When the Roll is Called Up Yonder
Rev.
Charles Lewis
Hosea
11:1-9
October
25, 2009
Mt.
25:31-46
Snohomish
P.C.
Introduction to Hosea
Our tendency is to think that the
God we find in the OT is full of God’s judgment and wrath while than the one we
find in the NT is full of God’s unconditional acceptance and love. The early church rejected that notion as
false, that the God of the OT was the same God we find in the NT. For any who still wonder, the prophet Hosea
should take away any lingering doubt.
There are no words in the NT that are filled with more tender care and mercy
than we find here in this OT passage about God’s relentless and unceasing pursuit
of his wayward people. As we find in
the NT, so we find here in the OT: God comes not in wrath to condemn, but in
love to save. (Read Hosea 11:1-9).
Introduction to Matthew 25:31-26
This is our seventh sermon in the series on the Apostle’s Creed, the
focus today being on Jesus who “ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand
of God the Father Almighty, from whom he shall come to judge the quick and the
dead.”
I was told recently by Jack Walchenbach that use of old English word in “’the quick’ and the dead” is a reference
to those who try to cross I-5 by foot.
There’s the quick and there’s the dead.
Under the influence of great works of art like Michelangelo’s “Last
Judgment” or Mozart’s thundering “Dies Irae (God have mercy),” Christians are
likely to confess the coming of Christ in judgment more like crossing I-5 by
foot, there’s a lot more gnawing fear at the prospect than expectant joy at the
completion of it.
The depiction of the Last Judgment in the parables of the
sheep and the goats seems to lend some credence to this apprehension.
Of the four gospel writers, Matthew alone offers this massive judgment
scene, bringing Jesus’ teaching ministry and parables to dramatic close. Just
as Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount earlier in Matthew with four
warnings prior to his closing story about judgment, with those who build their
house on rock that will withstand the stormy judgment and those who build on
the sand that will get swept away (7:24-27), Jesus now concludes his Sermon on
the World’s End in the same way. Jesus
gives four warnings just prior to the Story of the Last Judgment when the goats
and the sheep will be separated, some bound for a life that will withstand the
judgment and inherit God’s kingdom and those who will be swept away to ruin.
Sermon
Have you noticed how full the world seems to be of people speculating about
how it’s all going to end? Scientists
tell us that the sun will eventually burn out in a few billion years and that
will be that of good old Mother Earth. Politicians, ethicists, and most scientists warn
us that long before that happens, we may burn ourselves up first with global
warming…or nuclear annihilation. A number of religious folk seem to think it’s
all going to end in some great Armageddon, a cosmic battle between good and
evil, with the evil forces wreaking havoc on the earth and God snatching the
“good guys” out and whisking them up into heaven in rapturous joy before they
have to suffer like the “bad guys” who all go up in flames. The
writers of the "Left Behind" series have sold nearly 70 million books
of fictitious imagination trying to sell this idea about a future that they
proport to know about, even though the NT writers and Jesus himself are silent
about how and when. Others see the end much
differently altogether. The poet wrote:
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a
whimper."
Matthew 25:31-40 speaks of the end times and a great judgment to come. It
presents Jesus as the judge who welcomes into the kingdom those who, in
welcoming the little ones, have welcomed him.
And he dismisses those who, in refusing the little ones, have refused
him, so that the people are divided like sheep and goats, some inheriting eternal
life and the blessings of the Father, and some relegated to death (25: 46). In Matthew we find the fullest expression in
the gospels of the conviction of our Creed that not only will Jesus come again,
but he will come as the judge of the living and the dead. So what
will this end be like, and what will be
the nature of this judgment?
Asking a simple question, a Sunday School teacher got a simple answer.
“What do you have to do to make it to heaven?” she asked her class of
children. A hand shot up and one of the
kids responded without batting an eye: “You have to die.”
That’s how many of us grew up. God
loves us and has a place prepared for us and when we die, Jesus is our free
ticket into heaven. What child questions
that? What child should?
Unless you’re the little girl who went to the church camp I attended as a
child where she was asked one night by a well-intentioned but misguided
counselor, “If you die tonight, where do you think you’ll spend eternity, in
heaven or in hell?” Frightened to
death, the poor little girl asked Jesus into her life on the spot. The fire
insurance theology is, unfortunately, still around.
But it’s not part of Jesus’ teaching.
