Matthew 25:31-46
November 20, 2011
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
If you had to be an animal during Bible times, you would prefer not to be a goat. For one reason, there’s that scapegoat thing. The scapegoat was the goat over whose head the high priest Aaron confessed the sins of the people of Israel on the Day of Atonement. Then the goat, symbolically bearing their sins, was driven out into the wilderness, where it probably became dinner for a hungry lion. Now you know where the scapegoat came from.
Now, one might argue, being a sheep could be equally dangerous. A sheep, after given up its wool, often appear on the dinner table, or in a stew, or on the altar as a sacrifice. I don’t think we are serving mutton in the Fellowship Hall this afternoon.
Goats in the Bible are not viewed as sympathetically as sheep, and the New Testament singles out goats for unwelcome treatment as well. When talking about the final judgment, Jesus speaks of separating sheep from goats, but it’s clear that the goats are the losers in the sorting out.
When Jesus was talking about God’s judgment, his followers heard a familiar story—sheep go one way; goats the other. When Jesus said, “All the nations will be gathered before him…” (25:32), they were probably excited to hear that the long-awaited moment of the wicked goats, the Gentiles will get their due. But we know that this story has a surprising ending, one that undoubtedly shakes everything they’ve come to believe about faith and ethnicity.
We know that neither the sheep nor the goats are especially bright. Both of them are equally clueless as to when, exactly, they saw the Lord “hungry or thirsty, or as a stranger or naked, or imprisoned.” Also, sheep and goats are usually milling around together and haven’t the slightest idea how they got there until the shepherd sorts them out. Contrary to what the first hearers of this lesson from Jesus heard, of seeing themselves as the beloved sheep and everyone else as the unwanted goat, Jesus was using sheep and goats as an analogy for humankind. At the end, there will be two groups of people: sheep-people on the right and goat-people on the left.
The ones on the right are welcomed into the kingdom of God. The ones on the left are told to depart from Christ’s presence forever. The criteria for the sorting, however, have nothing to do with whether goats have hair but sheep have fleece or that a goat’s tail stands up while a sheep’s hangs down. Rather, they have to do whether or not one has been merciful and helpful to those in dire straits. Those on the right, Jesus said, have actually ministered to him by their compassion toward those in need. Those on the left have actually ignored him by ignoring the needy.
Omission in Our Commission
There are several things we can hear from this judgment story for ourselves. What we don’t do can be as great a reflection of our commitment to follow Jesus—or lack thereof—as what we do. Our omission in our commission is a serious sin.
Our church continues to talk about plans to mobilize ourselves to do mission. Our Missions Committee is now planning to travel to Mexicali, Mexico next year when going to Xian, China was not proving to be a good opportunity. We like to partner with a hill tribe village in Thailand for a long-term relationship. These are all significant and dramatic ways that we can love our neighbors, the least of these, and putting that into action.
But not all of us are able to participate in these significant and substantial mission endeavors. But every Christian can hear these words of Jesus as a reminder that the doing of good deeds is an essential part of faith. Every fellowship group in our church is involved in some service project every year—serving at a soup kitchen, cooking at Friday Night School, putting together toiletry bags for seamen who come into the Port of Oakland, donating Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes and others.
When we omit doing the small things, we are not following Jesus. There should be no omission in our commission.
Some readers of the Bible have taken this passage and giving it a one-sided view of the Christian life, making it sound as if the whole of it is doing good things. The final judgment as described here seems to look only at whether or not one loved one’s neighbor. It says nothing about whether or not one loved God, sought for forgiveness of sins or embraced Jesus as Savior. Judging from this passage alone, a nonbeliever who is compassionate to his neighbor in need is on the same footing as a believer who does the same. I don’t believe that is true.
Jesus wasn’t trying to give a full description of the final judgment in this passage, but rather to make a point about not ignoring the poor, economically depressed and oppressed among us. The point here is that having our sins forgiven should result in a greater willingness to love our neighbors. The point is when we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, there’s nothing else we want to do more than to live a life like Jesus’. The point is that when we love God with all of our mind, heart and soul, we love the world and all the people God made with all of our mind, heart and soul.
In the New Testament, we see that Paul writing to Titus says, “I desire that you insist on these things, so that those who have come to believe in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works; these things are excellent and profitable to everyone” (3:8).
James writes, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace’ keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:15-17).
In 1 Corinthians 11:22, Paul chastises the rich folk for coming to the Eucharistic meal early and eating all of the food and not leaving any for the poor folk who had jobs and arrive late. “What, do you have no homes in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing? In other words, “How can you come here to honor Christ who died for you, yet you do not honor the needs of the poor?”
As Christians, we do good deeds because we believe in God, our sins are forgiven and we have embraced Jesus as our Savior. And for our faith to be lasting, Jesus tells us to love our neighbors and to do good deeds.
Daily Small Things
I read that goats and sheep have different eating habits. Goats browse on leaves, shrubs, twigs and vines. Sheep graze on grass and clover. Goats are curious and independent in nature, while sheep prefer to stay put with the flock. This is what goats and sheep like to do everyday. What do you do everyday?
This judgment account reminds us that faith is what we do everyday. Our compassion for others belongs in not only in extraordinary circumstances, but also in our ordinary and everyday encounters. We need to hear that because most of life is not played out on the big stage, in the kinds of events that make headline news. Rather, it happens in the smaller things—the chance meetings, the routine places, the circumstances where, when we do a good deed, it seems to us so ordinary that we think it’s hardly worth mentioning, and certainly not worthy of earning us a place with sheep.
