I don’t usually open a sermon by quoting a past Vice President of the United States of America, but this morning I want to. Al Gore had a documentary some years ago called, An Inconvenient Truth. This morning, I couldn’t help but think our passage is perhaps best described by Al Gore as an “inconvenient truth.” It might not be about the destruction of the environment, which his documentary is about, and that is an issue unto itself. But there is an inconvenient truth to what Jesus is saying to us that grabs us and grasps us and shakes us.
Whenever I am confronted by a text or a passage or a word of Jesus that I think is an inconvenient truth, I usually test it in my own mind. I imagine myself sitting on the subway, and somebody next to me sees me reading this inconvenient passage, and asks me, “What are you reading?” I test myself by asking myself whether or not to share it with them, because it could be an inconvenient moment for me. I might be embarrassed by it. I might find that it challenges me too much, so I am silent.
I agree with the great John Stott, who preached at All Souls’ Church in London and was a great hero of mine. He wrote a book titled Christ, the Controversialist. Sometimes I think that Stott is absolutely correct. There are times in Jesus’ life and ministry when he is a controversialist, when what he says goes against the tide of human reason or experience, when he goes right to the heart and the soul of the matter like no one else. Jesus can speak inconvenient truths in very controversial ways that can shake us.
Matthew 25 and this parable shake us because it talks about the glory of the Son of Man, and when he returns in his glory he will judge. He will judge between the sheep and the goats. He will tell us by what criteria we are judged, the extent to which we help the needy and the vulnerable and the poor. He reveals to us the pitfalls of not responding to his challenge. The words of Jesus, “Whatever you do for one of the least of these my children you have done it to me. Or, whatever you have not done to the least of these my children, you have not done for me” shakes us to our core! If you can read that my friends and not have the earth move beneath your feet, if you can read that and not be convicted in some way, I suggest that your soul is dead! Those words of Jesus go right to the heart of all the things that we worry about: judgement, truth, compassion, the dangers of not being compassionate, and his authority and his rule.
I like what Lyndsay Armstrong, a minister of First Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia says: “There is no text in all of Scripture that is more like a heart check than this passage.” What Lyndsay is getting at is that when we go to the doctor and we have our blood test, we look at our kidney function and we look at our cholesterol and we look at our sugar levels and we look at our chemistry, and we try and discern if our heart is good and our body is well. Well, Matthew 25, according to Lyndsay is our heart check. It really tests where we are in our relationship with God and with Christ.
On this Reign of Christ Sunday, this text just screams at us with the controversial nature of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Why? Well, because of who is speaking. The “Who” that is speaking and addressing us has all the power and all the sovereignty that a text can muster. He is the One who is returning in glory. He is the One who is raised from the dead. He is the One, who is, as the Creed says, “the judge of the living and the dead.” He is the sovereign one! He reigns! And as the one who reigns, it is he who has all the authority and all the power and all the Holy Spirit behind him and carries with him the authority “whatever you have done for the least of these, my children, you have done for me.”
Who is he speaking to? One might think that he is only speaking to his followers, but there is no sense in the text that that is the case. Maybe he is only speaking to the Jews, who knew the law, and the law always upholds the care of the widow and the orphan, but there is no such limitation there. Maybe he is only speaking to the lambs, to those who are going to experience eternity. Or maybe he is only speaking to the goats that they might hear what they need to hear. No, the text is clear: it is for all nations – panta ta ethne – all the nations, all ethnicities, and the whole world. No qualifications! The whole world! All the nations are being challenged by Jesus.
What is he saying? He is saying above all else that the human heart and the human existence really does matter, that for the Son of God we human beings and those with whom we live on this earth actually do count and are of great value. I hear from some of my more cynical friends who like to call themselves “Post Christians” or those who want to adopt the new atheism or the new agnosticism or those who believe in humanism, they keep telling me that the only thing that really matters is the human condition, and the worth and the welfare and the achievements of human beings are all that really matter, that when you boil existence down and the reason why we are on this earth, the only thing that matters is the worth, the welfare, and the achievement of the human being. They lift this up as their great goal and they say, “This is the highest good.” I even know ministers who have become discouraged with The Gospel and have walked away from Jesus, and have said that is where they are going to end up: the worth, the welfare and the achievement of the human is the only thing that is important.
Where does this come from? During the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, human life was treated like garbage. Humans were discounted, traded, sold. The poor and homeless were left to die on the streets, the sick had no care. Prisoners were tortured and thrown away and put in irons and forgotten about. Humanity, for all for all its so-called humanity, did terrible things! So where did a positive humanism come from? Where did this sense that human beings matter come from? It came from the Christians. It came from the likes of Erasmus, the great Dutch philosopher, who during the Renaissance as a Christian said that “human beings are of inestimable value and worth.” Even the great Martin Luther, who believed in the sinfulness of the human being, nevertheless believed that God identified fully with the human; that God cared for and loved the human. Erasmus said he came to this by reading a passage, our passage this morning, “Whatever you have done for these the least of my children, you have done it for me.”
