Four times and we still don’t get it. When I give a message it is nice when people are complimentary.  I appreciate that.  However, my goal should not be that you like or agree with what I say, but that I say what you need to hear.  I hope I say what we both need to hear.  Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  I am very comfortable and hear very little from pulpits designed to make me feel uncomfortable.

Matthew 25:31-46

 Jesus said to his disciples: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’ And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

The last verse says, “And these will go off to eternal punishment.” Has God set up an eternal torture chamber? Is God a monster? Is God less compassionate and merciful than the average person on the street? When it comes to “hell fire and damnation” Matthew takes the cake.

Matthew 13:42 ^“and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew 10:28

²⁸ “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.  Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Did you ever think of it this way?

“If you do that again you are grounded for the rest of your life!”

Or, “Great.  You backed into our neighbor’s car. How many times have I told you to check the mirrors before you back out of the driveway?  Don’t ever ask to borrow the car again.”

 It is called hyperbole. We use it all the time.  Matthew is using hyperbole which is a rhetorical and literary technique where an author or speaker intentionally uses exaggeration and overstatement for emphasis and effect.

Matthew uses hyperbole a lot. 

Matthew 5:29-30.  If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

If you are going to interpret the hell literally, then you have to do that for the rest of the above section — which makes me wonder why there aren’t more blind, one-handed, fundamentalist, literalist Christians.  Maybe they are perfect?  I will not temper this next statement.  A literal interpretation is the least useful. It takes minimal thought and abuses the text.  But I get it.  If you can twist the text to end up with a God of violence, retribution and exclusion, then it gives you free rein to be the same. 

But we don’t want to throw out the symbolism of fire.   Scientist and theologian Ilia Delios said, “Real fire is destructive; throw yourself into a fire and you will be destroyed. God’s fire is destructive too, because it can swiftly eliminate all self-illusions, grandiose ideas, ego-inflation, and self-centeredness. Throw yourself into the spiritual fire of divine love, and everything you grasp for yourself will be destroyed until there is nothing left but the pure truth of yourself. “

Fire as a cleansing agent is a good metaphor. 

Back to the goats and sheep. The threat in the text is shouting to the reader, “This is really important and crucial.  Pay attention.” Hence Matthew’s use of hyperbole. To stress the point even more, the same verses are repeated four times which does not happen anywhere else in the gospels.  We better pay attention.

Nine of the ten commandments are “Thou shalt nots”.  The goats are not in trouble because of “Shalt not’s.”  They are in trouble because of “Thou shalt didn’t’s”.  The goats’ sins are sins of omission.

Go to church, pray, be nice  —  I am doing that rather well, thank you very much.  Feed the hungry!  What is that supposed to mean?  I give money to Catholic Charities and helped with grocery rescue.  Was that enough, or am I supposed to hand out sandwiches to the homeless?  I have never visited anyone in prison.  I came across information where you can get set up to be a pen pal to an inmate.  How about I just pray for the incarcerated.  Good enough?

Have you ever asked yourself this question?  “Am I really that much different than the nice atheist fellow down the street?  Am I a cruise-control Christian?”  

Matthew 5:11. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” 

Matthew 10:28. “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannnot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

If I was accused of being a follower of Christ could they find enough evidence to convict me? Notice I did not say believer.  I said follower.  I am saying walking the talk.

Revelation 3:15-18 “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm-neither hot nor cold-I am about to vomit you out of my mouth.” 

Tepid Christianity changes nothing.  It just maintains the status quo which by the way is working very nicely for me.  I don’t want to change.  Do you?

January 11, 1927 “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.” In these words of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. J.H. Holmes summed up the Indian leader’s view of Christianity in a recent interview with a CRIMSON reporter. Dr. Holmes, professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College and a member of the Society of Friends, has just completed a tour around the world, during which he spent some time in India. He had several opportunities of conversing with Gandhi. He was present at the meeting of the All-Indian Congress and had the honor of being the only westerner ever allowed to speak from their platform.

