With this sermon Pastor Brooks concluded a series on a few of the common ways Christianity is misunderstood. Listen now to this sermon about a scripture that paints a picture of Jesus coming again at the end of time.
Scripture Reading—Matthew 25: 31-46
Let’s pretend for the moment that each one of us is an extraordinarily talented painter. If we can imagine the painting in our mind, we can paint it. Anyone who has seen my handwriting knows I don’t have great hand dexterity and muscle control, but this morning I do because this morning I am a great painter like all of you. Now, I want you to further imagine that you are going to paint two different paintings that have two very different sources of inspiration. The inspiration for the first painting is this: you come here on a Sunday morning, and you have the best worship experience ever. As always, the choir sounds like a chorus of angels. In place of the sermon that morning, we have testimonies from members who share the most remarkable stories of life transformation that you have ever heard. You have never been so moved in a worship service. To make it better, we sing all your favorite hymns. Everything is perfect. You leave the sanctuary after worship and head down to the labyrinth. Amazingly, the trees surrounding the labyrinth are filled with flowers, even though they have never had flowers previously. In this spiritual wonderland, you dance around on the labyrinth filled with a sense of awe and ecstasy. It is the best spiritual experience ever!
With this incredible source of inspiration, you immediately go home and paint a picture that expresses how you’re feeling. Maybe it is your vision of what paradise or heaven looks like. You’re surrounded by all the people you love in the most beautiful place imaginable. The colors are vibrant and full of life. Your painting captures the very essence of how beautiful life can be. Take a moment to imagine that picture. Who is in it? What are their facial expressions like? What’s the setting? Are you on Maui? What are the details? Are there flowers? Is everyone drinking margaritas? Take a moment to breathe it all in. Enjoy your painting…because in a moment…we are going to have a rather jarring switch.
Now, your source of inspiration is going to be the polar opposite of your first painting. This time it is Sunday morning again. You’re driving to church, and suddenly fire engines speed by you with their sirens blaring. They turn off Highway 99 onto 68th Street to drive to the top of hill. You follow them up the hill and to your surprise they are pulling into our church parking lot. Our entire church building is up in flames. Because it is Sunday morning, our whole congregation is there watching the church burn. Everyone can tell there will be no saving it. You get out of the car, and you soon learn some very depressing information. On Saturday afternoon, our church received a letter in the mail stating that our insurance was not renewed. Apparently, some paperwork got lost in the transit. It dawns on everyone that we will now need 20 more capital campaigns to rebuild our church.
To add to the pain of it all, speculation is rampant about the cause of the fire. Some of our local neighbors are convinced that God caused the fire as punishment for our sins. Our support of marriage equality had surely done us in. The firefighters, however, share that various signs indicate that the cause was arson. Each of us wonders who it might be? Was someone upset with a stand we took as a church? Was it our open and affirming stance? Was it our hosting of Planned Parenthood meetings? Was it some deranged person who objected to our blessing of the animals service because of a firm belief that animals don’t have souls? Eventually, someone discovers a note that professes to be written by the arsonist, and let’s imagine that whoever you already think is the personification of evil is also the arsonist.
With a mixture of great sorrow and anger, you go home and you paint. All of your feelings go into the painting. Part of the picture focuses on a face of anguish. Maybe it’s your own face filled with sadness. Part of the picture focuses on your rage. You might even be the kind of person who doesn’t like getting angry and hardly ever gets angry, but you can’t help it in this instance. All you can think about is wishing that justice be served for the arsonists. On a typical day, you want to love everyone, but in this moment part of you would just like to see the arsonists suffer. At a gut level, you feel like they deserve to feel some pain, and so that’s what you paint. You envision them paying the price for what they did. Maybe they are in agony as they themselves are surrounded by ten-foot flames. Whatever the case may be, you do feel a sense of satisfaction in envisioning their demise. If you have any moral qualms about it, you then remember that it is just a painting—one that happens to make you feel a lot better. It is like watching a movie in which the superhero demolishes the bad guy at the end. At a visceral level, it feels so good to see it happen after having witnessed the havoc wrecked by the bad guy in all the earlier scenes. Imagine yourself taking a step back from your painting to experience the full emotional catharsis that it provides.
