Poolesville Presbyterian Church
11.20.11; Rev. David Williams
Before we begin...I have a confession to make.
I am, and have always been, a gamer. I like gaming, and by “gaming” I don’t mean someone who participates in the “gaming” industry, that peculiar institution that involves you giving someone money so that you can experience the thrill of losing money, over and over and over again. I never did understand the appeal in that kind of game. It used to be called “gambling,” of course, before they decided to hide the “B” and the “L,” because I suppose they thought doing so would hide away the fact that it’s BL.
No, I play video games. I have since I was a young lad, and that first Atari 2600 arrived one Christmas after a sustained campaign of cajoling and whimpering. It filled my fallow tween hours with Combat, and Centipede, and PacMan, and Star Raiders. I once played Space Invaders for such a prolonged period that when I went to sleep that night, I found that when I closed my eyes, I could still see the game cranking away. That was strange, but stranger still, I found I could control it. Must have inadvertently downloaded it, I guess.
Whichever way, that Atari was the latest and greatest technological advancement, providing cutting edge entertainment through the raw processing power of its four kilobyte chip. Given that a Word Document that contains only the number 4 and the letter K is 15 kilobytes, things have clearly come a ways since then.
Having gamed for over three decades, across several dozen different platforms, I’ve watched the medium evolve. One of the most striking changes in the last few years is the introduction of systems of ethics and morality into the virtual world in which you’re gaming. The first game to do this well arrived about a decade ago. It was called Fable, and you played a young man growing up in a place called Albion. How you grew up, however, depended on you. As a child, you could help others, run errands, find lost cats, and stop bullies from hurting other children. Or, if you so chose, you could steal things, intimidate other children into obeying you and giving you stuff, and punt chickens down the street. That last one was rather tempting, particularly given that the game kept track of your chicken-kicking skills.
As you grew into adulthood in the game, those choices continued. You could choose to be kind and giving and noble, in which case everyone would be overjoyed to see you, villagers would applaud your arrival, and you’d eventually start glowing just a little bit, as a trail of butterflies and small tweeting birds followed you. Alternately, you could be cruel and selfish and vicious, in which case you’d grow horns, people would cower or flee in terror at your arrival, and the only things flying around you would be biting flies and lobbyists.
It was interesting, because it meant that the way in which you acted had a direct influence on the way in which the game played. This went well beyond just shooting something and having it blow up, or jumping over something. The dynamics of the world changed, depending on your ethical choices.
But those choices were almost entirely binary. There was the good path. There was the bad path. Everything was nice and neat and clear, without confusion, without greyscale. There’s good, and there’s evil, and there’s a nice little gauge at the upper left of the screen that lets you know how you’re doing.
But in non-virtual life? Well, life out here in the meatspace world tends to be a bit more challenging. Once you get out of a realm created in binary, things stop being binary.
That’s one of the biggest challenges, I think, in trying to wrap our heads around the story that Jesus tells in Matthew’s Gospel today. This particular story is unique to Matthew. None of the other three Gospels contain it. It is also the only place in any of the Gospels where Jesus explicitly describes what will happen at the conclusion of all things. When Jesus speaks of the Reign of God, he almost always does so using poetry, metaphor, and storytelling. These are forms of teaching that require us to use our insights and imagination, and that don’t lend themselves to being taken literally.
Here in the final story of a sequence of stories that have brought us to the end of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew, though, he steps away from that approach. This is not a parable, a story told to speak to a meaning beyond the story. It is not an allegory, in which every thing in the story acts as a symbolic stand-in for some other thing. It’s just a description, a recounting...or, I suppose, a “precounting”...of how things are going to wrap up.
It’s a pretty classic image, with the Son of Man on the throne of glory, surrounded by angels and suffused in the sort of light you typically see in a Steven Spielberg film. This is the big cosmic Sorting Hat moment, when the lives of every single human being from every single nation are measured against the only standard that counts.
It appears, as we read it, to be something of a binary process. The good go on the right hand, in the sheep line. The not-good? They go in the goat line. The sheep are the righteous, the goats, the unrighteous.
Figuring out the difference should be a simple thing. All the Son of Man needs to do is check whether you’re a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church (USA), right? Oh, and whether you’ve gotten your generous pledge in for the next year.
But when all those nervous Methodists and Episcopalians and Buddhists get to the front of the line, we find that the judgment call is measured by standards that are somewhat different from those we might otherwise expect.
For all of the really amazing amount of energy Christians have spent arguing about theological and doctrinal issues over the last 2,000 years, there’s no doctrinal multiple choice test administered. There is also no reference, much to the befuddlement of many followers of Jesus, to whether or not you’ve been a church going Christian or accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
Instead, the measure is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting those who are sick or imprisoned. Done it? Then you’re set. Somehow managed not to get around to it? Then things aren’t looking so good for you.
It’s a pretty simple measure, but one that we might, upon some reflection, struggle with a bit. How does that work?
Have we done things that are good? Have we cared for those in need, and given a kind word to those who were lost or hurting? I’m pretty sure we’ve all done that here and there, more or less.
But life is typically not as straightforward as the drop-down conversation menu in a game, in which you can either give a hungry man some bread or kick him.
There are times we give of ourselves, but not fully. There are times we are good, but not wholly. We might give, but feel a tinge of resentment. We might pull away, failing to give as much as we could. We might be meeting one need, but failing to meet another. That’s the reality in which we live. How does this vision of how things are measured connect with our deeply greyscale reality?
Here, I think it’s worth keeping a couple of things in mind.
First, that our world is most often not black and white is not an excuse for inaction or paralysis. Jesus presents us with a living or dying edge, that place in ourselves where we are daily, moment by moment, given the choice to live out grace or live out selfishness. That choice is not a binary one, an either/or, a one or a zero. We don’t live in two dimensional space, after all.
But we are day by day, hour by hour, given the freedom to move closer towards being that soul that we were created to be. We are given to grow deeper in grace, richer in patience, freer with mercy. We can speak a kind word about that soul, instead of a bitter one. We can take a moment for silence, to listen for God, to hear the other. And we can choose to use our energies, our life, in ways that bring more light into the world. That is true wherever we are.
Second, while our lives may be painted in a shade of grey, we have a grasp of what is expected of us, wherever we find ourselves in our own development as spiritual and ethical persons. We know what is expected of us. We are shown, with clarity, that we are to deepen our commitment to love, mercy, justice, and grace. That is true for churches, which need to take the care of others...the last, the least, the lost...as a significant and visible priority. That is true for ourselves as individuals, as well. Wherever we are, we know how to lean more deeply into that reality. And in doing so, reality itself is changed, as is our relationship to it.
That’s a meaningful goal. It’s the goal of the Reign of Christ. This life is not, after all, a game. Live it, and inherit that grace that He intended for all of us. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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