Continuing in Gandhi’s words, “I believe in the teachings of Christ, but you on the other side of the world do not. I read the Bible faithfully and see little in Christendom that those who profess faith pretend to see.

“The Christians above all others are seeking after wealth. Their aim is to be rich at the expense of their neighbors. They come among aliens to exploit them for their own good and cheat them to do so. Their prosperity is far more essential to them than the life, liberty, and happiness of others.

“The Christians are the most warlike people.” 

Me: 100 years later and not much has changed.

When speaking of the sheep and the goats, Jesus does not say, “Whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, was as if you did for me.” He says, “Whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.” The connection is total and direct. There is no gap. The face of the poor, the stranger, the hungry, the sick, the naked, thirsty and imprisoned is the face of Christ. The pain and suffering of the poor, the stranger, the hungry, the sick, the naked, thirsty and imprisoned is the pain of Christ. Christ is not up there. Christ is right here, right now in the flesh of our brothers and sisters.  WE ARE THE BODY OF CHRIST. The Palestinians, the Israelis, the Ukrainians and the Russians are the body of Christ. The immigrants on the southern border are the body of Christ.

If you knew that Jesus had come back and was sitting on a Sprague sidewalk homeless and hungry, you would not hesitate to go pick him up, take him home, feed and house him.  Well, he is sitting on Sprague.  How has so much of Christianity gotten it so wrong? Young people are not bailing on Christianity because of the influence of secular humanism.  They are bailing because of Christian hypocrisy gone rampant.  True Christianity has not been tried and found wanting.  It has never been tried.

In the past Christians burnt people at the stake because their beliefs were wrong.  The church has never punished anyone because they didn’t give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked.

People that fight for the rights of the LGBTQ are ostracized from their church community.  I doubt the same community has ostracized a member because they did not care for the ill or visit prisoners.  The Catholic hierarchy teaches that divorcees that remarry without an annulment are sinners, and the second marriage is considered adulterous. However, Catholics in their first marriage that are greedy, degrade the poor, want more people jailed and the homeless shipped to Death Valley are good to go.  Why do we get uptight about the non-essentials and down loose about the essentials? Why? Because it is easier.  We can puff up our chests with our sense of moral superiority. I do it and it is nothing but bovine excrement. 

Next time someone asks you if you are a Christian, before responding ask yourself this.  How many coats do I have in my closet?  If it is more than two, then think twice about saying, “Yes, I am a Christian.”  Luke 3:11. If you have two coats give one to the poor.  If you have food share it with the hungry.”

I try to judge no one.  I do not know where you are on your path of spirituality.  Some of my message has been harsh, but mediocrity doesn’t cut it.  The problem is not out there.  It is in here.   If you want to see tepid Christianity, you need look no further than me.

Now here is how we get off the hook, kind of.  In the Revelation verse I cited, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm-neither hot nor cold-I am about to vomit you out of my mouth.”  The community John of Patmos is writing to is under heavy persecution.  Declare Caesar as Lord or you will be killed.   Some Christians are even caving and squealing on their brothers and sisters. Times are tough.  You have to make a definite choice.  John is using hyperbole.

But does God really want to vomit us out of his mouth?  I don’t think so.  We are loved beyond belief. Our names are written in the palm of God’s hand.  Decide to give all you have away and go to Ecuador to be a missionary.  God will not love you more.  Decide to chuck it all, ruthlessly accumulate as much wealth as possible and become mean-spirited.  God will not love you any less.  Unless my last two statements were true, then it is not love.  It is a transaction.  Quid pro Quo.  Do this to get that.  For love to be love, it has to be unconditional.

However, I can’t help but think that the Divine mystery carries a profound sense of sadness.  Sad that her comfortable children that could do so much to alleviate the suffering of her other children are doing nothing. So much potential and here we are, like 40 year-olds living at home, mooching off our parents, eating pizza and playing video games in the basement.

