The Beggar at the Gates of Rome

Epiphany UCC

For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken.

As most of you already know, today is last Sunday of the church calendar, with Advent beginning the new church year next Sunday. And every last Sunday of the liturgical year most churches shift their gaze towards celebrating the point of church itself, the reason we gather together, the reason being the Christ, and the reign of God that Jesus promised was both not here, not yet, and yet was actually here, even now. Today is called Christ the King Sunday or sometimes the Reign of Christ Sunday, drawing as it does to the monarchial images of antiquity, monarchies being the governmental norm during most of the world’s history. On this Sunday, we often get images of Christ or God being lifted up and acting quite kingly, and today’s text is no difference, in many ways, and I’ll get to that in a second. What I want to do before we get to the Ezekiel text itself is to explore the images, the impressions, the ways we might try to describe Jesus to someone who simply asked us who this Jesus was and is. Who is Jesus for you? How would you describe him? What did he do, and what does he mean to you? If you were describing Jesus to someone who had never heard of him, never heard of Christianity, how would you explain this Jesus, this Christ to them? Now, that question alone might require a few minutes to sort out our thoughts, on where to begin, and how to begin, and where to end up, even, as we formulate our understanding or understandings of who Jesus is to us.

And then, on top of trying to describe Jesus who might be to us, to explain this Jesus, we might then have to go into trying to explain who God is, and what relationship God and Jesus are to each other, and that might get us into all sorts of mysteries like the Trinity and what and who the Spirit is in relationship to who Jesus is, and it all gets pretty messy from then on out. I do think, though, that if we were to try to describe the personalities – and yes, I realize the inadequacy of language when speaking of divinity, especially using a word like “personalities” to describe the divine –if we were trying to describe the personalities of God, of Spirit, of Jesus, many of us might likely land on the idea that Jesus was, in a way, the heart of God put on full display some two thousand years ago. Despite all Jesus’ difficult teachings, and sometimes harsh rhetoric towards his enemies – and he did have enemies – most of us imagine him as a gentle soul, perhaps the gentlest of souls, imagining him almost as our friend, the Christ of songs like “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and in another favorite, “Softly and Tenderly.” As noted by others, Jesus often functions in our imagination as God’s soft side, as God’s heart, whereas God, the Lord, God the Parent, plays the role of a strict, sometimes harsh, but still loving father or mother. Of course, that is a not necessarily how God the Creator and Parent is always presented in our Bible, but it is there enough in our Bibles that people often mistakenly relegate the mean God to the Old Testament and the nice God to the New Testament. And we do the same with Jesus, as if Jesus was showing us a new, kinder, loving side of God in New Testament that we didn’t easily see in the Old Testament – for some, this false dichotomy found in the idea that the God of the Old Testament is the God you fear and the God of the New Testament is the God you love.

But just as that assumption about God and our Bile are too simplistic, our images of Jesus should be more complicated than that of the gentle Jesus, especially if you read the actual Gospels – I mean, there are times when Jesus is angry, violently so, as you see him turning over money changers tables in the Temple in a fit of rage. And you find in places like the latter part of Matthew and parts of Mark where Jesus is seen as the Messiah who will come in the last day to judge the quick and the dead, who will hold us accountable on whether or not we have practiced his teachings of love and justice. The echoes of that image have their roots in texts like the one we have before us today, in this beautiful text from the book of Ezekiel, where once again God is seen as the Shepherd and we the sheep, a common metaphor both in the New and Old Testaments. The prophet Ezekiel, the same man who will ask whether or not dry bones can still live a few chapters later, puts before us in chapter 34 a vision of God that mirrors one of Jesus’ own stories about sifting between the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. In that parable, Jesus asks the sheep and the goats about whether or not they have visited him in jail, etc. and he divides up the world by those did and did not do these acts of compassion and justice. Ezekiel is writing and speaking hundreds of years earlier to a people captured by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, and though the vision he was given by God was harsher than his counterpart the prophet Isaiah, he had still hope, he still believed that God would remake Israel from the inside out, and create a more just nation. Unlike Jesus’ story in Matthew 25 of separating the sheep and the goats based on their deeds, here there are no goats, and only sheep, and the first divine act is bringing all the sheep, the lean ones, the fat ones, back into the sheepfold, back under the care of the Divine Shepherd. The Promised Land the sheep will find is idyllic when they come back home, especially as they have come from an altogether different pasture, out of a place of clouds and thick darkness, Babylon itself, as the text here says.

But it’s interesting that a shift quickly happens that moves the people from coming out of Babylon to a newly reconstituted Israel, with all sort of utterances about who this new Israel will be. And this important, because in the prophetic narrative, the reason why ancient Empire after ancient Empire has simply rolled over the nation of Israel is because the people have been unfaithful, and thus God has allowed Israel’s enemies to defeat them, or, according to some prophets, God has actually sent these empires to punish the people of Israel. What concerns so much of Ezekiel’s attention is what kind of people Israel will be – and how will it treat the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, the somebodies and the nobodies. All this talk of lean and fat sheep, culminates in this verse, where the prophet, in speaking for God, says the following to the fat sheep, the powerful sheep, the sheep who were somebodies: Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. I have to admit that when I read this verse, I thought of one of our dogs, Chloe, who is bigger than our other dog Zuki, and whenever there is something to be had, some treat to be dispensed, Chloe will use her weight and size to push herself in front of a two dog line, and poor Zuki just has to step back a bit, being smaller and thinner than Chloe. That is what the poor, the powerless, the nobodies often experience in this world, pushed and pulled, butted around until they are scattered far and wide, which makes them even more vulnerable than they were before.

