A Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
In October 2020, a news story came out of Bay Village, Ohio. The police had been called because of concern over a strange homeless person sleeping on a park bench. The police arrived and checked out the scene, only to find that it was a statue. And it wasn’t just some statue of a random person on a bench, it was a sculpture of Jesus, lying down, covered in a shroud, with his nail-pierced feet sticking out of the bottom of the blanket. The sculpture, by the artist Timothy Schmalz, had been placed outside of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church that very day and within 20 minutes someone called the police to report the “suspicious person” in the park.
The sculpture was meant to highlight the plight of homelessness facing so many in our nation’s towns and draw attention to the “othering” that we so often do to those who are most in need. The church also hoped that the sculpture would remind passersby that Jesus himself was aligned with folks like this, the least in our society. He hung out with the lowly and the misunderstood; he was them, and they were him. So much so that if he came back today, we might not even cross paths with him, because he’d probably be in the places we don’t like to go and be with the people we don’t like to be with. If he came back today, we might even walk by him without a hint of recognition, maybe we’d pass him by, and then make a call to the police because of some stinky, suspicious homeless person, hanging out where they don’t belong.
It was a difficult pill for the disciples to swallow and still can be an uncomfortable truth for us today, that Jesus hung out with the have-nots and lifted up the lowest. It must have been unexpected for the first-century people of God, since they expected the Messiah to come with royalty and riches, high social standing and military prowess. Instead, they got a simple man, born to a teenage woman but no discernable biological father, destined to be a meager carpenter like his adopted dad, perhaps, yet ridding himself of whatever social standing he might have had by hanging out with the wrong kind of people in the bad part of town.
See, they expected their savior to be a somebody and got a nobody. They wanted power, and they got poverty. They assumed the Messiah would be destined for greatness, and instead, as he tried to tell them time and time again, no, my destiny is death.
They didn’t want to hear it, that the Messiah would be killed. They didn’t want to understand it, that God was at work in a totally new and different way. They didn’t want to see it, the savior of the world flipping that world right on its head, submitting himself to servanthood, subverting their very idea of what greatness looked like. taking the way things were, with status and money and power at the top, and turning it upside down, raising up the lepers who were cast out of the towns, uplifting the criminals who were left to die alone, taking the littlest children in his arms who were seen as vulnerable and even invaluable since they couldn’t contribute a single thing to the household.
And, as much as I and we believe that you and me are different than those distracted early disciples who couldn’t grasp this new way of the world, as much as we would profess that we value this upside-down kingdom of God, in which the last will be first and the first will be last, we still find ourselves in the grip of a society that places our worth and the worth of others in wealth, status, accomplishment, and contribution.
Even as people of God, these pressures still weigh on us. Even as the body of Christ, we still are expected to strive and struggle and fight our way to the top to be great, to be impressive, to be someone.
But here’s the thing we know in our heads and need to revive in our hearts. Christ changed the game when he came to us as a nobody. Christ changed the game when he saved the world by serving it. Christ changed the game when he said that, actually, to be “first,” to be “great,” is to be last and servant of all… to be on top actually looks a lot like stooping low…
As scholar and pastor Elisabeth Johnson says, “true greatness, according to Jesus, is not to be above others. But to be least of all and servant of all. It is not to ascend the social ladder but rather descend it, taking the lowest place. It is not to seek the company of the powerful, but to welcome and care for those without status.”
It can be an unexpected and even difficult truth, that the kingdom of God reordered the way of the world; but it is good news, because the upside-down reign of God in our midst means that we get to see ourselves and our neighbors with a different lens, a new perspective, that frees us from meeting these worldly and frankly unreachable measures of greatness. Instead, we get to see that, deep down in our soul, our value can be found in nothing else than God alone. Our worth comes from nothing else than being made in the image of God.
Remember now, the image of God is in you and in me. And it is an extraordinary grace to be unconditionally loved and treasured by God in equal measure on our best days and our worst, when we are flying high and when we are brought way down low. And remember now, the image of God is in every one of our neighbors as well, not just the nearby children in the West End but our children in the East End as well. Not just in the top executive at the top hospital in town, but also in the person sleeping in the alley behind it. Because the worth and the value of each one of us comes not from what we do or where we live but from the One who lovingly made us.
What a transformation our world might undergo if we saw ourselves that way, and even more so, if we saw it in every person we met along the way! Imagine the way the kingdom of God would be bursting forth in our midst if we ignored the social ladder and looked into the eyes of the grocery bagger instead of averting our gaze, if we listened to the woman at the CARITAS dinner instead of assuming she had nothing coherent to say, if we knew the name of the man wrapped in a shroud, lying on the park bench, instead of calling the police on him, and if we believed that they were Christ and he was them. Perhaps then, we might be one step closer to God’s kingdom coming, God’s will being done, here on this earth as it is in heaven.
The Rev. Kilpy Singer