Matthew 25:31-46 "Choosing Sides"

         According to author JK Rowling, at the beginning of a school year each new student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would individually approach the front of the dining hall and sit on an old three-legged stool, the stars of the nighttime sky dancing gently overhead on the ceiling.  An ancient and worn-out pointed hat was placed gently upon his or her head.  The student sat very still with wide-open eyes as the hat swayed and shook and finally blurted out the name of one of the four Hogwarts’ houses: Griffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw.

         For those of you who have read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, you know that it was the Ritual of the Sorting Hat, and it placed each student in the most appropriate house for his or her temperament, strengths, and weaknesses.  And not a single student really knew the precise reason for his or her housing assignment.

         This parable about the sheep and the goats could be Jesus’ version of the Sorting Hat.  It appears near the end of the Gospel of Matthew, just before the events of Holy Week begin to unfold. 

        Jesus is on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, the Holy City.  He has been talking with his followers, knowing in his heart of hearts what is likely to happen in the next few days and taking this one final opportunity to proclaim the Gospel truth. 

         He has taught Peter, James, John, Judas, and the others in parables about wise and foolish maidens and faithful and unfaithful servants.  He has told them about giving migrant laborers those gold coins we call talents and seeing who would bury them and who would invest them.

         And now in the gathering dusk, Jesus tells his final story.  It forms a bookend of sorts, coupled with the Beatitudes (or Blessings) by which he began his ministry.  According to this Gospel writer, it was also on a hillside - way back when. 

         Blogger Ray Stedman describes the poignant scene this way:  Jesus stood “ in the midst of a tiny band of forsaken men, and looking out over a city where even at that moment his enemies were completing the plans for his arrest and execution. When Jesus uttered these words, by every human appearance he was defeated. The powers of darkness were triumphant, the shadow of the cross was falling across his pathway, the crowds that once had followed him had long since gone, his friends were fearful and powerless, and one of them was even then set to betray him. Yet as he surveyed the centuries he saw the light that was yet to come, and without uncertainty in his words, in that hour of triumphant evil and seeming human defeat, he declared, "When the Son of man comes in his glory...he will sit on his glorious throne. [And] before him will be gathered the nations."

         Throughout his ministry, Jesus declares often what it will take to make God’s dream for the world a reality. In doing so, he talks a lot about life on this earth now, much more than he talks about the hereafter.  He talks a lot about justice and mercy.  He talks a lot about the forgotten ones, the ones who wander about this world having been chewed up and spat out by the rest of us. 

         Sometimes Jesus is fairly cryptic and we, like his ancient disciples before us, scratch our heads quizzically and wonder just what we are supposed to do with his mysterious and nonsensical words.  At other times, he is much clearer. But nowhere – certainly not in the Gospel of Matthew – nowhere is Jesus more explicit about God’s expectation for us than he is in this story that makes us feel so uncomfortable that we may actually squirm when we hear it, this parable of the sheep and the goats.

         In it, Jesus tells us that we are put on a team.  We are either a sheep or a goat.  And whichever team we end up on, we will be surprised. 

         Those of us who have lived lives of justice, actively and consistently making the world a better place for those less fortunate than we, not to earn stars in our crown or grace points in heaven but only because we saw a need in the world and chose to respond, he will say, "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me."

         And when those folks express surprise and ask when they ever had the opportunity to do such things for him, he will answer them, "As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me." This is the sheep team.

         And to the others who will look equally surprised, he will say in these words we cannot quite expunge from the backs of our own minds even now, even today: "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and no drink.  I was a stranger.  I was naked.  I was sick.  I was in prison.”  And to their befuddled question “Lord, when?” he will answer: "As you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."  This is the goat team.

         Their surprise is almost as if they were thinking that if they had only known that Jesus was serious about all those parables like the Good Samaritan and the farmer who built a second barn to house all his extra harvest, this sheep and goat business would have turned out differently for them. 

         If they had only known that there was more to this Christianity business than just showing up in worship, or sticking a small check or some loose change in the offering plate, or enduring boring committee meetings (even if they were for the sake of the Gospel, or so we kept telling ourselves) …

        If they had only known that Jesus’ was to be found in the unfocused eyes of the hungry, in the restless hands of the jobless, in the coughs and cancers of the uninsured, they would have been right in there going to bat for the least of these. 

         Why didn’t somebody tell them? After all, those who ended up on the goat team seldom, if ever, woke up in the morning, looked at themselves in the mirror, and declared, “Today I am going to be racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic, greedy, a conflict maker.”

         However, the criteria for a team assignment is quite straightforward and twofold.  First, we choose whether or not we will respond to the world’s need.  Second (and equally important as the first), we decide who merits our assistance.  Most of us do pretty well on the first criteria.  We all engage at one time or another in a share of those random acts of kindness. 

         However (and here’s the rub), we oftentimes end up trying to figure out just who the least of these are that we will act compassionately toward.  Beware of that tendency because it will cause us our sheep status.   Though a narrower target group would certainly make any project more manageable and probably financially less risky, once we arbitrarily create a smaller pool of least ones, we are cut from the sheep team.  Jesus calls us to always err on the side of justice.