When Jesus speaks about our eternal destiny, it’s not so much in term of
heaven but in terms of a very down-to-earth practical question: how have you
treated the littlest ones around you, because how you’ve treated the last and
the least is how you treated me. The question
that has bearing on our life’s destiny, is based on the simplest of things… handing
out a cup of water to someone who’s thirsty or making a peanut butter and jelly
sandwich for someone who’s hungry; making a visit to someone in the hospital or
calling on someone whose landed in jail; opening your heart and your hand to a
stranger or your home to a guest. An act
of kindness here, a word of encouragement there… simple, common things done day
in and day out by common people who don’t even give it a second thought as
they’re doing it because its second hand.
Ordinary acts of kindness by ordinary people like you and me. That’s the question Jesus poses. Have you shown compassion on the lost and the
lonely, the left out and the let down, the last and the least?
Now let me be clear that the New Testament is emphatic that we are most
certainly saved – all of us – by grace and not by our own actions. There is no one keeping track of our good
deeds. Nevertheless, we find in this
parable of the last judgment, Jesus’ still holding us accountable for our
actions towards others.
Jesus says there will one day be a division between sheep and goats, one
heading off to eternal life and the other to ruin. I don’t have to tell you, though, what you
already know – that’s there’s a bit of sheep and goat in all of us. In fact, scripture is clear that, in the
words of Paul, “There is not one who is righteous, no, not one, but all have
fallen short.” We’re all a good portion
of goat. And so we hear in scripture
that: “God has fixed a day when the risen Jesus will judge the world, when, as
the writer of Hebrews says, “all are laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom
we must render an account (4:13).”
Coming face to face with Christ on the day of our reckoning and having all
things laid bare may meet with a bit of fear and trepidation. It certainly did for Eustice, the character
in C.S. Lewis’ best loved Chronicles of Narnia.
In the most vivid image of the last judgment I’ve come across, the rebellious
and obstinant child, Eustace, finds he’s become the very beast that he’s
allowed himself to be overcome by, a dragon whose curse leaves Eustice covered
in ugly and painful dragon scales.
Eustice tries gallantly to peel away the scales, tearing away three
layers like a snake shedding its skin over and over agin, but to no avail. The only one who can tear off the scales and
return Eustace to a boy once again is to allow the great lion and
Christ-figure, Aslan, do the ripping and tearing. “I was afraid of his claws,” Eustice says,
“but I was desperate…the very first tear he made was so deep I thought it had
gone right to my heart. And when he
began peeling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it
was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off… Then he caught hold of me
which I didn’t like because I was so tender underneath with no skin on. It smarted like anything when he threw me
into the water, but only for a moment.”
Then all the pain was gone and I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again (p.90-91).”
There’s an old saying in the world of athletics that fits the world of
faith as well: “No pain, no gain.” No
growth without honest reckoning. No
cheap grace. God’s grace accepts us as
we are but will not, out of love, leave us where we are. It’s a holy love that
tears away all that keeps us from loving God and others and being the person
God made us to be. As Deitrich Bonhoeffer
put it so well. “To believe that Christ is the judge is to recognize that cheap
grace is grace without discipleship, grace without a cross, grace without Jesus
Christ. Such grace is costly because it
calls us (to peel away all our old skin and leave it behind in order) to follow
Jesus. It is costly because it costs a
man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life,” but
not without that person dying too. The
old self has to go. The new self has to
emerge. Reconciliation with God and one
another has to happen.
In a beautifully written book called “Five People You Meet in Heaven,”
which I know a few of you have read, the author, Mitch Album, tells the story
of an amusement park maintenance man named Eddie who dies attempting to rescue
a little girl in a tragic accident.
Rather than being whisked right into heaven (as we often think of when
people die), Eddie instead finds himself encountering, one by one, five people
whose lives he has impacted in this world who are now dead. Some are people he knows that his actions
have injured, and some are people he harmed without ever knowing, like the man
who swerved to miss Eddie and was killed when, as a child, he darted out into
the street to retrieve a ball right in front of the man. Or like the young girl who was killed
unintentionally by Eddie in the war. Mitch
Album thoughtfully and movingly takes the reader through Eddie’s days - no
weeks - of coming to terms with the people he’s wronged, whether conscious of
it or not. I find Mitch Album theology
of heaven very sound. There’s no free
trip there without facing the past and being exposed to damage done in this
life – an honest appraisal. The path to
one’s final destiny is through the act of being reconciled with those wronged,
with acknowledgement made and forgiveness offered. There is no cheap grace here. The ticket into heaven comes at a cost, and
the cost is going through the painful work of recognizing and confessing the lives
impacted by one’s own life – what we did or did not do to the least of these we
did or did not do to Jesus himself.
