Matthew 25: 31-46
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24

Today is not a day where we can talk about God as some divine version of a benign and benevolent “Old King Cole the jolly old sole" or Jesus as a smiling hippy-dippy do-gooder King of Love. Today’s texts…from the Hebrew Prophet Ezekiel and from Matthew speak about a very different kind of Sovereign…A shepherd king of love and of justice.

Today’s texts make us uncomfortable…all this talk of sheep and goats…of fat & strong vs. the weak, of eternal punishment and the destruction of the powerful. There is a frightening kind of justice at work in these passages.

As disturbing and powerful as Jesus’ words are in Matthew…I want to first concentrate today on the words of Ezekiel…this strange little prophet who straddles perhaps the most tumultuous time in the history of the children of Abraham.

The time is around 587 B.C….the former great nation of Israel dissolved into the two nations of Israel and Judah generations ago…and Israel has fallen away…powerful Judah stands on the brink of falling into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, powerful king of Babylon…Ezekiel appears on the scene, he looks around and like most of the prophets, he is disgusted by what he sees.

A long succession of rich and powerful kings have been bad shepherds of the people…feeding themselves and exploiting the poor…making a big show of their religious rituals and yet leaving the poor and the widow without hope or food or clothing. Ezekiel speaks a word of judgment on those kings, foretelling the fall of Judah…and yet almost in the same breath…he speaks these words of hope and of justice.

‘Your earthly shepherds…your earthly kings have failed you’…God reminds them…’too concerned with their own profit, their own comfort, their own excesses…with what we might call the “way of life” they have made for themselves. They have bullied and pushed and separated the people so that none have a sense of home or herd. So I will come,’ God promises them…’I will be the shepherd…I will gather my people together…I will deliver them….’

These are the words that echo in the ears of the Hebrew people just a few years later as Ezekiel follows them into exile in Babylon….as they are scattered across what is now modern day Iraq, as they hope for return…as they hope…they remember the promise …that deliverance will come…

In the divine promises of today’s words of comfort, God invokes the memory of King David…the King chosen by God…the greatest leader Israel had ever known. As such, these are Royal Words God speaks….a vision of what true royalty…what a true sovereign should be…. And what is the manifesto of true Royalty? “I will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak…”

Five centuries later the Hebrew people, oppressed now by Rome remembered these words, held them close to their hearts, and hoped and prayed for this new King David…for the new royalty that would fulfill God’s promise…

And in time, they encountered the King of Kings….a lowly carpenter and Rabbi…an itinerate preacher and rabble-rouser who called the people back to God and to faithfulness, who didn’t just talk about love, but also cured the sick, and welcomed the lowly, the stranger, the unclean…and who threw out the money-changers who profited from their money-making schemes in the church…who challenged the powers that be, but also fed the hungry…who in today’s passage talked about meeting God in serving the lowest of the low, who saw the greatest separation from God not in sexual immorality or dishonesty, or even murder….but in the refusal to show compassion for those in need…in the denial of the needs of the least among us…For Jesus, standing at the brink of the cross….indifference to the needy…THAT is the sin justifying separation from God.

Ezekiel speaks Royal Words…words of hope and promise and justice….and century’s later, Jesus’ story of the righteous and the unrighteous shows us a Royal Way—where good and evil are no longer concepts…where justice and love have real, concrete outcomes….where the naked are clothed, the hungry are fed, the strangers are welcomed, the prisoner is comforted…This is the way of good leadership…of God’s kind of leadership…

It was as the challenge to follow this Royal Way was echoing in my brain that I read on Friday that, in the dead of night…2 am actually…the House of Representatives voted to cut $50 billion dollars in direct aid programs from the budget…if signed by the president…their proposal will cut 220,000 people off of Food Stamps…it strips billions away from programs helping poor students get a college education…and cuts away 11 and a half billion dollars from Medicaid…the health program that provides life-saving drugs for indigent AIDS, diabetes and cancer patients, and basic heath-care needs for the poorest of the poor and hundreds of thousands of elderly in our country…The apparent justification for all of these cuts…the costs associated with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita…or the War in Iraq, depending on who you talk to.

What seems to be happening is that the poorest of the poor, the elderly, the sick, and our children are being asked to pay for the costs of re-building these devastated communities at home and the devastated country we occupy on the other side of the world…yet after thanksgiving, Congress will return to approve approximately $78 Billion dollars in tax cuts for owners of stocks, businesses, and land who sell them at a profit, cuts that every pundit who has looked at them says will benefit the wealthiest Americans….

How is all of this possible? How is it that leaders, many of whom make a great show of their faith…who call upon the name of the good shepherd…many of whom campaigned on their Christian values…can even suggest that we are a people who will take from the poor and give to the rich?

We stand like Ezekiel scratching our heads, shaking our heads, incapable of understanding how things got to this point, how we could stray so far from what is right and what is good...I’m sure there are those who would tell me that I’m over simplifying…that there are market forces at work here and trickle down effects and that a rising tide raises all boats…. But Jesus’ Royal Way reminds us that our first priority is those with no boat at all…

Now what on earth does all of this have to do with our celebration of Reign of Christ Sunday? Where is the Good News here for us? How can we celebrate when we seem to be part of a society just like that one that Ezekiel condemned….when we seem to be a nation that commits the most heinous sin Jesus can even imagine?

What if…
What if the promised justice God makes through Ezekiel in Royal Words…and the promised deliverance of the Royal Way proclaimed by Christ are promises not just for the people of their time…but for our time too?

What if today is the day we answer the question…Who is our Sovereign? What if today is the day we say we will not live by the way of earthly kings…but we will be a manifestation of the Royal Way…we will take up the mantle of the prophet Ezekiel and call the kingdoms of this world back to the Royal Way…we will proclaim Christ our King…and not simply speak his promises, but recommit ourselves to walk that Royal Way with him…a way that loves…and in loving—acts and feeds and clothes and welcomes.

Christ the King Sunday/Reign of Christ Sunday is the newest liturgical feast day in our church year…Do you know when it was created? Less than 100 years ago…In the 1920’s ….fascism was rising across Europe…the leaders, specifically Pope Pius, saw the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and seemed to guess that soon…very soon…the churches would be under siege…Hitler would demand that churches take an oath of loyalty to him and to Germany…Mussolini would muzzle the church’s criticism of him…and the leaders of the church wisely thought, in these desperate times we need, and we will need, a day to remind us who is really in charge of our lives…whose power we can truly rely upon…who has the ultimate claim on our loyalties…

They were right…we need this day that reminds us who is in charge…and who we serve...and who’s Way we follow…for we need to remind ourselves and those who suffer at the hands of earthly kings…that God DID deliver the people from bondage in Babylon…God DID send a saving shepherd in Jesus Christ…and God WILL welcome the outcast, deliver the oppressed, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoner in our day too…even if God has to use us to do it…Amen