Secret Ballot

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.27.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Romans 8:26-39

I’m an fairly engaged politics fan, and follow politics in much the same way that some fans follow football or baseball or professional team foosball.  Even for me, though, I find myself asking the question: how long has this Presidential Election season been going on again?  After a nearly endless primary season, it seems like we’ve going through the high drama of election year politics for the past three years.

And it is drama.  It is, although so many Americans seem unable to get into it, choosing instead to focus their mental energies on whatever mean remarks Miley Cyrus is making on YouTube about her ex-boyfriend.   Any competition is drama, and unlike the mindless catty nothingness of celebro-tainment, American politics has behind it control of the most powerful nation on earth.  Every election year, we have no idea how things are going to work out, and with so much at stake and an uncertain outcome, how could it not be engaging.  You watch the polls and the polls of polls, see the candidates rise and fall in favor, and one is almost never entirely sure at the end of the day who’s going to come out on top.  The results are as secret, as hidden from our eyes, as the ballots that we all cast on election day.

It’s that mystery, that uncertainty about what might happen at the end of the day, that makes life seem interesting, and that makes participating in the democratic process such a vital and important things for hobbyist policy geeks like me.

Elections aren’t always that way.  Take, for instance, another election that will take place  in the next month.  On August 5, 2008, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will hold it’s parliamentary elections.  The citizens of North Korea will flow to the polls to vote for members of their Supreme People’s Assembly.  Following that election, members of the Supreme People’s Assembly will themselves elect the Chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country’s chief executive.

When the people of North Korea vote, they do get a choice.  They can either vote for a member of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland, or...not.  There are no other choices.  There is no drama, any more than there is any drama in the “election” of Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il.  Everything is already decided, which means the election comes across as...well...neither fair nor real.  That’s mostly because it’s not.   It’s a farce.

We know that democracy, real democracy, looks absolutely nothing like the elections in North Korea, and that just putting “democratic” and “republic” in the name of your country don’t mean either of those things is true.  How can an election be real if there’s no choice involved?

That, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s snippet from the Book of Romans.  It’s an unusually rich passage, full of soaring language and passion.  Here Paul tells us about the role the Holy Spirit plays when we ourselves can’t pray, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.

It also serves up perhaps the most challenging teaching ever to whup us Christians upside the head:  Paul’s oh-so-brief “teaching” about the elect and predestination.  In the event that you’ve not had the good pleasure to be exposed to this before, let me play it out there for you.

Who are the elect?  They’re the folks chosen by God to be in relationship with God.  Generally, most churches and most Christians interpret this to mean “themselves,” and then assume that pretty much everyone else...and especially the people we’ve decided we don’t like...are the “unelect.” We know who those people are, and we’re sure God doesn’t like ‘em.

What does predestination mean?  Well, it basically means God's foreknowledge of all of our actions, of all action, of everything and anything that has occurred or will occur.  We've got this image of God carefully writing out all of the code for the universe before installing it on His Almighty Laptop and clicking on the Install Button.   But that way of thinking is silly.  Time is meaningless to God.  All of time rests before God as an Eternal Now.

We generally don’t like this idea at all.  It messes with our desire to be the master of our own domain.  We want to be the ones making choices.  We want to be the ones who control our own destiny, who get to make the decisions that will determine whether we’re down wit’ Jesus or way down in Satan’s Authentic Country Style Hickory Pit Barbecue.  It’s Sinnerlicious!

We also tend to get cheesed off at the idea that God might somehow know who’s on the naughty and nice list even before we’ve had a chance to be bad or good.  Why would God make people, knowing they’re going to mess up? That’s not fair!  What would be the point of doing anything?  It makes all of life seem like a fix, as false and unreal as the upcoming election in North Korea.

Though we might respond that way to some of the language Paul uses, that would be missing the point Paul is making.  Before he uses those tricky words, in verse 28 Paul tells his audience that all things work together for good for those who love God.  After he’s finished using those tricky words, Paul’s speech soars up to rhythmic heights...and he says basically the same thing.  Nothing...nothing...can separate you from the love of God if you truly seek him. 

All Paul is talking about here is God's limitlessness.  Well, actually, that’s not true.  Paul is speaking of God’s limitless power *and* God’s limitless love.   And all Paul is asking his listeners to do in response to that love is have faith in it.  Sure, your life is hard.  Sure, things have gotten difficult.  But none of those things can separate you from God.

