Christ the King
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46
+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
LAST FRIDAY , the front page of The New York Times quoted an investment expert explaining the market’s huge financial losses as “response to real fear.”1 A recent Newsweek piece paraphrased FDR: “fear itself is Wall Street’s greatest fear.”2 The fear, anxiety, panic, anger, sadness, even despair of the market appears to be flowing out into all corners of our society, and more and more of us are struggling with these emotions at least to degree.
While most focus attention on the stock market, the heart of the crisis is the credit market. After years of promiscuous lending, lenders have lost confidence in most of their suitors and refuse to extend credit. When there’s little credit, the economy can’t be very fruitful. The word ‘credit’ comes from the Latin ‘credo’ – I trust, or I believe, as in the Creed which we just sang. So fear is inversely proportional to trust, or confidence, or faith. Fear diminishes creativity and fruitfulness, and the more we trust, the more creative and fruitful we are.
For many of us, our lack of trust in the markets means that we fear not having what we think is enough. Over many years, most of us have become used to increasing abundance, having more and more possessions. Last week, I received a Thanksgiving card: “May the good things in life be yours in abundance.” It was signed by my financial adviser. These days recognizing abundance requires a broader, deeper perspective than finance. Recognizing abundance won’t come in the grip of fear.
When we are fearful, our humanity is compromised. We have diminished capacity to identify with others; to be open to ideas and people; to learn and grow; to appreciate complexity; to allow for possibility; to exercise imagination; to adjust our habits, attitudes, and values; to have real confidence in ourselves rather than bluster. Fear makes us narrow and tight.
We can’t eliminate the possibility of fear in our lives. There’s always the possibility of hurtful loss: losing a loved one, losing our health, losing a job, losing respect, losing wealth, losing a comfortable lifestyle, losing interest and enthusiasm. We have to contain fear. Otherwise, it can destroy us.
Today’s gospel concludes a lengthy section about divine judgment at the end of time. The last two Sundays, we’ve heard Jesus tell his followers that they must be like the wise – not the foolish – virgins, and that his disciples must be resourceful like the man who turned five talents into ten. In this section, he also tells us that we must be patient and faithful.
Today, Jesus tells us that we must do acts of loving kindness for all, especially for the poor and forgotten, that we must recognize his presence in all people. God is going to judge humanity on whether we have mercy and compassion. The ultimate criteria for who’s with or against God is not known in what we believe or how we worship, but in how we treat other people, especially the hungry, the poor, the stranger, the sick, the outcast, the criminal. If we’re concerned about the state of our souls, then we have to respond to human need. Do we do anything for the left behind in our city, the starving in Ethiopia, the oppressed in Burma, the victims of war in Congo and Darfur, the homeless in Haiti?
The challenge of today’s gospel cuts to the quick, and as we listen to it, we can’t avoid examining ourselves, and we can’t avoid seeing how we fall short of what we’re called to be. Usually when we think of sin, we think about things we’ve done to hurt other people, but today’s gospel challenges us to think also about the way we have neglected and ignored other people. It reminds us that what we have failed to do can be as horrible as what we have done. If our eternal destiny depends upon how we meet this criteria, then I don’t know how we wouldn’t fear for our future.
Indeed, it may be that many of us already assume this. In our conscious mind, or more likely in our unconscious mind, we find ourselves unacceptable to God. We look at ourselves and at our mistakes and failures, and we wonder how God could ever find us acceptable, and so we fear him and we may not be completely sure of his love and mercy toward us.
Father Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic priest, gives thanks for being raised with a deeply moral religion that took commitment seriously and did not balk from calling sin sin.3 He feels pain for those who are raised in a moral relativism which excuses everything and challenges little.
But on the other hand, he points out, Christianity sometimes doesn’t allow for mistakes and failures. Christianity sometimes permanently stigmatizes our mistakes and failures. Think of all the people who bear the pain and doom of their mistakes: substance abuse, broken vows, crimes, abortion, betrayals, lies, irresponsibility, selfishness, callousness. Most of us probably can find ourselves on that list. When Christianity makes us feel unlovable or beyond the pale for our errors, it’s not being true to itself. Rolheiser reminds us of the gospel: “even though we cannot unscramble an egg, God’s grace lets us live happily and with renewed innocence far beyond any egg we may have scrambled.”
