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St. Andrew's Church
An Anglican Church • Grimsby, Ontario, Canada
Preached by
Stuart Pike
Rector
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Christ the King
St. Andrew's Church
25 November 2007
Matthew 25: 31-46
Three church-active women died and went to the pearly gates to see St. Peter.
The first woman was Catholic and said to St. Peter, "This is my Rosary." "Yes," says St. Peter. "I see that it is well-worn. You may come into Heaven."
The second woman was Baptist and said to St. Peter,"This is my Bible." "Yes," St. Peter nods approvingly. "I can see that the pages a nearly worn out from reading. You may come into Heaven."
The Third woman was an Anglican. She looked up at St. Peter, took a covered dish from behind her back and said,"St. Peter, this is my casserole."
Today is Christ the King Sunday and we talk, not only about our King, but also about inheriting the kingdom.
Our King Jesus is indeed our King, but he is a King who puts all the ways of the world upside down. If he is to be our King, we must follow his lead. We are to live the kind of life that Jesus shows us by example.
In Matthew 25 we have the vision of the coming of the Son of Man (Jesus Christ), coming in all of his glory as a King to judge everyone. And he will separate the sheep and the goats. We get the story. The sheep go on the right hand, and the goats go on the left. If there is any confusion about which side you want to be on, you definitely do not want to be a goat on the left hand side. Because they get sent into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and all of his angels. Not a wholesome prospect at all. But let us look at how the King determines who is the sheep and who is the goat.
Jesus calls the sheep to him because when he was hungry and thirsty, or a stranger, or sick or in prison, the sheep helped him. When they say they don't understand, Jesus explains that when they did it to the least, then they did it to him. Jesus identifies with the poor and the sick and the needy, and today, Jesus is made known to us in a special way among the poorest and least in the world.
There is no clearer indication in all of the scripture of how we are to find Jesus in our lives today. Jesus is all around us. But do we recognize him?
I will always be haunted by the vision I had in Madagascar of a young girl of, perhaps, seven years old. She was begging on the streets and on her back, strapped on by a piece of cloth knotted at her front, was her infant brother. Both of them were filthy - their clothes, their hands and faces were the colour of the street.
She was packing up to go to wherever she called home and she headed down a laneway when I was still fifty metres off. When I reached the laneway I could see her slowly walking, about to cross at the next street over. I felt helpless and at a loss of what to do. I was with others and we were heading to our comfortable hotel to have dinner. In the next split second, my friends had caught up with me and I simply continued to walk with them along the boulevard. I took one last glance down the alleyway to see this little girl, who was Jesus, carrying her heavy burden as if it was a cross. But she didn't mind, because her burden was her baby brother. I knew that in that moment, I was a goat.
But the goats are defined not according to any bad that they did. They are goats because they didn't do anything at all. They didn't do anything like attack the person in need. They just didn't do anything. This is the clincher. Jesus doesn't accept the excuse that we didn't do anything. Not doing anything is condemnation in itself. This is the answer to the question. We prove ourselves by the good use of our power. Condemnation comes by either the mis-use, or the lack of use of our power.
In our society today, this lack of use of power is the usual sort of sin. There aren't too many of us who go out of our way to do evil. But there are many who don't do what they could do for good. Most goats aren't black with sin - embroiled in hatred and greed and envy and perversion. Most goats are just luke-warm - not doing anything, just stumbling around until they stumble over the precipice. They don't go out with a bang, or even with a whimper. They just go out.
Now before everyone gets worried and stays awake at night wondering whether they are more goat-like or sheep-like, I think it is important to realize who we are. We are the Church, and we are members of the flock. With Christ as the King in our lives, he is the head of the body which is the Church. If we have taken our promises at baptism seriously, and if we trust in Jesus, then in the end, we will be on the good side. Christ not only promises the new kingdom to those who follow him. Christ also promises the transformation of our hearts. There should be signs of those transformed hearts in our lives, though.
Make no mistake it isn't by good works that we earn our way into heaven (for we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ our King) - we don't get to heaven because of the work we do for the poor, or through the amount of prayer that we do, or for how good our casseroles are for that matter. Jesus says in today's gospel reading, "Inherit the Kingdom." That means the kingdom is freely given. However, if we truly follow Christ our King, then there will be works there as evidence of our transformed hearts. We will do these things because Christ is indeed our King - a King who has it all wrong according to the world. A King who has it all right according to our hearts.
What can we do to reach out to the poor, the hungry, the sick or those in need?
Today is the "Make Poverty History Sabbath." Churches, Temples, Mosques and synagogues all over the world are invited to consider helping the world to make poverty history. The goals of the Make Poverty History campaign are to pressure governments to adopt the millennium development goals which they set for themselves at the turn of the millennium. Supporting Make Poverty History (www.makepovertyhistory.ca) is a way to act to end world poverty. Tithing your income (giving a tenth of what you earn) is another way to do it. Give some to your Church, and more to poverty reducing and development agencies. Giving to the Primate's World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) (www.pwrdf.org) is another way to make a difference here in Canada and around the world. May God's spirit move us to reach out to serve Jesus as he approaches us in the poor and needy. And may we be sheep! Amen.