Of course, after this glorious Reformation when people were reclaiming the value of the human through the eyes of Christ the enlightenment came. The Enlightenment writers: Voltaire and Nietzsche and others, suggested that the human being could stand alone, and did not need any reference to religion to believe in the worth and the welfare and the achievement of the human, and that, in fact, this was not necessary anymore. We could be good without any reference to God. All that was needed was a sense that we are human.
This form of humanism took on a life of its own. I would suggest to you that the world right now is a bundle, a mixing bowl, a mishmash of everything from believing that human beings don’t matter at all, as we see in parts of the world where life is taken cheaply, to the view that human beings are the highest order and the highest authority in the whole world. Yet, in this confusing state of affairs I cannot think of one single passage in the whole of human literature that affirms the dignity, the value, the importance of the human being more than the words of Jesus of Nazareth, “Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done it for me.”
It doesn’t matter what the state of affairs may be. It doesn’t matter if a person is in prison, for we probably are not running into prisoners on a daily basis, or the naked, that we give them clothing – we don’t see that very often in our daily walk, I don’t think – but the hungry, yes, the sick, yes, the stranger, yes, the lonely, yes, the vulnerable, yes, the frightened, yes, the abused, yes. Christ is not limiting it to the list here; he is talking about the very virtue, the very need of, the vulnerability of the weakest denominator. Jesus says, “Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done it for me.” His heart is with those who are lonely in their vulnerability. Whenever we say, “Have we done anything for you? Have we achieved anything for you? How do we serve you, Jesus? How do we serve you?”
Jesus says, “This is how you do it: you do it for me with them and if you do it for me with them, then you show them that you love me and I love them.”
I was reading about the brilliant Millard Fuller, who grew up and was in fact by virtue of business, quite a wealthy man. He and his wife, Linda attended a church called Koinonia Church in the Deep South in the United States. It was in the midst of one of the poorest neighbourhoods in one of the most southern cities, a bit like Ferguson today, where there was homelessness and despair and violence. In that congregation, Millard Fuller heard a sermon on Matthew 25. It said: “Whatever you have done for these the least of my children, you have done for me.” Millard Fuller got up from that church that day, and he and his wife created Habitat for Humanity. He wrote these words:
From north to south and east to west, everywhere two or more people are listening, I quote Jesus’ words: ‘I was a stranger when you invited me in.’ In a simple, functional, heartful house, the foundation of human development, I firmly believe that we, as Christians engage in this kind of work for any stranger, and when we do it, we do it for Jesus. When He comes again in glory, we will hear his words ‘Come you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you.’
As of last week, Habitat for Humanity has built 800,000 homes for 2.2 million people. As he says, “a drop in the bucket” for the homelessness in the world, but a sign that Jesus is alive in the hearts of people.
See what I mean? One person, listening to one word by Jesus, as controversial as it is, changes thousands of lives! It is an inconvenient truth when you hear it; it is life-giving power of the Risen Christ when you act upon it. There is a time though, folks when our hearts need a new rhythm, when as much as we have a heart for the world, it gets out of rhythm. I think when we come to church Sunday-by-Sunday we are re-starting our hearts. The reason why I think people need to go to church on a regular basis is to hear the Word of God, the Word of Christ, the Word of Scripture and to pray before him and honour him in order that our hearts get restarted, because very easily they can stop, very easily we can lose our rhythm and our beat, like that poor child Ali Khaleghi this last week who was hit by a puck in the chest. He was thirteen years old and his heart just stopped. He needed CPR and he needed a defibrillator to get it restarted. They boy was going to die, and his heart needed to be restarted.
I am pleased to say that in our church we have defibrillators. You can find them in the building. We do it because we know that the preaching gets so exciting that you may need it! So they are here for you on the walls. If you get overwhelmed, there they are. We’ll restart you!
It is the Word of God that restarts your heart when it gets out of beat. They can get out of beat for all manner of reasons. We can become blasé and complacent, and the church is dying in places because it has become complacent. It needs heart stimulation! It needs the passion of Jesus when he says, “Whatever you do for these the least of my children, you have done for me.”
It is easy for us to become content, to enjoy the peace, the worth, the welfare, the achievement of our humanity, but the Scripture realized something and Jesus realized something, and it is what I think the humanists unfortunately don’t quite get, and that is we can also be sinful, our hearts can get out of rhythm. We create our idols, and we forget those that are around us. We become blind to need. We become obsessed with self. We do not see the vulnerable. But not when Jesus kick-starts your heart, not when Jesus touches you, not when your heart becomes his heart, not when you see in the eyes of the other, Christ himself, not when you do it for the least of those and you do it for Christ. That is when your heart is beating, and it is beating well, for it is beating with Christ!
There is a most beautiful hymn that we sing. It is one of my all-time favourites. It kick-starts the heart. In the final verse of that hymn there are these words, and I leave you with our Choir singing them that your heart might beat with Christ:
Great God of heaven, after victory won,
may I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
still be my vision, O ruler of all.
Amen.