Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12, Defining moments

Lessons: Psalm 24, 29; 2 Samuel 1:17-27; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 25:31-46

When I was a young priest in my first parish as Rector there was a moment just before my daughter was born that I made a gentle decision.  Knowing we would become a one income family I decided to buy two herringbone jackets and several trousers to get me through the next number of winters.  I spent those winters yet to come in a wealthy suburban parish.  They were good years of significant work.  These were also the years our household was one of the struggling finances compared to most of my congregants. Yet we were also quite good at living in our income and developing thrift. By such habits we had what we needed, were able to tithe which was important to us and our daughter did not go without.  Yet we were always on the low end of the town’s economics.  This was just an awareness one carries in one’s gentle awareness.  I suppose we were just blessed in that it did not bother us much.  It was just there in the contrast of what we could take advantage of and what we had to manage.

Over a decade later I assumed a position in one of our poorest cities in a downtown parish.  I loved the place and the people and the work.  That was pretty usual for me.  There were however far many more occasions when the church doorbell rang and a person of poverty was there seeking aid.   Sometimes the person was one whom I/we could help and sometimes not.  I would walk the city streets and often be asked to help out financially or just be asked to pray.  I learned the essential nature of looking directly at a person and either help or often acknowledge that I could not help as they asked.  I learned this eye to eye contact kept us both human and in a momentary relationship of some peculiar equality, human to human.  It slowly set in on me that I had gone from being one of the least affluent to one of the most affluent without much change in my income or in the need to mange my finances.  Daily seeing poverty can deeply affect your sense of reality.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus puts forth one reality.  All live in a world where there is hunger, thirst, nakedness, real or false justice and penalty, sickness, loneliness and a sense of being not known, a stranger.  There is a time when we too will be judged by the compassion at the core of God by how well and willingly we have responded.  Jesus sees this as a sorting out of the sheep from the goats.  It is clear one wants to be a sheep and rest in God rather than a goat about to be roasted.

When the question is raised about our response everyone answers.

'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?  And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' Matthew 25:37-39, (44).

We are told that when we aid any we are aiding Christ.  He dwells in all who suffer, rightly or wrongly, he makes no distinction.  There is in Jesus vocabulary no such thing as the deserving poor and non-deserving poor.  We are all needful of care.  We all choose how we express this care.  Something in God will judge us and hold us accountable.  Did we share in the flow of God’s care or did we fail to notice its resource in us?

Years ago I was given a portrait of heaven and hell.  Both look the same.  There is a banquet table laden with food. Seated by the table are a mass of folk.  All have no use of their elbows, their arms are stiff.  In hell the people are all struggling to feed themselves unsuccessfully.  In heaven they each are feeding the persons across the table.  The difference is awareness of the other and acting on that awareness.

So it is with our souls.  The other is always in some way our tutor.  In our listening, steady or slow responding, in our caring we become deeper people.  When we aid and offer healing awareness of the other something in us grows. Perhaps we will offer a buck or two, perhaps something more precious, our awareness, a piece of our compassion, our time, our creative mind.  It is odd how God chooses to grow us.  Sad how we sometimes miss our own becoming.  And yet always there is grace to begin again.