text for today's 'Sheep and Goats' sermon

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of providing the sermon for the Toronto Community of Christ congregation’s Beyond the Walls online ministry. Like when I preached last summer, the congregation is working its way through the parables associated with a particular gospel (Luke last year, Matthew this year), and I preached on the parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

The parable’s reference to visiting prisoners—combined with having recently read Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle—made me think about a decade(ish)-old memory that I hadn’t thought of for a long time. I also got to think about a Gérard Siegwalt book I recently reread and a recent experience at a spiritual retreat I attended a few years ago. I enjoyed thinking about this text and putting the sermon together and wanted to link to it here. I also really enjoyed the contributions from Estaban (who, it turns out, has some professional overlap with what I do!), Ron, Leandro, Mike, and John, which all tied together into a service that did a lot for my Sunday.

Below, I’m embedding the YouTube recording and then sharing the text that I prepared:

“Lord, when was it that we saw you?”

I once attended a retreat where Apostle Robin Linkhart guided my congregation through several spiritual practices. One of the practices she introduced us to was visio divina, a kind of meditation that uses an image as a starting point for reflection. Each participant in the retreat received a different image to use. My image depicted a group of people, but the image had been cropped in such a way that I could only see them from the knees down.

“Great,” I thought to myself. “How am I supposed to learn something about God by meditating about a bunch of feet?” Yet, immediately after that thought, I realized that despite the strange perspective, I knew exactly what was happening in that picture. The feet in the image were wearing sandals, and the knees in the image were covered with robes—that’s how people dress in art of Bible scenes. What’s more, one (and only one) of the robes in the picture was white. That’s how Jesus dresses in art of Bible scenes so that we know that he’s Jesus, and not one of the disciples. This image had to come from an illustration of some story from the New Testament—and indeed it did. As I continued my meditation, I was struck by how quickly and easily I had recognized Jesus, even though I only saw him from the knees down.

There are many lessons that we can learn from the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, but the lessons that stand out to me today are those related to the parable’s teaching that Jesus can, in fact, be quite difficult to recognize. This makes some sense: Unlike the Jesus of art, the Jesus of first century Palestine didn’t have a special outfit he wore so that people would immediately recognize him. Yet, the parable goes further than that. Even without a special outfit, we Christians might expect to find Jesus preaching a sermon on a mount or sharing a Passover meal in an upper room. However, Jesus himself taught that we might instead find him appearing as someone who is hungry or thirsty or a foreigner or naked or sick or in prison.

“Lord, when was it that we saw you?”

I have only visited someone in prison once in my life. I met Richard (whose name I have changed) while living in the U.S. state of Michigan. He was interested in joining the church I attended at that time, and I helped prepare him for baptism, hoping that we could help him come closer to Jesus. Richard stopped attending our church shortly after his baptism. In that church, we saw ourselves as the only true way to Christ, and so some of us worried about his Christian commitment. I tried to call him sometimes to see how he was doing. One day, local news stations reported that a man had shot two people in town and then barricaded himself in a house on the street where Richard lived. When I heard the news, I called Richard to make sure that he was safe, leaving him a message when he didn’t respond.

As I continued to follow the news, though, I slowly realized that Richard was the shooter I had called to warn him about. I quickly called the pastor of our congregation to warn him that one of our own was being arrested; I was now less worried about Richard’s safety and more worried that his actions might tarnish our church’s reputation.

Some time passed. Richard went to trial, where it was decided that although he was mentally ill, he was guilty of murder. My congregation changed pastors, and the new pastor asked me to start helping with recordkeeping, including taking minutes during leadership meetings. In one such meeting, the new pastor noted that Richard’s crime made it necessary to consider excommunicating Richard from our church. He had never met Richard, though, and wanted to visit him in prison before making that decision; since I knew Richard, I volunteered to come along.

It was an awkward experience. The pastor and I visited Richard one at a time, according to prison rules. During his visit, the pastor learned that it was traditional for visitors to buy prisoners a treat from the vending machine, but we hadn’t prepared for that, so even if we were visiting him in prison, we didn’t bring him anything to eat when he was hungry. During my visit, I had trouble making small talk. I hadn’t known Richard all that well to begin with, and I just didn’t know how to talk to someone who was in prison for murder. After struggling for things to say, I ended up leaving early, disrupting the guards’ schedule and cutting Richard off from one of his rare contacts with the outside world. A few months later, I took minutes as the pastor and other congregational leaders formally excommunicated Richard, judging that his crimes were serious enough to sever his baptismal commitment to Jesus.

My entire relationship with Richard came down to me evaluating whether he was close enough to Jesus. Now, though, as I read the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, I realize that it never occurred to me that Jesus might have been present in my life through Richard, and that the real question was perhaps whether I was close enough to him. I don’t mean to oversimplify things. Richard was guilty of a serious crime, and one of the people he killed was a “stranger”— a foreigner who should have been “welcomed” to our town. Instead, the stranger’s young child and widow were left to mourn his death in their native country, far away from Michigan. As the Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber has written, “the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of Christike people.” Yet, she continues, “those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of Christike people. They all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other…. Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry [and imprisoned], needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of God might be known.”

