NEW YEARS 2007 | Matthew 25:31-46

Since New Years is such a famous time for drinking, I’d like to tell you about the last time I actually did any. I was in the studio with my band, Metaphor, and someone had brought a half case of Miller Lite. Not my favorite brew by far, but when you’re working, beer is beer. Over the course of nearly five hours, I had four of those beers, and as the evening wore on I grew increasingly ill. I almost passed out driving home, and when I arrived, I felt tremendously ill. I went straight to bed, but spent a fitful night sweating and cradling my aching head. The next day was more of the same—quite simply the worst hangover I have ever had, all wrought by four well-spaced beers.

Ever since that night I have not been able to enjoy even one alcoholic beverage without suffering for it for the next several days. My doctor has no explanation for this, and I have simply had to resign myself to a life without the pleasures of single-malt scotch and fine English ales. There are, perhaps, worse fates, but it took me a while to grieve the loss of these beloved things and come to such a place of repose.

Today, I think it is very easy to understand, actually. I turned 40. I turned 40 and everything started to fall apart. I turned 40 and my liver decided to go on sabbatical at the introduction of cabernet. I turned forty and the bald spot on the top of my head began hoarding real estate for itself. I turned forty and suddenly I could not for the life of me read the label on a can of soup without ocular assistance. If you haven’t figured it out, yet, turning forty sucks.

But back to alcohol. It may have just been the harbinger of further unwelcome changes in my body, but it was a hard one for me. I realized that a part of my identity was bound up in going down to the pub with Lawson for a game of darts and a pint. They look at you strange, you know, when you ask for non-alcoholic beer. But time marches on and there is no stopping what happens to our bodies as we age. So I would like to add a line to our reading from Ecclesiastes: “There is a time for ale, and a time for ginger ale.”

I was brought up in a tradition in which alcohol was always sinful, but I have learned better since then. Beer, in moderation, is a glorious gift of God. In excess, it is the very scourge of Satan my grandmother warned me about. Beer itself is morally neutral, as are most things in this world. It is what we do with them that makes them positive or negative forces in our lives. It’s all about context.

As the preacher of Ecclesiastes says, everything has its place, everything has its season. Almost everything can be good, and almost everything can hurt us. Even law and doctrines can be used for good or ill. Laws and dogmas always mean well, of course—they seek to protect, to preserve—but sometimes even they need to be reevaluated and left behind. It’s easy to get on our moral high-horses when we look back at history, but we need to be careful of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” and remember that those who have gone before us meant as well as we do, and they did they best they could in the context that they were in.

Let’s look at one cultural flash point today—homosexuality. The book of Leviticus quite clearly says that it is an abomination, and those who practice it should be put to death. Today most of us consider such a law to be itself an abomination. But let’s look for a moment at the cultural context in which it arose.

Ethics has never been an abstract endeavor. For the ancient Jews ethics was inseparable from the struggle to survive. If you have only a few hundred thousand people and are wandering about in the desert in danger of being attacked by hostile neighbors who outnumber you at almost any moment, “good” is whatever increases your population and therefore your chances for survival, and “bad” is anything that does NOT increase your numbers.

Yet today, our situation is quite different. The survival of the human race, and indeed the planet, depends today upon us having fewer children, on humans finding a sustainable population level, and that non-reproductive relationships contribute to the good of the whole.

Indeed, I would suggest that there are more gays and lesbians today than there were a hundred years ago because the DNA that dictates the attraction to reproductive or non-reproductive partnerships is simply part of the self-correcting biology of the planet. It is the way God designed it. There is a time to reproduce, and there is a time to simply make whoopee.

If everything has its place, and everything is good in its season, how do we discern the proper time for something? By what standard do we judge our vices, our laws, our scriptures, our lives? How do we know when it is time to wound or time to heal? When it is time to plant or time to reap? Time to talk, or time to listen?

