Obedience to Love

“Obedience to Love”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 20, 2011 at Grace Church, Lyons, NY

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”(Matt. 25:34-36)


Some statistics for our consideration: Hunger in the US – in 2010 14.5 percent, or 17.2 million households in the United States were “food insecure” meaning that they experience hunger and inadequate food supply at some point in every month. Of those households with children in the home, 9.8% were “food insecure.” With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. In 2007, nearly 50 million Americans did not have health insurance, while another 25 million were underinsured. (Source: Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey 2007) The total annual premium for a typical family health insurance plan offered by employers was $12,680 in 2008. (Source: Kaiser/HRET Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits, 2008) Even after health care reform, millions of Americans are un-or-underinsured, meaning that the high quality medical care otherwise available in our country is beyond the reach of the poor and most vulnerable. On November 8, Russell Pearce, Arizona Senator who was responsible for a draconian immigration law in Arizona lost his seat in a recall election which was motivated in no small measure by reaction against his inhospitable stance with respect to immigrants in Arizona.
In the midst of these statistics, the Gospel comes to us this morning as a living Word of God with something pretty clear to say about the world in which we live out our faith today. As we end our liturgical year with another of Matthew’s parables of judgment, Jesus describes God’s judgment upon humankind using the famous parable of the separation of the sheep and the goats. This is a parable that has troubled many thinking Christians over the centuries for a variety of reasons. Theologically, it seems to suggest that “salvation” is something that we can earn, a concept that is anathema to Protestant theologians in particular. The mantra among such theologians is we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. It is not anything that we do that brings our salvation, it is entirely up to God. This parable of the sheep and goats seems to contradict that theological position. It seems to suggest that if we do the acts of mercy that Jesus names in the parable, we’ll be judged among the righteous. What ever happened to salvation by grace?
This is one of those theological mind games that demonstrates the extent to which theological positions need to be based on more than one isolated quotation from scripture. It is in considering the scriptural texts as a whole that we evaluate any given portion and from that full consideration develop our theology. And if there is one issue on which both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament are clear, it is that our duty as children of God is to care for those that Jesus calls the “least of these” in today’s parable. The poor, the homeless, the outcast, the prisoner, all of those on the margins of society are to be the focus of our loving attention. That we serve Christ when we serve those he calls “the least of these” suggests that we cannot truly claim to believe in him nor to be disciples of his if we do not act on those claims in a real way. And today’s parable also suggests that we must care for those “least” amongst us because it is the right thing to do, not because we want to earn our own salvation. Those who were judged righteous in the parable were not even aware that they were serving Christ when they did what they believed to be right. Their hearts had been so transformed in the love of God, that they automatically did what God expects, because God who is love truly lived within them.
The duty to serve the poor, the outcast, the homeless and oppressed is universally required of people of faith in all of the world’s religions. In every major tradition, parables and sayings like the parable of the sheep and the goats abound. In the Hadith of Islam, interpretations of Qu’ranic verses, it is written, “On the day of judgment God Most High will say, "Son of Adam, I was sick and you did not visit Me." He will reply, "My Lord, how could I visit Thee when Thou art the Lord of the Universe!" He will say, "Did you not know that My servant so-and-so was ill and yet you did not visit him? Did you not know that if you had visited him you soon would have found Me with him?"” In the writings of the Tao, is the following:
Relieve people in distress as speedily as you must release a fish from a dry rill [lest he die]. Deliver people from danger as quickly as you must free a sparrow from a tight noose. Be compassionate to orphans and relieve widows. Respect the old and help the poor. Taoism. Tract of the Quiet Way
In the Buddhist tradition is a story about a man who gave water to a wandering pilgrim who showed up at his door, even though it meant that he and his family would go thirsty. The sacred writings of Hinduism also have many stories extolling acts of charity and kindness to the poor and downtrodden.
Given the overwhelming weight of the wisdom of sages from every religious tradition, it is abundantly clear that God Most High expects that we will care for those who are less fortunate than we are because it is simply the right thing to do. If we claim with our lips to love God, then we have no choice but to behave in charitable and loving ways to our fellow human beings. “Salvation” is something more than getting to heaven when we die. It is very much about what kind of a world we create while we live. God saves freely and through God’s abundant grace, but God judges us based upon our real world actions during our lifetimes.
This parable of judgment in Christian terms offers images of separation from God for those who did not render loving service to “the least of these.” Whether or not you believe in heaven and hell in the medieval, Dante’s Inferno kind of imagery, the notion that one can choose to put oneself outside of the embrace of our all loving God is also a universal religious belief. While not all religions speak of salvation in the way Christians do, and indeed, other world religions do not focus on the concept of “being saved” in the way some Christians do, all world religions share the fundamental concept that people’s actions in this life affect what happens to them in the next. In East Asian religions – Hinduism and Buddhism – the concept of karma suggests that what you do in this life has consequences that extend beyond this life. If you are a good and loving and generous and charitable person, you build up good karma, and go to a better place in the next life, whereas if you do bad things to other people bad consequences will follow you into the next life.
Our Abrahamic religious cousins, Muslims and Jews, also share the fundamental belief that one must care for those who are called the “least of these” by Jesus. Muslims believe that upon death the soul appears before God for judgment and that all the deeds one has done in one’s life will be weighed in balance and God, who is merciful, will judge accordingly. Since Muslims do not share our concept of salvation by faith through grace, they die with somewhat less assurance of the good outcome, but I have heard many of my Muslim friends declare with faith and trust that they know God to be merciful and compassionate and they rest their faith in that. And one of the five pillars of Islam is zakat, charitable giving, the requirement to give 2.5% of one’s savings to charity every year.
The universality of this command to care for those Jesus calls the “least of these” is underscored in the gospel text itself – “all the nations will be gathered” is a very universal image and one that suggests that ultimately God is far more concerned with how we do love in this world than with what we profess to believe about God. As our nation enters a national election year very soon, we people of faith do well to keep in mind this measuring rod of God’s judgment in light of the statistics about hunger, health care deprivation, imprisonment, immigration struggles and other issue of human rights and social justice that are part of our modern life. God doesn’t care what people say they believe or how they worship God or even if they worship God. God commands that we serve the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the outcast. God cares for the 99% that the Occupy Wall St. folks are purporting to represent.
God cares about how the needs of those least of these are met by our society. And God will judge those who have the power in society to address the needs of those people, based upon whether or not they do feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, heal the sick, house the homeless. It does matter to God what we do in this world especially with and for those on the bottom rung of our society. A Nicaraguan peasant Christian engaged in a gospel dialogue astutely summarizes what the gospel demands of us and it is not easy because it does require that we confront the systems in our culture that produce the statistics we recited earlier: “Obedience to love. Obedience to love is very revolutionary, because it commands us to disobey everything else.” (The Gospal in Solentiname, Ernesto Cardinal, 1978, p. 18)

Amen.