Today’s readings share the stories of the calling of the prophet Samuel and, 1000 years later, the calling of Jesus’ first disciples. And this week we remember the call and witness of a modern-day prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In our first reading we hear the story of the young temple assistant, Samuel, who mistook God’s calling him as a voice in the night coming from another room in the Shiloh temple where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. After approaching the elderly priest Eli for a third time that night, saying to him, “Yes…you called?” Samuel is wisely told that the next time he should just remain right where he is and say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening,” – and then listen. And so he does and gets an earful about the future of the old priest’s household, with implications for his own ministry and the future of all Israel. Thus begins Samuel’s call—his prophetic vocation. And in our gospel we hear about the call of Jesus’ disciples and their capacity, or incapacity, for listening to their calls—especially Nathanael the impetuous one, known as Bartholomew in the other gospels.

Now as the old adage goes, God gave each of us two ears and one mouth, so you’d think it would make sense that we would listen twice as much as we speak. True worship is defined in the 40th Psalm [v. 6] as the gift of an open ear (literally translated, “ears you have dug for me”). Of course, that’s a perennial problem for folks like me, for generally speaking, we clergy are generally speaking! Attentiveness, listening, is making a conscious effort to hear, with the heart and the mind. In very specific terms, God is constantly calling each of us in many and varied ways—through our memories, dreams, reflections, and through the many voices that come to us from within and without. If we would but stop, look and listen, we might discover our vocation—God’s call—somewhere through these voices. One of the recurring notes of biblical judgment is the damning and almost despairing line, “they have ears to hear but they hear not.” This does not refer to physical deafness, but to all the distracted, distorted or detached ways that people are deaf to God and to the cries of God’s creation. We are easily distracted by the myriad of voices that come to us every day. Like Samuel, we can easily mistake God’s voice calling for something or someone else, and rush away without waiting for the message. We can also easily distort the voice of God coming to us. Like Nathanael, we can misinterpret a divine message through our distorted or prejudicial perspectives—the way Nathanael, having heard Jesus was from a town even more remote than his own, stated, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” At least Nathanael went ahead with Philip when he said, “Come and see.” Along with distraction and distortion, we often detach from our capacity to listen attentively by being too fixated on the doing of many tasks all at the same time, as well as by our personal insecurities, and sometimes just not really caring. The sounds of our own organizational and personal needs can drown out even the clearest sounds of God calling.

Our readings today challenge us to listen attentively to the true source and nature of vocation—our calling by God, both as individuals and as a community. Frederick Buechner writes, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness, and the world’s deep hunger, meet.” So, what does that mean for you? How do you find that intersection? And how can you tell if it’s God calling you there? What does being called mean as you move through all the various arenas in which you live your life and through which your call may be lived out?

Quaker educator Parker Palmer suggests that we start by looking to the past and present at the places and experiences in our lives where we can discover just what our sources of deep gladness are; and from there we can then connect to the world and its hungers. But for a long time I have had this reversed. My own vocational journey – albeit grounded in a sense of gladness in God’s love, presence and purpose in my life – nonetheless, for years, was focused on the latter half of Buechner’s quote. In other words, I focused on what I ought to do, what I thought I should do, to help the common good. And I focused a lot less on the first part, in other words, what truly gladdens me in my life, what truly makes me come alive. I’ve spent a good bit of my time living life from the outside in more than from the inside out, at times trying to imitate my role models and heroes more than listening to my own heart and discovering my own birthright gifts. Parker Palmer asserts that “before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, instead listen for what it intends to do with you. And before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, instead let your life tell you what truths you [already] embody and what values you truly represent.” I have learned that I need to listen, listen for how God has already spoken to me, throughout my life experiences, rather than continually pursuing imperatives of acting only according to what I think I ought to do. In other words, a true sense of vocation does not come from willfulness or obligation; rather, it comes from attentive listening. The word “vocation” itself comes from the Latin “vocare” – meaning call. Vocation does not first and foremost mean a goal or task that you have to pursue; rather, it primarily means a calling that you listen for.