This is where our Gospel reading comes in. Now, on the surface of it, this is a nightmarish vision of Jesus looking very uncomfortable in his role as the Judge of the World. Let me put your mind at ease: Jesus never said these words. This story is not known to the earliest evangelist, Mark, and this kind of elevated mythologizing only shows up after another ten or twenty years when the Gospel of Matthew was written. Remember that another ten years later we get the Gospel of John, where Jesus routinely makes three self-aggrandizing messianic pronouncements before his second cup of coffee in the morning. No, this kind of mythology is the product of the early Christian community.

But like all mythology, it arises and endures because it is also, in some sense, true. Now it is not, obviously, literally true. I do not believe that Jesus himself is going to be sorting livestock at the culmination of the ages. This is, as Fr. Richard frequently reminds us, dream language. And dreams don’t tell us about the future, they are always symbolic snapshots of what is going on in our lives right now. And in this sense, it is TRUE. In what sense, then, is it true?

When I was a boy, I was taught by my Southern Baptist elders that we are not saved by works, but by faith. But this is obviously the opinion of people who esteemed the theology of Paul over the teachings of Jesus, because in this passage Jesus does not seem to be even the slightest bit interested in what anybody believes. Instead, he is concerned with what people are DOING. It is concern for the other, for the less fortunate, for the outcast that determines our own degree of inclusion. This is not something decided by some judge, from without, as depicted in this reading, but is a self-selecting process that is true even as it is being performed. Jesus judges no one—Jesus is simply saying what is true: those who are concerned for the community are already IN heaven, and those who care nothing for the suffering of others are ALREADY in hell. The sheep and the goats divide themselves—Jesus simply points out the criteria by which people sort themselves.

There is a time for Augustine, and a time for Charles Williams. And Williams says that community IS heaven, and isolation IS hell. And this is the criteria for discerning the value of all of those things in our lives that can either be helpful or harmful: do they contribute to your sharing in community, or do they take you away from it? That’s it. It’s that simple.

Going back to our example of alcohol, when I was twenty or even thirty, no social occasion was complete without a bottle of wine. It contributed to the quality of community, it was the symbol of conviviality, as the psalmist says, it made the heart glad. But as a lot of us have reached forty—and edging towards fifty—the amount of wine consumed at any given occasion has diminished greatly.

I have a friend for whom this is not true, however. I always imagine him lamenting with Hank Williams, Jr. “All my rowdy friends have settled down,” and indeed we have. But his consumption of alcohol has not diminished. He simply drinks alone. What in one season of life once contributed to community, in another season of life contributes only to isolation. What was at one time an appropriate sacrament of salvation, has become at another time, the instrument of damnation.

I find his example instructive as I consider my own resolutions for this New Years. It is important for me to consider the things I enjoy and to ask hard questions about them: How does this thing contribute to my being in community? And how does this thing nudge me into isolation? For I am free to choose those things that will make me an agent of inclusion, that will increase the quality and amount of community I share in, that will contribute to the good of the whole rather than the pleasure of a few. There is a time for everything in its season, but discerning the season is the tricky part.

The sorting of the sheep and goats isn’t about people, it’s a picture of a process that is going on in each and every one of us right now. What are those parts of ourselves that move us toward community, towards action on behalf of the whole, and what are those things move us to act selfishly, to withdraw, to buy into the illusion of the ego? The sheep and goats are not symbolic of people after all. All of us have an inner barnyard. Sorting the sheepish parts of our lives from the goatish parts is something that we traditionally do at New Years.

As you take stock of your life, your commitments, your relationships in this new year, I invite you to keep Williams’ criteria in mind. Are there things in your life that were useful and good at one time, but maybe not so helpful now? Defense mechanisms that kept us alive at six rarely serve us at thirty-six, after all. What are those things the seasons for which have passed? How do the things in your life encourage community, or tempt you to isolation? This is, perhaps, one of those times when it is okay to be a little sheepish. Let us pray…

Jesus, you do not judge us, but you do call us to judgement.
You call us to carefully discern the various parts of our lives,
And through your Spirit you whisper to us, you nudge us toward
Greater compassion, greater awareness, greater community.
Help us to not shrink from the hard work of discernment.
Help us to embrace and let go of things in their season,
as we strive to be faithful to your call to be lights in this world. Amen.