St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, November 23, 2008

Reign of Christ Sunday

Seeing the Invisible –Rev. David Mundy

Ezekiel 34:11, 16-23 Matthew 25:31-46

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Robert Lentz is an artist who has created a series of remarkable images of people of faith through the ages. He has used the ancient medium of the icon, best known in the Russian Orthodox tradition, as well as his own marvellous imagination.

One example is of Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the environment. Lentz has also created a number of images of Jesus. One shows Jesus as the Good Shepherd, although this sheep herder looks more like a Bedouin from the deserts of the Near East than the “gentle Jesus” we often see.

The image that intrigues me most is what I think of as Barbed Wire Jesus for the obvious reason that Jesus stares intently through barbed wire or perhaps the razor wire which is used to surround many prisons. It’s hard to tell whether Jesus is on the outside looking in, or on the inside looking out. It may be that the artist wanted us to be unsure because Jesus is the fiercely loving presence who cares about those who are often hidden from view in this world. Of course Jesus was imprisoned himself, albeit briefly. The gospels tell us that he was tortured while in the Roman jail of the Antonia Fortress before he was taken out to Golgotha for his execution.

This morning is the last Sunday of the Christian year and next week we are given a fresh start with the beginning of the Advent season. This Sunday is called the Reign of Christ or Christ the King in some traditions but the readings for the day always remind us that Jesus was not a conventional monarch.

Today in both the book of the prophet Ezekiel and in the gospel of Matthew we are offered images of the good shepherd who will not lead the flock astray. Ezekiel was both a priest and a prophet and he was one strange dude, whose visions often seem more like the nightmares which cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. In this section of his prophecy Ezekiel says that the shepherd will judge between the sheep and the goats. I have never really understood what the bible has against goats but it’s clear that there are the good guys and the bad guys even though it doesn’t the prophet doesn’t bother telling us what makes someone bad and someone good.

Roughly 600 years later Jesus of Nazareth who was from the line of David offers the same picture of the sheep and the goats although he is much more specific. Jesus invites us to ask ourselves whether we have responded to those who are hungry and naked and in prison. He says that some will reach out in compassion and some won’t. And he makes an extraordinary claim that when we do show kindness and caring for the marginalized and the unlovely of the world we are actually responding to him. Maybe it isn’t so out of the ordinary because Jesus was hungry and thirsty during his time in the desert. He was thrown into prison for his last hours, where he was beaten. Then on the cross he was humiliated as he hung in the heat of the day, virtually naked.

One writer has suggested that it is just human nature to look at the child with the distended belly and say “isn’t that terrible . . . but it isn’t my baby.” Or to see the elderly woman languishing in the nursing home bed and say “that’s sad . . . but it isn’t my mother.” Or to see the guy in rags on the park bench and say “life’s been rough for him . . . but he’s not my brother.”

But looking away from those who are suffering is not God’s nature and we are asked to turn our gaze back to see Christ in the unlikely faces and to see our child and our mother and our brother. In fact we are told that if we don’t see those who are often invisible in our culture our souls will be in a peril. Those words “truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these you did not do it to me. And those will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

This is where Christianity gets real, wouldn’t you say? There is no question that Jesus expects that our actions will reflect our words of faith.

Most of us would accept that as followers of Christ we are called to respond to the plight of those who are hungry and thirsty and who need financial assistance to be properly clothed and housed. There are many different practical ways we do this as a congregation. We also provide support to those who are dealing with mental and physical health challenges and we encourage our government to provide health care. I am regularly impressed by the compassion and generosity of St. Paul’s people.

There is one area mentioned in Jesus’ list, if we can call it a list, that we rarely address and that is the support of those who are in jail or prison. It’s likely that only a handful of us has ever walked through the doors of a penal institution, even though Canada has one of the highest incarceration rates amongst developed nations.

I actually spent four months in a maximum security prison, although I was allowed out every evening and on weekends. I was a twenty-four year-old student for the ministry at the time and this summer chaplaincy internship was part of my training. When I arrived, I suppose I thought of people who end up in prison as some sort of subspecies of the human race, different from “normal people.”

The chaplain I worked with was a hard-nosed guy who told the four of us in the intern program that we could leave our “bleeding heart” ideas at the door, and it was our job to keep the prisoners in the present rather than the past. But he also wanted us to understand that the people we were working with from day to day were human beings. Many had come from situations of childhood abuse, or had learning disabilities, or were illiterate. Some were there because of alcohol and drug problems. And there were a disproportionate number of aboriginal people in the prisons. These weren’t excuses in his view, but the chaplain wanted us to know that “there but for the grace of God” . . .

He suggested that we might meet someone who was evil during the course of the summer and at that time Clifford Olson the multiple murderer was in Kingston Pen, as Paul Bernardo is now. But he told us that it was far more likely we would meet people whose lives were a mess, who had done bad things and were now paying their debt to society.

The chaplain decided that I was young and naive and needed some toughening up, so he assigned me to visit in solitary confinement, or The Hole as it was affectionately known. One day I visited a man who might have qualified as evil. He was part of a biker gang and had killed over drugs. He was in his miserable confinement cell because he had beaten up another inmate and I was asked to visit him. The guards warned me not to get too close to the barred door because the prisoner was acting erratically. Duly noted!

As he spoke with me he paced back and forth frantically and told me that his nerves were so bad he might “take someone out.” Also duly noted. Then another prisoner let out a loud shriek and I’m here to tell you that while it’s said that white men can’t jump, they can if they are really scared. When I landed, my frantic inmate stared at me for a moment and then he laughed and said “I thought my nerves were bad.” He was human after all.

I have no idea whether I did much good for those inmates with whom I spent time during those four months but I was certainly changed by the experience. I have no doubt that Christ was in that place we might describe as godforsaken. I don’t like to admit that I have done very little visiting in jails and prisons since then, but the experience changed my view of humanity.

When we are able to see Christ in those who are the wounded or marginalized or the unlovely or the “screw-ups” of this world we simply can’t ignore them or make them invisible. Some times it will a lot harder to be compassionate than others, because some people are difficult to love, but who said that following Christ was supposed to be easy? There is a passage in the book of James which says this so well:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?

Can faith save you?

15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,

16and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?

17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. James 2

Ultimately compassion is not a checklist. It is a way of life, and so rather than checking off all the ways we “do good” in the world, we practice our faith with the understanding that we may never get it perfect but it becomes part of whom we are. In virtually every day there will be at least one opportunity to respond to Christ through both our words and deeds.

It is not practical for the majority of us to visit in a prison, although if our current federal government insists on putting young offenders in adult prisons we can voice our concerns loudly and clearly.

We are open to the stranger or visit the sick or contribute in some way to the needs of others. Simply living with an open heart will matter today and tomorrow and the next day.

What about the apparent harshness of Jesus in this passage? Where is the Good News or the gospel of what he offers here? Many people have commented to me through the years that the way this passage ends seems inconsistent with the Jesus they follow. The tone of judgement disturbs them and I have shared this discomfort at times. In another day many churches and cathedrals actually had scenes of Jesus judgement over the entranceway as a grim reminder of the possibility of eternal punishment. This depiction on a cathedral in France was plastered over for several centuries before it was uncovered once again.

We can’t plaster over the reality that Jesus told his disciples they would need to take on his yoke of service, even though he would try to make the burden light. And he said that his Way would have to be a narrow way at times. And he told Peter and the others that they must take up the cross to follow him. It is up to us to choose whether this can be the Good News of Christ because it will allow the invisible to become visible.

For this we can say, thanks be to God.