The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
November 23, 2008

Proper 29-A (Christ the King)
Ezekiel 34:11-17
1 Corinthians 15:20-28
Matthew 25:31-46


Some years ago, Professor Benny Kraut taught a course on the Holocaust at Queens College in New York. In the final moments of the last class one year, one of the students, Isaac Schulman, walked down the aisle, got down on one knee, white rose and ring in hand, and, before Professor Kraut and twenty-eight other students, asked a student, Alana Bell, for her hand in marriage. It was a moment that transfigured a course on a miserable chapter in human history. Cheers and shouts of mazel tov rang out for the couple. “Surprise is an understatement,” Alana said afterward.

Isaac had arranged it all with Professor Kraut ahead of time, and at one point it looked as if the plan was going to unravel, because Alana got up to leave the class a few minutes early to speak to another professor. But Professor Kraut blocked the door, insisting that she couldn’t risk missing the final minutes of the class.

At first, Isaac had worried about making a proposal of marriage at the close of a course about something as somber as the Holocaust, but Professor Kraut reassured him. “The goal of the Nazis was to completely eliminate the Jewish nation as a race,” Isaac later said, ”and marriage is the first step in doing the exact opposite. It is the perfect payback to such an atrocity.”

Perhaps we might even say that the marriage of Isaac and Alana transfigures the course of history, bringing life out of ashes.

One day Peter, James, and John went up a mountain with Jesus, where, to their minds’ eye Jesus transfigured the course of history, bringing life out of ashes. There on the mountain, after all those months on the road with Jesus, their vision of Jesus was sharpened. There they had a vision of Jesus’ glory. In their minds and in their hearts, if only for a moment, they saw Jesus as God sees Jesus, as King, as the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets.

The disciples’ experience was, I imagine, like that of artists. A sculptor doesn’t just grab a chisel and start whacking away to see what he can make of a piece of granite. When Michelangelo stood before the raw stone, he had already had a vision of David inside the stone. His tools merely helped him release the David he had already seen.

That’s what happened, I think, on the Mount of Transfiguration. God released to Peter and James and John the essential Jesus: Jesus stripped for the moment of all the incidental cultural and historical and political trappings that inevitably surrounded him as he walked the roads and lived the life of a Galilean in the days of Herod and Pilate, Jesus stripped down to the life he had in God's eyes, Jesus glorified.

And that’s what the Scriptures do for us. They sharpen our vision of God, and of ourselves. They help us see ourselves as God sees us, that is, as we really are. They help us see God as God really is. And they help us see and live the real life God has for us.

Consider the man who came to Jesus one day. “Master,” he said, ”tell my brother to divide our inheritance and share it with me.” But Jesus said to him, ”My friend, who made me a judge or divider over you?” Then Jesus said to all those in the crowd, ”Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for life is not defined by the things you have, even when you have a lot.”

Then Jesus told them this parable: ”There once was a rich man who had a terrific harvest from his land one year. And he thought to himself, ‘What am I to do? I don’t have enough room to store all my crops.’ Then he said, ’This is what I’ll do! I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and I will store all my grain and goods in them. And I will say to myself, ”Self, you’ve got it made! You have plenty of good things stored up for many years to come. Take things easy. Eat, drink, have a good time.”’ But God said to him, ’Fool! This very night you will die. And this hoard of yours? Whose will it be then?’”

“That’s what happens,” Jesus then said, ”when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.” Or, as other translations put it, ”That’s what happens when you have many possessions, but are not rich towards God.”

I have a friend who was a successful Chicago lawyer and who later became a priest. He had an interesting experience one night, a providential experience perhaps, which he says helped him with his vision of Jesus, and of himself.

One evening, during a week in which he was preparing his first sermon on the parable I just shared with you, my friend stumbled into an elegant little dinner party to which he had not been invited. The dinner he had been invited to – with people he had worked for as a lawyer before he went to seminary – turned out to have been the night before. “Someone's mistake,” my friend says, “theirs or mine. Or maybe, as it turned out, God’s.”