Even years after visiting Richard in prison, I have to admit that I am still working on recognizing Jesus in the faces (and the needs) of prisoners. I still expect to only recognize him as the one wearing white robes in a painting of a Bible scene.

“Lord, when was it that we saw you?”

At this congregational retreat, practicing visio divina, I continued to think about how easily I had recognized Jesus in his white robes. In my work as a professor, I sometimes consider how different social and cultural groups use different symbols to represent the same ideas. Because these symbols are tied to these groups, they might not be recognized outside of those groups.

In the religious culture that I (and perhaps many of you) grew up in, a white robe is a traditional—and, therefore, obvious—symbol for helping us recognize Jesus. In turn, Jesus is in some ways simply a human symbol of “mystery beyond understanding and love beyond imagination,” as we describe God in Community of Christ. You have to take a few steps to get from that white robe to the mystery and love that I (and perhaps many of you) associate with it, and I don’t think all of those steps would be obvious for all people.

We all know that it is the mystery and love of God that matter, and not the white robe, or any other symbol that we use to represent divinity. Yet, it can still be difficult for us to recognize God—or Jesus—when divinity appears in ways that do not match the social and cultural symbols that we are used to.

“Lord, when was it that we saw you?”

For example, let us consider the title in Matthew 25 that we associate with Jesus: “Lord.” For the Christians that I know, it is nothing out of the ordinary to call God our “Lord.” However, this title is itself a kind of symbol, one developed in the centuries before Jesus’s ministry to avoid pronouncing God’s name; what’s more, there are multiple stories in the Bible that suggest that at some point, this particular name for God was new and unfamiliar for believers—it was outside of the symbols that they were used to.

Consider Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush. After God asks Moses to liberate his people, Moses asks a curious question: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13). Moses recognizes that something divine is happening here—something full of mystery and love—but he doesn’t seem to recognize God in this form or under this name. Indeed, a few chapters later, God tells Moses “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The LORD’ I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3). In other words, Moses was meeting the same God who had supported his ancestors, but this time God was appearing with a new name and in new ways. We often talk about how inadequate Moses must have felt for the task of freeing his people; I wonder, though, how nervous he must have been to be serving God when God insisted on appearing in unfamiliar ways.

Another origin story for this new name of God comes from Genesis 4. As the French theologian Gérard Siegwalt notes, what we see in Genesis 4 is the ending of one world and the beginning of another. Cain has invented murder and definitively put end to his family’s innocence. Cain then goes on to build the first cities, where his descendants are inventing new careers, musical instruments, tools, and technologies—it is a fast paced and frightening world. And yet, with the birth of Adam and Eve’s son Seth, there is still hope for this new world, and it as all of this is happening, that “people began to invoke the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26).

Siegwalt sees great importance in this new name for God emerging at a time when old worlds are ending and new worlds are being born. Why? Because we live in a fast paced and frightening world that sometimes feels like it is ending around us. Siegwalt calls attention to “ecological and climate catastrophe,” “social catastrophe,” and “human, personal catastrophe”; yet, he also suggests that in the midst of this ending, a new world—and a new church—are being born to replace the old.

Furthermore, Siegwalt suggests, like the people in Genesis 4, the people of this new world—the people looking for this new church—may call God by a new name that we do not recognize. Like Moses—or like the characters in today’s parable—we may find the same God we have always worshipped appearing to us in unfamiliar ways or using names that God has not used with us before. We recognize God in Jesus, and we recognize Jesus as “Lord,” but will we recognize God in the names that our neighbors are invoking as they search for mystery and love in a world that seems to be ending?

For Siegwalt, this does not mean abandoning the sacred story that we tell as part of our faith; rather, it is a question of reinterpreting that sacred story for the needs of the times and places we find ourselves in now. Jesus will still be all around us—we just have to understand that he may no longer be wearing the white robe that we have put upon him.

“Lord, when was it that we saw you?”

In a testimony published in 1981, Apostle Charles Neff expressed his belief that “Jesus is not one who has gone away and will sometime come again, but is ever present, a face that can be seen anywhere in modern society.”

Neff served our church during a time when it was learning the same lesson that the characters in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats had also learned: That Jesus can, in fact, be quite difficult to recognize.

Neff’s invitation to see Jesus’s face all around us was his way of echoing Matthew 25: that Jesus is present in the needs of those who are hungry, or thirsty, or foreigners, or naked, or sick, or in prison.

Neff’s renegotiation of traditional beliefs was part of a reinterpretation of symbols that happened during that time, a challenge to our church to make it easier for outsiders to recognize Christ at work in our community.

Over four decades later, I think we are still working to recognize Jesus in these new ways—I know that I am! I can easily recognize the white robed Jesus of religious art, even if I only see him from the knees down. I want to do better at recognizing Jesus in the faces of prisoners like Richard and so many others whose needs I can help meet. I want to do better at representing Jesus in a way that those searching for mystery and love in a world that sometimes seems to be ending can easily find him.

Thank you.

• macro
• Communities
• Beyond the Walls
• Community of Christ
• Sheep and Goats
• La réinvention du nom de Dieu
• Gérard Siegwalt
• The Bezzle
• Cory Doctorow
• Nadia Bolz-Weber
• Accidental Saints
• Charles Neff
• incarnation