For those who use “predestination” to be judgmental about others, they miss the point.  God’s desire for all of our futures and for all of our nows is love, joy, and justice.  It is up to us to live into that grace.

For those who can’t stand the loss of choice that it seems to entail, it’s a little more difficult.  On the one hand, we have been created as free beings, made in the image of God and fully able to choose God freely.  On the other, God knows what those choices are before they are even made.  If we say we aren’t free, then we’re nothing more than robots, going through the motions.  If we say that God lacks awareness of creation, then God ceases to be God.  Somehow, the two must exist together.  How?  Well, when I learn how to see past, present and future all together as one moment, I’ll be sure to let you know.  Till then, what we have is faith.

The point and purpose of predestination is trust.  The reason behind election is trust.  You have to trust that in the secrecy of that time before time, God has chosen you to play a role in His Kingdom.  Doesn’t matter who you were.  Doesn’t matter if the world declared you lost or chosen.

In Christ, that vote has been cast in your favor. 

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Sight Unseen

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.20.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 8:12-25

Nobody in their right mind buys anything important without taking a good hard look at it first.

When you’re buying a *cough* pre-owned car, you don’t just order it and have it show up at your door. You want to inspect the paint for blemishes. You want to check the wheels for dings and damage and check the tires for wear. You pop open the hood and stare at the engine, stroke your chin, and make a few comments so that you’ll seem like you actually know a thing about engines. Hmmm. Is that dipstick carbon fibre?

Then you have drive it, to get a sense of how comfortable it is and how well it actually runs. How smoothly does it shift? You turn down the stereo and concentrate on it. How well does it brake? You find a spot and hit the brakes hard. How does it perform in a sudden evasive maneuver? You make a hard sudden lane change to find out. How long can you balance it on two wheels? That last one isn’t really necessary, but the salespeople always enjoy it. If it passes all of those tests, after you’re sure you know the car inside and out, then and only then would you consider buying it.

When you’re buying a house, you don’t just show up and write a check. You hire a home inspector. You have professionals pore over the house at every level. You check the foundation for cracks. You check the insulation and the quality of the windows and the water flow around the house. And it’s not just the house you examine. You check out the neighborhood around the house, and the quality of the schools and the resale values over time. It matters. You want to know every last possible detail you can before you hand your soul over to the bank at six-and-a-quarter percent for the next thirty years.

When we can’t physically see the thing, like when we’re buying online, we check double extra carefully. What’s the seller’s reputation? You check that they’re trusted, that they have all the right reviews of their service. What’s the product’s reputation? You check out consumer reviews and industry magazines and listen to the voices of level-headed friends who’ve owned the product.

We want to have a full and complete grasp of the things we buy before we buy them, because we know if we don’t, we’ll be disappointed. We need to have a complete grasp of every last thing we’re going to possess, because trust just isn’t ever a factor when it comes to our lives as consumers. If we have to have a motto, it is caveat emptor, which means “buyer beware.” And so we are wary, always careful and on our guard.

But today, we heard the Apostle Paul tell us a little bit about what it will mean when the promise of Christ is fulfilled. You’ve been hearing a whole bunch of preaching on the Book of Romans these last few weeks, and today, I’m sure you’ll be excited to hear, will be no exception.

As we reach the middle of chapter eight of this highly complex letter, Paul has just finished giving us an explanation the role of the law and the role of faith in our salvation. It’s an argument that he begins in chapter one, and that ends at the end of this chapter. It ain’t an easy read.

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s interesting is the degree to which he managed to couch the end result of that struggle in terms that aren’t matter of fact. His writing here isn’t about the specifics. The struggle is deeply there, the groaning and the effort of faith, but the reward...well...Paul there gets a little coy.

He speaks about life governed by the Holy Spirit, but that’s in the now and not in the fulfillment of God’s time. He speaks about a glory to be revealed, but then he doesn’t actually reveal it. Paul speaks instead in soaring and rhythmic cadences, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty of what awaits us in glory...we don’t hear details. What we get instead is Paul telling us about hope.