Anyway, he had come to the right place, an apartment high above Lake Shore Drive, but on the wrong night. Graciously, he was invited in anyway for a lemonade, which became a gin and tonic, which became the elegant little dinner party “with a more exclusive guest list than the night before: Fortune 500 CEO types from Texas who travel around the world to each other’s board meetings and golf clubs, while their wives buy art and antiques. Nice folks, nice talk, but all in all with a good many more zeros at the end of all the numbers than [my friend] was used to.”

“Over dessert, the host, who had retired from international finance into international charity, proposed a little game to draw out the guests, and perhaps,” my friend says, to test him, the new priest: “What would each of us do if we were suddenly given $20 million? How would we spend it? To what cause would we give it? ‘It’s an important thing to think about,’ said the host of the party. ‘It focuses your vision of life. It tells you what your values are.’”

“The ante was then raised to $50 million by a guest who probably already had $20 million, and who therefore needed something bigger to focus his vision.” This happened years ago, so perhaps today the stakes would be $50 billion. Anyway, the play about how they would use their windfalls continued until coffee was brought.

My friend began to think about the anomaly of it all. Here were men and women who had tremendous personal possessions and who, through their corporations and trusts and connections, controlled hundreds of millions, even billions, along with the power such money carries. And yet, they needed to play a game “to focus their vision of life, to define their values!” Odder still, to my friend, the game they chose to play was exactly the same game they had chosen to live: the game, as Jesus calls it in his parable, of judging and dividing the money and power of this world.

“But, of course,” thought my friend, ”I play it too, this game of judge and divide. And so do you. We all play it. What other game, what other life, is there? How to spend our money, our energy, and our time? What else is important?”

So this is what my friend told his parish the next Sunday:

”This game of our lives is not made up of easy moves and obvious choices. The stakes are high: success or failure, right or wrong, prosperity or depression, war or peace, justice or inequity? Which will it be?

“You would think, wouldn’t you, that Jesus would have been more helpful with the man who came to him about dividing his brother’s inheritance. You would think that a rabbi like Jesus, a teacher, a leader, the glorified Son of God, would have had an answer. Or at least a little rule for playing the game of life. Especially because, as a matter of fact, in that Jewish society of Jesus there actually was a rule – Deuteronomy 21:17 – which governed the apportionment of inheritances among brothers, just as there were rules for most other questions in life, and just as there were lots of lawyers and scribes and pharisees to interpret and apply the rules for people.

“And lest we think this was just the Jewish approach to life, I would suggest that this man, with his concerns about ‘judging and dividing’ wealth, was very much like us in our anxiety about getting a fair deal and an equal opportunity. His society, [Jesus’ society], with all its rules to assure fairness and justice, was much like ours, [very much like American society], which graduates each year,” my friend the lawyer and priest says, ”about twice as many lawyers to administer the rules of fairness and justice as there are in all of Japan.”

“And since fairness and justice are so important, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that our Christian faith would have helped the new priest answer that party question about the $50 million.” After all, that’s why the host had asked the question of my friend, the man in the collar. He wanted to find out the Church’s answer, Christ’s answer, God’s answer to the question of “judge and divide,” the question that’s supposed to focus our vision of life.

“So how come Jesus refused to help?” my friend asks. “How come he even rebukes the man who came to him [with a sarcastic question]: ’Man, who made me judge or divider over you?’ How come Jesus proceeds to tell the parable of the rich fool, whose soul was demanded of him that night, and ends up with that strange and haunting suggestion that the real game of life is not the laying up or allocation of wealth and power at all, but the filling of one’s barns with God instead of Self, or being ‘rich towards God’?”

What kind of answer would that have been for my friend, both lawyer and priest, to give to his host, the international man of charity? What kind of answer is this “richness towards God” business for the practical questions of fairness and justice in life, and the questions of stewardship that you and I bring to Jesus? Questions like “How much should I keep for myself?” and “How much should I give to others and to God’s church? What is the rule?”

You know, one of the things about this life as a parish priest, as experienced both by my friend in Chicago and by me here in Colorado Springs, “is the sharp contrast, even in this parish, between those who have an abundance of luxury cars, European vacations, and important jobs, and those who despair about next month’s rent, losing a job, or paying a hospital bill. How are we to judge and divide?”

