Cathedral Sermons
Sunday July 25, 2010; Social Service Sunday
Readings: Micah 6:8-12; James2:14-17; Matthew 25:31-45
It’s good to be here in this soon to be super city, in this state of the art cathedral, with good reason to feel pleased about life and lots to celebrate.
And what do we get from the designers of the lectionary for the annual celebration of Anglican Social Services, which as I’m sure you know really are worth celebrating? More people meet our church through our social services than all the Sunday morning eucharists put together.
So what’s on offer from the Gospel reading today? Well, it’s hardly celebration material. A vision of the Last Judgement, no less. Portrayed in a way that no one in our western culture has taken seriously for about 500 years. Leonardo Da Vinci did, along with a raft of Renaissance painters on prominent sites like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Images of a finger pointing God, leaning forward from his throne of glory, surrounded by clouds of angels, sorting out the bad sheep from the good goats or is it the good goats from the bad sheep?
Whatever it is, it’s a light year away from anything most of us can take seriously at face value, let alone reconcile with the God of generosity and universal love that Jesus preached.
It would be nice to be able to drop this passage about a harsh and uncompromising judge, like we drop the verses in the psalms about cursing your enemies and beating their brains out. But we don’t have that luxury. We can’t pick and choose Scripture verses to suit us. Hard wired into the biblical vision is a God who loves us unconditionally but equally firmly holds us to account for our actions. We reap what we sow, we live with the consequences of our choices for better or worse.
And that message doesn’t change, even though we dress it up differently to suit our time and culture. The old images of the Last Judgement are beyond most of us. Not even Cecil B. De Mille dared to make a movie about it. It was too unbelievable even for Hollywood, only Monty Python found mileage in it.
Today’s images of this global accountability for all humanity and all creation are packaged differently – try pictures of global warming, of devastating oil spills poisoning the ocean, of nuclear warfare tipping us into cataclysm, of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Those are the images that terrify us more than any avenging angel or culling of sheep and goats.
But change the costumes in which God’s call to accountability is dressed and there are lessons aplenty waiting for us in this Gospel passage. Let me choose just two for this Social Service Sunday that might help us sharpen our awareness of what Anglican Social Services do and our willingness to support them with our money and our prayers and our volunteer energy.
The first concerns the place God stands in to observe us and assess us. One of the most earliest movies from my celluloid memory bank, well stocked as it is, was called The Prince and the Pauper, based on a Mark Twain story. It described how a young prince and a mistreated street kid swap places and learn to see the world in radically different ways from where they stand. It’s an old theme often retold with managers watching workers, politicians watching voters, kings watching their subjects, Robin Hood watching the Sheriff of Notingham, incognito and camouflaged. And what they see of course undercover, is always revealing. Uncluttered by courtesy and obligation, flattery and trying to please, the truth comes out sharp and hard.
That’s how God works in this Gospel story. He watches us undercover, invisible and his people say I didn’t know you were there God. We didn’t see you.
When was it that we saw a naked or a hungry or a sick or an imprisoned God? You didn’t tell us you were there. We thought it was someone else, someone who didn’t matter. Someone we could ignore.
Do you know that we have 8,200 people in prison in this country. In the western world, only The United States boasts a bigger number. Do you know that 80% of our prisoners are functionally illiterate, that over 40% of them have a diagnosable mental illness, that 80% have an issue of drug or alcohol addiction? We’re going to spend $700 million maintaining and expanding our prisons in the next four years. Only $11 million of that will go on rehabilitation. The National Health Committee’s report released this week paints a dismal picture of the health of Kiwi prisoners and their families, especially their younger children. It describes a culture of violence and degradation inside our prisons, creating a knock on effect of despair and poverty for their families waiting outside, often unable to communicate or know what’s happening to sons, fathers and partners.
The public mood about these prisoners is increasingly unsympathetic. Lock them up, pack them in and throw away the key and their cigarettes too. If they get a second chance they definitely don’t deserve a third. And though they have to be locked up in prison, don’t build them in my back yard. Out of sight is out of mind, thank God.
Less blatantly we have a similar attitude to older people. They’re nice to have around, though preferably not on TV too often, unless they die their hair and fix their teeth and dress up to look younger. Even Cameron Bennett looks too old, it seems from ever trendier TVNZ. Maori TV is the only channel where old people are allowed to look old. The preferred place for older people on the Pakeha stage is with other older people in well fenced enclaves where they can decay together. Out of sight, out of mind.
Precisely this attitude was reflected in a Herald column last week by Noel McCarthy who went on about her fear of aging and the inevitability of becoming decrepit and ugly and unnoticed, graphically described but none of which, she smugly reminded us, describes her, still young and pretty as she tells us she is. Out of sight, out of mind, thank God.
Well, be careful which God you are thanking when you talk like Noel and other self proclaimed beauties, (or Corrections Minister Judith Collins who to be fair to her), doesn’t invoke God’s name in this debate, good Anglican that she is or anyone else who favours being insulated from the poor, the sick and hungry and the captives of our time.
Because the God we know in Jesus Christ, the God of this final judgement story, is exactly the opposite. The God we worship and the God we witness through our social services is present in the very people we seek to keep out of sight and out of mind. This is a God who stands unnamed and unrecognized in the sick and the hungry, the prisoners, some of the old and all of the dispossessed of Aotearoa, and who measures us by our ability to see him these people we would rather forget.
And what can we say when we genuinely fail to see this incognito God who is present everywhere and in everyone but most vividly and consistently in the least among us, the most wounded, the most dispossessed.
It’s very hard to see such a God. What can we say?
Well, according to this gospel story, not much. The judgement is brutal and short. Depart from me.
Whatever the excuse.
And there are plenty of excuses. I worked in Europe in the 1970’s with close German friends, only a little older than me, who genuinely didn’t know that Jewish people were being transported in cattle cars through the railways that ran through their home towns and villages, into extermination camps. Thirty years after the war was over, these friends would say over and over, we didn’t know. And I would think but never say out loud, you mightn’t have known but weren’t you wondering? And then I would ask myself would I have more curious, been more brave?
And did we know what we have been doing to gay and lesbian people in many, though happily not all, of our churches, and not this one, for so long, by insisting they stay silent and quiet and unable to exercise leadership and enjoy their dignity as God’s daughters and sons.
It’s easy enough to make this list longer and longer of all the people in desperate need that we simply don’t see, don’t hear their cry, don’t recognize their pain. Out of sight is out of mind, God forgive us.
But here is the good news. We can learn to see where we have been blind. We can learn to hear where we have been deaf. And we can learn to reach out and touch what we have avoided and chosen to ignore.
And when we do, with a little nudging and encouraging each other within communities of service like this one, when we do start to see and hear and touch the broken, hurting, bleeding world as it really is, then God does see and feel our actions because God is already there ahead of us, waiting for us to join him in the healing and the feeding, the visiting and the speaking up for what is just and honourable and true.
The good news for us from this Gospel story is that we are judged not so much by what we have done wrong in the past, which is often hard to let go and forget, but what we have yet failed to do and see.
And that, thank God, is much more about the future than the past. There is still time. The judgement is not on those who have failed back then, but those who still do nothing now.
The Final Judgement is a story set at the end of time, reminding us there is still time. Thanks be to God.