Now, let’s reflect on this for a moment. I began with two visualizations of paintings because I think sometimes it can be easy to forget the ways in which the Bible is like a series of paintings. Like a series of paintings produced over many years, the moments in history that inspire each work vary wildly. Within the Psalms alone, one can see the depths of despair and lament as well as the peaks of joy and thanksgiving. Each painting is coming from a different place. It has a different source of inspiration and motivation. With the gospel of Matthew, the fundamental reality that lies behind the paintings contained within it is the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in year 70 of the Common Era. The Temple that was regarded as the literal home of God on earth was set on fire and left for ruin. Talk about a faith shattering experience. Questions abounded: who is to blame? Are we being punished for our sins? How will justice be served?
The painting that Matthew gives in many ways reflects this situation. Matthew painted a picture that evoked the common imaginings of early Christianity. As a couple of biblical scholars note, “there were several crises that convinced some early Christians that they were indeed experiencing the final events of history.” In the year 39, Emperor Caligula “attempted to place a statue of himself” in the Temple. In the year 64, there was the horrendous persecution of Christians in Rome by Emperor Nero. From 66 to 70, there was a “catastrophic war in Palestine.” It appeared the world was quickly heading toward doom. Apocalyptic visions of the future were common. Matthew’s vision of the future is painted in this vain as well. Jesus will come again, and finally, justice will be served. The empires of this world will be trumped. The mighty king will separate the just from the unjust. The just receive vindication while the unjust pay the price. Not only was Matthew painting out of the spiritual and social upheaval of the time. He was painting in the style of the time. He was additionally painting with the limited understandings of that era.
When we take the Bible in a very literal fashion as the Word of God, these passages can be kind of embarrassing. Yikes, I think they were wrong about that prediction. The world didn’t come to an end. To make matters worse, these passages are often cited within the framework of what Marcus Borg calls “heaven-and-hell Christianity.” As this phrase suggests, this version of Christianity interprets almost everything through the lens of a particular understanding of afterlife. Borg, however, persuasively argues that in most of the Bible salvation is not about afterlife and afterlife is not a major point of emphasis. Yet, it is through this pervasive framework of heaven and hell that scriptures are so often misunderstood and abused. Borg argues that the “heaven-and-hell framework is like a black hole that sucks the meaning of Christian language into it, changing and distorting it.” A faith that would otherwise be about transforming the self and the world in this life effectively becomes subdued and domesticated in its otherworldly rendition. Borg notes that as a result “the political passion of the Bible” is commonly eliminated.
Yet, Matthew’s painting in our scripture for today actually has a lot of political passion. As one scholar of apocalyptic thought in Judaism notes, “The apocalyptic worldview envisioned a radical relocation of power and in this way redefined the possible and the real.” Likewise, another scholar notes that such scenes “function to encourage the oppressed minority to persevere, to remain faithful to God’s purposes in difficult circumstances.” It is realized that “present injustice is not a permanent way of life. God’s action will reverse it.” In our scripture for today, the world is turned on its head. Those who are lauded aren’t the ones at the top of the societal heap. It is just the opposite. The just whom God embraces are the ones meeting the needs of the hungry, the naked, and the imprisoned. Salvation is found in acts of compassion for the abused, the neglected, and the punished. This passage isn’t about pie-in-the-sky. It’s about the nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty of the here and now.
The Christian tradition shouldn’t be reduced to sermonizing about heaven and hell. The Christian tradition is ultimately a tradition of painters, thinkers, and storytellers who are struggling to make meaning in an often crazy-making world. In painting pictures that envision the future, I am not so concerned with whether the paintings are accurate predictors of events. I am more concerned with whether the paintings reflect my values and aspirations, whether they paint pictures of the world that inspire me to a life of transformation. For me, this is the Christian tradition that sustains and motivates me. As Paul once wrote, “For in hope, we are saved.” May the faith of our church be one that nourishes and feeds our deepest hopes. May it be a faith that enables us to imagine a world transformed by love. Amen.