The End of All Things

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 11.23.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 25

This has been a mess of a week, craziness, the tumbling reality of being a Dad with two sons in multiple activities and a wife whose consulting business has her out there travelling.  There’ve been shows and swimming and gigs, mixed in with Session meetings and class preparations and the rest of life, and in the thick of it all.  So of course, this is the perfect month to try to be writing a novel.

It’s National Novel Writing Month again.  It rolls around every November, and for years I’d promised myself I’d finally get out some of those stories that were struggling to get out my head when the kids were young.  It’s a neat thing, run by a nonprofit organization that does everything in its power to help hopeful authors stop dreaming and actually make that dream a reality.

They provide online tools and advice, plus encouraging “you can do it” support from human beings who’ve actually published books.  That encouragement is important, because what they’re asking is that you write a fifty thousand word manuscript in thirty days.  It pans down to just under one thousand seven hundred words a day.  That’s the full written text of a sermon a day, every day, for thirty days.

One of the reasons, you can be sure, that this particular sermon references NaNoWriMo.  Nothing else quite felt right, including the entirely completed sermon I wrote that revolved around a completely insane video game called Goat Simulator.  Maybe next time I preach on this scripture.

Having done it last year and fallen just short of the fifty thousand word mark, I elected to take another swing at it this time around.  This time, there was something different.  I’d been writing bits and pieces of the story on and off over the last year.  I’d been figuring out characters, thinking about plot twists, trying to make the whole thing cohesive.  Bits and pieces of the it came out, and I’d dutifully write them down, like setting out the corner pieces of a jigsaw puzzle as you begin.

Back in August, I got a brainstorm.   There it was.  I could visualize it, see it, like it was playing out on the screen in front of me.  The end of my novel.  It had to end that way.

Only...it wasn’t written yet.  Here, I had the end, the final goal, those last few pages that bring the whole story to what felt like a soaring conclusion.  I knew where I was going, but I didn’t have a clue what the space between the end and the .  I didn’t know what it looked like, that journey.  I didn’t have any sense of most of it.

But there was the ending of my story, sitting there, like a beacon.  This is where you’re headed.  This is the point and goal, how the tale you’re telling comes to an end.

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.  This is also the only place in the Bible where Jesus right up and says: this is what it’s going to be like at the end.

Here in the final vignette in a sequence of stories that have brought us to the end of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew, though, he steps away from the familiar path that we’ve gotten used to as we’ve listened to him teach.  

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.  

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.

Instead, the measure is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting those who are sick or imprisoned.  Did you believe what I taught, Jesus asks, enough to have believed it with your whole life?  Was love of your neighbor something that lived for you, that breathed for you, that you didn’t just think with big thinky thoughts, but that was how you were towards even the most broken souls around you?

What isn’t this story?

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 something else, something else entirely, a laying out of a guiding future, an intent.

There’s a formal term for this casting out of a future, among people who care about the art of telling a story.    And no, that term isn’t “spoiler,” like when someone tells you exactly how that film is going to turn out.  We haaate spoilers.  Did you realize he was Keyser Soze?    You know, she’s really a man.  Like my favorite part was when he realized he’s totally a ghost himself.   Oh, c’mon, Jesus.  You totally ruined the ending, dude.

This story isn’t one that can be ruined by knowing the ending.  This is a different sort of story, a story that imbues life with purpose and intention.  In a story that defines us, that casts out our identity for us, knowing the end is called prolepsis, a “before taking.”  

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 how much, in those moments, do we really sense that they’re the end goal of our story?  How vividly do we see how vital that time is that we spend caring for others, bot individually and separately.   

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 purpose?

It’s what we have to hold in front of ourselves as we share together in the life and fellowship of this little community.  What’s the purpose of it?  What’s the reason we gather?

It’s to teach and to share with one another, as we strengthen each other in the journey together.  That’s the reason we give, it’s the reason we share, and it can be easy to miss in the humble nature of this time we spend together.

Here, an image of glory, of all of the nations, of Big Things Happening in Big Ways.  And here we are, teeny tiny, a little slip of a thing.  How do we place what we’re doing here together into the context of this moment, this end, this purpose?  How do we keep it from becoming little more than a distraction, as aimless and pointless as charging about a screen with a simulated goat?

Here, in front of us, we’re shown the value that defines everything we’re trying to do here together.  In this story, Jesus lays out the measure for our every action, for all that we do.  Does it show caring to the world?  Does it strengthen and encourage others and ourselves as we work together to show that caring, to strangers and to everyone we interact.

That purpose is the thing we’re asked to consider, here in the waning weeks of the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Fourteen.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN