“Seeing Jesus”

Amanda Hendler-Voss

November 20, 2011

Landmines seem to litter today’s gospel reading as Jesus speaks a word that makes many of us uncomfortable.  He speaks a word of judgment, and—to be more specific—a word of eternal judgment.  Some of us sitting in church this morning gave up on the idea of hell long ago.  Our belief in a loving God seems incompatible with a Jesus who judges us harshly.  Our gut tells us that no matter how evil someone might act, the God of forgiveness and new life can transform brokenness into wholeness.  But that’s not the word we hear in today’s text.

If we’ve learned anything from those spiritual giants who’ve gone before us—mystics and prophets, monks and activists—if we’ve learned anything from those lives illuminated by divine brilliance, it’s that a robust faith requires questions.  Doubt, brokenness, weakness, suffering—these human experiences are the only road to spiritual growth.  Our discomfort with Jesus’ words, then, should not be diminished.  It’s the very place where we might wrestle with this passage, struggle against its rough places and see what surfaces.

Perhaps the greatest tension in this text is the one that exists between how Jesus calls us to live and how we actually do live.  One commentator remarked, “I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about how I believe I’m morally superior because I’ve fed the hungry, quenched the thirsty, clothed the naked, taken care of the sick.  But when I’m honest with myself, I have to think hard to remember the last time I actually did any of these things.  And then this passage haunts me.”  And maybe that is the purpose of today’s scripture reading—to haunt us so that we seek Jesus in the least of these.  If we aren’t haunted by Jesus’ words, then I fear we are not delving deeply enough into this text.  Jesus was not, after all, a feel-good kind of guy.  Jesus offered a harsh critique of religion, politics, and society.  He spoke truth to power, railed against the powerful on behalf of the poor and when his words were ignored, he turned over tables in the temple with a righteous fury.  Jesus was a radical, but most of those who claim the name of Christian are not.

It’s not because we don’t want to be radical—we want to be on the side of love, we hunger for social justice, we believe that change is possible.  It’s not that we don’t want to be radical, it’s that, if we are honest with ourselves, our nation’s consumerist culture shapes us more than our Christian identities.  And our privileges with regard to race, class, and nationality have the terrible power to distort us.

This week, Elspeth Gilmore, who identifies as a member of “the 1%” said this on national radio: “All the rules of the economy have been tilted in my favor, yet it is not in my interest to let the disparities of wealth keep growing.  We should not have to hoard our wealth in this nation to keep our families healthy or get a good education.  Health and education should be rights.”  She continues, “There are more than 1,500 wealthy people under 35 who know that our lives would be better if we personally had less and we could all rely on a collective safety net.  We need a more just economy, so let me say this as plainly as I can: tax me.  If the 1% had less money, we—100% of us—would be better off.”

I was struck by the simple truth of her testimony.  The accumulation of wealth can create dysfunction.  It separates us and perpetuates the lie that we all get exactly what we deserve.  While those of us sitting here this morning are probably not in the 1% of our nation’s most wealthy, we certainly do have privileges as global citizens that separate us from the least of these.  Even those of us who are unemployed or working class do not face starvation, as our sisters and brothers in east Africa do.  For the most part, we have clean water to drink and several pairs of shoes in our closet.  These simple things shouldn’t make us privileged, but they do.  We live in a world where just having a few changes of clothing, access to a food pantry and a roof over our heads means that we struggle to understand the poorest of the poor.  When Jesus spoke of the least of these, he didn’t mean those in the middle.  He meant those on the bottom.  Those desperate ones who hunger for food and justice, who thirst for clean water and rain for their crops, who sleep out in the cold, who suffer illness without treatment, who live on death row, imprisoned by loneliness.  How do we care for the least of these?  We aren’t being asked to single-handedly change the systemic sin that grinds under the poor, but we are asked to accompany them.  And from our vantage point, even if we aren’t the 1%, it’s hard to do what Jesus asks.

A few months ago, I was in a café when I noticed a woman who I suspected was homeless.  You see, when I’m out for my morning runs, I almost always pass her—walking, alone, in the early hours of the day.  She’s usually wearing the same clothes and carrying a large bag.  Once I noticed her, I began to see her in public places.  When I passed her by, I would pray for her—asking God to smile on her, to whisper that she is beautifully and wonderfully made.  And then one day I saw her in the café.  She had no food or drink.  I felt God urging me to do something.  I wanted to walk over, hand her ten bucks, and say, “God told me to give you this.”  But I didn’t.  I faltered for just one minute.  Suppose she wasn’t homeless or hungry.  It sounds crazy to walk over to a stranger, give them money, and say, “God told me to give you this.”  And so I talked myself out of doing what I should have done.  I stayed in my comfort zone, buffered by my privilege to choose whether or not to talk to someone like her.  I confess this to you because I want you to know that if you often fail at what Jesus is asking, you are not alone.  I saw this same woman at Pritchard Park a few Sundays ago, eating our free breakfast.  Still, I didn’t remember what God had urged me to do months earlier.  I buried my discomfort under the self-righteous notion that I was feeding the poor.  And today, this passage haunts me.

Throughout the Bible we see the pattern of God speaking from the underside—through children and slaves, prostitutes and exiles, prophets and laborers.  God speaks from below, and Jesus is found among the least of these.  If you want to know if God exists, go to those pockets of suffering where the most vulnerable people reside, and there you will find the face of Christ.

