“Then the righteous will
answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty
and give thee drink?” St. Matthew 25:37
“Love
God. Love your neighbor. Change the World.” For some years this was the official tagline
of the Episcopal Church, the slogan you would see on the denominational
website, the mantra repeated by the Presiding Bishop at official gatherings. Under the leadership of our current presiding
bishop, Michael Curry, the new tagline is, “The Jesus Movement.” But the
“change the world” language does get trotted out from time to time. It has an enduring to stir people’s hearts
and to get them thinking big about the implications of following Jesus Christ
in the life of the Church.
Some of you
will know that Fr. Mac and I do a fair amount of writing for The Living
Church’s Covenant blog, and this week
there was a compelling article by our friend Dan Martins, the Bishop of
Springfield, about this slogan, “Love God.
Love your neighbor. Change the
World.[1]” Bishops Martins acknowledged, “It’s catchy,
it’s memorable, and you can’t really argue with it without sounding hopelessly
curmudgeonly.”
But Bishop
Martins also challenged at least one common interpretation of the idea that the
church’s responsibility is to “change the world.” Public worship, evangelism, prayer and Bible
study, forming the faith of young people—all the other things that the church
does--according to this interpretation, are ultimately instrumental means
towards the ultimate goal of social change.
According this view, he suggests, “the prize on which we are to keep our
collective eye is a completely just society, yielding peace throughout the
world.”
This view
lines up pretty squarely with the agenda of the Social Gospel, an important
movement within American Protestantism that began in the mid-nineteenth
century. Social Gospel leaders brought
rhetorical power, social influence and the tools of scientific planning to
tackle a series of deep public injustices.
They founded thousands of relief organizations and lobbied for new laws,
with the New Testament in one hand and reams of social statistics in the
other. They had enormous confidence
about the ability of religiously motivated people to make true and lasting
change. Indeed, many of the relief
programs in our great cities that continue to feed the hungry, clothe the naked
and house the homeless can trace their origins to an earnest Congregationalist
or Methodist minister (occasionally even an Episcopalian) fired with the energy
of the Social Gospel.
William
Blake’s “Jerusalem” functioned as an anthem for the movement in England, and
gives a good taste of its universal spirit.
It famously closed:
I
will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor
shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till
we have built Jerusalem,
In
Englands green & pleasant Land.
The
breathless passion for righting deep-seated injustice and ancient wrongs is
quite moving (especially when sung to Sir Hubert Parry’s stirring tune). You
can sense in it the determination and the confidence that made some great
saints and gave to many more a sense of common purpose in a deeply changing
society.
Could it,
though, be a bit too confident and
determined? Could it be a bit too
certain of having the plans figured out already, with just the right amount of
skill and strength to do it all in a generation?
The
theological temptation of the Social Gospel is to slide too easily into
Pelagianism, the false belief that human character and human society can be
perfected by our effort alone, without any need for God’s grace. Pelagianism is arrogant, overestimating human
skill and integrity. It also never quite
reaches its goals, running aground on the hard rocks of folly, sin and
death. The Social Gospel was deeply
influential in many places, but Denver, Seattle and Milwaukee never quite
became the new Jerusalem.
Today’s
Gospel lesson was a great favorite among the leaders of the Social Gospel
movement. In this well-known parable of
the Last Judgment, Christ highly praises services rendered to the poor and
needy. He stands in the long tradition
of Israel’s prophets. In messages like
today’s Old Testament lesson, they emphasized that those given authority would
be judged on the basis of their just treatment of the poor and vulnerable.
Jesus tells
us here that He stands in the midst of our dealings with those who suffer. When we feed the hungry, clothe the naked,
visit the sick we are ministering directly to Him whom we love above all. This kind of work expresses the new life of
loving generosity that He has established among His people. He promises the greatest possible reward for it—an
honorable place at His right hand, and eternal life in His kingdom.
But what
strikes me as I read the parable is how surprised the sheep are when the great
king singles them out for commendation.
“When did we see you?” they ask Him.
Were you really there when we were feeding the hungry and giving the
homeless a place to sleep and visiting the poor fellow in prison? These sheep, they don’t really sound like
people who are confident that they know how to change the world. If they have already drafted the plans for the
new Jerusalem and resolved not to “cease from mental fight,” they don’t show it
very clearly.
Did they
think they were changing the world in those acts of mercy? Somehow, I doubt it, at least most of the
time. They are humble tasks, after all. Visiting the sick, clothing the naked—these
are simple duties, likely to go completely unnoticed by the world. In his sermon on the passage, St. John
Chrysostom calls them “light things.”
Because the tasks are expected of all, they are easy to fulfill. The great preacher added, “He said not,
"I was in prison," and ye did not set me free, but, and "ye
visited me not. Also, His hunger
required no costly dainties, but necessary food. [2]”
Perhaps also
they are surprised, because there’s no great sense of accomplishment that comes
with these kinds of tasks. You go to a
sick person’s bed, and there’s so little you can actually do. You feed a homeless person one day, but as
you walk away, you can guess he’ll be waiting for another meal tomorrow. I’ve known a few people who have given
themselves completely to the kind of ministry that Jesus praises in this
parable. Most days, they really don’t
feel like they are changing the world.
They are sometimes discouraged and often exhausted. They run up against mental illness and racism,
a culture of generational poverty, habitual
cruelty, corrupted social systems: the kinds of things well-meaning people
can’t master.
But they They
can be kind. They can soothe the pain a
bit. But they don’t claim to a solution
to hand. And maybe that’s a good
thing. Bishop Martins put it this way: “We’re
more like a Tylenol to the world’s headache, taking the edge off the pain, than
we are a surgical procedure that permanently fixes the problem. God will do the
heavy lifting, in his way and in his time.”
For me, at
least, that gets the balance right.
Jesus is a great king. He began
to change the world when He broke the power of sin and death at the Cross. And he will transform and fulfill the world
completely, when He returns in His royal power at the end of time. In his kingdom, there is perfect justice and
all are sustained with what they need.
He will cleanse the world of sickness and corruption and we will all
live in peace and joy. He promises a
Jerusalem, but its founder and builder is God,[3]
and it descends from heaven,[4]
our true eternal home.
That’s not
to say that we shouldn’t work to enact good policies, and that God doesn’t
bless good works undertaken to help people turn their lives around. There are good theological reasons for
faith-based advocacy. Some of you may
have power to change some aspect of the life of the world in a significant way,
and God surely expects you to use that power faithfully.
But remember
that the work Jesus praises most highly praises are those ways we administer
“Tylenol to the world’s headaches.” He
wants us to get our hands dirty, to turn up even when it seems pointless, to
step into that uncomfortable but sacred place alongside another in his or her
suffering. It doesn’t feel like changing
the world. But He is there, ready to
meet us, our King present in “the least of these.”
No comments:
Post a Comment