Over the past few years I’ve been listening though some “cracked-open” places in my life. A refrain in my own discovery or rediscovery of vocation is that verse from the Leonard Cohen song that goes, “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” – or gets out, I might add. Over the past few years, I’ve become more and more “cracked open,” if you will, re-discovering that it is an illusion that authentic ministry comes out of my strengths only, rather than out of my weaknesses and limitations as well. I’m becoming more “cracked open” as my competencies are questioned or even broken apart. I’m becoming more “cracked open” as my limitations bump up against reality. I am also more “cracked open” realizing my illusions of invulnerability and indispensability are just that: illusions. But at the same time however, the deep gladness which most often doesn’t lie on the surface of my existence is being re-discovered in the cracks – the cracked-openness of my life.

As I look for that deep gladness in the places in my life where I’ve been “cracked open” as it were and can rediscover my true self, I find there the self that can then intersect with and be given to addressing some of the world’s deep hungers and the common good. I can then continue to seek a right relationship with institutions with which I have had a lifelong lover’s quarrel – institutions such as the Church. Through all this I find myself on a journey described well by the poet May Sarton who wrote, “Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places. I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other peoples’ faces.” I’m still on that journey. As I continue to listen for my true self behind roles and action, behind masks and identities, I am becoming myself – discovering the places both where I exert my best energies and where I am being dissolved or shaken and cracked open, and rediscovering a deep gladness. That is my hope for all of you as well, that in the time ahead, you also continue to seek in yourself and amongst yourselves the places where your deep gladness is to be found—where you come alive--and from there, continue to connect with the world’s deep hunger in whatever appropriate ways. From this comes a sense of true vocation as real and meaningful as the calling of Samuel or Jesus’ disciples. And it starts with the simple and open posture recommended to Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

Notes:

Additional quotes:

"Finding our vocation [calling] is not just "finding my lifework," nor even "finding what God wants me to do." Finding our vocation is largely a matter of finding where God is, the God who hides in our neighbors, in ourselves, and in [the] world. Once we notice the Hidden God...at work-in the workplace, families, the community, and the church-and when we realize the part we play in [God's] design, we have found our vocation."  ~ God at Work, Gene Edward Veith

“Listening for God is not just learning religion. It’s connecting the absolutely ordinary life you live—your routine, your work, your questions, your pain—with the hunger everyone of us has for deep meaning and deep community.” – “A new era for you” William McD. Tully (New York: St. Bartholomew’s Church)

"Don't ask what the world needs. Rather ask - what makes you come alive?
Then go and do it! Because what the world needs is people who have come
alive."   -  Howard Thurman

“If you bring forth what is in you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  - Jesus, from the Gospel of Thomas

“…Tell me, what is it you plan to do
 with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver

"The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence; not for the one good
deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day
calling unto day shall make a life worth living." -- W.E.B. Du Bois

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?  -- Rabbi Hillel

All Saints Church,  Worcester, MA
December 18, 2011 at the 7:45, 9:00 and 10:30 a.m. services
The Rev. Kevin D. Bean
 •  2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16;  •  Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26;  •  Romans 16:25-27;  •  Luke 1:26-38

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, Mary receives a visit from an angel.  This event is what the Church calls the Annunciation, and it’s quite an announcement!  Over the centuries, artists have attempted to portray the moment when Mary became aware that she was going to have a very special baby.  You’ve seen some of these paintings: Mary sits calmly and regally, and often looks so composed that it is hard to remember she was just a girl (only in her early teens).  She gazes at what the artists portray as a winged messenger Gabriel who bows in her presence. Gabriel is one of only two divine messengers – angels if you will – who are given a name in the Hebrew Bible. The name Gabriel means “man of God.” Whether he is more man than angelic being, or the other way around, gets a little blurry in the accounts in Daniel and then in this gospel of Luke where he is mentioned. Anyway, in these paintings the bowing angel usually holds a lily, or in some paintings an olive branch, or in others a royal scepter or staff, signifying respectively the purity, the peace, and the authority the messenger brings from God.  Mary and the angel bend toward each other and look at one another at an intersection between time and eternity, heaven and earth, humanity and God.  Somewhere up higher in these paintings you can usually see a dove, symbolizing that what’s happening is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; but below or rather at the center, everything focuses on Mary.  The angel kneels in front of the young woman upon whose answer God and the whole creation depend.

