The Pauper Is the King: a sermon for Christ the King Sunday, 2011

Matthew 25:31-46

31 ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³²All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. ³⁴Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” ³⁷Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” ⁴⁰And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” ⁴¹Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; ⁴²for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” ⁴⁴Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” ⁴⁵Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” ⁴⁶And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’ 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
   be acceptable to you,
   O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

In 2008 I travelled with a Holston Confernce mission team to the city of Yei in the south of what was then Sudan. I’d been overseas before, but it was my first experience in mission overseas, and my first experience in what we generally call a third-world country.

Mentally, I knew what to expect. I had just come out of three years’ seminary work in a school almost as heavily focused on ministry with the poor as it is on theological training. In fact, I have a hard time differentiating between good theology and ministry with the poor. They go hand-in-hand.

So when I went to the Sudan, I had an idea what to expect. And the team had been trained before we left, and we had spoken with several people who had been to Sudan, and one Sudanese student who was currently studying in the States.

And the journey to Sudan was rather gradual, or rather was graduated. We flew first to Amsterdam, where people rushed from terminal to terminal talking in any number of languages that made us begin to feel like outsiders, strangers in a strange land. But we found our way around because signage was printed in English and Dutch, and announcements made over the intercom always included translations into English.

Add to that the phenomenon that international travelers, to my observation, seem to be either from America or have experience with American customs.

So it was just a little odd spending time in Amsterdam between flights.

The next took us far south to Uganda. We landed at Entebbe International Airport. International. Now, how many of us have been to an international airport? Like Detroit-Warren, or Hartsfield Atlanta, or J.F.K.? What would you say about them? They’re busy, right? And big. Really big.

That’s what I think of when I hear the term, “international airport”. But Entebbe isn’t that. Entebbe is a little bigger than Tri-Cities. Maybe about the size of McGhee-Tyson in Alcoa.

That was probably my first “Oh, I didn’t expect that” moment.

We stayed in the capital of Uganda, Kampala, which is within reasonable driving distance of Entebbe on paved roads. We were in one of the nicer hotels in town. We visited the East Africa Conference office, which is a house, maybe the size of most houses around here, surrounded by a concrete and brick wall with a couple lines of razor wire mounted above.

Now, what does the presence of razor wire say about a place?

That was probably my second “Oh, I didn’t expect that” moment.

We left Uganda in what most of us would consider a puddle-jumper of a plane. I think it held twenty of us, so the mission team was almost all the passenger capacity. The landscape below us was shrub and grass, dotted with occasional thatched roofs and divided by occasional winding rivers.

I didn’t see the Yei airport as we approached, but I watched as trees and shrubs grew larger and larger until suddenly we were sliding down a dirt path with grass whipping just off the wingtips.

Dirt. The runway is dirt. No pavement, no concrete. Dirt.

Oh. I didn’t expect that.

We debarked and I looked around for an airport, or a luggage truck.

There was a building made of cinder block. It was smaller than our house.

Dirt runway. I should have expected the airport to be something like that.

We got into Land Rovers with big plastic pipes coming out of the engine just in front of the window. Now, I knew they weren’t exhaust pipes because you can’t build an exhaust pipe out of plastic. They looked like periscopes. Since then, I’ve seen a handful on four-wheel drive vehicles in the states. They’re snorkels. They’re air-intake mechanisms for driving through water too deep for the grill to work.

Had I known what they were, I might have anticipated what the drive would be like.

Y’all think you have dirt roads. Y’all ain’t seen nothin’.

There is no gravel. Just packed and dried mud. We were there during the rainy season, which meant the roads were cut with gulleys. Seriously. You could stand in them and the road would be above your head. Gulleys.

We arrived in Yei and saw thatched roof after thatched roof, houses made of sticks and mud maybe ten or twelve feet in diameter, each housing its own family broken by years of war, trying to return to the land they’d left as refugees. Or women holding families together after their husbands had left to go to war and never returned.

And children. Children everywhere. Especially at the school where we held our training. Children who lived at the school, were fed by the families who supported the school, who didn’t see their families who had sent them here to learn, to provide something better for themselves than their families could ever hope to do.

And I knew what to expect. I knew what this would look like, what it would smell like, how hard it was. My brain knew it.

But my eyes had never experienced it. My feet had never danced with someone whose life was only heartache and struggle except for the joy of Christ. I had never heard Christ preached by people so desperate for hope. I had never heard singing like that. What did I care if I didn’t know the tune? I just wanted to soak it in, to feel, to capture a bit of that joy, that hope. I just wanted to watch, to share, to sing with them.

I have never seen a church so alive.

And as I looked around, as we worshiped together, my vision was transformed. I’d expected this, but experiencing it was something different altogether. I heard the king saying to the nations, to me:

Come, you that are blessed by my Father,

inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;

For I am hungry

and you bring food,

I am thirsty

and you bring drink,

I am a stranger to you

and I welcome you

and you welcome me,

I am sick

and you are taking care of me.

Come, inherit the kingdom.

Someone grabbed my hand, looked into my eyes, and began dancing with me as we sang. I held her gaze and realized I was dancing with Christ. I was dancing with Christ! And so were my team members, and so was everyone worshiping with us.

And it struck me: The woman holding my gaze was also dancing with Christ.

Caught up in our best moments, offering praise that needed no translation, promising to each other everything the other could offer, each one of us was Christ for the other.

I am still processing that experience. I am still struggling to understand. But what I know is that Jesus’ words in Matthew hold a key to that understanding.

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

We talk about poverty. We talk about the poor. Sometimes we even send money. In fact, most of the tithe we send, as a church, to the Holston Annual Conference supports ministry with marginalized persons.

But seldom do we get involved.

We leave it to people better qualified, better informed, more experienced.

And we sit in our pews or our Sunday School classes and we say how important ministry with the poor is. We even shelve in our memories stories of the poor pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, or of those who have sharing their blessings with those who have not. We sometimes even remember stories of paupers and princes trading places.

We forget that once upon a time, Glory came down from the greatest throne of all and chose to dwell in the wretchedness and poverty of humanity. We forget that the Almighty still dwells among us today, not in the places of pride and greed, but rather in the places of humility and poverty.

We must remember that it is not in helping out those who do not need help that we help Christ. It is in feeding the hungry, quenching the thirst of the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned that we find Christ. It is in the eyes of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the impoverished, the sick, the imprisoned even that we see the eyes of Christ.

It is not in the eyes of the powerful that we find glory.

It is in the eyes of the pauper that we find the King.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.