Two weeks ago at the end of the meeting, an announcement was made that someone was in the lobby that needed gas.  Last week Ken made the announcement that a member needed assistance helping a homeless family.  I trust that the response was overwhelming. I hope that I have been preaching to the choir.

This message was given to Spokane Friends by John Kinney during Sunday morning worship on March 10, 2024.

I

The last time I stood up here in front of you, I used the title “Whose fault is it?”  I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts of a philosopher and anthropologist and theologian all wrapped up in one person, whose name was Rene Girard.  He was born in France in 1923,  but he came over to the United States when he was 25 to do his PhD at Indiana University.  After that he had a teaching career in French language and literature that took him to Duke University, to Bryn Mawr, then to Johns Hopkins and finally ended up at Stanford when he was 58 years old and he stayed there until he retired from academia in 1995 and died in 2015, eight years short of living 100 years.   During his career he wrote more than 30 books in all sorts of different fields – but he was probably most famous for his diagnosis of the human condition and what the life of Jesus tells us about God.  To remind you where we got to a month ago:

First, Girard asks, Why are we such a violent species?  Because we want what other people want just because someone else has them – things we don’t need and never even thought of until we saw that someone else wanted them.    Here’s James 4: the first two verses:  “Those conflicts and disputes among you,,, where do they come from?  Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.” 

Second, Girard asks, How do feel safe in such a violent world?  We blame someone else – it’s their fault.  The beginning of “us” versus “them”.  Scapegoating.    We pick a minority group or a foreign group and say “it’s all their fault” and so we keep peace with each other, because we have a common enemy that we can direct our violence toward.

And it affects our theology, also.  Our God is a violent God – he  punishes us for our original sin of violence.  He is a God of justice and he demands that someone has to pay for our violence.  demands payment for all this violence in the world.  Someone has to pay.  So we have pagan sacrifices, Salem witch trials, and all those Biblical stories where God is vengeful and will punish those “others,” or even us, unless someone protects us from the wrath of God.  And from around the tenth century onward, we have adopted Anslem’s notion that Jesus is the one who pays the price for our sins.  It works pretty well, doesn’t it?

But, says Girard, Jesus’s life is a totally non-violent life, and he shows us a non-violent God.  It was our violence that killed Jesus, and God had to bring him back to life again to show us how wrong we were about a violent God,  And now we can  understand that God loves us, God forgives us, and Jesus shows us how to live together as children of a loving God.  We don’t have to imitate other people by wanting what they want. We have a new person to imitate, the one that imitates God and shows us what God is like and how we should be living in the world God created.

And that’s where we left it a month ago.   And historically, it seemed to be working pretty well – early Christians were peaceful, they were known for loving each other.  They were thrown to lions rather than fight back when persecuted. Some historians think that things went wrong when Constantine conflated Christianity with military power.  So then we could go to war and return to violence, and God is on our side this time. And we have the Crusades – we are  back to a violent God who punishes his enemies,  and so way down here in the 21^st century, churches are condemning people to hell because they don’t have the right beliefs and God is going to punish them, or we are going to punish them in God’s name. And this notion of God is why some of us left the churches of our childhood.

 But we study the life of Jesus, vindicated by God’s resurrection of him, and we discover that God is kind, merciful, like a good parent.  We learn that the answer to violence is forgiveness –  and we want to imitate his way of life, and in so doing we become transformed into non-violent people who love even the unlovable people of our own time and place. And as we draw more and more “others” into our circle of love, the world itself becomes transformed.   That is, if we don’t destroy ourselves first. The great fear of nuclear war in the mid-twentieth century was gradually replaced by concern for how we are devastating our environment. Now the situations in the Middle East and between Russian and Ukraine, many people again are fearful of nuclear war. And so the gospel does not say everything will end well; there is no way to guarantee that the circle of love will grow fast enough to outrun the violence of our species in general.  What we do know that Christ promised to with us till the end of the Age, even if we bring it to an end ourselves.