Art and gospel story have been intermingled in our minds to express the inexpressible: because, of course, this whole event is almost inexpressible. It is so profound and majestic, so full of cosmic significance that we have to turn to a certain kind of story and art to share it among us.  For mystery can only be expressed in the language of mystery. 

Let’s look a little more at the angel and Mary.  First of all, in the original Greek of Luke’s gospel, the word for angel can mean messenger or message.  Always in the Bible, angels are understood to be the messengers or messages of God.  Yet, we might find it more helpful to reverse the statement and say that messages from God are our angels.  With this understanding we realize that angels have visited each one of us, too. Sometimes the message is of encouragement, sometimes of warning.  Its way of coming to us may be through any of the many means of communication in our culture. Phone calls, or e-mails, conversations, or periods of quiet reflection, in a dream, a passage in a book, a remark of someone very close to us or not so close—any number of these may be messages borne on great wings, as it were, irrespective of the everyday disguise through which they come to us. As the Letter to the Hebrews testifies, “some have entertained angels without knowing it” (13:2). We don’t know what actual form Mary’s angel really took.  We do not know what voice brought to Mary the realization of what God was calling her to.  We only know that she heard the voice, wrestled with it, as it were, had a transaction with it by using her own voice, and then accepted it; and therefore her future and the future of all humanity became utterly changed.

The first thing Mary hears from her angelic messenger is “Greetings favored one!  The Lord is with you.” The story goes that Mary was confused and disturbed by these words and “pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”  Messages that come at us or come from within us—and we all experience them—have to be pondered, evaluated.  The more intense or demanding they are, the more essential it is to do this.  Messages within us can come from many sources.  They can be angelic and creative, or not from God, leading us in a wrong direction—even destructive—from a shadow source.  We do well if we are troubled or concerned when something deeply directive wells up within us and we feel called to specific action.  We are wise if we examine very carefully “what sort of greeting this might be.”

Such is Mary’s concern that she feels fearful, perplexed, and inadequate.  As with everything else we humans feel, fear has a legitimate role.  It can act as warning.  It can clear our vision to see false notes in a possibility, to see traps, to realize that we are attracted to something that is essentially unwise or harmful.  But on the other hand, fear can keep us on the edge of possible action, and at worst it can immobilize.  Mary’s fear is also combined with confusion: “How can this be, since I am a virgin,” or as some translations read, “since I have no husband.”  Young Mary’s fear also had a root in her doubts about her own abilities and limited life experience.  Mary’s question in essence asked, “why me, why ordinary me?”

Often we do not believe in our own abilities.  Often we do not believe that others believe in us!  It is significant that the message to Mary tells her that she is believed in, she is God’s “favored one.”  That sense of being believed in by God, being trusted and accepted as one fitted for a particular task—even one as unbelievable and awesome as literally conceiving and giving birth to God—helps her cut through her feelings of fear, perplexity, and inadequacy. It provides the grace for Mary to say yes and live into her vocation.  And besides, she is told, the Holy Spirit of God will help her accomplish this; and furthermore, her cousin Elizabeth is in a somewhat similar situation. And to finally reassure her, Mary hears, “for nothing will be impossible with God.”

Mary’s call, her vocation, was immense—“You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”  While the vocation asked of Mary was immense, actually beyond human comprehension, what is true of Mary is to a degree true of our lives.  If we have a sense of being given a call, a vocation for a certain task, we may realize the task has been given because we possess the ability to carry it out, whether or not we really think so at the time.  We have, in the language of the messenger, found “favor with God.”  That does not mean of course that we are morally or spiritually or physically superior in any way.  It does mean that God has confidence that we, with God’s grace, can carry out God’s purpose. Of course a lot of the time, more often than not, important things that happen in life seem to choose us more than our choosing them.  Our best laid five-or ten-year plans are often interrupted by life’s own plans for us: by sudden illness or surprise babies, by aging parents and by economic forces and other unforeseen events, or by new ideas growing in us. And in all this, if we ask God, God will give us the courage to live out our call.

