November 21, 1999
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Ng is Not a Name
Growing up in Boston where there were very few Chinese Americans was often time embarrassing. In those yesterdays, teachers on the first day of school would have you print your last name first and then the initial of your first name on these little white cards. The teacher would then insert these little cards in this slotted cardboard to know who was sitting in which chair in the classroom.
One year, my junior high school teacher looked at my card, “NG, D” and looked up at me and said, “Is this a “No good desk?” The other kids laughed and I was extremely embarrassed!
For a long time afterward, I was so embarrassed over my name. Since my last name didn’t have a vowel, it didn’t even qualified as an English word you can pronounce. And furthermore, in the dictionary, the initials, “N.G.” is actually defined as “no good.” I felt embarrassingly no good. When we used to give our name for a table at a restaurant, I would say, “Washington.” “NG” is in this name and how can anybody miss pronounce the Father of our Country!
Embarrassed Believers
Hugh Hewitt, the host of a PBS show called, “Searching for God in America,” wrote a recent book entitled, The Embarrassed Believer. He points out that our culture is full of what he calls E.B.s—Embarrassed Believers, people of faith who are too ashamed to let the world know that they are Christians.
Do you sometimes feel that everyone in the restaurant is looking at you when you say grace out loud at your table? Your face gets hot and your become nervous.
Or perhaps a time when you are about to share an encouraging word with a friend to be strong in the faith—you begin to feel your heart beating harder and you are lost with words.
If you have felt ill at eased, flustered, and self-conscious, then you might be an EB, an Embarrassed Believer. Hewitt suggests that the embarrassment stems not from some innate discomfort with the gospel message, but with the public and media perception of what Christians are like. The media portrays Christians as “backward” in their thinking, poorly educated, and identified with wild, right-wing, extremist agendas.
Hewitt shows that Christians today, while not facing any physical danger for sharing their faith, do face public scorn and media ridicule. We fall for it. We are embarrassed. We’re quiet. We become speechless.
If you suspect that you’re an E.B., don’t worry. You’re are not alone. Most of us here this morning probably can identify with this syndrome. What has caused this pathology in our faith? What are the symptoms of this disease? Maybe part of the answer lies in our belief that religion is a personal, private matter. We say religion is our personal faith, and that it has nothing to do with anyone else. Keep it to yourself!
But not everything personal is private. All of your clothing is personal—it all belongs to you. But not all of it is private. Of course, some are private and they should be left unnamed. But the rest of your wardrobe is very public—you share it out all the time. In fact, we go shopping for clothes that would look good when we wear it outside in public. And some of us Embarrassed Believers would be more ready to wear an “E.B.” emblazoned over our chest to give free advertisement to Eddie Bauer than we would be willing to advertise Jesus Christ! Our clothing speaks. It communicates…yet it’s personal.
So, too, does religion speak—our Christian faith shouts out. Deep faith is personal, but it dismisses privatization and publicizes our faith in action. We should not be embarrassed about praying in public. We should not be embarrassed over giving witness to our friends. It’s like I am not embarrassed anymore about giving by last name, “Ng” when I ask for a table at a restaurant. Especially since we now live in San Francisco.
Parable of the Last Judgment
After three Sunday sermons from the parables in Matthew, we come to the fourth and final parable of Jesus’ teachings about the end of the age and the coming of God’s kingdom of heaven. Each one of these “advent” parables gives a picture of what the kingdom of heaven will look like when it finally comes. We heard about the delayed kingdom and that to be wise, we need to be faithful and be prepared like the bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom. Last Sunday, we looked at the abundance of talents that have already been given to us and for us not to worry about scarcity. Rather, if we were to under utilize them, we become worthless servants, thrown out into darkness where weeping and gnashing of teeth happen.
The whole gospel of Matthew has been moving toward and preparing for this dramatic parable. In Matthew, Jesus is the great teacher, and this parable, The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, is his last formal act of teaching, the final point, the parting lesson of his teaching ministry. And Matthew does not disappoint us for he gives us a majestic picture of the triumphant Jesus reigning in glory as king and judge at the end of time.
In Matthew 25, we see Jesus who had “nowhere to lay his head” (Mt. 8:20) is now seated on the royal throne as king. All the nations of the earth, row after row of humanity, are gathered before the throne of the Son of Man. Just as a shepherd in that time sometimes
would divide the larger flock, separating the sheep from the less valuable goats, so the Son of Man divides the people into the “sheep” on the right hand and the “goats” on the left.
The Son of Man pronounces judgment upon both the sheep and the goats. For the sheep, the news is good. They are given a divine blessing and are revealed as the true heirs of God’s kingdom because they provided food, drink, hospitality, clothing, and care for the Son of Man. As for the goats, however, they are condemned “into the eternal fire” because they supplied none of these amenities, even though the Son of Man was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, and in prison.
The twist in this parable is that neither the people who are the sheep or those who are the goats had any idea that when they gave compassion toward people in need, they were providing ministry to the Son of Man. Both groups are stunned and exclaimed, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison? The surprising reply is that whenever they acted—or failed to act—compassionately “to one of the least of these who are members of my family,” they did so to Jesus Christ.
If we are so embarrassed about our faith, how will we be courageous enough to provide food, drink, hospitality, clothing, and care for the least of these who are members of God’s family? How can we be healed from this syndrome of embarrassment that prevents us from praying and giving our testimonies in public?
