The Overlooked Sacrament

The Overlooked Sacrament--June 6, 2018

"Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me'." [Matthew 25:34-40]

They say you can judge a person by the company he or she keeps.  They say the people with whom you associate will reveal who you really are.

Jesus, it would seem, is okay with that.

We make a mistake, I believe, in reading this familiar parable of Jesus, often called "The Sheep and the Goats" or "The Judgment of the Nations," and assuming that in it Jesus is laying out a set of requirements for earning one's place in some heavenly afterlife.  I can remember as a kid, slowly drinking in the gospel of being "saved by grace through faith apart from works" in the Lutheran church of my childhood, and then hearing this story on some Sunday, and thinking to myself, "Well, this story doesn't fit with all of that stuff about not being able to earn our way in! I guess I have to pick which set of Bible verses I'm going to believe."  And, sure, at first blush, it looks like you have to pick, either the claim of grace that you can't earn God's love or work your way into heaven on the one hand, or the claim of this parable, that seems to suggest that the ones who get to "inherit the kingdom" are the ones who have checked off a sufficient number of good deeds enough to win their heavenly merit badges.

But this seriously misses the point of the story as Jesus tells it.  Reading this parable and assuming it is about how to earn your way into the afterlife is like looking at the Mona Lisa and saying, "This would be a lovely landscape that da Vinci has painted here, except that this lady is blocking the view!"  She's the center of attention, after all--she is the subject!  And Jesus is the subject of his story, too.  This story is not about how to rack up enough heaven points to win a trip to glory; it is about Jesus, and the sorts of folks with whom Jesus chooses to identify.

Before we go any further, then, let me simply add that if you would like further evidence of my claim that this story is not about people earning their way into eternal life by completing an assigned list of "favors for Jesus," pay attention to the way the "righteous" respond to the king figure.  They are totally surprised that they had been doing anything for Jesus!  They are astounded that they had done anything worth mentioning, and certainly weren't under the impression they were doing anything for Jesus all along.  They are blessedly clueless.  This can't be a story meant to instruct us how to log in enough heaven points or do enough good deed.  And honestly, the fact that we still seem bent on turning every Bible story into something about me is evidence of how deeply self-centered we still are.

No, dear ones.  No--this isn't about how to do enough good deeds to win a spot next to Jesus in the heavenly realm.  Jesus himself plainly says just the opposite--he has already been in our midst, in the very presence of the nobodies, the anybodies, and the overlooked who have been right at our side and among us all along.  This is not a story about how to get "up" to where Jesus is by paying your dues in nice actions and good deeds for your Heavenly Permanent Record; it is about Jesus teaching us where to spot him right now already.

Jesus, in other words, is telling us about the company he keeps, because that will tell us a great deal about who he is.

And the long and the short of it is this: Jesus identifies with the "other."  Of all the places the Lord of the nations could choose to show up, Jesus says, "You'll catch me with the hungry and the poor, the imprisoned and the incurably sick, the foreigner and the naked, the vulnerable and the marginalized. You want to see God?  That's where to start."

Now, so that we are clear here, this isn't to say that God is "only" in certain places, and that God is absent elsewhere.  No, the witness of the Scriptures is that the living God "fills all in all" and that there ain't nowhere that God ain't.  But there are places--points within creation itself--where God in Christ chooses to be seen and promises to be visible.  In liturgical and theological circles, we call these spots "sacraments," and talk about how Christ is truly present in ordinary physical, time-and-space-bound stuff like bread and wine, like water and the spoken Word.  

Christians have classically claimed that Christ is truly present, for example, in the broken bread and poured out cup we call Communion. And we say that, not because the bread is magic or the wine is ontologically different from the bottle of Concord or Zinfandel on the shelf at your local liquor store, but because the living God is capable of being present in perfectly ordinary things, revealed in commonness and hidden in plain sight.  That, in a nutshell, is at least a Lutheran theology of the sacraments: that the same Christ who is present to all the cosmos chooses to be recognizable in the very things that seem too earthy to contain the divine, exactly because that is the sort of God we have.  

Well, if that is anywhere close to the right ballpark, then I think Jesus may have given us one more promised place to spot him--the people who show us the face of God in their empty-handed hunger and nakedness, in the complicated baggage of being prisoners, and in the "otherness" of the foreigner, the refugee, and the stranger.  This is where Jesus sets up camp.  These, Jesus outright announces, are his people.  So the matter is really very simple.  If you are interested in finding God, in addition to the poured out water of the Font, the broken open bread at the Table, the spoken-aloud sound of the Word, and the gathered-together assembly of disciples, Jesus promises, almost like a sacrament, to be found among the least. Jesus--the very embodiment of the living God, mind you--identifies with the other and the overlooked, not in some sentimentalized sense as though all poor people secretly have hearts of gold, or all foreigners and strangers secretly have a mysterious wisdom about them, but as God's unconditional solidarity with humanity at our most empty-handed. It is because God graciously says over the lot of us, "You are beloved, and I claim you and identify with you, apart from what you have or have done or where you have come from," that Jesus declares, "When you did it to these lowly ones, you did it to me."  He says it, not as a hint for how to earn a future reward, but as a promise of where he holds office hours right now.  That is grace, grace, grace, all the way down.

Let me ask, then, on this new day, whether you are interested in finding a sure spot to find Jesus.  Because, if you happen to be looking, I know a couple of Jesus' most likely old haunts.  Jesus has told us himself the sort of company he keeps... and that, it turns out, says quite a bit about the sort of character he is.

Lord Jesus, help us to meet you among your people today, and to see you where you choose to be present.  Thank you, Lord Jesus, for identifying with us.