Stewardship, Part 5: “Witness”

November 19, 2023 – Ordinary Time

Stewardship Sunday

Matthew 25:31-46

Pastor Mike

Growing up, I never heard this passage of scripture quoted or read aloud or preached. Which I now know is strange, because, in Matthew’s Gospel at least, this word is the very pinnacle of Jesus’ teachings – a final, urgent plea for his disciples to live in solidarity with those who suffer. But you wouldn’t have known this in the church I attended as a teenager. No, you, like I, would have instead heard another famous scripture frequently preached: John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.”  Anyone else know that one by heart?

 In both John 3:16 and Matthew 25, Jesus draws a dividing line in the sand, and he tells us what, in the end, will separate those who perish from those who live. The condition for salvation in John 3:16 is belief. The condition for salvation in Matthew 25 is service. Seeing as all Christians are accountable to all of the Bible, we don’t really get to choose whether we’ll be a “John 3:16 Christian” or a “Matthew 25 Christian.” But more often than not, we privilege and overdo our preference. My childhood church chose to drill down on belief.

 Oh, I can close my eyes even on a cold fall morning in Idaho and feel the heavy heat of summer in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, feel my heart beat faster as the church camp evangelist moves us toward the moment of surrender at the altar: “For whosoever believeth in him…” That was the culture I came up in. In youth group, we memorized John 3:16, and at Christian music festivals it seemed like everyone sported a John 3:16 t-shirt or bracelet or tattoo.

 I absorbed this emphasis on belief and, because I was smart, I made it work for me. I aced every class on theology in college, got a gold star for orthodoxy, which means “straight” or “correct” beliefs about God. Now, John 3:16 actually calls us to believe in a person, to trust the love of a living Christ and receive his presence into our lives. When we – when I – start to think being Christian means thinking proper thoughts about Jesus, rather than knowing him, we lose the personal dimension of faith. I lost it. Despite my college honors, my fluency in God-talk, by the time I graduated I wasn’t talking to God very much at all, and my soul felt sick.

 Then, at twenty-two, I moved to North Carolina to attend Duke Divinity School. I was suddenly in a completely different theological environment; the focus shifted almost entirely to Matthew 25 form of Christianity. What mattered to my peers at professors at Duke was justice. I woke up to the world, realizing for the first time that structural oppression and systemic injustices exist. I followed a prophetic Jesus who spoke truth to power and proclaimed the coming of God’s righteous kingdom. There I was, learning how to be a pastor at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in a Southern town full of racial friction. I interrogated my privilege, I protested police violence, I changed my mind about matters of gender and sexuality and challenged my attachment to various “isms” and “phobias”. When three Muslim students from the University of North Carolina were shot just down the road in Chapel Hill, I went to the mass vigil and stayed up all night rewriting the sermon I had to preach the next day in class.

 When I think back on those years of epiphany and action, I hear the voice of William Barber, one of our great contemporary African American preachers, booming through those memories: “I was hungry and you fed you me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was in prison and you visited me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me in.” Matthew 25 came to the forefront, was seared into my spirit, and I will always be grateful for that.

But you know what? Even something as wonderful as justice can become depersonalized. In our efforts to prove our righteousness to the world, we can slowly lose real compassion and concern for real people. It is very easy, once you are convinced that Jesus does actually care about the brokenness of our politics, and about the evil hidden in our histories, to shift the focus from serving people who suffer to evaluating people just like you. ‘Does he believe the right things? Do she say the right things in the right way?’ And when that happens, Matthew 25 gets distorted just like John 3:16. We get legalistic rather than relational. We lose the living person of Christ, who dwells both in our hearts (John 3:16) and in the company of the poor and poor in spirit (Matt. 25).

 I got this way eventually. I developed a critical spirit. I’d go home for Christmas and lambast my parents for not being woke enough. I’d roll my eyes at other pastors who preached about intimacy with Christ, or whose sermons didn’t summon Christians to tangible actions. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but it’s true: I was fired up and immature. I was out of balance. Over time, the Spirit brought me back into balance, back to the living presence of Christ.

 The heart of Matthew 25 became clear to me when I started attending a creative writing group on North Carolina’s Death Row. Every Tuesday at noon I passed through several levels of security and was escorted down a maze of hallways to get to a room where I sat side by side with men in red jumpsuits, men who were, by brutal design, Nobodies to the rest world. Slowly, over several years, they became Somebodies to me. I read and critiqued their writing, I shared my own writing with them. I brought them books and carried out their own handwritten manifestoes, stories, and poems, hidden secrets slipped in my pockets. They were never cuffed or chained, and I touched freely their hands, their shoulders, their backs. We looked one another in the eyes, confirmed one another’s humanity.

  Paul, Rodney, and JT.

LeRoy, Lyle, and Melvin.

Braxton, George, and El Rico.

 I repeat their names as prayer. When I think about criminal justice reform, when I think about capital punishment, when I think about the Christian response to racism and poverty, I don’t think in abstractions anymore. I don’t think so much as I feel. I feel the love I have for those men, I feel the love I received from them, and my thinking builds upon the foundation of that love. The call of the Christian to justice is good and real. But it takes its shape from Christ, who took up residence in our condition, who lived among us and shared our sufferings. God did not sit up high and pontificate about the world; God came very near and transformed it from the inside out.

 And now?

 Well, today, I no longer perceive John 3:16 and Matthew 25 to be at odds with one another. They establish the inner and outer frontiers of our discipleship, calling us to keep Christ at the center. But I will tell you that Matthew 25 haunts me. I’m a pastor after all, the pastor of a Christian church. Surely, in the end, I’ll take my place among the blessed sheep, right? Well, in Jesus’ teaching everyone seems pretty surprised at their fate. They have to ask about it: “When Lord? When was it that we either did or did not serve you?” The implication is that God’s presence was not immediately evident in persons and situations that call us to service. The hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned – these are the messy, broken, taxing realities of life. The difference is that the righteous nations served anyway, out of compassion, even though God remained hidden. The cursed nations did not serve; they were waiting for the world to somehow prove itself worthy of their time and energy.

 So that’s why it haunts me. The element of surprise. Matthew 25 is a way of measuring all the demands on my time and attention, all my compulsions toward escape and distraction. Matthew 25 reminds me of what’s at stake. What’s at stake for God’s beloved, suffering children, and what’s at stake for my own soul, are bound up together.

 I’ve been very biographical this morning. I haven’t gotten into the weeds of the text at all. But I have lived with this scripture as a guiding light for many years, so I offer my witness to you. Matthew 25 is, after all, a word for the Church to live by.

 Did you notice that all the language in the passage is communal, that it’s all about groups of people? “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (v. 32). And all the questions are asked in the plural, “When was it that we gave you food?”

 We stand under this judgment together, as a Church.

 Will we pour out our presence, reminding the Nobodies of the world that they are Somebodies to God?

 Will we pour out our prayers, so that the cries of the needy never go unheard, but are held in perpetual remembrance before the throne of God?

 Will we pour out our gifts, using our shared resources to lace with life a social order built upon death?

 Will we pour out our service, even when the glory of it remains hidden?

 This is our witness.

 Thanks be to God.

Amen.