Home    Theology    History    Homilies    Newsletters    Events    Pictures    Staff    Contact Us    Links	The Best Seats In The House November 20, 2005 Text: Matthew 25: 31-46 This particular Sunday has always been a liturgical enigma, a unique combination of celebrations. In the church universal, this is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the celebration of Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday, where we celebrate the culmination of Christ’s return. Our gospel lesson is a key text in this celebration because of its vivid depiction of the time to come. In this particular church, this Sunday has always been Memorial Sunday, our version of All Saints’ Day/Totenfest which is celebrated earlier in other churches. If you combine these two celebrations and then throw in Thanksgiving, which we also take time to celebrate this Sunday, you have a liturgical traffic jam. When I first became Pastor back in the olden days of 1992, I didn’t know what to make of this combination but I saw it as a tradition to which you adjust. Over the years, I’ve grown older (not open to debate) and, hopefully, wiser (open to much debate). But I’ve slowly managed to discover how to explore the connections between all these celebrations. For example, aren’t we thankful for the lives and blessings of the saints? Don’t we believe the saints have already observed the scene described in Matthew today? Do we not anticipate with thanksgiving the life in Christ yet to come? In addition, two years ago, I had an experience that helped me connect the dots between these various liturgical events. Two years ago, on the evening of Memorial Sunday, I called my mother had a disjointed conversation where we even talked about funerals. That Tuesday she saw her doctor who immediately sent her to the hospital where they discovered that, ten days earlier, she’d suffered a heart attack and did not know it. Things got better very briefly and then got worse even more quickly and there was no time to travel back east. So I sat on Thanksgiving morning with my partner Vince absentmindedly watching, of all things, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, while we waited for THE phone call. Things moved quickly as they do in such situations. People were called, online plane reservations were made and, best of all, later that day, my friend Jeff Richards – our wonderful musician – came over with a full Thanksgiving meal (turkey and all the trimmings) that Vincent and I, in the emotional rush of the day, weren’t able to enjoy at his house but which sustained us later in the day. That Monday, I discovered the great skills of the Dyer-Lake Funeral Home. As pastor of this church I am well acquainted with the need for skilled funeral home staff, having seen such skill in action at Lake View Funeral Home (ably headed by our own Ray Hallowell). They responded with grace and healing and, best of all, with utmost efficiency and skill - and my experience gave me another way to connect the liturgical dots for this Sunday. The visitation and the funeral for my mother took place in her church, the Evangelical Covenant Church of Attleboro, Massachusetts. The visitation took place in the church parlor and the funeral – where my brother the organist played and I, the pastor and singer, sang – took place in the sanctuary. The location was appropriate because my mother was a faithful minister in that church. She was a minister of hospitality and her major ministry was the funeral collation. In Chicago, we have the Edelweiss and White Eagle Restaurants where families may gather to eat after the funeral but, at the Covenant Church in Attleboro, they had the ministry of the funeral collation. My mother organized the table spread - a thanksgiving feast, if you will - that family and friends could share after returning from the cemetery. She made the phone calls to solicit donations for the table , made the coffee, set the table and had things ready at the right moment. (My mother will come back to haunt me if I don’t add that she did not minister alone and if I did not take a second to thank her colleague in ministry, Marge Bailey!) It was behind-the-scenes ministry made wonderfully visible at the right moment. Because of this ministry, the staff of the funeral home present at the church for my mother’s visitation and funeral knew who my mother was: she was the woman in the kitchen, who, while they prepared the church for past funerals, asked them – the ones there to serve - if they wanted to be served, perhaps a cup of coffee or something to eat while they did their work. She was “the coffee lady.” The Saints of the Church. A Service of Thanksgiving. Ministry for the service to Christ. All together in one moment in the church. “When was it, Lord, when you were hungry and I gave you something to eat?” Perhaps it was when I was preparing to serve and you asked me if I needed sustenance. And so, as you served the least of these my children, so you served me.” Two brief notes about our gospel selection for today in the midst of our liturgical bounty. First, please notice the element of surprise in the gospel message. “When was it, Lord?” the righteous ask, “At what time, did we give you – CHRIST – something to eat, something to wear, needed medical assistance, shelter, comfort in prison? We don’t remember serving you.” They were surprised because love – the ministry of love in Christ’s name – is unplanned; rather, it is, simply, lived out. People act in love as a result of who they are. The saints who act in love are not always reminding us of how saintly they are because they’re busy living out their love in action. I think my mother too would be surprised to find her work called a ministry. The gospel story is about the surprise (yes, the surprise!) and the joy (yes, the joy!) of seeing Christ in those we serve. (A brief reminder here that saintly does not equal perfect. Perhaps we can even laugh a bit today at how sometimes “unsaintly” the saints were.) Second, please notice how this story illustrates the fragility of the metaphor we sometimes use too glibly in the church, the metaphor/image of the Body of Christ. We use this image to describe the church because we want to get away from the hierarchical images the world foists on us, such as the notion of “the survival of only the fittest.” We use the image of the Body of Christ because we see the interdependence of the very different parts of the body, how they work together to do the work they were called, as members of the Body of Christ, to do in Christ’s name – the ministry of service, i.e. the feeding and the clothing and the shelter and comfort and the compassion for those children of Christ. The fragility of the Body of Christ is also seen in the constant need for the ministries of caring described in Matthew’s text. All of the needs mentioned in this ancient text are still needs today! Life in the Body of Christ combines both the element of surprise and the element of fragility. We serve because we see Christ in others even as we see the uniqueness of those whom we serve in Christ’s name. We see in action how the interdependency is fraught with fragility. The good news – both for the surprise and the fragility – is that the mystery of Christ transforms us and the body is changed and we become Christ’s body. This is the mystery and the celebration of today, whether you celebrate it as Memorial Sunday, Reign of Christ Sunday and/or Thanksgiving Sunday. Let us praise the God who makes it so, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.