This bugs us. We don’t want hope. We want to see the end product, or at least a highly informational brochure. We want to have evidence of everything that God has intended for us, right there in front of us. We want to see our rightness with the Big Guy played out across everything we do. We want evidence of our successful career, we want to drop three inches from our waistline, we want the Lord to miraculously improve the mileage we’re getting. Having those things right in front of us would be tremendously confidence building. We’d know exactly what we were getting in for.

Unfortunately for us, that’s not how God works. Instead of that absolute, you-can-touch-it-you-can-feel-it certainty, we approach God and the fulfillment of God’s promise with hope. And as the Apostle Paul puts it so bluntly, hope is not certainty. I do not hope that which I know. Hope is about trust, and that means that hope includes an element of doubt, at least some small sprinkle of not-knowing. To have hope is about a yearning for a future reality that you don’t quite yet grasp.

Hope is, in fact, something viewed as essential to the Christian journey. In verse 24 of today’s reading, the New Revised Standard Version translation says that “in hope we were saved.” The NIV says “in this hope we were saved.” The King James says “by hope we were saved.” Somehow, our willingness to accept the unknowability of what God has intended for us...to accept it’s goodness but know that some things will have to be anticipated...that abiding hopefulness is an important part of our salvation.

Hope surfaces at other places in Romans, and it is woven up deeply with the fulfillment of the faithful life.

It’s that hope that we’ve got to embrace whenever we turn ourselves towards the future. For all of our planning and careful mapping out of every possible option before us, the future isn’t something that we can hold in our hands. We can try to take that good, hard look at our futures...but the reality of what lies before us is not known to us and can’t be known to us...until we get there.

That’s doubly true about what God has in store for us. Yes, we can’t touch it. Yes, we can’t feel it. But it’s not a product. It’s not a commodity. It’s not something we go out and buy. We can’t think of it that way, because that way of thinking has nothing to do with God.

Think of it, instead, as a present, a gift given to us by someone who loves us. Nothing ruins the joy of getting a gift like knowing exactly what it is beforehand.

So have hope. Don’t try to spoil the surprise.

Good Soil

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.13.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Last year, rather than continuing to mow our mostly unused back yard, I yielded to this itching vision I'd had of turning the yard into a wildflower meadow. Rather than spending twenty minutes of my life every single week spewing fumes and carbon into the air, I let the back grow. I also prepared and seeded several strategic patches with a mix of indigenous wildflowers. It was to be glorious, tall waving grass intermingled with speckles of reds and blues and golds, through which Bambi and Thumper and all their little forest friends could cavort in Technicolor splendor.

But I planted too late in the season, and the drought hit hard last year, and the whole project withered. I got maybe three flowers, two of which were clovers that would have come up anyway. Meh.

This year, I clung to that vision of our backyard as a rainbow riot of color. I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted my own little idyllic slice of springtime floral Eden. So I let it grow again. I did more research. I spent the better part of two Saturday afternoons turning the soil. I seeded earlier in the season with a selection of shade-tolerant flowers. I carefully monitored the patches to insure that they were adequately watered. I checked on the progress dotingly, looking every evening for signs of progress. And sure enough, it began. That beginning was certainly promising enough. Seedlings sprang up right on cue, a glorious splash of delicate green growth. I could see that vision of perfection rising on a thousand tiny shoots.

And then they just did nothing. They didn’t grow. They didn’t change. Weeks passed. Still just feeble looking shoots. More weeks passed. The grass grew just great, soaring up past the stalled seedlings. Eventually, four lonely little flowers blossomed, but even they quickly faded to nothing. The patches that I had cultivated and sweated over and seen in my mind's eye as lavishly painted with Columbine and Cornflower and Sweet Williams and Snapdragons and Poppies were...just...tall...grass.

Not enough sunlight, it seems. It was not to be.

Back in mid-June, I took the mower to it. I just fired up my Honda and plowed into the flowerless meadow, and the tall grass fell before me and the flowerless seedlings were churned into mulch beneath the whirling blades. It was all very satisfying. Very cathartic. I gave up on the idea of having wildflowers in the yard at all.

Earlier this month, I got ready to mow my front yard one morning. It’s a big flat patch. It gets a ton of sun. And to my great amazement and delight, I saw that under the bright light of morning it was a riot of little golden flowers and tiny white-pink clovers. All that work, all that labor, all that digging and turning and seeding and watering had yielded nothing. But where I’d put in no labor at all...and shoot, even mowing it down every week...the flowers came. Hard to understand.

