"At the End, A King," a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Theodore J. Wardlaw, Dean of the Austin Presbyterian Seminary, delivered on November 30, 2006, in Christ Chapel
Matthew 25:31-46
One November day, maybe five or six years ago while I was still serving as a parish pastor in Atlanta, I took the train from our neighborhood in Atlanta down to my church some five miles away, in the very heart of downtown. I didn’t take the train very often, didn’t take it often enough for that matter; but now and then I would take the train, and it never failed to be a worthwhile experience. Sometimes I would strike up a conversation with a stranger—one of those kairos conversations that always made a difference, at least to me. Sometimes I’d sit there daydreaming amid the click-clack, click-clack regularity of sound. Sometimes I’d see something out the window as that train sliced through the backsides of neighborhoods and then into railroad yards and past old, broken-down buildings on its way downtown.
On this particular occasion, it was in fact something I saw while daydreaming that, in my mind’s eye, I can still see to this day. Heading toward downtown, and looking out the window to my left, I saw it; and, at first, because we went by fast enough, I wasn’t sure I could believe my eyes. So I took the train again a few days later, and, fortuitously on this day, the train slowed down at just the right moment—long enough for me to take in the whole scene.
Someone had obviously climbed up on a lower roof of an old, abandoned industrial building—the empty shell of a factory, maybe, or a warehouse—and had painted, on the brick wall that rose up above that roof and spread out for a half-block or so, a mural that could not be seen from the ground, but only from the elevated tracks of that train. The mural was, in fact, a heavenly vision, alive with vivid color and a kind of primitive energy. In effect, it was a tableau showing various scenes from the life of Jesus Christ—Christ being born in a manger, Christ healing the sick, Christ feeding the five thousand, Christ gathering the children to his knee, Christ entering Jerusalem, Christ nailed to a cross, Christ laid in the tomb, Christ risen from the dead. It was the story, painted on the bricks of an old dilapidated building, that we all of us know so well. It was the story, in fact, that we’ve spent this whole liturgical year rehearsing; and here, at the end of that year, it comforts me to think back to that story splashed up in paint, that testimony, really, on a hopeless old building, to the hope we have in Jesus Christ. And as I think back to that scene, I remember, in the middle of the whole tableau, four words painted boldly that summed it all up—that proclaimed good news to that particular tattered urban neighborhood and to any of the rest of us who might have noticed. “The Lord is Coming,” those four words said.
“The Lord is Coming.”
It’s often the case, even among us aspiring clergy and professional religionists, that when we speak of the Lord we speak of him in a different tense. “The Lord has come,” we often say; and what we mean by that is that his presence in our midst was not some docetic mystery, not some case of wishful thinking that we projected into a story that is essentially fictional. No, “the Lord has come,” we say, by which we mean that he really was here—in the same earthy way in which we are really here. Like us, he felt pain and temptation and sadness and unspeakable joy and anguish and the burden of too much work to do and the satisfaction of work accomplished. Like us, he experienced the whole nine yards; and then, just like we will do some day, one way or another, he died. And because he assumed unto himself every ounce of life that we assume—life lived on the rooftops as well as life lived in the cellars—he knew, not because he read about it but from experience, what a mixed bag life can be. “The Lord has come,” we say, and we say it with certainty.
Or often we make another statement, in a different tense. “The Lord is come,” we say, by which we mean that, in a mysterious sense, the Lord is here even now, in our midst. This is certainly the most popular point that we derive from our text this morning—that what Jesus means by these words, “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…,” is that Jesus does walk still across the landscape of our lives in the stranger’s guise.
To say that “the Lord is come” is to say that the Lord is here—hidden in the faces of all who suffer and cry out for compassion, hidden behind the pain of the poor and the sick and the imprisoned. We say it often in seminary, for we are learning here, if we didn’t know it already, that there is not one square inch in all of creation where, if one looks hard enough, one cannot find carved there the initials of God. “The Lord is come and even now is visible if we look hard enough, we say. Look hard enough, beneath the addictions and paranoias of the man who walks up and down Guadalupe and who sleeps in the doorways off Sixth Street, or beneath the nervous laughter of the businessman who looks at the clock above the bar and says he really should be getting home but before he goes he will have just one more, or beneath the bravado of the soldier in Iraq who has to be tough but who is counting the days when he gets to go home, or beneath the pretensions and insecurities of the well-heeled woman standing in a mirror at Nordstrom’s and in possession of everything in the world except what she wants the most. Look hard enough there, and you will see the face of someone crying out for compassion; and the One Who is come insists that it is his own face. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,” he says, “you did it to me.”
