Ezekiel 34:11-24 11For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. 12As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. 13I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. 14I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. 16I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. 17As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats: 18Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? 19And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet? 20Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. 21Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, 22I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. 23I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. 24And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken.
Matthew 25:31-45 31‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” 37Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” 40And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,* you did it to me.” 41Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” 44Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” 45Then he will answer them, “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.” 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’
Ezekiel 34:11-24 and Matthew 25:31-46
11/23/2014 – Hancock First U.M.C.
“I Myself Will Search Them Out”
Rev. Amy Lee Brun Terhune
The Reader's Digest tells of young Matthew, age 4, eating an apple in the back seat of the car. "Daddy," said Matthew, "why is my apple turning brown?" His father explained, "Because after you ate the skin off, the meat of the apple came in contact with the air which caused it to oxidize, thus changing its molecular structure and turning it into a different color." There was a long silence, and then Matthew asked softly, "Daddy, are you talking to me?" [from a sermon by Dr. Eugene Brice; as used in “Celebrating Christ The King” by King Duncan,
In our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus separates people as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The sheep are commended for their compassion. The goats are condemned for their lack of compassion. And we, who hear this lesson and ponder it, find ourselves wondering, “Lord, are you talking to me?”
Well, yes. And we can’t plead lack of understanding. As parables go, this one is quite straightforward. It’s hard to miss the meaning here. We’re to act with courage and compassion, to treat others as if they were Christ himself; to live in such a way that others see Christ in us. In fact, it’s the clarity of the message that leaves us troubled. It’s like Mark Twain once famously said: “It’s not
those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
He is so right. This is some tough stuff. And it does trouble us. It’s supposed to, I think. There is probably something wrong with anyone who is not a little bit troubled by this text.
Part of my discomfort with this passage is rooted in all the talk about “eternal punishment” and “eternal fire prepared for the devil”, and the fact that God seems willing to send folks there who don’t ‘measure up’. That sounds kind of like ‘works righteousness’ to me—that one can ‘earn’ their way in by doing good things. But don’t we profess ‘salvation by faith alone’? I talked about that just a few weeks back when we were learning about Martin Luther. Sola Fidé (faith alone) is how we are saved. But ask yourself: what is faith? Is it something that happens entirely within us? If we intellectually assert the Lordship of Christ, but it doesn’t spill over into our behavior, is faith really alive within our hearts? John Wesley was quite clear on this: works without faith are shallow, faith without works is dead. Meaning that faith and works are two halves of one whole – they come as a package deal.
If we look at the lesson that accompanies our gospel—the one from the prophet Ezekiel—we can clearly see that Jesus did not pull this image of separate sheep and goats out of thin air. It has a long history in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures with which Jesus was very familiar. In Ezekiel, we find God vowing to separate sheep from sheep and rams from goats. And the basis for separation seems to be predicated on the way one treats others, just as it is in Matthew.
But Ezekiel’s passage is particularly directed at the leadership, who seem to have put self-preservation above service. They liked to think of themselves as shepherds of the people, but Ezekiel makes a point of noting that in God’s eyes, we’re all sheep. We’re all in the same flock. We’re all on the same field. And Ezekiel makes a point of noting that God goes searching for us, seeking us. “I myself will search for my sheep,” says the Lord. “I myself will be their shepherd.” That translates into a message of enormous hope: it means that God rolls up his sleeves and goes to work, forever reaching out to us, calling to us, caring for us. God is the one who gives rest to the weary, binds the injured, strengthens the faint, feeds the hungry. Jesus draws on that image, and asks simply that we imitate what God is already doing among us—that we participate in that work.
So we dare not get caught up in the hellfire and damnation imagery. Please understand: that’s not the point of any of Jesus’ parables. He’s really not interested in seeing us fail and wind up suffering for eternity. Jesus wants us to succeed in the endeavor to live authentic lives of faith, and it is to that end that he challenges us.
Let me put that another way. I’m not convinced that it’s merely what we do that separates us. All of us drop the ball sometimes. I suspect it has to do more with sensitivity. This passage is really a call to open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds to those around us. To pay attention. Sensitivity starts when we are able to see beyond ourselves; when we can imagine what it might be like to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.
Several years back, I had a church member approach me to ask I would be willing to offer some counseling to a young man who wasn’t a member of the church. Well, of course I was willing. I’ll listen if there’s someone who needs a safe place to talk. So this young man came in—he was probably about 25 years old, or so. He’d been in the Army for four years, and was now taking classes at the community college, trying to figure out what to do with his life. We chatted just a bit, to get to know each other, and after about ten minutes or so, I asked him why it was he wanted to see me. He told me that his soul was stuck. I thought that was an interesting image, and asked him to explain to me what he meant. And a story began to pour out. It seemed that a decade before, when he was sixteen, his father sat him down as the basketball season was starting. He’d made the varsity team, and had some real talent. His father said, “Look son. You need to get a college education if you’re gonna be somebody in this world, but we don’t have a lot of money. You’re going to need to get a scholarship, and basketball is your best shot. You need to score points and you need to win games. I’d rather see you get called for a foul than the other team score. If you have to cheat to win, you do it. Your future is at stake.”