Almost as hard to understand as what we hear from the lips of Christ this morning. This little teaching is called the Parable of the Sower. It involves the story of a man who goes out planting. He seems...well...a little careless with his seed. He sows it on a path, where the birds chow down on it. He sows it on rocky ground, and get blasted by the sun. He sows some among weeds, where they can’t grow. But some, seemingly at random, falls in good soil...and grows and grows into a truly impressive harvest.

Jesus delivers this message while bobbing in a little boat as a great crowd gathers to listen. We don’t hear the response of the crowds, but we do hear the response of the disciples.

In the section that has been conveniently edited out of today’s reading, the disciples come to Jesus right after he teaches, and say...um...hey...Jesus...why are you telling them stories? I’m not sure they get it. Can’t you make it a little easier for them? Can’t you make it a little easier for us? But there is a reason that Jesus does not give people five easy to understand practical lessons for their lives now. There’s a reason Jesus tells them this strange, obscure, confusing story.

That’s because Jesus views understanding as a gift from God. In order to get understanding from parables, you also need to be focused. Storytelling as a style of teaching is intentionally merciless. Rabbis and teachers of wisdom commonly used storytelling, because that way of teaching rewards good insightful students and punishes weak students. It’s not the friendliest technique for developing self-esteem...but then again, that’s not the point. If you’re perceptive and open, or care enough to ask, you might get it. If you’re lazy...well...then you won’t get it. And the rabbis didn’t care. It was your loss.

But though he was intentionally hard to understand, a significant part of the point that Jesus was making was that His teaching and the Good News it bore were not something that would be given only to a chosen few. It’s not just for those folks who are so obviously, flagrantly spiritual. It’s not for the folks who spend every waking moment in church, or every moment studying scripture. It’s right there for everyone. It’s given to the lazy. It’s given to the willfully ignorant. It’s given to the greedy. Everybody gets a shot at it.

And while ignorance or laziness or a willingness to spend more time in line for a 3G iPhone than you do trying to understand the reason for your existence can get in the way of receiving the Word, one thing that’s worth paying attention to is the “foolishness” of the sower. Who’s going to bother seeding their sidewalk? Who sows seeds on rocky ground? Who pitches seeds among weeds? Why not just plant the seeds in carefully furrowed and fertilized earth?

The answer lies, I think, in a sower who knows that sometimes the places that seem rocky and choked with dandelions can, in fact, produce. Just because something seems...at that moment...to be untenable doesn’t mean it can’t change. That it can’t become something different.

I Fought the Law, and The Law Won

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.06.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Reading: Romans 7: 15-25

What is sin? People seem to have so many different ways of interpreting it.

Among some folks who don’t believe in God at all, there’s the attitude that nothing is sin. Sin is an outmoded concept, a meaningless and judgmental nothing word. People who argue this tend to deeply embrace a shallowly postmodern attitude. That means that they believe that everything is relative, and things are only what you say them to be. If you believe that eating really, really good high quality dark chocolate is a sin...and Lord knows it feels that way...that’s your opinion. But it’s only an opinion, nothing more and nothing less. Nothing is truly “bad.” Nothing is truly “good.” These people tend not to be very happy, because for some reason, their lives become a shambles.

For those who embrace the crazy idea that some things are good and some things are bad, and who believe that in some way God is involved, sin can have a couple of different meanings.

There’s the attitude, held by some folks, that sin has only to do with injustice and oppression. It’s all the fault of society or cultural bigotries or poverty. We’re all depraved on account of we’re deprived. If someone does something wrong, it isn’t their fault in any way. It must be because their self-esteem was somehow harmed as a child, or they came out of a dysfunctional family, or they got a B minus instead of the A they knew they deserved on that paper. No one is ever responsible for anything. It’s all society’s fault...and God loves you no matter what.

There’s the attitude, held by other folks, that sin is all about how you personally have failed to stick to the Rules with a capital R. These people tend to have long lists of things that God hates. If you do any of those things, you sin. That includes eating the chocolate I mentioned before, watching any movie that isn’t rated G and produced by and for Christians, listening to any of that newfangled “rock’n roll” music. If you’re a woman, that might include owning any shoes that might not be described as “sensible,” if you’re a man, even thinking for a moment about Scarlett Johannsen. Oops. Sorry.

