What matters in the end...

What matters in the end…

Matthew 25:34-40

Vacation in Ely this summer was unique.  Tracy had just retired.    On the first Wednesday of the vacation, my friend, Joe, a physician, retired.  Looming on the horizon was today—August 17th—and my retirement.  We’d been through so many other changes together—getting married, having children, losing parents, you name it.  Why not retire together, too?

For Joe and me, there was a particular resonance.  At 17 years old, we began a conversation with each other about what we wanted to be when we grew up.  He flirted briefly with being a priest, I think.  I flirted briefly with being a “Philosopher/king.”  It seemed oddly parallel to have a conversation at the end of what we had done when we grew up.

What was clarified for me in the conversation was that the seeds of who we would become were already planted in us 48 years ago.  Joe was the most idealistic person I’ve ever known.  He had a profound sense of right and wrong.  Integrity was all about living up to those standards.  In retrospect, I probably loved ideas as much as anyone had.  I was deeply committed to thinking and persuasion and rationality.  In our worst moments, Joe was hardest on himself for not living up to his sometimes impossibly high standards and I could be found floating off into the stratosphere of abstract thinking:  “I know that we agree that this is a chair but what actually makes this chair a chair?”  I urgently wanted to talk about the teleological suspension of the ethical and Heidegger’s concept of the event of appropriation.  The problem, of course, was that both of us had to live in the real world where ideals are compromised all the time and where ideas and arguments don’t really mean that much to that many people.

What I said to Joe—words spoken from my heart—was that I thought that he did an amazing job of learning to live in this rough and tumble world which often doesn’t care about what’s right and good.  He found a way to be a person of integrity who inspired patients and whole systems of health care to aspire to be better.  He found a way to challenge others without demanding perfection.  He found a way to lose some really big battles without losing his ideals.  He found a way to be idealistic and still get things done.

Although our journeys were different, I like to think we were working in the same “zip code.”  When I went to seminary, I wanted to be a professor, most likely a professor of theological ethics.  Theology had all the elegance of philosophy.  Ethics had that component of persuasion.  I will spend my life making a case for what’s right and that case will be irresistible.  (At that point, I was still convinced that what mattered most was that things be rational and that if an argument was rational then the vast majority of people would be convinced and act accordingly.

So, I was set to fly off into the stratosphere in seminary except actual people and their needs kept getting in the way. I spent a lot of time in the homeless shelters in Uptown in Chicago, volunteering and then working as an intern with a guy named Don Benedict at the People’s Church—a famous rabble rouser in the city.  Eventually, I worked at Fourth Presbyterian Church in their crisis counseling center.  Over time, I’m pretty sure that I knew most of the homeless folks in Chicago and they knew me.  What began to be challenged was the notion that ideas mattered most.  Maybe what matters more is feeding people and making sure that they don’t freeze to death.  This became more and more true as I learned people’s names and their stories and witnessed their suffering, first hand.

Eventually, there was a memorable night at the shelter.  The place was packed.  There were volunteers from all over the place.  In my mind, some of those people were “right thinking” people like me who love the ideas and theological concepts that I loved and some of those people were the folks with whom I disagreed on all things theological and theoretical. Now, though, it was time to get the mattresses out of the closet which meant that you had to be ready to stare down the bed bugs that we all knew were in there.  (Bed bugs and fleas to be more specific.)  

What became obvious in a flash was that most people weren’t going there.  There was absolutely no correlation between the ideas and arguments that people loved and whether they would go in.  It was deeper than that.  (Again, I’ll remind you that at this point in my life, nothing was deeper than one’s beloved ideas and arguments.) I stepped into the closet and realized that the person next to me and I would not have agreed on a single theological concept but we did agree on the notion that these beds need to get cleaned.  No one made that case out loud.  Again, it was deeper than that.  We were looking at profound human needs and we were moved to action because we cared.  I felt so close to that person in that moment that I wanted to put my finger to my lips and just whisper, “Don’t say a word!” If he spoke, he was going to start talking about “being washed in the blood of Jesus” and if I spoke, I knew that I was going to say something equally off-putting to him.  “Shhh…”

Less talk.  More action.  It’s not that the words don’t matter.  It’s not that making the case for something doesn’t matter.  It was just the first of a whole lifetime of lessons for me that what matters more than the ideas that mean so much and the arguments which matter, too, are the compassion-inspired and, dare I say, God- inspired, actions that we take that are grounded in care, from one human being to another.  Let’s talk about what we think.  Let’s try to change each other’s minds.  However, let’s never forget that what matters, first and foremost, is that we respond to the needs of the people around us.