Sometimes the Christian faith can seem intimidating, the demands of Jesus overwhelming. Some of you have told me that you are too young or too old, not smart enough or too smart and have too many things to do to get involved, too poor to give and too well off that you are giving to much larger charitable organizations than the church.
We are not judged by our ability to accomplish great and noble deeds of faith. We are judged by the one who said that we would be evaluated on our efforts for the “least of these,” those whose greatest needs are for the small things that most of us, in our privileged status, take for granted—small things like a cup of clean, clear water, a visit to those who are down and out, a small show of concern. It’s the small things that we do on a day to day basis that shows concern and compassion for the least of these is what Christ asks of us.
Passing the Plate
For most of us, the way that we respond to those in need on a weekly basis is our giving to the work of the church. On a regular basis, you give generously and sacrificially to helping people around the world when they are down and out. As of last week, you gave over $4300 for the World Mission Offering, surpassing our annual goal for the first time in a number of years. I know that whenever there’s a crisis around the world, you have always come to others’ assistance.
Yet when we receive the offering plates, there are some studies to suggest that our small acts of giving are so small as to make them utterly insignificant. A recent book, Passing the Plate by Christian Smith, Michael Emerson, and Patricia Snell, suggests that we North American Christians could do a great deal better in being obedient to Jesus’ demand that we look after the “least of these.”
This study of our stewardship practices shows more than one out of four American Protestants give away no money at all—“not even a token $5 per year.” Of all Christian groups, evangelical Protestants score best: only 10 percent gave nothing away. Evangelicals tend to be the most generous Christians, but their giving is not all that great too. Thirty-six percent report that they give away less than two percent of their income.
If we respond in our giving as we have been commanded, we could make a huge impact. Committed American Christians—those who say their faith is very important to them and those who attend church at least twice a month—earn more than $2.5 trillion dollars every year. If we active Christians gave away 10 percent of our after-tax earnings, we would add another $46 billion to ministry around the world.
About 5 percent of American Christians provide 60 percent of the money churches and religious groups use to operate. I suspect that holds true for our congregation as well. A small group of generous givers is funding the church for everyone else.
You probably already know that America’s biggest givers—as a percentage of their income—are its lowest income earners. The “least of these” among us, in regard to income, give the highest percentage of income to the church. My challenge to you is that you give whatever you can but it’s important for you to fill out a pledge card to make a commitment to give something. I pray that we’ll surpass our giving units of 154 this year in 2012! We are at 134 now.
Not only am I asking you to give of your income to Christ’s work, imagine how much farther we can advance God’s kingdom when we give 10 percent of our time to God as well, in ministries that may one day be recognized as serving the risen Lord through service to others.
If we spend eight hours a day sleeping, that leaves 16 waking hours. One-tenth of that is 1.6 hours. Multiply that figure by seven, and you get just over 11 hours a week. Just think of what our church could accomplish, if we used all those hours to serve “the least of these” in our community! There are two places where the strength of a Christian’s commitment is recorded in writing: the checkbook and the calendar. Of the two, the calendar is probably most revealing.
When did we see you, Lord? Was it during the hours we spent in front of the TV or out shopping just for fun? Was it getting the house all perfect like Martha Stewart’s ideal to impress our friends? Or was it those extra hours we put in at work, hoping to impress our boss’s favor and get that promotion?
There’s nothing wrong with such pursuits, but if we allow them to crowd out Christian service, we just may be taking our place among the goats.
Helping Jesus
There’s an old story—probably invented by some preacher—but it illustrates the spirit of this passage very well. It’s about a boy living in a children’s home. For grace at the dinner table, the superintendent usually prayed, “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let this food to us be blessed.” After this happened several times, the boy said to him, “You always ask Jesus to come, but he never does. Will he ever come?”
The superintendent said, “If we really want him to, he will.”
The boy thought, “I really want him to, so I’m going to put a chair beside me tonight so he’ll have a place to sit when he comes.”
That evening, during supper, there was a knock on the door, and standing there was an old man, poorly clothed, cold and hungry. The superintendent invited him to join them for supper, and he pointed to the empty chair. The man sat and the boy gladly passed food to him and even shared from his own plate.
Later the boy said, “Jesus must not have been able to come himself, so he sent this man in his place.”
Our good deeds are not by themselves a means of salvation, but they do put us in a right relationship with Jesus, whether we recognize it or not. Jesus was probably not trying to scare us by talking about judgment. More likely, he was trying to get our attention in a dramatic way and communicate that God really does want us to love our neighbor as ourselves. He really does want us to keep working at it, to not excuse ourselves, to not assume somebody else will do it and to not act as if it doesn’t matter.
It does matter. To those on his right, those who have unknowingly served him through good deeds to others, he says “Come…inherit the kingdom.” To those on the left, who have unknowingly ignored him by knowingly ignoring the needs of others, he says, “Depart…” Depart is a terrible word especially if it’s departing into the eternal fire.
But all we need to remember is: “Truly I tell you, just as you did these small and kind things to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ, judge of all people, ruler of the world, we give you thanks that you have given us a place and a role in the work of your kingdom through this church. Give us the grace to obey your command to reach out to those in need. Stir up in us a desire to please you by performing those small things that would bring peace and justice to those in need. In your name, we pray. Amen.