But as the Apostle Paul approaches it in the text today from his letter to the church at Rome, sin is something very different. It’s not nothing. It’s not all about social injustice. It’s also not about violating one of a list of rules. Sin is somehow woven up into who we are. It’s a law unto itself, a state of being that somehow violates the intent that God has for your life.

Paul brings it up in the letter to the church at Rome for several reasons. This letter is, after all, his great theological explanation of the law, our nature, and the necessity of faith for our salvation. In the seventh chapter of this book, the apostle gets into a long comparison of the law and sin. The law itself is the knowledge of what God desires, of what is necessary for us to live in harmony with God and with one another. Paul says this is a good thing, but that somehow we as human beings are radically set against the law. Though we know the goodness of what God asks of us, we find that we resist it. We know we shouldn’t covet, and yet for some reason we just can’t stop leafing through those catalogues. We know we should treat others with respect and openness, but when it comes right down to it, we just can’t seem to find it in ourselves to forgive.

Those struggles are ongoing, constant and seemingly futile. Fulfilling the demands of even the most basic of God’s laws seems utterly beyond us. We just can’t seem to accomplish it ourselves. When Paul describes his own struggles with sin, he describes it as not a list of things or a social thing, but somehow as a power, a basic flaw in all of us.

For those who don’t like Paul...and there are many modern Christians who’ve decided that somehow Paul represents everything that ‘s wrong with Christianity...what should be most striking about this little passage is just how Paul expresses this perspective on sin. He doesn’t describe sin in terms of the evil that all those narsty unbelievers commit. He doesn’t go into a long rant against those who somehow don’t meet his standards. He describes sin in himself, from his own deep personal sense of it. Unlike the hypocrites who are quick to judge everyone for being judgmental, Paul articulates sin in a way that shows first and foremost, he holds himself accountable.

Paul, who has a powerful sense of the presence of God’s Spirit and the central reality of God’s love, views sin as that thing that tears us apart, that brings death and sorrow and brokenness to our lives. It is the dark shadow that stands in opposition to the goodness that God intends for all of us. That goodness is spoken in Torah, the law of God, but sin defies it. What sin is defying is that law that heals the rifts between us and other human creatures. Sin is what shatters the relationships between us and God and between us and neighbor. Paul describes it as “of the flesh,” which doesn’t mean everything about our bodies is bad. Instead, “of the flesh” means oriented towards ourselves. At it’s heart, at it’s core, sin is selfishness, self-orientation, self-absorption, and self-serving.

If that’s what the Apostle teaches about sin, the logical next question is...how do we get around it? How can we manage to overcome sin?

From Paul’s teaching, overcoming sin is not just a matter of obeying the laws of God. It’s not like checking a box, or making sure you don’t drive more than 85 on the Beltway. That is the speed limit, isn’t it?

Well...um..I think it’s different for motorcycles.

The Apostle himself answers the question about overcoming sin in the next chapter, where he says sin can be overcome only:

“..if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.”

Overcoming sin is about turning away from yourself. It’s about allowing yourself to be...through faith...inwardly transformed by the Spirit of Christ. It is through seeking that, through seeking a way to break free of our desire to serve only ourselves, that we both come to understand the nature of sin and how to overcome it. We are not, as much as we’d like to claim it, a law in and of ourselves. In God’s creation, there is only the one law...the law that defines all things..and though we might struggle against it, it is ultimately not something we can overcome without destroying ourselves, those around us, and creation itself.

Dixie Cup

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda/Ingleside Retirement Community Chapel
06.29.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 10:40-42

As you get older, your memory of childhood starts to fragment into a string of impressions. Every moment of every day of your life isn’t stashed away. The odds are good that you have very little idea what you had for lunch on the third Tuesday after your seventh birthday. Instead, we keep those things that make up part of our story, imprinted into us as a part of who we are and why we are. People and places and moments that are somehow important stick with us longer, go into us deeper, and speak more to the moments that are to follow.

