock, it has both sheep and goats in it.”
I couldn’t
tell the difference between the two—they were all fuzzy smelly four legged
things that blended into the mud of Jericho
—and to be
clear I grew up in Wyoming, so I kinda like to think I can tell a sheep from
a goat,
but there
in Jericho, those things were all either very sheepy looking goats or very
goaty looking sheep.
And that’s
a good reminder for church-folk,
If we ever start to feel above someone else,
or more pious,
or closer to God
—if we ever start looking across the pew and
saying, “pee-ew, they shouldn’t be in
church.”
It’s a
good reminder that we all are sheepy
goats and goaty sheeps here
in Christ’s flock—it is for Christ alone to make a judgment between us.
After all,
the Church isn’t some museum for pristine and precious objects, it’s a flock with messy living critters in it, with all the mud and muck and dust and drama
that comes with that.
As we so
often hear, the Church isn’t a museum
for saints—it’s a hospital for sinners.
And for
that matter, when Luther read Augustine’s description of the Church, read that
we’re a mixed body—he thought the
image of the Church being filled with saints and sinners at the same time,
He thought
it expressed a more personal truth
—that each
of us, too, is at the same time saint
and sinner…
The horns
of the goat and the sheep inside us, are inextricably locked.
There is a
civil war within our soul.
It is what
Dr. King called “The Schizophrenia of Man.”
Robert
Lewis Stevenson personified this conflict in his book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The
Apostle Paul writes, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what
I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot
do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I
do.”
If we’re
true to ourselves, we could do no less than Adam, and throw up our hands and
say, “My God, I am spirit and I am
dust.”
True, there
are times when we can say yes, I fed
the hungry—but also times when our own
stomachs grumble, and we think it more important to feed ourselves first.
Times when
we give the thirsty a drink—and times
when we don’t believe their claim that they lack potable water.
Sometimes
we are open armed to a stranger—other
times we hide from them out of fear.
Sometimes
we see a naked sick convict and hold
out hope for them, but just as often we draw back and say Nope—not today, not ever.
Because we’re both sheep and goat… we can’t rely on the consistency of our heart or the continuous rightness of our own actions.
—so we, like Ezekiel, can only trust in a good shepherd
—the one who seeks us
scattered sheep out,
who binds up our injuries,
who feeds us with good pasture,
who makes us to lay down in
good grazing land.
Caught as we are, between sheep and goat, all
we can do is trust that God is gracious.
And the
wild thing about all this is where we find a gracious God…
that
shepherd, that King Jesus,
because
Jesus turns everything upside down—his Kingship is the opposite of what we
expect—We’ll always find Jesus in
the last place we look.
Think on
it—what kind of King we have!
The king’s palace? A stable.
The
King’s bed? A manger.
The King’s first foreign visit? Fleeing to Egypt as a
refugee.
The King’s war-horse? A donkey.
The King’s crown? Thorns.
The King’s throne? A cross.
Even in the book of Revelation Jesus shows up in an
unexpected way—the Revelator hears “Behold
the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” and he turns around expecting to see a conquering lion—but instead—there, a slain lamb.
So too, on this Christ the King Sunday
—he reigns in the last
place you’d look— “Where’d I see you Lord?” I am the hungry one, the thirsty one, the naked stranger sick and imprisoned.
Just as I couldn’t distinguish from a sheep and a goat at
Jericho, so too it’s hard to see Jesus—he’s in the last place we’d think to
look.
So all we can do is testify
to these, wonderful, terrifying, astonishing moments when Christ comes in unexpected
ways.
Consider X,
one of my members who is in Hospice, who will probably be dead by the end of
this week—when I took communion to him for the last time, his wife dipped a
little popsicle sponge into the wine and he drank from it—
Christ
was there in that, seeming to say, “Don’t worry—from the cross I too drank from
a sponge, that sour wine.”
Christ
right there in the Hospice—the last place we’d look!
Sometimes
Christ’s presence is made known in a little louder way.
I think
of my friend X’s call to Seminary—she was the tech person for a lobbying firm
in DC, lobbying for the interests of companies that sold sub-prime mortgages—you
know, the people who crashed our economy at the end of 2007.
