Christ the King, Year A November 20, 2011
Isaiah 1:10-20, 2:1-4, Matthew 25:31-46 St. Alban’s, Austin
I don’t spend hours cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I spend weeks.
As soon as the November food magazines hit the stands I scoop them up with a kind of abandon that would horrify me if they were any other kind of magazine. I typically consider magazines to be a waste of money. And I Tivo a bunch of shows on the Food Network, and now there is so much on the web that I spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about this single meal. Not the eating. The cooking. The sharing. But it’s not so much a single meal as it is a singular meal.
What’s it going to look like this year, this day that we set aside to set the table with the good stuff, endure relatives we generally avoid, watch football, mess up every inch of kitchen space, gorge ourselves at an hour when we aren’t typically eating, did I mention watch football teams we don’t even care about, go for a walk, nap, and – oh, yes – give thanks to God?
There are the years when it’s all family. Kids home from college. Grandparents come from out of town. New babies and cousins and aunts and uncles, all of us joined by blood or marriage. And then there are the odd years when the table is populated by the stragglers. Sometimes you’re th host. Sometimes you’re the orphan. I’ll never forget the precious friends who included me the first year after my divorce when the court decreed the children would be with their dad. You find yourself sitting down, at your own table or someone else’s with people who might not even know each other or have all that much in common except for the fact that this year they didn’t have a family gathering to go to. Sometimes those are the richest Thanksgivings of all.
Today we are all worshiping together at one service so that we can all give thanks to God together, and one way we do that is by pledging our gifts to God. At the Temple on their equivalent of Thanksgiving first century Jews would literally bring the first fruits of their harvest. So instead of a paper card with writing on it you might bring forward a basket of wheat or a bowl of olives, lemons, pomegranates, honey, cheese, wool. Not the leftovers after you’d taken what you needed for the year, but the very first ones picked or produced. John Bennet and I raised our pledge this year and I have to tell you I sort of gasped when I wrote the number on the pledge card. It’s a stretch. But we’re trusting that God will take good care of us as he always has.
And so I sat down to write my sermon and what did I get? Isaiah – God’s mouthpiece – in a tirade against the people of Jerusalem saying how much God hates their sacrifices and is tired of their festivals and their worship. Oh, swell! I hate your sacrifices, folks, but come right up here and put your pledge cards on the altar. Huh? And it’s my job to find the good news of the gospel in that!
Well, there’s work to do, so let’s get to it. Isaiah was a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah
in the 8th century BCE at just the same time that the northern kingdom of Israel, where the worship of the one Lord had fallen apart, was being devastated by the Assyrian empire.
Isaiah has a huge job to do.
He has to get God’s words across to his people so they don’t lapse into full-blown idolatry and get wiped out like the northern kingdom. So he starts by calling them names – Sodom and Gomorrah – God destroyed those faithless cities back in the book of Genesis. Isaiah confronts the people for their perfunctory worship of God. Oh, they might get to worship once a week, and they might put an offering on the altar, just enough, and they might observe the required festivals, but God could see into their hearts and God knows that at this point, where they are not giving God the first thought the other six days of the week, the only way to get their attention is by giving them what might be considered a rude reality check. You are on the road to no place good.
But then God encourages. Then God promises. Then God reminds them that God has blessed them in the past and will bless them in the future. Then God reminds them that he is the God of creation and forgiveness and deliverance. All God needs is their hearts.
Not so long ago at a vestry meeting a new vestry person was looking over the church budget. We were talking about service and outreach and this person was flipping through the pages and looked up and asked what percentage of our budget goes toward outreach. I mean, I see numbers for copier expenses and diocesan assessment and utilities and salaries. But where is the number that goes to serve the world off the hill? It looks like we’re spending most of our money on ourselves. I have to tell you it was one of my favorite moments of the year when another vestry member answered, 100% of our budget goes toward outreach.
Jesus said, 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, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.
This is why we are church. This is why we pledge, hopefully enough to make us gasp a little. This is why we worship together, give thanks to God together, because we grow when we come together. We challenge each other in a lot of ways and we empower each other in ways that would never happen if we didn’t gather for worship and listen to difficult scriptures together
and give thanks to God together for our disparate blessings. I mean, talk about a feast made up of the stragglers! We gather as the body of Christ that is St. Alban’s and we are transformed
for the purpose that we get down off this hill and keep God in our consciousness all week long as we serve the least, the lost, and the last in his name and do our part in the transformation of other lives.
In the society of Isaiah’s world and Jesus’ world and Matthew’s world the dispossessed were the widows, the orphans, and the sojourners, people who had no familial systems to define them or support them. They are why we are Christians. They are why it matters that we give to God in gratitude. They are why it matters that we don’t just go through the motions but worship and serve and share with our hearts. They are why we come together and risk being transformed again and again and again.
The kingdom will be present on Thursday in one form or another as we gather for our extraordinary meal. Whether we are with family or at one of those amazing straggler events, our meal is very much a holy eucharist because there is not a moment of a day that is not the Lord’s and there is not a breath we take that is not pure gift. There is not an act of kindness that doesn’t make God glad. There is not a gift we can give that doesn’t make us richer.
Let us pray:
Gracious and loving God, giver of all that is good and true and beautiful and life-giving. These cards represent our sweat, they represent our lives, they represent our dreams. The pledges which we make on them are but tokens of the awesome gifts that have been given to us and they are pledged in thanksgiving for all we have received, for all we have been inspired to be, for all we are challenged to become, in this place. May they be the first fruits of all we have and not what we have left over, so that we may live out as closely as possible how you give to us.
May we see them as our offering to you, sacred, holy, yet earthy, filled with possibilities. May we hold this image in our hearts and minds so as we watch our offerings each week come to your table, we can see our very selves being part of this offering, it is us on the table, living sacrifices to you. Amen. (1)
(1) Prayer by the Rt. Rev. Greg Rickel, Bishop of the Diocese of Olympia
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