For some reason, I remember dixie cups, the bitty little ones that you can buy in stacks by the hundreds. These were nothing like the giant half-gallon buckets that they give you these days at McDonalds or Seven Eleven. This was a teeny bit of paper, scarcely larger than a little plastic communion cup, decorated with flowers or paisleys or Sesame street characters. It was just enough for you to get a refreshing mouthful of water.

In the bathroom of my grandparents houses, there were dispensers located strategically by the sink. They were always stocked up with an orderly column of those cups. As a guest in those houses, those cups stood like a regiment of hospitality, a little reminder that someone was thinking about you and the fact that you might wake in the night and be thirsty. Hello, said that regiment of containers, in the silent way of things set out with care. Are you thirsty? Why don’t you have a little drink?

We don’t forget those little moments of grace.

Matthew’s Gospel today talks about welcome, about receiving, and about being grateful. It’s an interesting thing to hear from Matthew, because Matthew is a Gospel that comes to us from a crucible of conflict. Many scholars of the Bible believe that Matthew is a later Gospel, one that comes from a period after the fall of Jerusalem. Even more important, Matthew seems to come to us from a time of tremendous conflict within the church. If, as most scholars think, this gospel reached it’s final written form towards the end of the first century, then Christians were facing a tremendous battle. They were struggling with the reality of this question: Can you be Christian and still be a Jew?

During the time of Christ, and in the earliest days of the church, Christianity was a Jewish movement. But at the time Matthew’s Gospel was written down, Judaism had just experienced a massive blow. After the Zealots had risen up in revolution to throw off Roman rule, Rome had come down hard. Six legions of crack troops were brought against the Jerusalem, and after a long and desperate siege, the city fell in the year 70. Not only were the fortifications destroyed, but the temple itself..rebuilt after the Babylonian destruction...was razed to the ground.

The Judaism of priests and sacrifice was no more. But the temple, ruled by what the Gospels called Saduccees, was no longer the only place you could be a Jew. Synagogues had risen up, places where people could gather and discuss Torah and live out a life in response to it. It was in those synagogues that Christianity engaged with Judaism, and it was in those synagogues that the early Christians were finding themselves increasingly not welcome. Their message was not received there.

The section I read this morning comes right after one of the most challenging sections of Christ’s teaching as recorded in this Gospel, in which Jesus...the prince of peace...says that he has come not to bring peace but a sword, setting families and friends against one another. The Gospel of Matthew was written for a people who were facing just such a struggle. A Christians, they were being cast out. They were engaged in deep struggles because of their newfound faith, and as they left, they found themselves often separated from loved ones who remained.

And so the question must have been asked, again and again...what is the fate of those “on the other side?” What happens to those who have shown grace to us, who have loved us, who have cared for us...but who do not profess this faith?

It’s a question that was asked back then, and it’s a question that is still asked.

This last week, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life came out with one of their vast temperature takings of the landscape of American faith. This recent survey of over 25,000 religious folk isn't just methodologically sound. It also gets at some of the underlying theological assumptions among the different religious traditions in the U.S. Among those questions was that very question. What happens to those who do not profess your faith?

What the researchers found was that 83% of the members of the pluralist former mainline churches...that’s folks like us Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians...feel that a person of another faith can be in right relationship with God and inherit eternal life. We're up there with the Buddhists (86%) and the Jews (82%) on that front.

More startling was the finding that fifty-nine percent of self-described evangelicals felt exactly the same way. That’s a significant majority. People...particularly people who have a strong sense of the grace and love of Christ...who “know him personally,” as it were...have a great deal of difficulty damning the graceful. Or the gentle. Or the hospitable.

Here in this little passage in Matthew, there are signs that the gospel writer was drawing out sayings of Jesus to say...well, perhaps Jesus doesn’t. Perhaps there is space in His grace to remember those who welcome him, or show kindness to him. It is Matthew, after all, who gives us the only detailed story of the last judgment in all of the teachings of Jesus. In that story, which comes to us in Matthew 25:31-46, it isn’t our church membership or our own conviction of our own salvation that counts. When the Son of Man divides up the sheep and the goats, the standard he’ll use is this: it’s how we received those in need. How we comforted those in time of need. It could be something as simple as offering up a tiny little cup of cool water to one who thirsts.

We don’t forget those moments of grace.

We have to trust that God doesn’t, either.