11/19/2014 Sermon on Matthew 25:31-46 Next week is Thanksgiving. As we all know, Thanksgiving is a time when we can give thanks for what God has given us by partaking in a great feast with family and friends. Many different traditions abound. For most of us, it includes eating turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and other delicious dishes. I have heard of some families that substitute the turkey with a goose, and still others that skip the bird altogether and go for tofu. But the point still remains, that whenever we gather together on Thanksgiving, it is a time to feast and to joyfully express our gratitude for the things that God has given us. Unfortunately, however, that is starting to change. Consumerism is on the rise. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has become an enormously popular day for people to buy up as many good deals as they can. People will sometimes even camp outside of Wal-Mart the night before so as to get in the moment the doors open, so as to not miss out. And every year, it gets worse. Malls are now opening up on Thanksgiving Evening – just moments after we have finished the last few bites of our turkey. Stores are erupting with violence as people stampede one another for the latest TV, computer, or phone. Our country is going insane! This is a huge problem. It goes against what Thanksgiving is all about. Rather than maintaining a spirit of gratefulness for what we already have, our stores are convincing us that what we have simply is not enough. We need more. We need more clothes, more gifts for our kids at Christmas time, more Christmas decorations, nicer furniture… And the list goes on and on. And to be perfectly honest, I am not even sure that we can blame the stores entirely. The stores are simply reflecting a trend of our culture, the demands of the public, which is that enough is never enough. 1 And so, with all this consumerism on the rise, we begin to define ourselves by it. If someone were to ask you how you measure your life, how would you respond? Here in America, I think a lot of people do, unfortunately, measure themselves by what they have. We measure ourselves by how great of a job we have, how much money we make, how nice of a house we live in, how pristine of an education we have received... I am reminded of the beginning scene of the famous movie, Fight Club. On the surface, Fight Club is just a gruesome movie about a couple of guys who have made up a club where men can come and fight to get their energy out. It’s not actually a movie I would really recommend watching, as it is filled with some pretty disturbing violence. All that being said, when you watch the film closely, it’s actually about the misguided attempt to feel alive in a world where we have become numb. And the reason we have become numb is precisely because we have come to define ourselves by our material possessions, rather than a deeper spiritual reality. In the beginning of the movie, the narrator makes a great point about our possession-obsessed culture. As the camera scans his beautifully adorned apartment, filled with gorgeous furniture and cute decorations from Ikea, the narrator says his apt line, “We work at jobs we hate to buy stuff that we don’t need.” And yet, in today’s passage, Jesus turns all of that around. Here, Jesus is Christ the King. It is the Final Day, the day when Jesus, who is All in All, will reign supreme and measure our lives. Like a heard of sheep and goats, we will come before the throne, and Jesus will separate us out. And when Jesus measures our lives, it will be by something totally counter-cultural to what the American Dream measures our lives by. Rather than measuring us by the house that we own, the career that we have developed, or the shape of the car that we drive, Jesus measures us by something completely different. And that is this: how much we have blessed others, particularly the weakest members of our society. 2 This is the Gospel. It is something so counter to everything we have been taught, it is truly unbelievable. In all truth, I think that we are often tempted to think of good deeds as an almost “extra credit.” When we visit an elderly friend in the hospital, sponsor a child from overseas, give money to the food-shelf, or do any other kind of “good deed”, we think of it as something that we do on the side, while our “real lives” of endless toil and consumerism keep on going. But that’s not what Jesus says. Instead, Jesus says that our entire lives will be measured by how we have blessed others, particularly the vulnerable in our society. So of course, we have to ask ourselves, what does this look like? How can we begin blessing other people in the face of a life that can sometimes feel overwhelmingly busy? Well for one, I think that we can start by looking right in front of our noses, right in our work places. While volunteering at the food shelf is truly a wonderful thing, I think that we need to start by looking at the place where we spend the most hours each and every day. Our workplaces are our mission field. And I do believe that if we allow the Holy Spirit to open up our eyes in our work places, we will see how God is calling us to bless those who are hurting. Maybe in your workplace you have a number of new immigrants who, in a whirlwind, are trying to learn English and a new job all at once. In America, they feel like strangers. What would mean to be friendly to them, make conversation with them, and perhaps to even welcome them into your home? Or maybe you work in the medical field, and have a number of patients who come from unfortunate backgrounds of extreme poverty. What would it mean to spend some extra time visiting with them, caring for them, and showing them the love of Christ? Yes, truly, right in our very own workplaces, there are boundless opportunities to bless the people who may seem unimportant in our eyes, but who are supremely important in the eyes of Jesus. 3 And that’s the point I want to get to next. These are all opportunities. I think that sometimes, when we hear these words of Jesus, we can feel exasperated, overwhelmed, and defensive. I know that’s how I often feel! And yet, I want to encourage us to instead think about these words of Jesus not as another list of things to do, but rather as an opportunity to live into the Kingdom, right here on earth. In the movie Fight Club, the narrator has become so numb from consumer culture that he forms a club where men can fight one another to feel alive again. What a sad, dehumanizing response to our obsession with possessions! Jesus, however, offers us a far richer, deeper reality. Instead of obsessing over things, Jesus invites us to obsess over people. He invites us to take time for others, to invite the stranger in, and to offer the excess of what we have to someone who might be in deeper need than us. That is eternal life, an opportunity to not only feel but to actually be more alive than ever before. It is the opportunity to spread that life beyond ourselves and into the world. And yet, of course, we will all fall short. There will be times when we do not notice the need around us. There will be times when we will be so caught up in the business of life that in the rush of things, we do not notice the hungry person who lives next door to us, or the child who has no school clothes for the upcoming year. And that is where the grace comes in. I think that part of why Jesus tells us these stories is so that we will learn all the more the importance of why we desperately need the blood of his sacrifice. On our own, it truly is impossible. And yet, when Jesus died on that cross, he took the punishment for all the ways that we fall short onto him. But when he rose again on the third day, he conquered it all. He forgave us. I actually think that on the last day, every last one of his will be deemed guilty. Every last one of us will have fallen short. But because of his blood and because of the cross and because of the 4 resurrection, those who are called will be forgiven and invited into eternal life. Armed with his grace, we can begin living into that eternal life today, right now. Yes, eternal life starts today. Living into the Kingdom Vision starts today. And what does that look like? It looks like following Jesus with our entire hearts, minds, and souls. And when we do that, responding to the needs around us and combating evil in the world becomes second nature. Seeing the need and responding to it in the way that we feel called becomes just something that we do, sewn into the fabric of our identities. So as we go into this season of Thanksgiving, I want to encourage all of us to live into the new reality, the eternal life that Jesus has given to us today. Let us not get swept up into the consumer culture of our day. Instead, let us get swept up in freely blessing the world around us with the abundance of gifts that God has given us, so that they, too, might begin to experience the love of Christ. Amen. 5