We have been reflecting on an event called the Annunciation.  In following the conversation of Mary and her messenger, we see that the messenger does not merely come to impose a task.  Mary is not directed to obey.  The message begins by stating a possibility.  Only if Mary accepts her vocation can the possibility become actuality.  That is true of each of our lives.  God visits. God calls.  God invites.  God offers us life as vocation. That is enabled by the gift and response of faith.  Faith is the ability to receive God and it is the open space in our mind, heart, and spirit (and in Mary’s case, her womb too), in which God acts.  Such faith is not some inert or passive thing: Such faith has us energetically and actively will to have the will of God and no other done.  That is exactly the meaning of the words which Mary spoke as she went from fear to perplexity, to expectancy and faith.  She says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” and in that simple self-offering she defines all Christian vocation; and makes Christmas a reality.

Mary was the earthly anchor for God’s Christmas purposes to become a reality. So also are we. “We are all meant to be the mothers of God,” wrote Meister Eckhart, a medieval mystic and theologian.  “What good is it to me,” he continued, “if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?  And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace?  What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to the Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?  This then, is the fullness of time: [namely] when the Son of God is begotten in us.” 

So, greetings, favored ones!  The Lord is with each of you.  Do not be afraid.  For nothing will be impossible with God.

“Prepare the way of the Lord”…“hastening the coming of the Day of God”

In our readings today we hear, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” At this time of the year we know what preparation is – in the hassle of holiday gift lists, trudging through mountains of mail order catalogues or web sites. We endure endless checkout lines, overspend, overeat, or over party; overextend ourselves addressing greeting cards to persons, many of whom we neglect the rest of the year; and generally wind ourselves up to anxious frazzles!

But we also know a better kind of preparation in the rituals we each have – in putting up the Christmas tree, cooking special foods, opening Advent calendars; in smelling the aroma of an Advent wreath and putting out the crèche, in caroling and engaging in acts of giving through our church, schools and workplaces.

We know that many things have happened to the Advent/Christmas season over the years, much of which is a bit irritating, to say the least. Harried shoppers, the poor and those for whom this season is a very lonely or sad time, can all testify that this season is sometimes survived more than celebrated—especially in this time of economic distress. But in spite of the cancerous commercialization of Christmas and the secularization of these holy-days (a.k.a. holidays), some of all this hullabaloo is to the glory of God, especially the way this season makes us all more child-like, a little more open. So while it has all seemed to have gotten out of hand, we can still redeem the beautiful, good and truthful elements of this special season.

So, I just can’t get furious with what has become of this season. As if the child-like spirit of preparation and celebration could somehow be suppressed, our puritan ancestors banned the observance of holy holidays such as Christmas, supposedly because of their sinful frivolity and earthliness. But it is interesting to note that the emergence of Santa Claus (a.k.a. St. Nicholas) as a popular figure came about precisely during the time when the preparation for and celebration of Jesus born in Bethlehem was suppressed. If child-like joy and merrymaking are put down in one form, they pop up in another. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of seafarers and sailors, children and thieves – quite a combination! And also, in a pluralistic society such as ours, it seems to have become necessary to have a set of secular symbols for this time of year, for the sake of a common set of symbols, no matter how tasteless or shallow some of them may be. And so, our preparation and celebration can combine the mindful preparing of the way of the God become human—the Incarnate God in Jesus of Nazareth—with the child-like merriment that is engendered by Christmas trees, St. Nick and the rest.

Now, in our Advent Scriptures, John the Baptist is a figure whom we also meet up with each year, especially in the middle two weeks of Advent, and this is no accident. It is a way of telling us that we all need to wake up, pay attention and prepare ourselves to say Yes to God who comes to us in the person of Jesus who lived and died as one of us, the
same Jesus who continually seeks to abide with us and enlist us in his ongoing mission of repairing the world. The sixth century BC prophet Isaiah’s words of consolation, quoted in our first reading, envision preparing a way in the wilderness as the geographic route which his fellow Judeans would travel home after their exile in Babylon. John, on the other hand, called his contemporaries nearly six hundred years later to prepare the way of the Lord and make a right pathway to God—first through the wilderness of their own hearts—a wilderness in which God would not just have us survive, but thrive. And when we traverse the highways or byways of our interior wilderness, we might find John the Baptist in our pathway, hearing him say, “Prepare the way of the Lord and make a straight—a right—pathway through the windings of sin and the rough ways of selfishness and fear, through the mountains and hills of arrogance or self-righteousness, and the valleys of discouragement and despair—so that God can make a home in your hearts.” John’s message of conversion calls for a reordering of personal and societal priorities with the understanding that we all share a common humanity and common longing as children of God.

