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The Last Sunday after Pentecost The breeze of God’s love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen. How shall we live? How shall we live—a simple question, but one that can be answered on many levels; a profound question that gets to the very core of our being and our identity as Christians, as God’s beloved children. How shall we live? This week, as we close out our liturgical year, we also finish our reading of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew’s gospel is full of instructions on how to live—so much so that it’s sometimes called the “teaching gospel,”— and one of the threads woven through the rich fabric of the gospel is the thread of discipleship. Jesus calls us to a life of discipleship and over and over, both in his preaching to the crowds who throng to him and in his more private teaching to his chosen band of followers, we’ve heard Jesus instruct his hearers on what it means to take on a life of discipleship. We hear it in the Sermon on the Mount. We hear it in the series of parables woven through the middle of the gospel. We hear it when Jesus gives his summary of the law: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And now we hear it in the culmination of his teaching, the stories Jesus tells about what his second coming will be like. If you recall the gospels of the last two weeks, Jesus has told his followers that no one knows the hour or day of his coming, and that the essential task is to be prepared. Last week’s gospel showed us one way to be prepared: by making the most of what God has entrusted to us. This week’s gospel concludes this teaching with an apocalyptic vision of the last day, a vision of judgment, when the sheep are separated from the goats, when we will be called into account for our actions. This judgment scene is uncomfortable for us—we sit uneasily with the notion of a judging God, and steeped as we are in Paul’s theology of salvation through grace by faith alone, we squirm at the notion that our actions might really make a difference when that day of judgment comes. But no matter how ill at ease the themes of this gospel might make us, there is no getting away from the fact that it summarizes quite pointedly what Jesus has been saying all along about how we should live. One of the interesting things about this story is that everyone was surprised—both the group who had reached out to the poor and the hungry, and those who had failed to do so. What’s so interesting about this is that it implies that neither group was motivated primarily by hope for reward or fear of punishment. Rather, both groups seemed to operate on a more basic life ethic—an ethic Jesus highlighted when he was asked which law was the greatest—the ethic of love. Both groups operated on this ethic of love, but where they differed was in where and how that love was focused. For the sheep in our story, the ethic of love seemed to be focused outward: to the poor, the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, the oppressed, and it resulted in acts of mercy. For the goats in the story, the focus seemed to be inward, so much so that they were oblivious to the needs in the world around them, and they failed to act with mercy. The group who acted with mercy truly entertained angels unawares, while the others, with their inward focus, missed out on the presence of God in their very midst. How shall we live? In these days of an uncertain and troubling economy it’s easy for us to turn our focus ever more inward—to protect our assets, to look out for ourselves first, and to justify our doing so as prudent. But our gospel today warns us that when we focus inward, we not only fail to act with mercy, we also shut ourselves off from seeing God in our midst. We fail to look after the needs of others in an effort—however well-motivated—to take care of ourselves but what we really do is to risk cutting ourselves off from what is most important. This week we celebrate our national holiday of Thanksgiving. The gospel passage appointed for Thanksgiving Day also comes from Matthew—from the Sermon on the Mount, and it speaks powerfully to this conundrum. In this passage Jesus says, "I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? …Therefore do not worry, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear?' …But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." So what would it look like if we let go of our worry and instead we turned our focus more to others, if we looked to the needs of the community at large more than to our own individual needs, and if we did so not out of hope for reward, immediate or eternal, but rather as an expression of our of love—love for God and our neighbor? Can we imagine a world in which caring for each other was our prime motivation? A world in which no one went hungry, a world where a child did not die every thirty seconds from a treatable cause, where humans did not suffer from lack of basic health care? Perhaps in these perilous times this all sounds a bit foolish, like so much pie in the sky. But what we overlook, I think, is that if we truly lived this way, each and every one of us, we would ALL be taken care of. And as Jesus tells us in today’s gospel, that is the kingdom of God. How shall we live? The message in Matthew’s gospel is pretty clear: We are called to live a life of discipleship, a live centered on and rooted in love—God’s love for us and our love for God. We are called to live not by worrying about ourselves but rather by striving first for the kingdom of God—a kingdom where we our love is focused outward, focused on showing mercy, focused on caring for others. And in doing so we shall meet God, now and in the life eternal. So how shall we live?
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