There’s a story about an “order of monks that declined in numbers.  In fact, there were only five monks left to care for their decaying house—the abbot, and four others, all over the age of 70.  Clearly, it was a dying order.  In the woods surrounding the monastery, there was a hermitage.  The abbot decided—as a last resort—to visit the hermitage in case the hermit could offer any advice to save the monastery.  The hermit welcomed the abbot into his hut.  When the abbot explained the purpose of the visit, the hermit commiserated.  ‘I know how it is,’ he said thoughtfully.  ‘The spirit has gone out of the people.  It is the same in many nearby towns.  I have no advice to give.  The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.’

When the abbot returned to the monastery, the monks asked what the hermit had said.  ‘He couldn’t help,’ the abbot answered.  ‘The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving, it was something cryptic—that the Messiah is one of us.  I don’t know what he meant.’  In the weeks and months that followed, the monks pondered these words.  The Messiah is one of us?  Could he have possibly meant one of us here at the monastery?  If so, who?

If he meant anyone, it must have been the Abbot.  He’s been our leader for a generation.  On the other hand, he might have meant brother Thomas.  Brother Thomas is a holy man, everyone knows he is a man of light.  Certainly he could not have meant brother Elred!  Elred gets crotchety at times.  But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in peoples’ sides, when you look back on it, Elred is virtually always right.  Often very right.  Maybe the hermit did mean brother Elred.  But surely not brother Phillip.  Phillip is so passive, a real nobody.  But then, he has a gift for always being there when you need him.  He just magically appears by your side.  Maybe Phillip is the Messiah.  Of course the hermit couldn’t possibly have meant me.  I’m just an ordinary person.  Yet supposing he did?  Suppose I am the Messiah?  O God, not me.  I couldn’t be that much for you, could I?

As they contemplated in this manner, the monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them was the Messiah.  And, on the off chance that each monk himself might be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect.  Because the forest in which it was situated was so beautiful, people would often come to picnic on the lawn of the monastery.  They would wander its paths and pray in its dilapidated chapel.  As they did so, without even knowing it, they sensed the aura of extraordinary respect that permeated the monks and their monastery.  There was something strangely compelling about it.  Hardly knowing why, they began to frequent the monastery and bring friends.  And their friends brought friends.  Then it just so happened that a young man who came to visit asked to join the monks.  Then another.  And another.  Within a few years, the monastery became a thriving order again and, thanks to the hermit’s gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality.”

A beautiful story, right?  What would it mean, in your life, to treat each person in your household as if they might be Christ incarnate?  What would it mean if we went out into the world—into our places of work, our social circles, our children’s schools, and looked vigilantly for the Messiah?  How would the world lurch if each time we encountered someone in our daily lives, we secretly wondered whether they might be Jesus in disguise and treated them accordingly?  Over time, we might begin to catch glimpses of Jesus in ourselves.  In fact, this is the hard truth of Jesus’ judgment in our text for today.  The kingdom reality is that Jesus is the hungry one in need of food.  Jesus is the thirsty one in need of clean water.  Jesus is the homeless one in need of warm clothes.  Jesus is living with HIV.  Jesus waits on death row.  Jesus is in all of these places, because there’s no power in the world that can keep him out.  God has placed the Christ light in every human being, and no one can snuff it out, not even you.  If we fail to see Jesus in the poor and suffering, then we might miss him altogether.  If we can’t find Jesus in the most vulnerable—in our children, in the developmentally disabled, in the mentally ill—if we can’t find Jesus in those living desperate lives, then we sentence ourselves to separation from God, and we are lost.

So today, I want to throw down a challenge.  This week, as we eat from tables heavy with abundance and offer gratitude to God, I challenge you to do what Jesus asks.  I’m not talking about dropping off food at the food bank, I’m talking about looking for Jesus.  Feed someone who’s hungry, and then introduce yourself and sit with them as if you were sitting at the feet of Jesus.  Bring a meal to the sick, and linger at the bedside to behold the shining wisdom in the face of one who’s contemplating the journey home to God.  Bring a blanket to a cold place in the city where people go when they don’t have homes, and see if you can find Jesus.  Look as if you were desperate to find him.  Give as if you were giving to Jesus himself.  Because you are.

And even if you have an ordinary encounter, and you can’t possibly imagine how you saw Jesus in the one you served, remember Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to serving the dying poor on the streets of Calcutta.  After her death, we learned that Mother Teresa, the very picture of a Christian saint, experienced spiritual doubts and struggles that lasted nearly fifty years.  She confessed that, most of that time, she felt no presence of God whatsoever.  Although she pined for a great intimacy with God that went unrealized, she did not doubt God’s existence.  In other words, her devotion to God was undiminished.  Her hunger for the face of Christ in the poor did not end until her death when she made her final journey home into the presence of the God who is now fully known.

I’ll close with the words written on the wall of Mother Teresa’s home for children:

“People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.  Forgive them anyway.  If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.  What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.  Create anyway.  If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.  Be happy anyway.  Give the best that you have and it will never be enough.  Give your best anyway.  In the final analysis, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.”  Beloved people of God, this week, may we seek Jesus.  Amen.

1 Comment

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  By SLICK, November 30, 2011 @ 10:56 am

  Amanda – Bravo – another powerful and forthright sermon that touches many nerves and emotion in any and all of us.

  I might add a suggestion that I have found that I feel better in my comfort zone in buying a homeless person food pr giving him.her a plate of food rather than giving him/her money as an option to spend on things including some food.

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