The New Testament is clear that we are most certainly saved – all of us –
by grace and not by our own merit.
There is no one keeping track of points.
Nevertheless, Jesus’ sense of justice still holds us accountable for our
actions towards others.
This is the judgment, Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John: that “God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son so that none should perish but all
find eternal life, but some have chosen to reject it, preferring not to do an
honest assessment of their life. This
is the judgment: not that Christ came to condemn, but those who are unwilling
to come into the light and have their deeds exposed condemn themselves. They’d rather wear the old ugly scales than
have the pain of them being torn off and new clothes put on.
Judgment, then, is not about
punishment but about love. It’s not an
inquisition or a firing line or life in an eternal combustion engine. The Creed is clear where Jesus comes from to
judge the living and the dead - not from a despotic, vengeful God, but from the
Father whose compassion, Hosea tells us, is warmed for us, who will never give
up on us, who comes not in wrath but in grace and truth. This
is the judgment that the judge loved the world so much that he took upon
himself the sentence we all deserve, the Judge being judged in our place …the judge crying out from the cross among his most
memorable last words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
For that reason the Reformers saw judgment not as a cause for fear, but
for joy. Luther said: “I do not fear
judgment because Christ sits next to the Father and is my guardian and
advocate.” And Calvin wrote: “We are
assured that we will be brought before no other judgment seat than that of our
Redeemer, to whom we must look for our salvation!”
We are most certainly saved by grace and not by our own merit. There is no one keeping track of
points. Nevertheless, Jesus’ sense of
justice still holds us accountable for our actions towards others. And that standard he holds before us is not
what we say we believe. Not how
eloquently or how often we pray. Not whether we read the Bible every day. It's
not how hard we work at church, not how well informed we are about every
theological nuance, it’s not how pure,
or noble, or how otherwise impeccable our personal behavior has been. The question that Christ asks of us is this:
Where is compassion and mercy being extended in our life? It’s that simple. Where is compassion and mercy being extended
in our life?
Not long after I
graduated from seminary, a classmate of Ann’s and mine was serving in the large
Bel Air Presbyterian Church in
Convinced
that this visitor’s presence would be as unwelcome as it was incongruous, Care
Crawford followed the bag lady through the store with the intent of comforting
the woman when security intervened and the woman was asked to leave To her surprise, no one stepped in to stop
the bag lady who b then had wandered into the very expensive Special Occasions
Department and an nicely-dressed saleswoman greeted her. When the customer
asked to try on evening dresses, the salesperson brought the woman to the
fitting room where she gave her gown after gown to try on and inspect. Care was by now eavesdropping from the
adjoining fitting room, and was astonished at the salesperson’s responses to
the woman. With infinite patience, the
salesperson evaluated which dresses looked best on her and were the most
flattering. After trying on a half a
dozen or so elegant dresses the homeless woman, unable to make a choice,
thanked the saleswoman, and left the store with her head held high.
After
the homeless woman was gone, Carolyn made her way from the adjacent fitting
room to ask the saleswoman about the incident. The woman’s reply was: “this is
what we are here for: to serve and be kind”. ''The
Gospel According to Nordstrom” Carolyn Crawford called it, is to lavish on a
bedraggled bag lady the same type of patient, respectful, and dignified
treatment she might bestow on a Beverly Hills socialite.
How do we treat the last and the
least? We are most certainly saved by
grace and not by our own merit. There
is no one keeping track of points.
Nevertheless, Jesus’ sense of justice says that how we treat others has
bearing on our eternal destiny. It tells
us how much work we have yet to do in this life or in the life to come in
having our scales peeled off and being re-clothed anew.
We know that, of course, don’t we?
We know that what we do and how we treat others matters now and into all
eternity. How we act makes a difference
even, and especially in, all the little ways that no one ever sees or knows; no
one except the Judge who, as our Friend, sees and hears everything we do and
say; no one except the Judge who is judged in our place, who mercifully forgives
us, and sets us joyfully free to inherit the blessings of God’s love forever.
Prayer:
Great God, help
us to be generous in offering compassion where help is needed. Give us grace to
see you in the least ones through whom no recognition will come. Help us to
know you in the little ones from whom no reward will be given. Teach us to be
wise enough to discern your presence even in those by whom no thanks are likely
to be said. We pray in the name of Jesus
Christ, our Judge and our Advocate, the Judge and Advocate of us all. Amen.