"Seeing is Doing" - Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

Seeing is Doing
Lent 5 – Narrative Lectionary 1
March 22, 2015
Grace, Mankato, MN
Matthew 25.31-46

Last week, I ended the sermon on the parable of the ten maidens with both an invitation and a teaser. The invitation was to encourage you to be alert and watch for the presence of God, in your life and in the world. As a way to start, I introduced a portion of the ancient practice, Examen of Consciousness. Examen encourages one to reflect on our day, good, bad and everywhere in between, and ask how God is working in, with and through those events. So, before we go on, I want to ask those of you who tried, how did it go this week? It’s okay if it didn’t go well or didn’t go at all, there’s no shame or scolding. However, I would encourage you to keep trying.

The teaser was that this week we were going to discover that God shows up in unexpected places. Today we read the last and perhaps most unsettling of Matthew’s parables encountered this Lent, the sheep and the goats. One reason this might be jarring is that when read in the Revised Common Lectionary we would encounter this parable on Christ the King Sunday, just before Advent. In that context, the emphasis is on the end of time and Christ’s second coming. But here we read it just before the passion narrative starts in earnest, giving it an entirely different spin. In fact, in the very next verses Jesus makes his last prediction of his death. In this context, I believe Jesus was preparing his followers to see God in unexpected places. This is a huge shift for them (and us) because we have different notions of the power and presence of God.

We set ourselves up for this disorientation by typically describing God in absolute terms: Omniscient, Omnipotent and Omnipresent (All-knowing, All-powerful and All-present). You can hear the old familiar hymn: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise…” Of course, in some ways it’s true, but not in the ways that we typically think. This parable challenges us to rethink where we might find God. There’s a story told in poetic terms of a preacher who would climb the steeple and drop admonitions down upon his parishioners’ heads each week. One week he cried from the steeple, “Where are you, God?” A voice from below: “Here among my people.” This should be no surprise to us because this is the same God who came to earth as a helpless baby and who would ultimately claim victory by defeating sin on a cross.

This parable is full of shocking irony. Isn’t it interesting that neither group knew which they were, sheep or goats? In fact, the parable itself warns against any kind of assessment on our part or grouping on our part. The minute we try to figure out which we are (or anyone else is) we automatically put ourselves in the goat camp. Furthermore, we don’t do acts of charity to see Christ; we do it because the doing needs doing. Service to the least of these our brothers and sisters flows out of the grace given to us by the one who serves us. Yet, it is in the doing to the least of these that we see Christ. I think is kind of like the “Magic Eye” pictures, where there is a picture hidden in a picture. If you look at it directly, you can’t see it, but if you cross your eyes slightly and look beyond it, you see the picture jump out at you.

I’ve titled this sermon, Seeing is Doing, but perhaps it could just as easily be, Doing is Seeing. Or maybe in good Lutheran fashion we hold these two seeming opposite but true things in tension. The point is that there is no place that God cannot be and, more often than not, God is precisely in those places we least expect and that’s good news. Acts of service compel us to see Jesus and seeing Jesus compels us to acts of service. As we enter Holy Week next Palm Sunday, let us be open to seeing Jesus where we least expect. And for those who long for Jesus to return, know that he’s already here, because Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. Amen.