It was an incredibly busy day at the office.
Tom heard his cell phone ring when he was in a meeting at 3 p.m. but he let it ring. “She knows not to bother me at the office,” he thought. By four o’clock, he was swept up in a conflict that was about to ruin a delicate business deal. He heard the phone again but did not even check the number. The urgency of what he was doing meant that they could wait. After all, he was making a living for his family.
He had to follow the meeting up with some documentation, emailing colleagues, going over the events, sending out his last thoughts. He left the office at 6:30 p.m. and got on his cell phone in the car. He called his wife, noting that she had tried him five times throughout the day. No answer.
He pulled into the driveway about ten minutes before 7 p.m. The lights in the house were off. Her car was gone. No kids around.
There was a note on the kitchen table.
Tom, I cannot believe that you forgot your son’s birthday. You promised to take him and his friends to the basketball game tonight. I have gone ahead and taken them.
And then the last line stung…
I don’t even know who you are anymore…
Tom sat down. What was happening to his life? How had he ended up so alone?
In that moment, he saw his life from a new perspective. And he didn’t like what he saw. More than that, he didn’t believe that God liked it either.
My son Max was about four years old when he first began to ask me the question. I call it the question, because each of my three boys has asked it and I never know how to answer.
“Mommy, will the world get hurt? Will it be over? Will we all die?”
The possibilities are endless. I remember in college, doing research on the Nemesis affair, the scientific hypothesis that the dinosaurs extinction was the direct result of a meteor hitting the earth. The Nemesis meteor would have hit with such force that it would have caused a dust cloud to arise and cover the face of the planet, blocking out the suns rays for a length of time long enough to cause all floura and fauna to die, hence the death of the dinosaurs. Geologists have found a layer of meteoric dust at the time of the dinosaurs extinction. Could that be what happened?
Once I began to study that scientific possibility, there was no denying that such an event could happen again. There was no denying that we are vulnerable. As a planet, hurting through time and space, there is no telling what we might run into.
“Mommy, will the world end?”
The Biblical answer is a clear yes. The world was born and the world will end. Just like all human life, the life of the world as we know it has a limit. God did not intend for us to last forever. That is why the Bible begins with the creation and ends with the end of the world.
Today marks the last Sunday of the Christian year. Today Jesus tells us, in no uncertain terms, about the end of the world. Today, Jesus tells us about the kingship of Christ and what many call the last judgment. We call this Sunday Christ the King Sunday.
The Son of Man will be seated on a throne and he will separate people one from another.
Christ will make a decision. Some will come in and some will go out. And Christ will make the final call.
This passage of Scripture has led to incredible fear and the judgment of one Christian over another for centuries. The question of who will get in and who will be left to eternal damnation is a question that lurks underneath our lives, causing us to wonder and to feel anxiety.
There are two kinds of Christian thought today. One is a Universalist perspective, ie that all good folk will go to heaven, no matter what their particular actions, so long as they don’t do something terrible. No matter what their faith. God loves you is the message, all you have to do is accept that fact. Sometimes I call this the Good for You Theory.
The other, equally inadequate theory, is that God’s judgment can be identified in advance by others and that we can tell people who is in and who is out depending on their particular beliefs. Those who do not believe in the correct way will be damned. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that only they are going to “get in” to heaven.
So which is it? Who is in and who is out? Will we ever know? What about people of other religions? What about those who do so much good but don’t believe in God? How can we figure it all out? And if we cannot be sure, then how can we do the best we can to prepare ourselves for this judgment?
When it comes to determining who gets in to heaven, there is a clear answer to that conundrum in the very title of this Sunday: Christ is the King.
You are not the King and I am not the King. Christ is the King. This means ultimately that we can surmise all we want about who gets in and who doesn’t, but the reality is that it is not up to us. And more than that, we cannot understand all that the King will do. Let Christ be the King and stop concerning yourself with what is not your role, to judge the salvation of others. All that we are to concern ourselves with is the state of our own soul and the manner of our own living.
In the gospel for today, Jesus gives us a clear idea of what the King asks of us. He describes the Son of Man seated on the throne passing judgment. And when the King accepts or rejects a soul, he mentions how that person treated others, particularly the poor and vulnerable in this life. And then he says,
Whenever you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.
Here is one of the greatest clues to salvation. If you live for yourself alone, you will die alone. You cannot go to God if you cannot share in the selfless nature of God. If you rush around your entire life fulfilling your own dreams and pleasing yourself, you will find a note on the table one day. God will have gone on ahead with life and you will be forever trapped in the selfishness of your shallow existence.
Why is selfish living incompatible with salvation? Because everything is interconnected. Living for the self is cutting yourself off from life. God exists in the poor and the downtrodden, the hungry and the needy. God exists in the other. When we help those who cannot help us back, we are helping God.
That means that we don’t just help others because God asked us to, we help others because we will be saved if we do so, because it is the only way to be fully alive.
God is part of everything here. God is in the poor, amidst the handicapped, the homeless. It is not an option, to help others, it is an absolute necessity. Everything is interconnected. You are not separate from those around you. If you have more, if you have been blessed with resources, with skills, then you are to share them. It is not an option, something for you to commend yourself about, it is a necessary act. Not necessary for the poor, necessary for your soul’s well-being.
Your belief in God must be expressed through your service and radical generosity. There is no true belief in God without actions that reinforce that belief. If you say you love Jesus and believe in him but live without giving a dime away or helping anyone in need, then your words are empty. Faith and works are two sides of one coin. There is no faith without works. And for those who do good works, often there is some kind of faith hidden deep down inside them, even if it can’t be articulated.
I do not like the word Charity. It implies that you are doing something that you should be commended for, something way beyond the call of duty. It implies that giving to others is a fundamentally unreasonable act, one that is done by super people who are selfless in nature. Charity implies some kind of ultra kindness, an abnormality. But charity is life as it should be, where people care for each other. Charity happens when we realize that to help another is to love God. You determine your salvation by how selflessly you live. Those who give their lives away will be saved. Those who cling to life, love, belongings, money-they will be left behind.
Can you put your loved ones ahead of yourself and love them enough to give yourself to them? If you can, then what about the people that you don’t even know? What about the poor?
If you want to see the face of Jesus, look deep in the eyes of the poor and you will find him. And you will want to help him there, to do whatever you can to help him. Help him. Give generously of everything you have: money, time, talent.
Live for yourself alone and you will die by yourself alone. Live for others and you will live with God.
