Every afternoon it was the same for a few weeks that fall. I was 9.
My sister Lizzie left me for 90 minutes until Daddy got home from work. I’d tip-toe into her room and take her copy of Songs in the Key of Life , I’d put that album on my Dad’s stereo which I was not allowed to play with, I’d lay in the middle of our living room and listen with absolute awe Stevie’s soulful voice sing:
“Good morn or evening friends
Here’s your friendly announcer:
I have serious news to pass on to everybody. What I’m about to say could mean the world’s disaster. Could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain
... its that
Love’s in need of love today.Don’t delay..Send in yours right away. Hate’s goin’ ‘round. Breaking many hearts. Stop it please. Before its gone too far.
I did this every day until one day—Dad came home early. “What the hell are you doing George Anne?”
I’m listening to Stevie Wonder.
This is Stevie Wonder?
(I should mention that my Dad LOVED all kinds of music and was always curious about music—I knew how to distract him)
Yeah.
We sat down and listened to it together. Oh I did have consequences that day but first we listened.
If I were to have a soundtrack for Matthew 25’s Christ the King Sunday -- without reservation it would be: Songs in the Key of Life. Stevie Wonder knows God.
I invite you to take a listen to, “Have A Little Talk With God”, “AS,” and “Village Ghetto Land.” These are songs that revealed God to me at an early age.
I wonder: what’s the soundtrack of apocalypse for you?
Oh dear. I’m in the soup now—aren’t I? I’ve gone and done it—stepped in it again. I’ve used a word that most Episcopalians will politely clear their throat... then run away!!
Apocalypse!!!
Perhaps by you now, beloved ones of Christ, you realized that we’ve been playing with TNT -- the apocalypse these last several weeks in Matthew 25: from bridesmaids in the darkness, to cruel overlords demanding interest, to today’s final bit of Matthew 25: we are dealing with end times, apocalypse. I wonder: why are we so allergic to this genre in scripture?
How often I’ve heard our church wanting to shun the beauty imagination and genius of Matthew, Revelation, Daniel, and the whole of Apocalyptic Literature because we might scare people away, because they might think it’s dark scary or even better—not relevant or entertaining. I get it. Our siblings in Christ have taken on apocalyptic passages in ways that create obstacles. We have chosen to step away and have wholeheartedly turned away from teaching about judgement and salvation in ways that are holistic. We have been seduced into living inside a sunny little bubble of privilege.
And it is sinful. It’s called cheap grace not reckoning with the ways that our world is broken and how that is being revealed to us. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works to be a Christ follower. Beloved ones of Christ: we are called to harrow hell. One of the greatest sins in the Episcopal Church is that we’ve given over apocalyptic literature to our siblings in Christ who tarnished its imagination and beauty. Let’s take it back because my hunch is more than any other type of literature in the scripture it can teach us how to harrow hell.
The genius of apocalyptic literature is that it works on two levels.
First: it works on the profoundly personal psychological level. Let’s take this passage for example: this is at work in each of us. In the examination of our soul daily as well as eternally at the celestial banquet table: how integrated are we? What’s separated out in us?
Every human being from birth onwards is in exile and on a quest to integrate the community that is in their being back together in some fashion.
What are the goats of my soul? What are the sheep? Have I visited and contended with them? When I come to the end of the day, the year, my life and I am sitting with God in these places what do I make of this? Do I know the vulnerable pieces of myself—can I hang out in those places?
Apocalypse literally means the revealing. What is being revealed to me? I wonder what it would like if our prayer was: Divine Holy One: What will be revealed to me today? And then at the end of the day again what was revealed of me today?
We harrow our own personal hell first and then take on the hell we see revealed in the brokenness of the world. And that part is straightforward: we know what to do. Feeding people. Housing people. Reckoning with history to understand why it is people are hungry, people are houseless, people are in prison. What is revealed there: be curious about that as well.
That’s an important piece of apocalypse too that Matthew 25 so brilliantly point us toward: Justice and Mercy alongside each other. See why I love this chapter of Matthew so much? This little apocalyptic interlude is the best writing in all the Gospels because it is revealing to us how to live and do this work of following Christ the King and bringing about the Kingdom of God. We harrow hell in depths of our being and we harrow hell in our broken world as the Christ the King would have us do. Both are necessary. We can’t do one without the other.
Looking back on these 3 dark stories that are put together in Chapter 25 of Matthew, which are all about judgement and apocalypse, I want to mention a theme that is central in Matthew’s Gospel.
Matthew’s Gospel is meant to be contemplative in the best sense of the word. Matthew invites us to hold salvos—wholeness in astonishing and radical ways. Salvation was a birthright—a certainty in Jesus’ time. Jews are in. Everyone else out. Today, evangelical’s salvation is a set of words and exclusivist ideas. Evangelicals are in and everyone else out. Sound familiar? Scripture’s right: There’s nothing new under the sun.
Matthew’s core message is set to frustrate the arrogant and certain: Those who are doubtless of their place at the celestial banquet are about to be blindsided. Please don’t avoid the darkness beloved ones of Christ—don’t be afraid of it. Christ the King is there too to help us in it and through it. That’s the point of the cross and salvation. Salvation is not just for us it’s for all creation. ALL CREATION.
The entirety of the universe is set free in that Kingdom, in Christ the King and the celestial banquet that we are called to in the culmination of the end of each day, year, our lives and at the time of the end -in judgement which is the integration of our being— our salvos—our wholeness. So why flee from darkness, from our core teachings? The darkness will be illuminated and bright with our celestial and cosmic King.
We have nothing to fear at the cosmic banquet: we can listen like a child does to music—waiting for Daddy to come home and knowing that she might just get caught but consequences are love.
Amen.