Sermons

November 20 2005

Sheep to the Right, Goats to the Left, Do-Si-Do

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo

When my son was about 2 years old we would make frequent trips to Montreal to visit some very good friends who were living there at the time. It was a five and a half hour train trip and I know parents among you will ring with this when you hear me say that I approached that train trip, with my two year old, and a great deal of trepidation.

So you’re locked in this car for five and a half hours and my son was not just any two year old. He was an insane two year old. He was a wall bouncing, crazy, two year old. So I developed a system for surviving those train trips. I would take, in those days it was a Sony Walkman, to day it would be an Ipod, and a small thermos filled to the brim with a very good Bloody Caesar mix. I would put the headphones on and I would sip the Bloody Caesars and I would let Damien run up and down the aisle and I would try not to hear what happened as he did that. I figured the adults were adults and they could look after themselves. We would, I hoped, all survive somehow. And survive we did.

I’ll get back to that story while we for a moment turn to this biblical story. This is one of those stories in the Bible that people like to leave alone. Or else what they’ll do is abbreviate it. We’ve done that here. Where we read the first few verses where the good guys get to go to heaven and leave off that nasty bit about damnation at the end, the part where all the bad guys go to hell. And they’re not "guys" either, they’re goats and sheep and goats and sheep are so cute! If you’ve ever been to farm country and you’ve hung out on a sheep farm or a place where goats are raised you’ll know that looking after those animals is in many ways delightful. You can’t be in a bad mood long around sheep, lambs and goats. At first read it also sounds as if there’s just three participants in this story, the King, this overbearing, patriarchal Lord, and there’s sheep and goats and he decides who goes where. On a closer reading you recognize that there are a number of people in this parable. There are the angels, the courtiers. Who are the angel courtiers? What is he saying? Is he saying that we’re the angels and the courtiers? Is he saying that we, his followers will also be the judges of all the nations? Or are angels some kind of unearthly beings that don’t find other positions in scripture at all?

Where are we really sending these goats to? This "other kingdom", this dark land, what does that look like? Then there are the prisoners and the naked and all of those folk that the good guys are helping. What happens to them? Just because you’re sick or naked or imprisoned does that mean that you get a "get into heaven free card"? What does that mean? There are a lot of people in this parable. It is a pretty strange story.

There are those who would just dismiss it and wouldn’t read it on Sunday. I just came from a conference where I was sitting on the far right of the stage for a reason. On the far left of the stage was a minister who said that they don’t mention God in their Church because "God" conjures up too many overbearingly patriarchal images. That’s kind of an interesting take. Why do we grapple with these stories? Why do we read about eternal punishment in a place where presumably we welcome everyone and everyone is forgiven and everyone is loved? Why?

There’s a group called The Jesus Seminar under the direction of a theologian called Robert Funk in California and they vote on what Jesus really said and he didn’t say. They cast little balls, read for "yes", black for "no" and grey for "maybe". Only about 18% of what Jesus said in scripture passes as the "red" ball. So 82% of everything we read would not be the words of Jesus but would be the words of the early Church or it’s interpolation. I don’t know? The Jesus they end up with is nice. He’s liberal. He has all the right views on everything. He never gets angry. He never loses it like the mothers on trains or the Jesus in this passage. He’s very much at final analysis, like a university professor or biblical scholar. Albert Schwietzer once said that whenever you look for the historical Jesus you end up finding a mirror image of yourself. I think whenever we look for a Jesus period, we end up with a mirror image of ourselves.
I was reading to Lawrence in our congregation, who’s blind , the other day and he said, "You know the Bible is kind of like an ink blot a Rorschach test." You get out of it what you see in it.

There are hundreds of stories in the Bible. There are hundreds of Bibles in the Bible. The job of a theologian and we’re all theologians is to figure out what we want to keep in all of this and what we don’t. That is the job of theology. Luther did it. He tossed out the epistle of James. He said it was an epistle of straw. What do we want to keep in what we know about the stories of Jesus and what do we want to toss out? More importantly why should we grapple with it all or at all?