I listened to this with a certain dumbfounded stupor, mainly because I couldn’t imagine a parent saying that to a kid.
He admitted to me that he knew it was wrong, but he was young and impressionable, and he wanted to please his dad. At one game, there was a kid on the other team who was pretty good, and they were paired up, guarding each other (or whatever you call it). He was frustrated because this guy kept blocking his shots. Finally, he ran into him, and used his shin to pop the other guy’s knee out of place. The kid went down in agony and was out for nearly half the season. Then he told me that his coach called him to his office to talk about the incident. The coach had sort of suspected it was done on purpose, although the young player adamantly denied it. Well, the coach couldn’t prove it was purposeful, but he did say this: “Just think: how would you feel if it had gone the other way, and that kid had done this to you?”
This 25-year-old guy sitting in my office began to break down. He’d never thought about it from that perspective before. He’d never put himself in the place of the other kid. And he was overcome with guilt and remorse. As it turned out, his playing suffered because of the guilt he felt, and he didn’t stay with basketball. The last time he’d had any contact with his dad was the week before he left for the Army some seven or eight years ago. Even now, a decade later, the guilt from that incident still sometimes kept him up at night, and exacerbated troubled digestive issues and polluted present relationships.
Well, to my way of thinking, that was a lousy way to deal with guilt. I suggested that he really needed professional counseling to deal with the issues stemming from his family of origin. But I also pointed out that he can’t change the past or what he did. The question is: did he learn from it? Does he think about how others would feel before he acts or speaks? Is he more compassionate than he otherwise would have been; more sensitive; better able to put others first? Is he a better man now than he was?
Now maybe we don’t have anything quite like that on our conscience, but all of us have said or done things that were hurtful or insensitive. All of us are guilty, at times, of failing to think about how what we want could negatively impact another. All of us, at times, have been blind to needs of another right in front of us. So those questions apply to ourselves as well: what are we doing about it? Do we learn from it? Do we grow from it? I truly believe that Jesus isn’t looking to condemn us. Jesus would much rather affirm us in the effort to live our faith. Jesus will always challenge our complacency, blindness, and insensitivity. But the good news is that Jesus will also…always… search us out when we lose our way.
So this passage is really a call to open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds to those around us. To pay attention. Sensitivity starts when we are able to see beyond ourselves. But it grows we learn to integrate sensitivity into our identity.
In the passage from Matthew, both the sheep and the goats are surprised. Jesus tells both groups, “I was hungry, thirsty, sick, in prison, and so on” and both respond, “Lord, when did we see you in that condition?” Neither group remembers these encounters. The sheep responded to a perceived need because servanthood was a part of who they were—it formed their very identity. They didn’t have to think about it, really. The goats did not respond because they did not view themselves as connected to anyone else.
King Duncan offers fascinating insight into these differing identities. He writes, “Too many of us Christians have changed our Theology into Meology…meaning that my real Christian concern is for me…not for Thee. To many, the church exists to serve me…to meet my needs…a place to seek my salvation…to nurture my family…to worship my God. That is Meology. [from “Blessing, Testing, Response” by King Duncan, What we really need to do, he argues, is to learn Theeology, spelled t-h-e-e-o-l-o-g-y. Theeology. And let me be clear: Theeology can be learned. That’s the whole point. We are in charge of shaping our own identities. We can learn to be sensitive to others; to make service our instinctual response. We can learn to see Christ in others, and to see others with eyes of Christ.
“Max is a minister who works with the homeless and street people in the Ft. Lauderdale, FL area. Through his ministry, Max became friends with one such street person named Archie. Archie has severe gout in each foot and can barely walk. Each day he sells the Ft. Lauderdale paper out on the sidewalk. Selling the daily newspaper is his livelihood whether feeling bad, sick, tired—rain or shine, Archie sells those papers. He lives in a little one-room apartment that rents by the week. He depends on the sales of each day’s papers to pay for rent, food and utilities. But despite all the obstacles in his life, Archie is a man of deep faith.
“One day Max met Archie and noticed that Archie had an excited look on his face; he could hardly contain himself. He told Max that he just had to come and see his apartment; he had something to show him. Max was hesitant to go down this darkened area to Archie’s apartment, but he knew he must.
“They arrived at the apartment. Archie said that each day he had been saving a little money. He then threw open the door held out his arms and said, “Look!” And there in this dingy, small one room apartment was a sofa, ripped and torn with all the stuffing coming out, but it belonged to Archie. There was a junky little black and white TV, no rabbit ears—just a bent coat hanger, and there was even a recliner chair—all Archie’s. Archie had saved a long time to have things “this nice.”
“Archie looked at Max and said, “I have all I need now.” Can you imagine that? And that’s when Max noticed that there stretched out in the recliner was a big ol’ man named Jim—a friend of Archie’s. Max recognized him as another street person. Archie didn’t mention him, but as big as he was, it was hard not to notice him.