The good news is that we have a God who does not just give us one chance, but is continually giving us new opportunities. The good news is that we have a God who sent his son so that we who have made serious mistakes – sins – can know his love for us, his desire for us to be with him. The good news is that we have a God that tells us our mistakes aren’t forever, or even a lifetime, that his grace and love can wash us clean. The good news is that God loves us no matter what, that he is always reaching out to help us live fully now.
So perhaps, there’s another way to understand today’s gospel. Perhaps, our neglect of others, our missed opportunities to reach out to the stranger and invite him to share and shape our lives, will not bring God’s judgment down upon us, but rather these are ways we separate ourselves from God. I don’t think that we have a God that judges us and expels us, but rather I think that God gives us a choice. If we want to be part of him, to share his life, then we have to be with him in the hungry, the poor, the stranger, the sick, the outcast, the criminal. We want to learn to see him in other people, and we want to learn to see ourselves in them.
When the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Sir Jonathan Sacks, spoke to the Anglican bishops last summer, he discussed contracts and covenants. He noticed that we generally assume them to be the same thing. He explained that contracts govern transactions meant to benefit both parties, and both parties remain separate. A covenant, however, is a relationship where two or more people, respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust to share their interests, and to transform their lives by forming a union, an ‘us.’ God makes a covenant, not a contract, with us.
Sacks asked, “Why is it that the state and the market alone cannot sustain a society?” He answered by beginning with Charles Darwin.
I understand from Darwin that all life evolves by natural selection, which means, by the way of competition for scarce resources: food, shelter and the like.
If so, you would expect that all societies would value the most competitive, even the most ruthless individuals. But Darwin noticed that it isn’t so. In fact, in every society of which he knew, it was the most altruistic individuals who were the most valued and admired, not the most competitive. Or, if I can put it in the language of [the noted atheist] Richard Dawkins: a bundle of selfish genes get together and produce selfless people. That was Dawkins’ paradox, and it lay unsolved until the late 1970’s.
It was then that three very different disciplines converged: sociobiology, a branch of mathematics called games theory, and high-speed computer simulation. ...
To cut a long story short, what they discovered was that though natural selection works through the genes of individuals, individuals – certainly in the higher life-forms – survive only because they are members of groups. And groups survive only on the basis of reciprocity and trust, and on what I have called covenant, or the logic of co-operation. One human versus one lion, the lion wins. Ten humans versus one lion, the humans have a chance.It turns out that the very things that make Homo sapiens different – the use of language, the size of the brain, even the moral sense itself – have to do with the ability to form and sustain groups: the larger the brain, the larger the group.
Neo-Darwinians call this reciprocal altruism. Sociologists call it trust. Economists call it social capital. And it is one of the great intellectual discoveries of our time. Individuals need groups. Groups need co-operation. And co-operation needs covenant, bonds of reciprocity and trust.
Traditionally, that was the work of religion. After all, the word ‘religion’ itself comes from the Latin root meaning ‘to bind’.
Today’s gospel calls upon us to recognize that all of us are in this together, that we are bound together, that we have responsibilities to one another, that we reach out to all to build bonds of love and trust with all. When we do that, then we have real abundance – not in terms of mere wealth and possessions, but rather in terms of love, trust, friendships, beauty, character, interests, and enthusiasms. With Christ at our center, and seeing him in one another, my financial adviser is right: the good things in life are ours, and in abundance. We have so much to be grateful for. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1 Vikas Bajaj and Jack Healy, ‘Dow Falls 5.6% Amid Worries Over Banks,’ The New York Times, Nov 21, ‘08.
2 Daniel Gross, ‘Anatomy of Fear,’ Newsweek, October 30, 2008, pp. 31-33.
3 Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten Among the Lilies, Doubleday (2005), pp. 144-45, for this and next two paragraphs.
©2008 Lane John Davenport
