There are people going hungry in Africa and Asia but also right down the street. There are people who cannot heat their homes this winter and people who don’t even have a home. We will go eat lunch today but there will people who haven’t eaten since Friday. This is the last parable Jesus tells his disciples. These are the last words he conveys to them as a group. He looks at them and says that these people are our family and we need to be taking care of them.
We cannot forget that but we in order to do that we need to stop the judgment. We have a huge tendency to look at people in need around us, the least of these in our community, and pass judgment on them. We constantly pass judgment but Christ tells us to stop and have compassion.
Brothers and sisters, we all are sinners and the majority of us are lucky enough to escape paying for those sins for the rest of our lives. Instead of seeing the just the sin, we need to learn how to see the person, the child of God, as Jesus did. Instead of imparting judgment to impart compassion. In the parable, Jesus the king is the judge. We do not need to do that. He is quite capable of judgment. He calls on us to do the compassion part with the least of these, for Him in His Name.
When we start with compassion then we start to take care of those people’s needs. When we start with compassion we start to have a heart that looks like the King we serve.
Mother Teresa once said: “When I die and I meet Jesus I can see him upset that I judged too much but I cannot envision him telling me he is angry because I had too much compassion.”
.So what does all this mean for us as members of Burt Presbyterian Church? Well, one of our core values is acceptance of others and hospitality ot others in the name of Jseus Christ. That’s why we’re an Acts 16”5 congregation – because we as a congregation feel
that we should be a welcoming place to everybody regardless of race, color, economic status, letting Jesus tear down the barriers between us.
But it means more than that. It means that each one of us should take that core value of acceptance and love and try to live that value in our daily lives. It means that when we go out into the world, we don’t look at the world as a world of “us” and “them,” but that we look at the world as composed of children of God, and potential church members with us, either here or in other churches. And we respect other religions, too, because we with for them to respect us and to live in peace with us. The Bible calls on us to live in peace if we possibly can.
The church cannot preach acts of loving kindness to the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned and the naked unless it is composed of congregations of people who live out those acts of loving kindness in their everyday lives.
Those acts of kindness don’t just happen here at the church building on Sunday morning.
Those acts of kindness need to happen in our everyday lives, in our everyday encounters, when you entertain a stranger, when you refrain from thoughts of hate or ridicule, and stay away from those who say and do such things,, when you stand up for the rights of the poor, the down and out, those who are struggling to survive.
Judgment day is coming – and we must be people of the cross. And, God knows that a people of the cross are so much needed in our world in where fear of terror seems to be ruling. However, fear not, and see that there is much Good News in today's text. A final judgment is coming, and may it come soon. For Christ's judgment will cast out fear, and war, and terror, and poverty, and inhumanity.
And because that day is surely coming, we can continue to live our lives with hope. Having children and baptizing them into the mission of Christ, sharing with them the stories and the life of faith, so they might tell others that there is indeed a leader who is worthy to give our true allegiance to. And we may face death with hope, knowing that it is Jesus Christ who will complete the work of the Church and the mission of the Kingdom of God, and that one day, in the twinkling of an eye, we will be raised imperishable, to share in a new Heaven and a New Earth.
For we have faith in the one with the nail pierced hands and feet who walks among those who suffer, pouring out a promise made in his blood, loving all who come to Him regardless of their background – and one day we believe that all of the creation will be set free from slavery to fear and death.
Believe in Jesus the Christ, our Judge and our Hope!
AMEN! AMEN!
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