Pondering Fear to Love No. 5 (Part 2)
When we left the last post Pondering (Part 1) Fear to Love No. 4, I was pondering the question “are gay people going to hell?” The post wasn’t specifically about that question, but rather how to know if I was saved or not, because sin seemed for the longest time to be categorizable.
My checklist of sin or not sin was crumbling.
Throughout my childhood, an act was either a sin or it wasn’t. Being saved meant asking Jesus Christ to be your personal Lord and Savior and then not messing up moving forward. If you did mess up, you must ask for forgiveness to be safe/saved. But, as I grew in my life and faith and met new people in other denominations, my firm foundation was crumbling.
Today, as I sat down to write a reflection on the upcoming text from New Year’s Day, I realized it was Matthew 25: 31-46, one of my favorites. It felt like a blatant Holy Spirit moment that I use this text to continue on with the Pondering Part 1 post.
I remember a preacher using this text at Balls Creek Camp Meeting once. The point I remember is that goats are people who aren’t saved, and they will not have eternal life, which means they will burn in the fires of hell forever. FOREVER! So, get your butt to the front of the church and ask Jesus into your heart RIGHT NOW!
So then why in the world is this one of my favorite texts?
Because the second time I heard a sermon from this scripture text was while I was sitting in Honduras during my Cross-Cultural Experience for seminary. Dr. Dan Bell, a Methodist Professor at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, preached. We had spent nearly two weeks with the people of Honduras, living among them. I should share that the people of my home congregation paid most of my fee for this trip in support of my education and out of love for me.
We concluded our trip in a village, inside a row of villages, across from a large tract of land and a huge home guarded by men with machine guns. The landowner lived there, and the men of the village had mostly worked for him in the fields. The row of villages sat on rocky soil. As a farmer’s daughter, I could see that little would grow in the villages, but just across the road sat electricity, irrigation, and lush green crops. The landowner had taken all the good soil and resources. Our trip was guided by the Heifer Project International. They had come into the villages and offered the people a way to be self-sufficient.
To paint a picture for you, the children’s bellies were bloated from infections, the women had mostly lost their teeth because nursing their babies took the calcium that would have kept their teeth strong. There was hunger, and there were no men. Only women and children.
When Heifer came in to help, the villages accepted. When the men went back to work the next day on the plantation, they were shot or arrested for trespassing. Nothing had changed except that they said yes. The women left in the villages retracted their yes response to Heifer and the men who weren’t dead were released from prison and returned home and to work for the landowner – all accept one village.
They moved forward with Heifer in grief and fear.
They received their first animal, a cow. They learned how to process and store and grow corn on their rocky soil. As they learned Heifer gave them more and more to create self-sufficiency. Eventually, they began to thrive. They were excited to show us two things. First, the storage of corn and grain they had grown on their land and put up for the future. They showed us their honey and their animals. And Gloria the Heifer representative shared with us that this tiny village had begun tithing their baby animals, grain, and honey to their neighboring villages who were themselves starting to have hope. More and more villages were transitioning away from dependency on the landowner. Despite this joy, there were no men in this tiny village because those who were still alive and imprisoned had not been returned. It had been years at this point.
The second thing they were excited to show us was their church. Rich with color from hand-woven wall coverings and hand-built instruments, it was their most sacred space. It struck me that amid great suffering, abuse, death, and oppression the people of the village lifted their eyes to the Lord. They sang and gave thanks for all God had done for them. Standing in my place of privilege I felt in my gut a reality that I would never know the level of liberation they had in a God who saves them – and not in the selfish, keep me out of an eternity of hell way – but in the right here, right now, in this hell – we choose to find joy in knowing we are loved by the God of the least and the lost. I will never know that level of hope and gratitude for a Savior.
Then Dr. Bell preached on our last day together, and what I remember from that single sermon, in that sacred space was this… “Someday the goat in them will be gone. Their suffering and pain and oppression will come to an end and all that will be left is the sheep.” This was both a glimpse of the Kingdom and a moment where I hyper-focused on the phrase “the goat in them.”
So first, they weren’t goats – they had goat in them, but they also would have sheep left which means they have sheep in them too.
This gnawing truth began to take hold in my heart, and with each new layer of pondering my foundation of a checklist found new ways to crumble. There’s no checklist or chart. There is no sin column or not sin column.
We are not either sheep or goat.
We are at the same time both goat and sheep.
God does not separate us one from the other, God separates us from ourselves – our sinful nature.
Over the years, I feel like God continues to show and remind me that approaching a relationship with the Divine for the purposes of knowing right and wrong that I might be saved is self-serving and manipulative. In this text, the author of the Gospel of Matthew stays true to the theme of judgment, and with a faith view that is worried about me, myself, and my salvation, of course, I would work for a way to see myself as a sheep. The goats in Jesus’ telling of this eschatological discourse did the same.
Those on the right as referenced in the scripture (not a political reference), the sheep, heard from the King when he was hungry, they gave food. When he was thirsty drink, a stranger - welcome, naked – clothes, sick – care, and in prison – they visited. Their question was one of surprise and ignorance. They didn’t realize they had been serving Jesus. Instead, they were simply acting mercifully to those in need – the least and lost.
In contrast, those on the left, the goats, asked, “but when,” to look for an excuse. They were placing blame on Jesus for their inaction, in a sense saying, “but you didn’t show us it was you.”
It seems for Matthew, in this case, that judgment is not about a self-proclaiming acceptance of Jesus, but rather mercy is lived out in the here and how. Of course, we can’t get that right every time. Martin Luther talks about us being a saint and a sinner in all things we do. No single act is strictly saint or sinner. Even when we strive to help others we get some level of self-gratification out of it – we can’t help it. Luther defines a saint – a sheep – as a forgiven sinner – or for today – a forgiven goat.
I had been looking at scripture to decide what I had to do to be saved, and as I moved from fear to love, I began to see God as the subject of the verb. I may have moments of mercifulness toward others, but it isn’t about me. The road to heaven is not a sticker chart.
It is God who is merciful. It is God who gives food, drink, welcome, clothing, care, and companionship. It is God who sees us when we are at our lowest, who knows the goat of our hearts and sends the Son as the ultimate provider.
God took my two lists – my sin and not sin – and said, you don’t need the lists because in all things I see you – I love you – I forgive you – and I claim you. That means I am free to be merciful to others having experienced for myself the mercifulness of God. That means that my relationship with God doesn’t have to be built on fear or manipulation or law-abiding efforts.
Instead, I am free to feel imperfect gratitude and imperfectly respond to the world and myself mercifully. While I am grateful that I learned to ponder, and I am more grateful I learned to ponder the right questions. It didn’t matter that this new person in my life was gay – it mattered that they too were a child of God, sheep, and goat, claimed and loved. It meant that sin is not weighed on a scale. In everything, we are saint and sinner, and it isn’t about a single act that can be placed in a column on a list, but rather how God shows mercy. It means that even on my best days, I am forgiven – and so are you!
Today’s Scripture Lesson
Matthew 25:31-46
Connections to Mentions:
Heifer International: https://www.heifer.org/
Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary: https://www.lr.edu/campuses/ltss
Dr. Daniel M. Bell Jr: https://www.danielmbelljr.com