When I was at Yale, it was my privilege to study with Henri Nouwen, God rest his soul; and, in fact, to live in his home for a semester. One day, one of my classmates said to him, “Whenever I look into your face, I see the face of Christ.” Nouwen received the praise, but then corrected her gently. “No, my dear,” he said, “It is the Christ in you who sees the Christ in me.” This is the way that theology runs, when we focus upon what it means to say that the Lord is with us in the present tense.
The Lord is with us—in you and in me. “The Lord is come” in the forms of the hungry, and the thirsty, and the stranger, and the naked, and the prisoner; and so it also needs to be said that “the Lord is come” in the forms of our attention to them and our compassion for them.
All the same, though, I wonder if, in our zeal to say that “the Lord has come” in the past tense and that “the Lord is come” in the present tense; we end up saying very little, really, about the confident hope of our faith in the future tense—that “the Lord will come again.”
But what would it mean if we could manage to ignore the future tense altogether? It would mean, I suspect, that we could settle for that nearsighted maxim that “history repeats itself.” It would mean that we could say that “the poor are always with us,” and then, with a shrug of the shoulder, walk away to make the next payment on the Mercedes. We could say “There will be wars and rumors of wars,” and just hope that when the time came we would have more firepower than the other guys. We could say, “Once a jerk, always a jerk,” and let many suns go down on our anger. We could assume that tomorrow would be just like today, only moreso. We could plan prudently to draw the best available hand from the present deck, but we would already know what’s in the cards.
But the primary affirmation of this text, I believe, is a powerful statement that is set in the future tense. It’s the gutsy proclamation of that mural splashed across that shabby building in that threadbare neighborhood—that “the Lord is coming!” Coming to embrace the world, at the end, with the wide arms of his grace, yes, but also with the wide arms of his justice.
When we think about Christ the King—the theme with which we put the lid on another Christian year—it is appropriate to focus on nothing so much as this picture of the Lord coming, at the end, to redeem the world and to gather it unto himself. For what the church affirms here at the end of the year, is that at the end, just as at the beginning, there is a King.
Now it’s often the case that we don’t know what to make of news like that. Maybe it has an otherworldly ring to it that is hard on our sophisticated ears. Or maybe it sounds like just more escapist talk about “the sweet by and by.” News like this is sometimes hard to fathom. But, truth be known, this is the news that, more than anything else, keeps us going as people of faith. It’s news that has the power to touch deep yearnings which we all of us have. For we all of us know what it means to look around at the world in its tragedy and brokenness, and to ache for the day when all of that is gathered up into larger purposes.
I watched a PBS special on Bobby Kennedy two nights ago, and I can’t think of a documentary that has moved me more. At the end of it, I realized that there were tears rolling down my cheeks, specifically at the footage of him announcing to a large crowd of African-Americans in Indianapolis news that most of them had not heard—news of the tragic death just a short while earlier of Martin Luther King, Jr. A white man from the ethos of Northeastern, Ivy-League privilege summoned a deep empathy, in that setting filled with people who were powerless and discriminated against, and quoted from Aeschylus—the Greek poet whose works had priested him through the tragedy of his brother’s death. He quoted Aeschylus: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” I watched all of that on the History Channel, and I ached and longed, not just for public leadership of that caliber (that seems enough to long for). No, I ached and longed primarily for the day when everything in our world that drives us to despair—everything: the senselessness in the Middle East, the indifference of the world toward places like the Sudan, the hubris in our own country that empowers us to bless a culture of greed and self-fascination that is off the charts, the inequities of life, the struggles that are tearing at our churches, all of it—when it all can somehow be gathered up into larger purposes, the hands of God who will someday complete what we cannot complete. I ache and long for that day.
Maybe, on that particular day in Atlanta, riding on that train, that’s why my heart sang at the sight of the proclamation, amid the rubble of life, that “the Lord is coming.” At some level, deep down inside each of us, don’t we long for that kind of news? Don’t we long for what I like to call evidence of the “upper story” of life, evidence that life is worthwhile because of where it’s headed?
When my dear friend Tom Long, the well-known preacher and professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory, preached at the eucharist that preceded my inauguration at Austin Seminary several years ago, he took as his text a verse from Acts: “[T]hey were all filled with the Holy Spirit…spoke the word of God with boldness…were of one heart and soul…everything they owned was held in common…great grace was upon them all…there was not a needy person among them… (Acts 4:31-34).”
“One day in my preaching class at the seminary,” he said, “some students and I were looking at [passages like this] in Acts, and you could sense a developing gloom forming over the students. Here they read of energized, Spirit-driven, grace-filled gatherings of believers, knowing full well they were heading out to serve graying congregations, many of them shrinking and fighting for their lives. Statisticians tell us that the average Christian congregation in America has fewer than seventy-five members and less that $1,000 in the bank. But we marched on through these passages in Acts rich with dream-like churches, full of great power and praise and wonder and energy and joy, when suddenly one of the students said, ‘Gee, this reminds me of Eleanor Reynolds.’