Finally we get to the apocalypse of my title for today.  So what do we mean by apocalypse?

The Dictionary says

1. Apocalypse  is  the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the Biblical book of Revelation, and
2. It has also come to mean an  event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale, e.g., “a stock market apocalypse”

Some churches have been founded on and continue to exist by peddling the notion of God coming in great wrath – the so-called Battle of Armegeddon. They predict when it will happen and how it will happen and what the mark of the Beast is and how God will separate the sheep from the goats,  The harvester lets the weeds grow along with the good grain because when it’s time to reap, he will keep the good grain and throw the rest into the fire.  In Jesus time, they were thinking of a fire such as existed at the dump outside the city walls, where refuse was thrown, and the fire just kept going as long as people added fuel to it. (I don’t recall that there was anything that didn’t burn up in that fire.)

Girard says we need to find a new way to interpret the last book in the New Testament. First remember that Revelation uses the imagery of its day.  Suppose an archeologist of the future who doesn’t know about our sports teams finds a document that says “Bears rip Eagles to shreds.” What would they make of that?   Or they find pictures (cartoons) of an Elephant and a Donkey fighting”. 

So we don’t know what the Riders of the Apocalypse means, be we have chosen to see it as God attacking us. Perhaps it doesn’t mean that. Maybe it means that we have no protection against our own violence until we learn to love each other.

The White horse rider carries a bow, indicating the military – the military is not going to save us from our own violence.

The second rider takes away our peace may mean that if peace was based on the military, that peace was an illusion.

The rider of the Black horse carries scales, suggesting weighing and measuring things. This might indicate the economy. Necessities become so expensive that many people living in poverty die of starvation. Capitalism is a system in which others become our competitors, and the winners are the ones who accumulates the most wealth and possessions. The economy cannot protect us from our violence.

The rider of the Pale Horse traditionally represents disease, natural accidents.  In Jesus’s day, Caesar brings peace (pax Romana, the Roman Empire), but can he provide peace from natural disasters, disease, fire, animal attacks, things that can also threaten our peace and lead to violence?

The significance of the riders may be that humanity realizes the “cracks” in our military, political, economic systems.  God is not threatening us with war, disease, famine, death, He is showing us that chaos can take over, and we could easily be the victims of our own violence.  Christ frees us from violence by giving us a real picture of God and showing us that  love and forgiveness are what we can now imitate and be transformed by, as we try to follow the example of Jesus, who said as he died, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

Remember when Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed ?  So tiny, yet look what happens. When it is planted it grows quickly to over nine feet tall and provides sanctuary for birds. So the Kingdom of God may start out tiny, but it can grow till all humans will be liberated,  because God welcomes everyone and God is the one bringing it about.

We live in this very polarized world with capitalism as our economic base – a  system based on us wanting to have more and more things that we don’t need and that don’t make us happy. It encourages us to see everyone else as our competitor, out to take advantage of us. The winners are the ones who accumulate the most wealth and possessions. This is not saving us from violence.

So what will we turn to next? The temptation (for me at least) is politics, but we must not raise up another group to hate. The only way to escape is to refuse to act violently against anyone –we must give ourselves over to non-violent direct action.    And our salvation is that God is helping us along, step by step, all the way.  We are called to live and continue to grow — and we are to give up asking God to end the world.  The gospel does not guarantee a happy ending to history.  It simply presents Humanity with two options; either imitate Christ, giving up all violence, or run the risk of self-destruction (Warren 2013, p.334).  

Remember that Scripture tells us that the best end to the story is that all nations will come to worship God.  We have been given a chance to escape our own violence and see past it to everything good God has given us.  So we come to this room each week to be encouraged by God and by each other to go out into our world and widen the boundaries of our ability to love and forgive and thus bring in the Kingdom of God.

This message was given to Spokane Friends by Lois Kieffaber during Sunday morning worship on March 3, 2024.

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