This conviction is what’s at the heart of our text for this morning, a text that has been a “north star” in ministry for me from the start.  What we read this morning is one part of a larger tale that is being spun about a moment of final judgment.  For a lot of people, this is the kind of text they love because they are on the hunt for getting to where they want to go in the next life.  They think, “Well…what matters way more than this life is going to heaven and avoiding hell.  So, I’m going to lean in every time that Scripture mentions anything close!” I’ve believed for a long time that Jesus talked about such things not to help us get to some other life but to help us not waste this life—the one we are living now.  In essence, if we pause for a moment and consider what matters in the end, then maybe we’ll live differently right here and right now.

At first in the text, there is a vision of separating sheep and goats.  (I have to be honest here and say that though I have little sheep and goat experience I am drawn, generally, to goats.  They just seem a lot more fun and a lot less smelly than sheep.) That, being said, in this story, the goats don’t measure up and are being sent off to the left and the sheep are the heroes and are being sent off to the right.  Now, we have to pause here and recognize what I think would have amused Jesus’ audience:  what king has anything to do with livestock?  No king is going to get exposed to the “muck” like that!  It also would have been an odd action to take—to separate sheep and goats.  Anyone who had them would have had them intermixed.  Sheep and goats were compatible.  So, for the people of his day, this whole scene would have been a strange vision: a king doing something entirely “non-royal” and a separation of animals that was totally unnatural.  Jesus loved to jar his audience awake!

Our text this morning is the king’s message to the sheep:  “Welcome, my beloved sheep!  Today, you take your place in God’s kingdom.”  (Again, it’s hard to believe that the audience wouldn’t have been looking slightly cockeyed and asking, “There are sheep in God’s kingdom?”) The king says, “Here’s why you’re in…”. Then, these words are offered at the heart of our text:  “I was hungry and you fed me.  I was thirsty and you gave me 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.”  In essence, the king says to the sheep, “I was desperately in need and you responded!” 

Then, the sheep ask the question any right thinking sheep would ask, “When did we see you desperately in need?”  This is a funny question!  “Were we buzzing along in life and didn’t notice it was you?”  After all, if you are walking along in life and you see a powerful, rich, important person in need, what do you do?  You help them!  Heck, even if you’re just self-interested you help them because who doesn’t want a powerful, rich, important person to be in their debt? However, the king clarifies:  “Whenever you did one of these things for someone who was overlooked and ignored—for someone who wasn’t powerful or rich or important—for someone who was never going to pay you back, guess what?  That was me!  You helped me!”

So, what matters in the end is helping the people that no one else wants to help.  What matters is helping the person in need whom everyone is convinced does not matter.  What matters in the end is that no one is left behind, that no one is left hungry or shivering or lonely.  What matters in the end is that everyone—every child of God —knows that they, in fact, do matter.

Here’s the thing: we all know this.  We know this not because it’s a great idea or a persuasive argument.  We know this because we’ve felt the incredible rush that wells up deep inside of us when we care in this way.  It feels good to drop off sweat socks or a case of peanut butter or a pack of diapers for someone in need.  It feels good to make sure that a child who might not have school supplies has them.  It feels good to go the extra mile to help someone at church.  It feels good to see the relief in someone else’s eyes when we hand a casserole to them at their home in the middle of a chaotic life moment and they realize they get to sit down with their family and have a meal.  It feels so good that we wonder if, maybe, helping someone else is the real reason we are here at all.

My buddy, Joe, and I both had the gift of getting to care for people—real, broken, total-piece-of work, amazingly lovable human beings—for a living.  In the course of doing so, he got to learn how to bring his ideals with him and embed them in the care he offered.  In the course of doing so, I got to try to use the ideas and the arguments that I loved to try to inspire and cajole others into caring for the people around them, too.  How lucky were we?