And in the world around us, of course, the inequities are truly scandalous. There is Haiti, for heaven’s sake! And parts of Africa and Asia and Latin America with millions of people on the road in our day simply looking for scraps to eat and a place to live, thousands of them even in our own land. “And you have to ask yourself: Why can’t Jesus bring justice to this mix-up of possessions and needs? Why didn’t God make his only Son “judge and divider” over us? When there is so much need, what kind of real Good News can Jesus’ line about “filling-your-barns-with-God-instead-of-Self” and “richness-towards-God” be for you and me here today?”

The answer – and it’s not an easy answer to hear, my friend admits – “is that Christ’s words about being rich towards God, or about filling one’s barn with God instead of Self, are, in the end, the only Good News that really is good.” Because it contains a transfigured vision of God, and of Christ, a transfigured vision of life and stewardship, and of ourselves, a vision of a God who brings life out of ashes and really does transfigure history.

“Far from being some sort of impractical piety,” my friend concluded at that party that night, ”in the end, ’richness towards God’ is Good News because it’s the only realistic way to live. And I stress that qualifier, ’in the end.’ Because that is exactly where the hitch comes in our usual ‘judge and divide’ approach to life. ‘In the end’ is death. [In the end], to all of us, God says, ’Your soul is demanded of you.’ In death, ’judge and divide’ means absolutely nothing.”

And toward his death, of course, is exactly where Jesus was headed as he was transfigured on the mountain that day. He was heading down the road to Jerusalem and the Cross. And he knew it.

“’I have seen everything that is done under the sun,’ says the wise author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, ‘and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.’ The Good News of Jesus, his ‘richness-towards-God’ response, starts precisely with this realistic bottom line of Ecclesiastes. The Good News of Jesus starts precisely with the truth of the ultimate failure of ‘judge and divide,’ with the ultimate failure of the power approach to religion and life. It is all vanity and a striving after wind. All our visions of filling our barns, all our visions of power, all the Jewish dreams and the Roman dreams and the American dreams. It is all vanity, all a striving after wind.”

So “instead of ‘judge and divide,’ instead of power, instead of our anxious concern about money and status and fairness towards us, Jesus starts with the Cross.” That’s the glory of life. That is history transfigured, a vision of life we’re enabled to see here on this feast day of Christ the King, the very same vision Peter and James and John were given on the Mount of Transfiguration.

The Cross. The Cross is the great vision of the vanity of vanities, the vision of the ultimate unfairness, the vision of the ultimate poverty of man toward man. “What a tragic waste! So much promise cut short,” says the worldly bishop in C. S. Lewis’s tale, The Great Divorce.

“But, of course, it isn’t so. The Cross was not the end, but the beginning. Not a death in vain, but a sacrifice of self that revealed to that frightened band of followers the real meaning of a life of ‘richness towards God.’

“In his life as well as in his death,” my friend reminds us, ”Jesus gave up all anxiety for ‘judge and divide’ living. He gave up all anxiety for getting a fair deal and an equal opportunity as a man among men.” He came back down the mountain to walk his way to the Cross, right in the midst of the unfairness of life.

“And if someone had come up to Jesus with a game about a $50 million inheritance, if someone had come to him with a question about stewardship, Jesus’ response would have been to tell the parable of the rich fool. ‘Man,’ he would have said, ‘you can’t truly focus your vision of life by playing “judge and divide.” Give it up. Your soul is required of you. Be rich towards God. Risk your life with me on the Cross.’”

The Cross, richness toward God – this is the vision that transfigures history. It is the life of which Jesus is King, real life as God reveals it in Jesus. Not fairy tale life, but sacrifice and love as the response to injustice.

And we, if we really do this in our lives, if we focus our vision and determine our values by the Cross rather than by ‘judge and divide,’ we will be raised to new life. Raised, says Jesus, to a life that is truly life, raised to a life of trusting God rather than barns or bullets, raised to a life lived in faith, raised to a life free for service to others, raised to a life in which we are free to give without fear and free to love without fear, raised to a life in which we are free to marry and rear children in defiance of the Holocaust, and free, in the end, even to die without fear, which is to be rich far beyond any $50 million windfall.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.