Matthew 25:31-40
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
March 19, 2023
“He’s poor, he’s old, he’s only in the way.” This quirky, old-timey song caught George Marcincavage’s ear back in January, as we gathered to plan music for Lent. He made a connection between the legendary bluegrass musician Charlie Poole’s words and the words of Jesus. Today he brought that connection to life. Thank you, George.
I don’t know what inspired Charlie Poole, with his partner Norman Woodlieff, to write this song back in the 1920’s. The words suggest that he perceived a change in the way society treated older adults. His final verse is a scathing critique of the younger generation; ironic, since he would have been in his 30’s at the time.
Whatever his perception of the cruelty of his own time, Poole lifts up a reality that transcends any particular time and place. He names our human propensity to identify some people as useless. He sings of being old and only in the way. Someone else, in a different time and place, might sing of being young and in the way. Or differently-abled and in the way of people who want to get somewhere fast. Or transgender and in the way of someone else’s definition of how human beings should look or act. Or a deep thinker who asks hard questions and gets in the way of how people choose to remember our history.
The first verse of Charlie Poole’s song calls out this painful human reality. His second verse is an exhortation, almost a warning: “Don’t point at them because they’re old and grey, for remember while you’re young, old age to you will come and you’ll be old and grey and only in the way.”
Poole names a perfectly fine motivation for treating a person who is vulnerable with kindness: someday it could be you. He proclaims an enlightened-self-interest twist on the Golden Rule: treat people the way you’d like to be treated, for someday you may be in their shoes. “Do you really want to be part of creating a culture that treats old people as useless,” he asks, “knowing that you will also, one day, be seen as useless?”
George dug up this song because it resonates powerfully with our gospel text. Like Poole, Jesus lifts up the people society considers to be useless. Poole focuses on older adults. Jesus talks about people who are hungry and thirsty, strangers and naked, sick and imprisoned–people who were seen, in his time, as only in the way.
In this gospel story, Jesus calls his followers to move deeper than the Golden Rule, deeper than enlightened self-interest. He calls us to a more profound motivation as we respond to people society sees as only in the way. “That which you do to the least of these my beloved, you do to me.” When you encounter someone who is hungry, he says, you encounter me. You encounter God, present in human form.
When you recognize the sacred in each person, when you respond with generosity and compassion, you enter the kin-dom of God, not as a reward but because that is what the kin-dom is. The kin-dom of God breaks in when we honor one other as sacred. Jesus calls us to so much more than simply treating one another the way we’d like to be treated; he calls us to treat one another as we would treat God. Jesus calls us to be especially attuned to God’s presence in the people whose worth society denies.
This last Monday our noontime prayer group huddled around the firepit on a raw overcast pre-snowstorm day. We focused on this scripture passage. We named the transformative power of seeing the sacred in those the world sees as useless. We admitted how hard it is do actually live that way.
We talked about what it means to see the sacred in someone we are inclined to judge, someone whose values or actions we find abhorrent. Would Jesus expect us to treat them as holy? We are pretty sure we know the answer to that question, and we are pretty sure we don’t always do it. We paused to thank God that Jesus does not ask us to be perfect, but to keep trying.
We also talked about the challenge of seeing and responding to the sacred in the millions of people we don’t know personally but we know are suffering: hungry and thirsty, alone, sick, in prison. Each person—Ukrainian and Russian—killed or displaced in the war is Jesus. Each child who is starving because of the drought in the Horn of Africa is Jesus. Every person imprisoned in our system of mass incarceration is Jesus. It feels overwhelming, sometimes devastating. We struggle to stay present to their humanity, to find a way to respond that feels like enough. We struggle to stay present to the sacred in each one of them. Does Jesus really expect us to see God in all these people we don’t even know? Once again, we are pretty sure we know the answer to that question, and we are pretty sure we don’t haven’t figured out how to do it. Once again, we paused to thank God that Jesus knows we are works in progress, and that Jesus promises to give us strength to persevere.
Jesus’ challenge to honor God in each person pushes us beyond charity to work for a broader transformation. How can we be content to live in a society that says it is okay for a sacred soul to starve, to be excluded, to be imprisoned unjustly? Even as we offer food and drink, we are called to plant gardens and dig wells, to challenge the extreme income inequity in our nation and our world. Even as we visit someone in prison, we are called to speak up about the gross injustices in our sentencing practices. It is good and sacred work to offer food and drink, clothing and welcome and companionship. It is good and sacred work to form partnerships, to advocate for public policy changes, to create opportunity for all.
As we huddled around the fire, daunted by the cold wind and the challenge of this passage, we began to think about the people who might first have heard Jesus’ words. We know that people who followed Jesus came from different walks of life; we know many of them had been ostracized. Some were poor and had probably been hungry and thirsty and even naked. Some felt like strangers, cast off by their families because of a feared illness. We know one was excluded from community because he was a tax collector. Some, no doubt, had been in prison. What did they hear in Jesus’ words?
For them, I imagine, this was not simply a message about giving charity. It was a message about their worth, their dignity, their sacredness. It was a message that would inspire them to insist that they be treated with dignity. It was an invitation to claim their role as leaders in Jesus’ world-changing movement to usher in the kin-dom of God.
“He’s poor. He’s old. He’s only in the way,” Charlie Poole sings. “No,” Jesus says. In the kin-dom of God, which is right here, right now, there is no such thing as being in the way. The kin-dom of God breaks in whenever we recognize the sacred in another person, including and especially the person who has been told they are in the way.
The kin-dom of God is not a place, not a destination. It is a journey. On this journey, we go from seeing one another as obstacles in our way to celebrating the sacred gift that we are on the way together. It is a journey of transformation, as we learn to claim our own dignity, as we grow in our capacity to see the sacred in each other. It is a journey of transformation, as we become bolder in our insistence that each person we encounter on the way is treated with dignity, compassion and justice.
This way of traveling together with Jesus is not a highway, with the goal of getting from one place to the other as fast as we can. This way is more like a windy country route, with lots of twists and turns, for the people we encounter on the way will lead us on holy detours. We will pause by the side of the road for a shared meal with a sacred stranger. We will take a hike off the path to drink together from a waterfall of God’s grace. We will divert to the state house to meet with our representatives, or spend Good Friday at MCI Framingham. We will sometimes think we are going in circles; then we will discover that our journey is a spiral, as we move deeper and deeper into the kin-dom of God’s love, deeper and deeper into the joy of seeing Jesus in every person we meet.
Old or young; grey or red or black or blond-haired; hungry or full, naked or over-clothed, sick or healthy, free or in prison– No matter who you are, God is present in you. You deserve to be treated with dignity. No matter who you encounter, God is present in them. They deserve to be treated with dignity. On this journey, no one is in the way. Let us celebrate that we are on the way together. Amen.