“`Who’s Eleanor Reynolds,’ I asked,” said Tom.
“`Aw, she’s this old woman in my congregation back home who is our church’s local historian…You can’t believe the things she says; I mean, she tells about an ordinary family night supper, and she makes it sound like it’s the messianic banquet.’
“That’s it,” said Tom Long. “Local church historians tell about family night suppers and make them sound like the messianic banquet. These portraits of the church in Acts are like local church history. Luke is the first Eleanor Reynolds. Local church historians may come across in the world of professional historians as amateurs and maybe as sappy and romantic, but the one virtue they have is that they love the church and the one ability they have is the capacity to see, the capacity to see—amid the ragged fortunes and foibles of real and struggling congregations—the blessed community of Jesus Christ shining through…[T]hey have the gift to see the church eschatologically, to sense in the everyday church the emerging presence of the kingdom of God.
“You know how local church historians write,” Tom went on. “They say things like, ‘In August of 1932, the Rev. C. W. Hawthorne became the pastor of Macedonia Church. He and his wife Irene were adored by everyone in the community. Reverend Hawthorne preached his first sermon on Sunday evening, August 28, and the whole town was present. Every heart was touched by his stirring words, and the Spirit moved mightily in the service. Reverend Hawthorne served faithfully until his death in 1941, and his ministry continues to bear much fruit today.’ Really?,” said Tom. “Adored by everyone? The whole town was present? Every heart was touched? Continues to bear much fruit? Really? Why would someone say such things? Because they’re true. Because you know they are true if you have the ability to see the church eschatologically, the ability to see the church as a foretaste of things to come, the ability to see the kingdom happening in the life of the struggling church, the ability to look at a family night supper and know that it’s an appetizer of the messianic banquet.”
What is it that you yearn for, when you imagine a foretaste of things to come? Is it a feast, where those who now eat out of garbage cans will be the honored guests at the head table? Is it a city, in which every inhabitant has a home and safety and people to love? Is it a wise judge who is fair enough to adjudicate both the wrongs done to you and the wrongs done by you? What is it that you yearn for?
A while back I was invited to take part in a conversation pulled together by our denominational headquarters. About twenty-five of us, all of us Presbyterian clergy, were invited to come to Louisville, and to engage in discourse on a timely theological topic. The feeling was that if we could get together to do something other than fight, it might be a good thing; and since we’re Presbyterians they decided that we should talk theology. They went to great pains to insure that the clergy invited there represented the theological spectrum in our church, and so there we were—evangelicals and traditionalists and moderates and liberals. The topic which focused our discussion at this symposium was “The Resurrection of the Body.” A nice, light little topic. And we went round and round on this topic for several days, chewing on it, walking around it, pushing against it; for who can say, after all, that they understand the resurrection?
Toward the end of our time together, one pastor, an evangelical, spoke through a frog in his throat. He said, “Here’s what I’m looking for when the Lord comes again.” He said, “I have a son who is nineteen years old and five feet tall. He suffers from spina biffeta.” He said, “All his life, I’ve pushed him and pushed him and pushed him to stretch as far as he can stretch; but he has had to overcome, or accept, some limitations. He’s had numerous operations,” he said, “and on five different occasions I’ve taught him how to walk.” He said, “He’s a good kid, and he’s doing fine now. But what he would like, more than anything else in the world, is to play basketball. He can’t in this life,” the man said. “It doesn’t count unless, when the Lord comes again, my son gets to beat me in a game of basketball. And it doesn’t count,” he continued, “unless I try as hard as I can not to let him beat me.” I heard that as a modest yearning for all that is wrong with the world to be set right when the Lord comes again to be crowned upon his kingly throne. And, here on the brink of the end of another Christian year, what the church has to say to that man, and to all of us whose hearts skip a beat at the dazzling thought of what God will do with our world before God is finished with it, is that the One Who will be King is that same One Who first died for all of his subjects. And so He will be a King Who, more than any other king we can imagine, is acquainted with brokenness and suffering and sorrow and grief. Which means that, on that day when He gathers all of us up into His greater purposes, He will not neglect to gather that up, too.
At the end, there is a King. But for now, what we have to live by is the promise that He is coming. In this pregnant meantime in which we live, it is our job to search for signs of that promise in just about any old place—in seminary communities like this one, in the life and work of those who live by his light, on the lips of those who yearn for his justice, and even on the splendidly-painted walls of abandoned buildings. “The Lord is coming,” shouts that wall to all who will notice. And there is no greater source of hope than that.
So, even so, Lord, quickly come. Even so, Lord, quickly come.
