But I actually don’t really like or care about New Year’s Eve. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like fireworks and streamers as much as the next guy. But I don’t really like being cold or staying up late or traffic, so the whole holiday ends up kind of anti-climactic to me. I would much rather be in bed at a decent hour, and then wake up and watch the Rose Parade in my pajamas. It hasn’t helped that last year New Year’s Day was a Sunday, and the year before that I had the flu, so I’ve totally gotten out of the habit of New Year’s Eve anyway.
The other thing I struggle with about the New Year is that I’m not a big resolution person. As you have probably noticed from my ministry style here, I prefer slow, measured consistent steps to big, bold moves. I’m a marathon runner, and you don’t train for a marathon by all of a sudden going out and running twenty miles. You build it, one mile at a time. So for me, part of the New Year is two weeks of riding out the sudden increase in Y membership until I can consistently snag a treadmill again.
Before you think I’ve become some grumpy, fun-hater, there is one thing I love about New Year. I love the retrospectiveness of the holiday. I love the invitation to look back on the year, both the joys and the sadness, and to think deeply about what those next small, consistent steps will be, so that in this next year, the joys will be increased and the sadnesses decreased. I don’t tend to make New Year’s Resolutions, as those feel too big and overwhelming to my fairly risk averse temperament. But I do love a good “January resolution.” I like to use this holiday think about what is the next small thing I should tackle. This tends to lead to a resolution list like, “get a haircut, get new shoes, get a mattress.” But let me tell you, as unexciting as that list sounds, those three resolutions marked the start of the year I was called to be pastor here, so that year turned out pretty darn awesome.
All this to say, I’ve been changing my mind recently on how to celebrate Christ the King Sunday. Part of that shift comes from the design of the liturgical calendar itself.
Today we are right here, this little white wedge of Christ the King Sunday. And looking at its place in the calendar we can see how it is just another piece of our journey, the shift between the harvest of the end of the season of the church and the stillness of beginning of the season of Christ. In fact the readings of late November and the readings of Advent don’t even differ all that much from each other, despite coming from different Gospels. We pick up next week in Mark just about where we leave off this week in Matthew. Some liturgical scholars have stopped making the distinction altogether, morphing the end of November and the beginning of December together in a season of apocalyptic hopefulness, an unveiling of the promise of the coming of the Savior.
Apocalypse literally means unveiling. From the Greek apo meaning under and kalypto meaning veil or covering, these apocalyptic Matthew and Mark readings are Jesus’ final revelation to the disciples before his crucifixion of who he is and what the coming kingdom of heaven will be. This morning’s reading gives us a vision of that kingdom. Like all of Jesus’ parables, the intention here is for us to read this seriously but not literally. With this image, Jesus offers the disciples, offers us, a peek behind the curtain into the promised reign of God.
The reading starts out with a grand vision. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him…” This description conjures for me a vast throne room bedecked in gold, stretching beyond measure with people from all corners of the globe. From this vast array of humanity, the Son of Man begins to sort the sheep from the goats. And here we have to acknowledge a bit of a translation error. Verse thirty-two in the NRSV reads, “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another…” This makes it sound like a separating of individuals. But the Greek doesn’t have the word “people,” the Greek reads “he will separate them,” the “them” being the nations. So the judgment described here isn’t a judgment of individuals, but of the collective whole. The question to ask ourselves is not what did I do, but what did we do? How well did we, collectively, as a community, as a nation, as the world, do in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger? Yet again, Jesus described a relationship that is not individual, but collective. As God so long ago pronounced to Cain, we are our brothers’ keepers. Rugged individualism has no place in the kingdom of heaven. We are responsible for each other, for caring for each other, for lifting each other up, and also for holding each other accountable. An interesting thing I didn’t know until Laurie pointed it out to me, Christ the King Sunday is a fairly recent holiday. It was established by Pope Pius the Sixth in 1925, at a time when rising global nationalism was becoming an increasing concern. As nations increasingly turned inward, putting their own needs above the needs of the global community, Pope Pius’ hope for the holiday was that it would help remind us that Christ is our King, and that both the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world are under the sovereignty of God.
But what strikes me the most about this reading is the sheep’s response to being blessed. “When was it,” they asked, “when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink, a stranger and we welcomed you, sick or in prison and visited you?” When was it that we did these things? And the goats too, when they were accursed asked, “When was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?” When would we have not done such a thing? The amazing thing about the required tasks is the overwhelming ordinariness of them. So simple, so commonplace were the events that led to judgment that neither side recognized them. The sheep didn’t know the power of their simple acts, while the goats missed simple opportunities as they looked for something greater.
Both the hope and the challenge of this description of judgment is that Jesus isn’t asking us to change the world here. Or, he is, but he’s asking us to do it in simple ways. The sheep weren’t sheep because they figured out the solution to world peace or ended hunger or brought an end to oppression. They were sheep because they fed, clothed, cared for, visited, the people immediately in front of them. These small acts of care are insignificant on an individual scale, but remember Jesus wasn’t talking on an individual scale, he was talking about nations. It may not matter much to the world if I feed one hungry person. But if I feed one hungry person, and you do, and you do, and you do, and then those once hungry people who are now no longer hungry also go out and start feeding people, that’s the way change happens. There isn’t a magic formula for bringing about the kingdom of God; rather this story describes it as a million tiny actions, a million little gestures, that one by one change the course of our existence.
So as we gather here this morning, on this closing of one church year and the dawning of another, the invitation this passage offers to us is to reflect back on the year with wonder. What were the overlooked acts that may have been part of the unveiling of the kingdom of God? We did a lot of things this year. Things we may not realize mattered as much as they will prove to matter. We increased our welcome to neighborhood kids. We became the neighborhood spot for fresh vegetables. We built tighter relationships with the Co-op and St. Peter in Family Camp. We put in new furnaces, and soon a new roof. We joined together just last week with over eighty people to celebrate the joint ministry of Trinity and Co-op.
And the flip side of New Year, the looking forward. If these are our reflections, what are the next small steps we are being called to take? This passage allows us to resist the temptation to become overwhelmed by the seeming size of the work and instead focus on the next small victory. Where are we going from here? Who is the next one hungry, thirsty, sick, lonely, or in prison person whom we are being called to serve? The apocalypse, the unveiling of the kingdom of heaven is not one grand gesture, but a million tiny peeks until the whole creation is revealed. This apocalypse has been happening since the beginning of creation, and it will continue until all is clothed in God’s glory. So this year, dear people of God, what small revelation are we being called to uncover? For the mystery of God is in the power of the ordinary miracle. Amen.
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