Recovering Embarrassed Believers
We need to be “recovering embarrassed believers.” When we come to church every week, we are attending our “embarrassed believers meetings.” And we cannot be anonymous. That’s been the problem. We can’t continue to hide our faith or be embarrassed that we are Christians. Each one of us needs to come out of our self-conscious fears of what we think others might be thinking about us and proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ publicly.
Many of you have said to me that one of the most memorable event that has happened to our church in recent years is when we marched from our church on Waverly Place through the streets of Chinatown to the Lau school on July 18th. Some of us should have felt embarrassed! Here we were carrying Bibles and hymnals. The children had colorful balloons. And if there was anything more unusually than to have your pastors in their long black robes carrying shiny offering plates, the big Bible, and the brass cross though the streets of Chinatown. It was a spectacle! What little embarrassment that we may have had was dashed away when we supported each other in the faith. This is what Christians can do.
With our church building under retrofit and renovation, we have another opportunity to make our faith public. Whenever I have told people that our church is under construction in Chinatown, a number of them have said to me, “Is the church on Sacramento Street?” I would say, “Yes, it is. It’s right across the street from the YMCA.” They would say, “I
see it every time I take the # Sacramento Street bus.” Let’s make our church so publicly known as the church that provides food, drink, hospitality, clothing, and care for the Son of Man that when people ask where the YMCA is, many will say “It’s right across the street from the First Chinese Baptist Church.”
For our faith to become public without embarrassment, we must grow spiritually, biblically, and theologically. I am praying that we would organize and start geographical based Bible studies all around the Bay Area. Here we can see people gathering in homes eager to study the word of God and applying its meaning on daily living. I am praying that we would find words and stories that may capture the faith journeys that we have taken so that when there is an opportunity to share the love of Christ with others, we can do that with confidence and vigor. I am praying that we experience God’s presence in our hearts so that we can talk to God with all of our worries and joys like the way we are able to talk with each other right now. I am praying that we can engage in first hand mission to provide food, drink, hospitality, clothing, and care for the Son of Man.
Jesus, Our Judge
The crux of this parable with Jesus as king and judge at the end of time is that when we don’t provide food, drink, hospitality, clothing, and care for the least of these our brothers and sisters, we have also not cared for the Son of Man. When we have been embarrassed about our faith that we have not cared for the marginalized and the oppressed people in our society, then Jesus is saying that we also have not cared for him.
The final teaching by Jesus is difficult for many of us here today because Jesus is pictured as the judge of the living and the dead. We don’t often think of Jesus as judge. We think of Jesus as good friend, the one who stills the storm, the good shepherd, as the one who affirms us, but rarely do we think of Jesus as judge.
And yet when we no longer image Jesus as judge, much has been lost. An undeniable fact is that Jesus taught this parable to his disciples and to us with him as the judge at the end of time. We cannot make Jesus into anything we want. He is what he was. And every Sunday, when we open up the Bible and listen to it, we are submitting to the authority of the past which is also the present.
In contemporary Christianity, we want to believe that we can be accountable to an ideal, a principle, or a goal. Sometimes, we think that we can hold ourselves accountable for the things we do. But we know that inherently, we are unable to discern ourselves truthfully. We use embarrassment, how we think people are perceiving us to make excuses about caring for the marginalized and oppressed in our world.
Just like members at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting requires accountability, we as Embarrassed Believers need accountability from Jesus. To be accountable to Jesus, we are accountable to a person, to an event who lived in history. Jesus’ life has its own integrity. It is an event, not an abstraction. He cannot be reduced to something else, any
more than you or I can be. He does not simply bring us the criteria for judging ourselves. Jesus is the criterion. We are judged by the person Jesus actually was.
While Jesus is the judge, it is equally important to recognize that the judge is Jesus. Our redeemer is the judge. The one to whom we are accountable is also the one who forgives. This is the good news in which we are most thankful today. Because Jesus is the judge, he also has the right to forgive us for our failures. Jesus forgives us for all those times when we felt so embarrassed that we did not provide food, drink, hospitality, clothing, and care for the least of these our brothers and sisters.
Good intentions, righteous principles, and lofty goals do not forgive. They cannot forgive. Only a person can forgive.
Continuing to be an embarrassed believer is no longer an excuse for us to not care for the Son of Man. But the one to whom we are to shout out from the mountaintop that Jesus Christ is King is also the one who suffered for our sake and will keep on forgiving us when we ask. For that, we are most thankful. More thankful than the turkey and sticky rice we eat at Thanksgiving dinners.
Therein is our hope, that the judge, the one who sits on the throne to evaluate our lives, is also the one who first laid down his life for us. Jesus did for us that which we cannot do for ourselves, whose judgment upon us is another side of his eternal love for us. In probably one of the most embarrassing events in history when Jesus was being betrayed, arrested, beaten, ridiculed, and finally crucified on the cross, Jesus never gave up on us.
Let us not give up on Jesus by being embarrassed believers of Christ anymore. Let us unashamedly recognize Jesus Christ as our Lord and King.
Let us pray.
Dear God, forgive us when we were embarrassed to speak of you. Work with us as we open up our hearts during this season of thanksgiving to work and grow closer with you. Continue to be our criterion from which we are to measure our discipleship. In the name of Jesus who is our King and Savior, we pray. Amen.