"The Human Face of God"

Original Sermon Date: 
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Rev. Bernard W. Nord
The 34th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Matthew 25:31-46
 
With appreciation for the late John A.T. Robinson, who wrote a book with the same title as this sermon,[1]I’d like to ask a question. What do you suppose would happen if wise virgins and prudent slaves and good sheep were all mixed up together with foolish virgins, imprudent slaves, and crafty and cranky goats in the kingdom of heaven? What do you suppose would happen? I wonder if we’d want to go there?
 
If the good and the faithful were all mixed up together with the bad and imprudent in the kingdom of heaven, what would happen is that the kingdom of heaven would look an awful lot like my family...and yours, I expect...the Nord’s, the Engle’s, and the Donaldson’s...the good and bad, beautiful and ugly, thin and fat, the opulent and the oppressed, the happy and the depressed, the navel gazers and the outwardly focused, the heroes and the horse thieves...all mixed up together in the same family. What would happen is, we might not want to go there.
 
What do you suppose would happen if the good and the bad and the wise and the foolish and the faithful and the unfaithful and the good goats and bad sheep were all mixed up together in the kingdom of heaven? What do you suppose would happen? I suppose that the kingdom of heaven would look an awful lot like St. Philip Presbyterian Church, all of us mixed up together, not knowing really who is who and which is which, not knowing any more than the righteous but perplexed folks who said, “When, Master, how?” Not knowing, really, why some of the virgins among us don’t have enough lamp oil or which have enough and which haven’t, knowing only there isn’t enough to go around but not hating anybody for it and not getting after anybody because he’s a little more cautious than we are in wanting to hide and protect what the master’s given us rather than risk losing it...which is what you do if you go public with it and put it in the market. I mean, who can criticize the cautious servant that Alice talked about last week?
 
What do you suppose would happen if the kingdom of heaven were as goofy a place as that, with that kind of diversity? I mean, I’ve always thought the kingdom of heaven would only be the good people. Go figure. What would happen, what will happen, is: the kingdom of heaven would, will look exactly like us and, perhaps, like every faith community and family in creation! Wow!
 
And you know what? It does. The kingdom of heaven -- the mysterious place that Jesus in Matthew’s telling describes to us -- looks just like us! “The kingdom of heaven will be like this:” (Matthew 25, Verse 1) ten bridesmaids, five of them wise and well prepared to meet the master; five of them short sighted and lazy. We don’t know which five, or why. We only know they’re among us. We don’t even know which group we’re in, the wise folks or the foolish folks. We don’t. Not really. Fastidious Martha of the two sisters of Bethany, she thought she knew. Well-organized, well prepared, well planned-ahead for, she thought she knew...but maybe she didn’t. Maybe Mary the Dreamer knew better. It isn’t always a matter of care and well-conceived planning. We don’t always know.
 
“The kingdom of heaven will be like this:” Three slaves have a master who goes on a trip and leaves the three of them in charge of financial management. One gets five parts of the bank account, one gets two parts, and the third is given one. All three do the best they can. The master comes back. The one with five has produced five more and is rewarded. The one given two has produced two more and is rewarded. The one given one gives that one back and no more...and the master casts him out where it’s dark and wooly. Don’t know for sure why. Frankly, it seems a bit unfair. The guy was afraid; he simply didn’t want to take a chance. But the kingdom of heaven is like that. Kind of like my family, kind of like yours, kind of like St. Philip Presbyterian Church, I guess, and every other church, local or regional, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Congregational or other wise. The kingdom of heaven is as goofy as that. It has an incredibly human face.
 
And, by extension in this series of stories in Matthew 25 about what God’s community is like, at once here but also not here, here but only in part; by extension, God’s community issues into a time when the Son of Man, the Christ of the heavens, comes again enthroned in glory. At the end of Chapter 25, just before Jesus moves, in Chapter 26, to Jerusalem and the cross, we’re told that, when finally the glorious kingdom of heaven is issued fully in, a time of reckoning will occur when all will be shaken down and evaluated. The bad will be separated from the good, the sheep from the goats.
 
Judgment Day will come. I don’t want to diminish that. When? We don’t know. How? We don’t know. Matthew’s people thought it would happen imminently. It hasn’t for two millennia. For two millennia we’ve been in the meanwhile, in the in-between time, not knowing who are sheep or goats, not knowing who the bad and who the good are, and feeling all the while a compulsion to do the best we can given all the ambiguity. The people of the kingdom that is coming, the kingdom that is here but not quite, the people of that kingdom are us.
 
So...we do the only thing we can. Forge ahead, best we can. It helps to acknowledge the kingdom hasn’t fully come yet but is on its way. And it helps to notice that in the meanwhile time we’re given some guides about doing the best we can. Quite clearly, the best we can do in every intermediate moment of life, and there are no final or complete moments, is to be compassionate. Compassionate… to respond to every human face and soul, partnering with whomever we can to make the response to God’s human face on this planet as complete and effective as possible.
 
Even in those moments when we don’t like each other or trust each other very much. Even then: partnering to see that the objectives that the Lord Master Judge, the Son of Man judge, calls us all to address are addressed as effectively as we have the capacity and the power to do. (And we have a lot of capacity and power.)
 
It’s a matter of just seeing to it that food boxes for the hungry face of God that shows in the faces of poor people gathered at the food banks of Houston or any of the places where our Kids Against Hunger boxes are sent, that the boxes get filled and the stuff that is placed in those boxes is put there without judgment about who deserves it and who doesn’t. It’s a matter of taking a cup, one too large for any one of us to carry alone, and then partnering however we must to give drink to parched throats where ever they are, whether in polluted, exhaust-filled alleys in downtown or East our Southeast Houston where our partners might be dedicated Catholic lay missionaries and Muslim young people determined to demonstrate the virtue that their faith tradition also contains...or in refugee camps operated by our Presbyterian Church in Kenya and South Sudan where the goal of refugees who walk for days and weeks is just to be safe, period. It’s a matter of coming together and taking a cup that is too big for any of us alone and giving those people and places a drink.
 
“When did we see thee naked, Lord, and clothe thee?” It’s a matter of helping creatively in ways all of us agree on and affirm together, so young and naked minds are clothed with knowledge and just reason, both within the rooms of our family here and far beyond as well; where the very face of God will be seen in the naked and shivering stranger; so the lonely face of God is responded to with kindness; so the unjustly imprisoned person of God or mind of God is liberated; so the least is empowered. So God’s intent is advanced, as well as possible, by our very own hands.
 
It won’t require unanimity on every topic in the family to get the work done. It will only take determination to get what is commonly held and commonly affirmed as good done. What the outcome will be, we don’t know for sure. No one knows but the master and judge himself/herself, the one called the Son of Man by Matthew and his generation, the one called the Divine, the Spirit of the Universe, even the nurturing parent by others.
 
Be assured, no one of us alone is that one. But, coming together, we begin to hear that one’s voice and begin to see that one’s face which, turns out, is a human face. And coming together, we begin again to figure out again just who we are as people called to an eternal, once-for-all, fully-in-place place called the kingdom of heaven, a place where Christ is king, a place that is coming but is also already here, a place that is given to us by Christ its monarch, a place that is a gift, a gift for which there could no greater or more pure response than just to give our profoundest thanks. Amen.
 
[1]Robinson, John A.T., The Human Face of God, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1973.