But our God in this text says that this sad and unjust arrangement will not be forever, that God will save her flock, that she will not allow this to happen forever, and that God will be their God and a King David will reemerge, will arise somehow from the past, and be their prince. For us Christians, we’ve typically understood this sentence as foretelling the coming of Jesus, this new David, and perhaps it does so, but I want us to pay attention to how different this particular image of Christ is from the one we think about when we sing “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and “Softly and Tenderly,” the sweet and gentle Jesus that many of treasure, including myself. In our text today, God and Christ are imagined as bringers of justice, as ones who free the people from outside forces like that of Babylon, but also frees us from the bondage and prisons found within Israel itself, from the ones that keep the lean sheep lean, and the fat sheep fat. And what is so interesting here in this text is this image of God feeding justice, feeding the food of justice to the sheep, but actually, not to all the sheep, but to the fat sheep alone, which is so unexpected, at least it is to me. In my mind, it would seem logical to feed the lean sheep the food of justice, they who have been deprived of food, they who haven’t had much justice, but in fact the text says that it was fat sheep, the powerful, the somebodies, that were fed justice. Now, you could think of it is hate feeding, of cramming justice down the throats of the unjust, but I don’t think that is the case – God doesn’t judge us, doesn’t hold us responsible simply to punish us, but to correct us and invite us into a new way of being, into a way of justice. God doesn’t forget the lean sheep, neither does God forget the fat sheep – they too are a part of the family, and they will not be given up on, which is a piece of good news for all of us, really, especially for those of us who don’t realize how fat we may have become compared to the rest of the world, or even the people around us.

And so that image of a God who sends a figure like David, like Christ, into the world to mete out justice is one of those pictures I want us to add to the myriad we have in our heads, to set the image of Christ being the one who judges both between the sheep and the goats, as found in Matthew 25, and the sheep and the sheep, as found in our text today. This Christ, this God, really does throw his lot in with marginalized, the meek, the poor, the nobodies in this world, and that should be not forgotten – and it continues a long and strong thread found throughout the Bible, of God and the prophets speaking out against the injustice of those who oppress Israel from the outside, the various Empires and their rulers, but who also speak out against those oppress others from within the tribe of Israel, the fat sheep, the ones who need justice fed to them. Jesus is not only the one who holds us when we are need of hope, and he is not not only the one who heals when our bodies and spirits are broken – he is also the one who stands within and beside those lean sheep, those despised by the world, the losers, the freaks, the nobodies, and brings justice to them, who makes the world right again, now and in the great Last Day.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, who used to teach up at Northwestern University in the United Methodist seminary on campus, reminds us in our Modern Lesson of how the church has so often failed to put that particular image beside all the other good and true images we have of our Christ. In doing so, she references an old Jewish legend about the coming of the Messiah, which tells of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi (who lived in the first half of the third century) who was meditating near the tomb of another great rabbi, and who was then mystically visited by the Prophet Elijah. "When will the Messiah

come?" asked Joshua. "Ask him," replied the Prophet. "The Messiah is at the gates of Rome, sitting among the poor, the sick and wretched, the lepers, begging for alms. Like them, he changes the bindings of his wounds, but does so one wound at the time, in order to be ready at a moment's notice." That image of the Messiah, for us Christians this Jesus of Nazareth, sitting at the gates of Rome, the gates of unparalleled power and wealth even in the 3rd century, sitting with his fellow lepers, his fellow nobodies, his fellow wounded, I mean, its stunning image, at least to me. The earlier image I invited us to embrace, the one of Jesus being our judge, the one of him handing out justice for the nobodies, and redemption for the somebodies, stands beside this image of Jesus, this one of a man, a leper, outside the gates of Rome, the gates that seemed to embody all that mattered, begging alongside his sisters and brothers. And yet, he will only untie, clean, and retie his bandages one at time, so that if he called upon, he will be ready at a moment’s notice.

Christ as judge, and Christ as the one riddled with leprosy, the Messiah as an instrument of divine justice, and Messiah as an instrument of solidarity with all those who have been wounded by life and injustice itself – those two images, among many others, needed to be added to our understanding of Christ the King, and what the reign of Christ might actually look like in the real world, the one that might come at a moment’s notice. The challenge for all of us is to make sure that we see the fullness of our Savior, and the fullness of what God is doing in this world. What gets us and our fellow Christians in trouble is when we think of Jesus being only our personal Savior, and thus uninterested in the salvation of the world, uninterested in making the world whole again, a Christ uninterested in justice, but somehow obsessed with us in particular, and our particular needs, Kevin’s particular needs, your particular needs. But, of course, we can also get ourselves into trouble when we think of Jesus as being only about justice, as one only interested in making only the world whole again, in making only the world a just place, but not also passionate in making us, in particular, whole again, in bringing salvation to us, wholeness to me, to you, in particular. Jesus is the prince who brings justice to those most in need of justice, the lean sheep, the thrown away people of this world, and Jesus also is the leper, the beggar at the gates of Rome, wounded, in need of healing, but ready, oh so ready, to be the instrument of God’s healing when time comes for us, and to us. Both images of Christ are true, and we’re asked to embrace both true pictures of him, and certainly many others as well. We just mustn’t make the mistake, as we and others often do, of not recognizing the fullness of our Christ, the many faces of our Christ, the one found in the image of Jesus as King found in our stain glass, to my left, right over there, the bringer of love and justice, but also the face of Jesus deformed by leprosy, hidden as it is by a hood, in the sculpture found on the front of your bulletin, the one who stands beside all the wounded and lean sheep of this world. May the Christ, in all of his fullness, in his complex beauty be praised, and welcomed and celebrated, forever and ever. Amen.