St. Martin’s Day 2011

By The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Sunday, November 13, 2011
22nd Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

I have three topics in today’s sermon.
First, there is the Gospel reading from Matthew.
Second, I will connect the Gospel to the story of St. Martin our patron Saint.
And, the third point …. I forgot the third point.

Really the third point is the most important and if you leave here with nothing else here it is, the test of the meaning of all our wonderful liturgy and music on our festival day is this; will we as a church fill a pick up truck with food for our hungry neighbors next Sunday?  This is the test of whether we are really a church or not; do we exist for our neighbors or for ourselves?  Do we build ourselves up with prayer, devotion, liturgy and music for our own amusement and satisfaction or do we build up our strength as a spiritual community to heal the world?  If it is only the first, we are an Anglican culture club. If it is the second, we are becoming the body of Christ.

Now, I turn to the Gospel.  Do I really need to preach on this gospel? Isn’t it perfectly clear?  “If you feed the hungry, you feed me,” says Jesus, so therefore be charitable to the most vulnerable.  This is the typical liberal ethical reading of the passage. Maybe I should just sit down.

But wait.  Who are the poor in this passage and who are the folks called to be charitable? This passage in Matthew begins back at verse 31. (Take out your pew Bibles….) Jesus sets up the story as a traditional Jewish story of final judgment, picturing the Messiah sitting on his throne sorting out the sheep and goats.  You are a sheep if you fed the poor and a goat if you ignored them.  But here is the twist.  The judgment story is about ‘the nations’ – it is about the gentiles, all the people of the world who are not Jews, the non-chosen or the not yet chosen.  So the story is saying that there are righteous gentiles out there who do God’s will by feeding and clothing and sheltering the most vulnerable.  God recognizes and respects and welcomes the goodness of folks outside of the covenant community, outside of the inside circle.

So if the gentiles are the ones doing charity who are the poor?  The clue is in the last sentence, where the Messiah says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members
of my family, you did it to me.”  According to the scholars, Jesus is referring here to his disciples who have gone out into the world and chosen voluntary poverty to witness to the coming of the Messiah.
Remember when Jesus commissions his disciples he sends them into the world with one cloak, one pair of sandals, and no food or money so their lives will witness to their dependence on God and their dependence on the charity of neighbors.  The hungry, naked, prisoner who is fed, clothed and comforted is the early Jewish-Christian disciple who has gone out into the world in complete vulnerability to give witness to Jesus.  The story is meant to be encouragement to the earliest disciples:  Go out, witness, be vulnerable, there are righteous gentiles who will encounter Christ in your vulnerability.

It is encouragement and it is reversal. We, the sent are not the superior or dominant party.  It is an encouragement to mutuality, to finding Christ in the encounter with strangers.

Remember, St. Martin was a gentile and- an un-baptized one at that -when he met the beggar at the city gate.  In the liberal ethical reading, the point of the St. Martin story is; be charitable like St.Martin when he cut his cloak in two and gave half to a cold, naked man.  But the deeper story is not one of charity it is one of conversion.  The poor man comes to Martin in his dreams and Martin realizes that he has met Christ.  Martin then seeks baptism and begins a process of stripping himself of his status as Roman soldier and citizen taking on the life of a citizen of God’s kingdom.  Cutting his cloak is just the beginning of a process where he chooses poverty and dependence on God, strips away status, rank, privilege, and position to pursue this Christ he met in a poor freezing man by a city gate.

There is something deeper than charity going on here and in some ways charity prevents us from going there.  The danger of charity is that it changes nothing. Charity supports the current order of the world. Charity does not change the relation of rich to poor.  The rich give and feel good about it and the poor are still poor. Unlike St. Martin, we are not converted in the process.

Nothing is really changed.  The deeper possibility and the deeper risk in the story is conversion…when we encounter Christ and we enter the process of stripping away all that props up our current identity to find our true self in the vulnerability of Christ and in relationship, mutual relationship with all those we consider outside our circle and below our rank.

Martin embodies this path of conversion.  Later in life when he becomes a bishop –unlike so many other bishops – he does not take on the trappings of the office as status and privilege and power over.
He is unpopular among his fellow bishops because he refuses to oppress and prosecute heretics.  He stays a person of mercy and integrity, refusing to hate his supposed enemies but rather choosing to love them.  This is the deepest path of charity.

Charity leaves the world as it is, conversion reverses the poles.  We do not get to be the generous, superior souls who are distant and unaffected by our encounter with Christ in our brother and sister.  We may fill a truck next Sunday, but in that filling will we shed some hardness in our hearts, will we lose some attachment to our present status, privilege and station and become more open to Christ in our neighbor?  Will we move out of ourselves and toward our neighbor and across significant divides into the relationships that will really reveal the fullness of Christ to us?  Well only as a first step.  Next week we do charity, there is no encounter, but maybe there is the beginning of conversion.  Maybe someone rides in the truck with me to St. Vincent’s in Germantown, maybe more of our members do hands on and face to face work at Jubilee School or in Guatemala or serve at St. James the Less, maybe even more of our folks meet with our neighbors through the regional POWER work – not to seek self-esteem or points on college applications but to seek and serve and experience conversion in Christ.