First of all, if "we" don’t, "they" will. Who are they? They are all of those people that we good United Church folk like to distance ourselves from, those fundamentalists, literalists. If we don’t make this Bible our book in some way shape or form, trust me, they will and they way they will read this passage will have an incredible emphasis on judgment and hell and they of course will read this passage as though they, themselves, are the righteous, which is of course not what is written. In this passage the righteous don’t even know that they are righteous before judgment. So if we don’t grapple with this Bible, holy or not, then we give it over to the domain of those who would use it as a weapon.

How do we make it our own in an intelligent and faithful way? How do we read something like "damnation" and think ourselves into that story? How do we allow Jesus to be Jesus? Because you know I don’t want to. I would like to Jesus that I could invent in my own image. I really would. I would like a Jesus who was a woman first of all. I would like a female Jesus with very liberal views. I would like a female Jesus who was out demonstrating against wars and I would like a female Jesus who performed the first same sex marriage. That’s what I would like. Bummer! It’s not in the book. What kind of Jesus would you like?

This is the story of our tribe. Now there’s a down side to tribal stories. The downside is that it’s a story of our tribe and not some other tribe. How do we speak our tribal legacy and by the way obviously the Bible is all sorts of things. It’s myth. It’s history. Mainly it’s a lot of people writing about their interaction with the divine and the sacred over thousands of years. How do we grapple with our tribal history in a way that’s not hurtful to others? First of all, accept that it is our tribal history for good or for ill. Remember that two year old who was running up and down the train car. At no point did I think of that two year old not as a gift from God. At no point did I wish I’d never given birth to that two year old. At no point did I want that two year old kept out of all family gatherings. I got that there was something God given in even the rantings of a two year old because two year olds are part of our family.

These are stories of our family. We have some weird family members. We do. And our family is capable of committing atrocities you wouldn’t believe. Just read about them in what we call the Holy Bible. There’s been some bloodshed. We’re embarrassed abut a lot of it and we should be. We should read it and cringe. We should read this story about salvation and damnation and cringe. But you know, Jesus was human and he had bad days too. He had days like mine on that train. Days like this day where he was speaking in the tradition of apocalyptic literature, from Zachariah and Isaiah and Ezekiel as a good Rabbi. He was talking about those who don’t follow God’s way and the judgment of those who don’t follow God’s way. He was talking on the eve of being betrayed by everyone he loved. He was talking close to his own crucifixion. He was having a really bad day. Or what if he wasn’t?

What if he was talking about the purview of judgment being in the lap of the divine and not ours? What if we don’t really have a clue what that might look like? After reading it and looking at it this way and the other, with horror and love, I still want to uphold it. I want to say, "Look at the beauty of this passage." Look at the way in which this passage includes the entire world as seen in those days. It doesn’t talk about Jews or Gentiles or faiths. It talks about those who love the Lord their God ,who yes is portrayed as a [patriarchal King because power didn’t get more powerful in those days than that, and their brother or sister as themselves. All those will be saved it says. And all the other ones? Who are they? We don’t know. I can’t fathom the "true" meaning of this with my small brain so I’m just going to let it sit like a bad smell . It’s the bad smell of our tribal history. It’s the bad smell of damnation and bloodshed and religions at war with each other in the world. We can avoid it and avoid our spiritual history or we can leave it alone and describe it as what it seems to us, a bad smell. We can say, "This too is part of what the divine and the sacred means to us." We can let it be carried forward into the next generation, "Lest we forget."

So whether Jesus really said this or not, we’ll never know for sure. I like to think he didn’t say that last part. I like my Jesus to be a nice guy but I’m quite ready to let him be an angry guy, a guy who’s having a bad day. One who lashes out at those who mean him harm and the Pharisees and religious institutions, the ones who represent empire and might and pretend to have faith and don’t’ have faith and don’t love their brother and sister as themselves but really only love their own image in the mirror.
I invite you to grapple with this whole book that is your story. Decide for yourself what is holy or not. If you abandon it you abandon you very self, your own history, your own ancestors. All faiths have such passages. Read them in, own them, wrestle with them, figure out what part they will play in your story and your Christ. Be the one called.