I.N.I.

a sermon for Christ the King Sunday, 23 November 1997, at Immanuel Lutheran Church, Mt Vernon, NY, based on Matthew 25:37-40 (and on a vicarage sermon of mine dated 26 Nov 1978)

A title for this sermon might be “search for the king.” It’s a phrase that can be taken two different ways. Possibly one that strikes you first is as an imperative, as a command. “Go out and look for the King; go find him.” But another way to look at that phrase is to take the word “for” to mean “on behalf of.” In other words, the second way to hear this phrase would be “search on behalf of the King; do the searching for him, in his place.”

This title ties together a number of elements of Scripture. The searching love of God is the subject of a lot of texts in the Bible. God searches for his sheep. The sheep don’t search for their shepherd. They seem to have a natural inclination to wander away, to stray from the right path, to get lost.

The sheep have an inborn tendency to scatter. Each one goes its own way. You might say that sheep are just like us, or–perhaps more accurately–we are just like the sheep are in this respect.

Look around you in the world. Look within your own heart from day to day. How often do you see someone doing God’s will on his or her own? Isn’t it more the case that we all run off doing what we want. In our day and age this attitude is built up and called “good” by the “do your own thing” way of life.

It comes out in many subtle ways. We’re told, for example, that it’s unhealthy to suppress our urges to do things (no matter how potentially harmful, or actually sinful they are). We’re told that it’s perfectly all right to pour immeasurable amounts of pollutants into our air and water because it’s good for business. We’re told that what used to be unacceptable lifestyles are perfectly all right nowadays because they’re “natural The list is practically endless. The point is still the same.

Our world bombards us daily with messages that it’s all right to do what comes naturally, and to do it with abandon. And there’s no mention of God and his will for our lives.

But God, our patient and loving Good Shepherd King, continually searches out his sheep no matter where their inclinations have led them. God, the king of the universe, came to our earth as a man to find his own. This is the search on behalf of the king.

Jesus Christ, whose role as King we celebrate this Christ the King Sunday, conducts a search of the whole world beginning at Judea, then Samaria, and now to the uttermost parts of the world. Christ combs the world with the gospel of his blood-bought forgiveness. He is looking for his followers. This search adds to the kingdom.

Those who, by the grace of God and the gift of the Holy Spirit, come into the Kingdom of God, are called to carry out the same search for the King that brought them in. The missionary imperatives of the Christian faith demand our participation in the search on behalf of the King. Our loving response to our loving God is to share his message with all those who are not yet members and heirs of the kingdom.

And this, I believe, is where the other search for the King comes in. To the unbeliever it is plain nonsense to hear the command to look for, to find, the King. Even the Wise Men searching for the baby Jesus were not left to their own devices. They were led by the now well-known star placed in the heavens by God. That’s why we are compelled to speak of salvation as an act completely initiated by God.

Now, on the other hand, to the believer it is a natural part of his or her new life to look for the king in the face of his brothers and sisters.

This Christ the King Sunday happens to fall in Thanksgiving week this year. That seems to make it an appropriate time for us to consider the life and death needs of other of our king’s children only a few days before most, if not all, of us sit down to a sumptuous feast on Thanksgiving Day.

Matthew 25, from which our text comes, makes it clear, quite clear, what our charge is. If we do not give food to the hungry, if we do not give a drink to the thirsty, if we do not welcome the stranger, if we do not clothe the naked, if we do not visit the sick and the imprisoned, then we will be sent to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. If we haven’t done those things, then we haven’t carried out our responsibilities as members of the Kingdom. If we haven’t done these things we are guilty of ignoring our King.

But if we have? Then we will inherit the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world. If we have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and all the rest, then we have done these things to our King.

Our search for the king’s face in the faces of the hungry, the naked, and the homeless is a search that is well-pleasing to God. When God called us to be in mission and ministry, he called us to (among other things) help those in need as if we were helping Christ himself. To this end we remember our church’s outreach and the outreach of community organizations that help people in need during this time of the year.

We live in a fortunate part of the world. Here in America there are relatively few people who go without food for days, who have to live out in the open air with barely any clothing and hardly any family or friends. But there are countless numbers of people in the world who do live and die just that way. And merely because they don’t knock on our doors to ask for help, we have no reason to deny them aid. Merely because the hungry and homeless in our own area are relatively better off than the starving refugees we see on the news from time to time, and because they don’t knock on our doors either, is no reason to deny them aid as we are able to give it.

Organizations like our Lutheran World Relief are a wonderful way for us to aid others. By pooling our resources and having experienced persons channeling the resources to the needy, we all can take our part in the search for the King as we should. We all can find the face of Christ our King in the faces of the hungry, the homeless and the naked in our world. We can simply love those people for Christ’s sake, not to bolster our own egos or salve our own consciences.

God searches for us. Christ the King searches for us, his lost sheep, brings us into the fold and nurtures use Our response, out of love and gratitude includes our search for other people with whom to share the Gospel about Christ and to share our material blessings.

Our king searches for us as a shepherd searches for his sheep.

We, then, search for our King because we know that when we aid the least of these his brothers and sisters we are aiding him.

“And the King will answer us, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethern, you did it to me’. And when we hear that, it will be the greatest Thanksgiving Day ever.

Amen

S.D.G.