And John is pretty blunt about all this. And here he is in our Advent pathway toward Jesus, so we’d better deal with him and what he is saying to us. John the Baptist makes it clear that we can only say yes to God in Christ coming into our midst by also being able to say a focused no to evil, fear, ignorance and injustice in our hearts and in the wider world. Only then can we prepare the way of the Lord instead of preventing or getting in the way. Advent calls us to prepare for the act of God that strikes down falsehood, selfishness, hopelessness—even death—in the coming of Jesus Christ.

Now the other thing I want to point out in our Advent readings today is a marvelous phrase in our second reading from the Second Letter of Peter. It’s important to note that Peter was intent that his readers understand that each day of our lives is, in effect, at least a preview of and partial realization of, the long-awaited “Day of God.”  Foretold by the prophets (e.g. Isaiah  35:5-6; 61:1-2) that day, that Final Day, will be marked by healings, celebration, as well as by a reckoning between the forces of good and evil. The great and Final Day can be previewed and found in each of our days as well; and in that testimony, we hear in Second Peter: “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the Day of God…”

“Hastening the coming of the Day of God?”—not just waiting for, not just earnestly desiring and preparing, but hastening? Our hastening the full and final coming of Christ when God will be all in all?  Doesn’t that sound a bit presumptuous?  Sure - and yet - if we can do that by any just or godly means, then by those means let’s do it! So, here’s an example: we read of Jesus’ many healing miracles which the Gospels refer to as a kind of preview to the great and final manifestation of God’s Kingdom. That is not to say that when we find Jesus with a sick person, he says to himself, “Oh, an opportunity to shine, an opportunity to preview, realize, and even hasten the Kingdom.”  No; Jesus simply heals—then and now—out of his compassion.  And we are called to be his hands and feet and heart in healing, and repairing and restoring his world. 

Yes, and the particular gift of healing the way Jesus healed is awesome and wonderful and real—and I’ve actually witnessed it, and not just on television either!  But at the same time, now 57 years as a baptized member of the Body of Christ and 31 years into ordained ministry, I also know that that same gift of miraculous healing has not been given to me, no matter how open or not open I’ve been to receive it. 

Now if the Holy Spirit did not give me or most of the rest of us that gift of miraculous healing power, maybe God has given us something else which we should discover and act upon.  What God has given most of us is what we can do when we encounter illness; namely, we can pray for God’s direct grace, intervention, and peace; we can pray for inner strengths to kick in, for courage and the ability to face each day and each challenge; we can pray for access to the best care that modern medicine can provide; and, beyond that, we can help where needed to organize the support system people and their families may need.  And beyond that, what we folk who don’t have the gift of miraculous healing must also do is to work for healthier lifestyles, a safer, cleaner environment, and for an appropriate accessible and affordable health care system for all. The exact form of such a system this preacher is not qualified to describe in detail, but it would fully address the issue of lack of access for many, and get a handle on costs that are spiraling out of control, affecting everyone.  Sure, if you can get your care and are covered at one of Worcester’s or Boston’s top hospitals, you’ve got the very best this world can provide. But, if you are poor and/or cannot afford insurance—along with 44 million other Americans who are without—it becomes clear that we in the wealthiest country in the world have some of the worst access to adequate and affordable healthcare of all industrialized nations.

So, if we can’t heal others with a miracle, then we can help in other ways, which God has given us the gifts to do. And these other ways are also what it means to be agents of God’s healing, and also what it means in our time not only to serve the common good, but also to preview and partially realize, and even hasten the kingdom of God.

So, with John the Baptist as our guide, we are called to wait in Advent, but not passively—but rather with expectancy and preparation—which is something you do actively, as in what you’d do to prepare for a child to be born in your own home. This doesn’t necessarily hasten the birth, but does have you more ready to receive it. Or as Austrian poet Ranier Maria Rilke put it. “Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come." Amen.