         The question then is not what we need to do to be saved and end up on the fast track to heaven when we die. The question is what we need to do now to bring God’s dream to fruition, so the world is a bit more like heaven.

         You see, the mark of a true follower of Jesus is not adherence to a creed and believing all the right things.  It is not one’s knowledge of the Bible.  It is not even one’s faith and profession of Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior. 

         The mark of a true follower of Jesus is the concern one shows – day in and day out - for those in need.  You see, for Jesus, helping the oppressed, the marginalized, and the down-and-out is the ultimate serious business.  Perhaps that is why at our baptism, we promise to care for one another and are reminded that we are called to “serve as Christ’s representatives in the world.”

         We are put on a team – sheep or goats - but I would say that, unlike the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts, our assignment is not a one-time decision.  We are put on a team every time we encounter a need in the world. We are put on a team – sheep or goats – every time we choose whether or not we will weep with those who weep, struggle with those who struggle, stand up for the down-and-out, share the pain of the family split by deportation or labeled as less than true blue American because of their religion or nation of origin.

         The mark of a true follower of Jesus is the practical demonstration of love.  There is no gray area.  You are either with him, or you are not. 

         As theologian Helmut Thielicke wrote:  "How easily we let a sentence like 'God is a God of love' pass over our lips. It even sounds a bit trite. But just let Jesus stand in front of us and look at us when we say the words and at once this pious little saying becomes an accusation. Then all of a sudden we hear it spoken by the beggar we shooed from our door yesterday, the servant-girl we dismissed, perhaps because she was going to have a baby, the neighbor whose name has recently been dragged through the newspapers because of some disgraceful affair, whom we let know that we always walk the straight and narrow path. Suddenly we hear them all speaking it, because this saying (God is a God of love) has something to do with all of them, not only with the God who dwells above the clouds, for in them the eyes of the Lord himself are gazing at us."

         Jesus promises to stand with those in the greatest need, and if we want to experience God’s presence, then we need to stand with them as well.  Jesus is hanging out in the mundane messiness of the world.  He is not sitting in the front pew in this or any other church.  If we want to experience God’s presence, then we need to be hanging out in the dark and dirty places too – choosing to rub elbows with our brothers and sisters who have made (in many instances been forced to make) those dark and dirty places their home.

         You know, we often interpret this parable from an individual standpoint.  What team am I on?  How compassionate am I?  However, in the first verse of this parable, the Gospel writer says that all the nations of the world are called together, implying that cultures and systems and – yes - even churches are eventually all brought to account.  This parable is more than just sizing up our own individual actions and purposes.  It is equally gauging us as a church. And so we must ask ourselves this question:  “Do we as the church look and act like Jesus?”

         This parable asks us as a congregation:  What programs and projects have we as a church put in place to serve the least of these?  What opportunities have we as a church given to individuals here to share their compassion and to side with the least of these?  What steps have we as a church taken to stand up for justice? 

         Last week, we added to our waterfall here at the front of our sanctuary strips of cloth indicating where each of you saw injustice in the world. The words you wrote covered a wide range – from anti-Semitic activity to family strife to hunger to addiction to women’s reproductive rights to immigration to disagreeing with the direction our President and Congress is taking us. 

         Though writing words may be a start, this parable of the sheep and the goats points out that words are not enough.  It is all about choices and priorities. 

         What are we choosing to do as a church to ensure that the least of these are not lost in the political tensions that circumscribe all those justice issues you mentioned? 

What are we as a church choosing to do to honor the least of these – and what more could we intentionally do? Is it time to set aside those mission projects we are so comfortable with that we do not even think about how they might be changing lives – and choose instead to venture off in new and more challenging directions?

         In a world as spiritually hungry as ours, surely many people from all walks of life, from all parts of the globe, seek to experience that amazing love that lies at the very foundation of our Christianity.  That is our calling, you know, to share that compassion – not intentionally, not because we are Christian do-gooders or because we are proselytizing, but just because we can, just because it is the human thing to do – and, for us, to do in his name – share that amazing love that we have experienced with the waitress, the panhandler, the nursing home resident, the harried young mother in the check out line in front of us at the grocery store.  Our calling as a bunch of Jesus’ 21^st century followers is not to change the world.  It is to make a difference in the world, one life at a time.  Surely we as individuals and as a church can choose to do that.    

        It is as Presbyterian pastor and theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “For Jesus the only distinction between (people) that ultimately matters seems to be not whether they are churchgoers or non-churchgoers, communists or capitalists, Catholics or Protestants or Jews, but do they or do they not love - love not in the sense of an emotion so much as in the sense of an act of the will, the loving act of willing another's good even, if need arise, at the expense of their own….

         …’As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’ Just as Jesus appeared (Buechner continues) at his birth as a helpless child that the world was free to care for or destroy, so now he appears as the pauper, the prisoner, the stranger: appears in every form of human need that the world is free to serve or to ignore.”

         In concluding then, because the parable of the sheep and the goats is all about choices and priorities, I challenge you in this third week of Lent to reflect on these questions: What team have you chosen to be on?  What team have we chosen as a church?  What evidence have we – as individuals but also as a church - that we look and act like Jesus?  What more could we do in his name?