Grateful, Loving, and Helpful
Grateful, Loving, and Helpful
Matthew 25:31-40
When I was in confirmation class, my father was my teacher. One day, he had us read the parable of the prodigal son and discuss it. You know the story—the younger son cashes in on his inheritance and runs away and blows it. Eventually, he makes his way home but before he can get there his father runs out to meet him, hugs him, and declares that it’s time to party. The older son sees this and resents it all. However, we see the grace and forgiveness and love of that father and we think, “What if God loves us like that?”
We read the parable. Dad asked if anyone had any thoughts. I said that I thought the lesson of the parable was that, “We all should take risks like that younger son. Life’s an adventure! We should go for it!” I’m pretty sure that when Dad heard that somewhat novel interpretation, he wasn’t thinking to himself, “Some day that kid’s going to preach!” I suspect he also made sure that I had no early access to my inheritance!
Instead, Dad said something like this: “Mark, that’s great that you shared your perspective. What’s wonderful about Scripture is that we all can hear things a little differently.” He didn’t embarass me or put me down for giving a “wrong” answer. He basically said, “Let’s think some more about this together and see what else we can see.” In retrospect, he was emodying the grace and love of the father in that parable as we sat together that day.
The overriding message of confirmation for me was, “You’re growing up. You’re developing your own perspective on what you believe and why you believe it. Let’s sit together for a while and ask some big questions and think together about what this whole faith thing is about.” It’s okay to think. It’s okay to disagree. It’s okay to ask questions. Sometimes, answers aren’t all that easy to come by. In the meantime, let me introduce you to some other thinkers who have asked those questions, too.
This is the confirmation experience that I tried to create when I taught confirmation. This is the confirmation experience that Tracy has created for so many young people for decades. This is the confirmation experience that this year’s confirmands have just completed. Who is God? Who is Jesus? What is the Holy Spirit? What are baptism and communion really about? What does it mean to live a life of faith. What you’ve declared today is that when it comes to this journey of faith, you’re in. You don’t have all the answers but you’re interested in continuing to ask the questions. And that is…fantastic!
This morning, I want to challenge you, though, to see what’s just as important as those questions. Faith is meant to be practiced and lived. We’re meant to live a loving life. This is why I hope that the church—wherever you go, whatever you do—will be a part of your journey. Of course, church is inconvenient. Who really wants to get up on a Sunday morning, right? There’s always something else to do. You could be getting things done or practicing something or…sleeping, right? Why would going and sitting in some pew matter all that much? Why go to church at all?
Some people would tell you that going to church will keep God from getting mad at you or will earn you points to go some place really cool when you’re dead. Some people will guilt you or shame you into thinking you have no choice. That’s not me. That’s also not this church. I hope it won’t be the kind of church you choose to be a part of in the future, either.
So, if guilt and shame and fear aren’t the reason to be here, what is? I’ll give you a few. First, I think a great reason to come to church is to say, “Thank you!” Being alive in this time and place is a gift. Worship, at its best, is not what we do in order to get something. Rather, worship is what we do when we’re grateful for what we’ve already been given. We realize how lucky we are to have people who love us and how lucky we are to have a church family. When we remember how lucky we are (which easily can be almost never), we thank God. When we thank God regularly—for food, for people to love and people who love us, for the beauty of this earth—we become grateful people. Church is where we go to practice being grateful people. It’s like going to the gym but we’re exercising different “muscles.”
Another reason to come to church is that someone might actually need your help. There might be a person who is going through something hard and the smile that you offer them when you sit down next to them makes all the difference, even though you never knew they were struggling. Or, you might be listening to “joys and concerns,” and realize that the problem that person is talking about is something you’ve actually been through. You have a name of someone who might help. Perhaps, you might be just the right person to make a difference, to make that person’s life less hard. The truth is that being needed by someone else and actually helping them feels so much better than just walking around thinking about ourselves all day long. Feeling useful and helpful is about as good as this life gets.
The question is who are supposed to help. Jesus says, if you want to follow me, you need to love God and love your neighbor. So, you can’t love God and hate people, something a lot of religious people have tried to do. “Okay, then, who is my neighbor?” Jesus says your neighbor is the person right in front of you, whether you happen to like them all that much or not, whether you feel like helping them or not. Notice their needs. Then, ask yourself, “What would it mean to love this person?”
The church is the kind of place that forces us out of our comfort zone of just caring for who we would have cared for anyway if we’d never come to church. Of course there are people we enjoy at church but there are always people, too, who are a challenge. They’re different enough from us that if we are going to love them, we’re going to have to really work at it—which, I think, in the end, is the point. In fact, I think practicing what it means to love the people who challenge us in the church get’s us ready for the “major league” challenge of loving the difficult people we meet outside the church. In the end, being grateful, loving, helpful people in the world is what this whole life of faith is about.
Some people think the point of this life is to get into heaven in the next life. I think if you’re leading a grateful, loving, helpful life, you’re already there. Jesus liked to tell people that the kingdom of God was already among them when love was being lived.
When Jesus is asked what that kingdom would look like, he tells a story— our text for today. Lots of people in Jesus’ day worried about being judged “worthy” by God. Today, a lot of people think instead, “How can I make sure that I haven’t wasted my life,” because wasting my life would seem like a pretty ungrateful thing to do. However we frame the question, the issue is the same: “What really matters most?”
Here’s what Jesus has to say. In the end, what matters most is whether you recognize the needs of the people around you and then actually do something to help them. In words that should haunt us, Jesus says, “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room, I was shivering and you gave me clothes, I was sick and you stopped to visit, I was in prison and you came to me.”
It sounds straighforward enough, right? It actually is! Somehow, though, things get messed up quickly in real life. We run into someone who is hungry and instead of feeding them we try to “feed” them some advice. We run into someone who is thirsty and we ask to see their “papers.” If someone’s thirsty, maybe even dying of thirst, should we really be worried about where they’re from? We run into someone who is homeless and we take their case all the way to the supreme court. (Or, we just tell them, “Not in my backyard.”) Meanwhile, they’re still homeless. Someone’s freezing and we say, “Man, it’s cold out here tonight!” Someone’s sick and we’re disturbed enough to think, “Boy, I really can’t afford to get sick right now.”
The people who are hearing these words are suddenly confused: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?” The king answers: “Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.’
That prodigal son parable? The father doesn’t have a discussion with his son. He runs to meet him and throws his arms wide open in love. That person who recognizes the needs of others responds to the actual needs, no questions asked. This is what faith in action looks like. This is what grateful, helpful, and loving people do. We ask our questions and share our ideas. We practice being grateful together. All of that, though, is in the service of bringing love to life. That’s what matter most in the end.