Christ the King – of mercy and justice

Here we are on the last Sunday of the Christian calendar, also known as Christ the King Sunday. Today we worship Christ the King, the head of the Church, whose crowned image watches over us from the great window above the church entrance. Christ the King – above us, among us and in us, the One who sees all and knows all. That’s awesome – and sobering.  According to this gospel lesson which appears only in Matthew, what Christ the King will do on the final day with all that seeing and knowing will be to sort us out into two groups as a shepherd separates goats to the left and sheep to the right, goats into eternal punishment and sheep into eternal life, depending on how we have behaved during our lifetimes. Matthew uses a lot of other images as well to describe this final separation, such as wheat and weeds, good seed and bad, wise maidens and foolish ones, good fruit and bad or no fruit, to name a few.  He uses all of those—and by the way, his is the only gospel who uses any of them—because Matthew is very intent on making his point that our lives are consequential. Matthew is telling us that our relationship with God is not so much a matter of having faith as it is a matter of doing faith. Where we do not do our faith, there are consequences.  Thus, there is this picture of a final judgment that will separate the sheep from the goats. Of course we recall other pictures from scripture that speak of all being raised up on the last day, of God being all in all, of the first being last and the last first, but of no one being tossed out of the line altogether. 

I don’t think we’re going to understand all of this today or anytime soon while we are still alive.  It is important though to see what other lessons this parable does give us about living out our faith and the more immediate and present ways that we find that life is consequential.

One lesson is that both our first reading from the prophet Ezekiel and our gospel image from Jesus teach that faith and compassion and justice are all intimately linked with each other and with the least and the lost, the poor and disenfranchised.  The quality of our faith is tested by how we stand with one another—that is, by the quality of compassion and justice amongst us and across the land.  The Hebrew prophets measured the quality and character of justice by assessing how people were dealing with widows, orphans and strangers—people on the edge, on the margins, socially and economically.  The primary message of the prophets, like Ezekiel, was not that people had neglected Scripture, or forgot attendance at the Temple, or worshipped false gods, but that people had forgotten the poor, and therefore had forgotten God.  Without the doing of justice and mercy God remains unknown.  Jesus continues this line as he challenges all to keep their eye on the edge of the circle, on the poor, for God is there.  Jesus announces his mission by bringing “good news to the poor,” and Jesus reveals himself as the center of a new web of relationships—a new community—with the poor as its privileged locus. All that is quite contrary, for example, to how we as a society and nation have failed to address the ever-increasing visible and less visible poverty divide that exists.  Today’s readings, in fact, take us beyond just individual faith responses by addressing the nations of the world.  As we look carefully, the gospel text begins with all nations being summoned before the king, and being given notice that the best test of a nation’s righteousness is how it treats its most vulnerable people! 

A second lesson is revealed when we read the gospel carefully and notice that both sheep and goats are totally baffled by the verdicts they receive.  “When was it that we saw you…?” That is what they both say to the king. Although this passage may have been written to get a goat’s attention, as it were, it is important to note that the sheep do not know what they have done right any more than the goats know what they have done wrong!  Both are oblivious to the ultimate importance of their actions or inaction, probably because they thought no one was looking.  They thought they were dealing with nobodies, not somebodies.  Who would have thought that “the least of these” would turn out to be Christ in disguise?  When the kingdom comes, the most important things we have done may turn out to be the things it never occurred to us to count.

And so a third and related lesson is discovering where Christ the king is in all this—he is certainly not just on a throne!  As Barbara Brown Taylor observes, “for the characters in the story, the biggest surprise of all seems to be that Jesus knew what they were up to when they did not think he was around. Sheep and goats alike, they thought that he occupied [only] one space at a time just as they did, and that the way they behaved in his presence was all that really counted.  Meanwhile, that left them lots of free time [to care or not to care when they were running into lots of others] in their lives, including the ones who did not count—the little ones, the least ones…the nursing home residents, the panhandlers, the inmates,” the checkout clerk, all the strangers on the street, at the grocery store.  Taylor also points out that the biggest surprise of all is that such people are not unknown to the king.  On the contrary, they are so close to the king that he counts everything done or not done to them or for them or with them as if it had been done or not done to him or for him or with him.  For sheep and goats alike, the surprise is that Jesus is not somewhere—he is everywhere—and especially with the supposed least important people who enter our lives straight on, or peripherally each day, whoever they may be.