She’d
recently started getting more serious about her faith, but she managed to compartmentalize—there
was Church Sam and there was subprime mortgage Sam. She knew her actions were
indirectly leading to less regulation of an industry that preyed upon
poor-folk, but she knew she was really a
good person.
Then one
day, she was knelt down at a computer tower and then she heard, chuu—chuu,
“Loan Shark!” chuu—Chuu “Loan Shark.”
And she
looked up and there was a cadre of protestors pushing a papier-mâché shark
through the halls of her office building.
and the very moment they chucked that shark
through her office door, she knew it was Jesus’ calling card and time to leave
and enter candidacy for Seminary
—a bunch
of hippies with a fake shark—but it was
Jesus showing up in the last place she’d ever think to look.
Or I
think back to the homeless feeding ministry in Philadelphia I tagged along with
a couple of times.
They
would go into Center City, passed the iconic Love Park, and passed the less
iconic clothespin in Center Square Plaza. Down to City Hall—that large
beautiful building with Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn, standing atop, in
statue form.
The
mayor’s office is there, the city council meets there, the movers and shakers,
the power peddlers and dealmakes—the political elites and kingmakers, they all
meet there.
But there
is another side to City Hall, beneath that brilliant building runs a series of
underground walkways that eventually lead to the SEPTA public transit system.
And
there, on the hard concrete floor, propped against unyielding concrete pillars.
There,
using collapsed cardboard boxes as both their pillows and bed, the far corner
as their bathroom.
There you find people living.
There,
underneath that throne of power, are people just surviving:
racked by mental illness,
possessed by addiction, thrown out by their families,
thrown out by their
countries of origin/
or maybe just there
because they’ve been down on their luck one too many times.
There surely, in that
last place we’d think to look, it could be said—Look at me hungry, thirsty, estranged,
naked, sick, and imprisoned.
Surely Christ was there.
And finally, that first
moment when I really got what my childhood Pastor meant, when she told me about a Theology of the Cross—
when she told me about how Jesus shows up in the last place we’d think
to look.
Eleven
years ago I was volunteering at the Comea Shelter, a homeless men’s Shelter
back home in Cheyenne Wyoming.
Each day
I filled the shelter’s old blue mini-van up with bedding and drove it down to
the commercial launder mat, picked up any donations around town, picked up the
clean bedding, and brought it all back.
Sometimes
shelter residents would ride with me and help me load and unload things.
Now, there
was one resident in particular who would often ride with me. He happened to have a Nazi swastika
prominently tattooed on his forehead.
We worked
together for several weeks—and during that time I did my best not to stare at
that thing on his head
—I did my
best not to ask questions about it.
Then one
day, we were driving along and he said to me, “Chris. I know you look at it.”
“Look at
what?” I asked.
“The
swastika,” he replied.
I was
–this close—to responding, “What Swastika,” but by that time I was staring at
his forehead instead of the road, so I replied guiltily, “Yeah, I do.”
“I got it
while I was in prison down in Denver,” he explained.
That was of course just the kind of
comforting thing you want to hear while alone with a guy twice your size.
“Oh,” was
all I could reply.
He then
told me how much he had hated blacks and Latinos… though he used much stronger
language for both.
“Oh,” I
again replied, limply.
He
continued, “Then I got out. No landlord wanted someone like me as a renter… the only place that would take me was
a housing co-operative for ex-convicts run by a black man. It took me a while,
but I just couldn’t hate them any more.”
Who’d ever have thought Jesus would show up
like that? Who’d have thought he would point to the power of redemption
and reconciliation through an image of racism and hate?
We sheep
and goats are all here before the king—our hope is that that carnivorous lion
we are brought to expect, is in fact the promised slain lamb of Revelation—a
gracious and kind God slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love.
Our true
selves are revealed only when he reigns,
when
Christ is king
—and that
reign is a strange and mysterious one.
Christ
reigns/ among the hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and
imprisoned.
Christ
reigns/ enthroned on the cross and served sour wine from a sponge—and reigns at
a final communion meal in a hospice.
Christ
reigns/ in the absurd prophetic act of activists wielding a papier-mâché shark.
Christ
reigns/ when those beneath the seats of power are fed.
Christ
reigns/ when a wicked and wounded symbol of hate becomes a sanctified scar of
repentance,
When it
becomes a reminder of a man’s new life and new community.
Christ reigns. A+A
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