Okay, so say that Jesus is present in every single person whose path crosses ours, and particularly in the lost ones, the last ones we would ever have expected.  So how do we live then, knowing that?  How do we find the courage to get through each day knowing that every pair of eyes may be Jesus’ eyes, especially those that are asking us for some recognition, some time, some help?  All we know is that we are asked to wrestle with that fact, to let it challenge us and unsettle us and—who knows?—maybe even to comfort us with the awareness that Jesus is so present with us and around us that we have such unlimited opportunities to meet him and serve him. Again, as Barbara Brown Taylor points out, the only way to tell if the eyes you encounter are really  Jesus’ eyes is to look into them, to risk that moment of recognition that may break your heart, or change your mind, or make you mad, or make you amend your life. Whatever effect it has on you, that seems to be the one thing that separates the sheep from the goats, the one thing that the sheep know how to do that the goats haven’t tried—namely, to look, to see, to connect, to respond.  Of course, sometimes when you look into those eyes you encounter, all you see is your own helplessness, your own inability to know what is right and how to respond.

And so, we are called into relationship – in here and out there, even when that relationship is unlikely and momentary, or sad or unsettling.  We are called to look at each other and see Christ, who promises to be there when our eyes meet, and in that glance, to teach us something we need to know—about Jesus, about our brothers and sisters, about ourselves—but we cannot know them if we will not look.  The goats are not condemned for doing bad things, remember, but for doing nothing.  They bore the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger no malice per se; they simply did not see any relationship between their lives and the lives especially of the least, the lost, and the last.  Well, there can be a relationship.  It is up to each one of us to decide what we will do—or will not do—about it, and not just each one of us individually but all of us together, and as a nation.  The sheep and goats in this story both speak in unison: “When was is that we saw you…?” they say, together, reminding us that we are part of a community, and a nation, and a community of nations, and that more often than not we can do things together that we cannot do alone.  We are together. And together we can welcome others in and widen our embrace.  We can do this because we are one people with Christ as our King.  When the time comes to sort us out, Christ’s are the eyes that will meet our eyes, the eyes of the King who sees, who knows—who knows when we have looked and when we have looked away; who knows the last, the lost, the least and who lays down his life for us all.  The one who will judge us most finally, thank God, is the one who loves us most fully.

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (London: Collins, 1973), p. 48. This gospel lesson today is one of the most vivid parables which Jesus ever spoke, and the good news of it is pretty clear. The things which Jesus picks out—giving a hungry person a meal, or a thirsty person a drink, welcoming a stranger, cheering the sick, visiting the prisoner—are things which anyone can do.  It is not so much a question of giving away thousands of dollars, or of leading great movements for social change, or of writing our names in the annals of history; rather, it is a case of giving simple, human help to the people we meet every day.  Thus, this parable opens wide the way to glory to so many of us ordinary people.

And yet, as the great 12th century philosopher Maimonides stated (Yad, Mattenot Aniyyim (10:7-12)), simply helping comes in various forms, some more appropriate than others. Maimonides wrote of eight ways of giving “righteous acts of charity.” Each level, in his view, is progressively more virtuous: the first step is that one gives but reluctantly. The next step is that one gives less than is appropriate, but with a giving heart. One does it because it’s the minimum of justice – it’s charity. The third step is that one gives after being asked. The fourth is that one gives before being asked. The fifth step is that one gives in such a way that the donor does not know the identity of the recipient. The sixth step is that one gives in such a way that the recipient does not know the identity of the donor. The seventh step is that one gives in such a way that neither the donor nor the recipient knows the identity of the other. The last step illustrates the step up from charity to justice. Maimonides concludes, “Lastly, the eighth and most meritorious step of all, is to anticipate charity by preventing poverty; namely, to assist the poor, either by a considerable gift or loan of money or by teaching them trades, or by putting them in the way of business so that they may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out a hand for charity.” And I would add a ninth, as it were, and that’s that people don’t get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as a gift or an act of charity. They only get these things in the act of claiming them through their own effort. So sometimes, as the saying goes, we give a fish; other times we teach others how to fish; but oftentimes we just need to help remove the obstacles  - some of which are ourselves - and then get out of the way for people to just get to the water, as it were. And that is what we sheep or goats most often forget.