Feast of Christ the King, November 22, 2020 – Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28; Matthew 25:31-46

Before I begin, just a few items of housekeeping. I’m sure that many of you, like me, are watching with alarm as the cases of Covid-19 rise throughout the area. Fortunately, so far, Sullivan County is not even a yellow zone, much less an orange zone. But this holiday weekend could prove to be our undoing, as people gather in one another’s homes for Thanksgiving dinner, not paying attention to the dire warnings we keep hearing from our medical authorities.

So I thought I would put some protocols into effect for the month of December. I’ve asked all of our social organizations to cancel their December meetings - the Holy Name Society, the Ave Maria Guild, and the Parish Council. And I’m going to ask the Holy Name Society if they would perhaps stop selling tickets on the 50/50 after next weekend. It’s too late for them to stop this weekend. We’ll do this weekend one more weekend. I know that there’s already more than $400 in the kitty, and so the prize for the winner is going to be a handsome prize even if we just stop right now, but my hunch is that if I tell the congregation that it’s almost time to stop, there’ll be a rush for tickets in the next two weeks.

I’ve also been told, this is just a piece of information for you to have, that those bandito scarves that some people like because it’s kind of old Wild West, don’t work as well for preventing the spread of germs as this kind of mask, or the double cotton masks that some people wear. And this is just a point of information; I’m not telling you that you can’t wear whatever kind of mask you want to church. But just be aware of that.
 
Carrie Underwood had a big country hit, and when I say country hit that means beware of overstatement. She had a big country hit called “Jesus Take the Wheel.” And it was a great idea. The story she’s telling is that she is overtired, car full of kids, and drifts away for just a second, and all of a sudden is confronted with an 18-wheeler bearing right down on her, and she panics. And says, “Jesus take the wheel; I don’t know what to do.” And the story goes on for two verses. And she flips the image into a metaphor about how the wheels frequently come off the car of life, and the only thing we can do in our desperation is say, “Jesus take the wheel.”

I was reminded of that because this very powerful parable that we just heard from Matthew’s gospel actually is based on the first reading, from the book of Ezekiel. And Jesus told, all together, in all the gospels, about five parables that involve shepherds in some way. All of them are rooted in the shepherd imagery from the book of Ezekiel, a little bit from the book of Isaiah, and the beautiful psalm we had as the psalm between the readings, “The Lord is My Shepherd.” The compound image has always been taken as one that is very gentle, very sweet, but the story in the first reading tells of a different tale. 

After the kingship of David, when Solomon took the throne, they both ruled over a united kingdom but the union was not a solid one. There were three counties, pretty much like the counties around here. There was Galilee, where Jesus lived, Samaria, which is between the two, and then, in the south what we call the kingdom of Judea. And once Solomon took control, he was unable to hold his own sons together, and on his death the kingdom broke up again, each one of them ruled by a local despot. They called them kings in the Old Testament, but they were more like the town supervisors we have today. That’s about the size of the area over which they governed. And each of them began to make alliances with pagan tribes around them, in order to protect them from the constant nomadic warfare that went on. You know the saying you always hear, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend. My enemy’s friend is my enemy,” and so on, and so forth. That’s the way it was. There were grave warnings in the law of God, not to make alliances with pagan nations and therefore be tempted to drift away from the worship of the one true God. But king after king thought better of that. As a result, the northern kingdom collapsed when the Assyrians attacked it under Nebuchadnezzar. Of course the southern kingdom of Judea, having made a separate alliance, was safe, and they kind of smugly looked at their northern neighbors and said, “Ha, ha. You know you made a big mistake.” And just about a century later, they made the same mistake and Jerusalem was destroyed.

Now when I say that, you have to imagine in your head the photographs you’ve seen of Berlin at the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. It was total devastation. The invading armies burnt whatever they could. They burned the fields so that the harvest for the next year was destroyed, and they would assassinate the members of the ruling family. The worst thing they would do is, sometimes, hold the king captive and make him watch as they killed his harem and his children, then blind him and take him living, as a captive, to another place, along with all these people with any kind of talents, the artisans, the farmers, all the people who could build or make, were taken away to enhance the economy of the conquering power.

So Ezekiel walks into this story of devastation and says the reason why this happened is because the shepherds did not shepherd the sheep. Now keep in mind that the king was also the leader of worship, so he wore two hats. Along with the king wearing his two hats, there were people who taught the Law of Moses. Ezekiel accuses all of them of failure. Their failure to keep the king and the people on the straight and narrow caused this to happen. Then he says, now God is going to come and shepherd the people himself. He’s going to right the wrong that was done. However, if he does, it means that the sheep also will fall under judgement. If they don’t keep the law then they are just as responsible as their leaders are.

Of course the Hebrew people did not realize that they were pawns in a much larger event taking place in the history of the world. They were rescued finally by another pagan king, Cyrus, whose Persians conquered the Assyrians and let all the conquered people go home to rebuild their societies because it was economically advisable to do that. But Jewish people saw Cyrus as God’s instrument in saving them. They rebuilt their society, they were conquered again by the Greeks, then by the Romans, but, St. Paul tells us that it was in the fullness of time that Jesus came. What he meant was that this pagan conquerer made it possible for the whole Middle East to communicate with one another once again. It was an ideal time for someone like Jesus to make his appearance.

So, in the minds of the prophets, God works through the events of history. We could say that we live in a time when the wheels have fallen off the car, very simply. And it’s interesting to notice the four classes of people that Ezekiel says God will rescue - the lost, the straying, the wounded, and the ill. There’s a difference between being lost and straying. You can get lost accidentally, but when you stray, you go where you shouldn’t go of your own free will. And so there are some people who need to be rescued because they can’t cope, and others who need to be rescued because they’ve made a mess of their lives.
There’s a difference between being wounded and being ill. You can be wounded in defense of something. You can have psychological wounds that are deep seated and not your fault. You can be sick from things that are in the air, or in the ground, or in the water that you have no control over, or you could have been the creator of your own illness.

And so it applies just as well today, if the wheels have fallen off the car, both in civic life and in church life. How do we make it possible for ourselves to believe that God will rescue us? What is there that tells us that this rescuing process that Ezekiel saw so long ago, takes place again and again? Well, what is it that is fundamental to our faith? It is the Eucharist.

In a lamp lit room two thousand years ago, Jesus, who was both completely human and completely divine, left us Himself in a meal. Now we face a time when very often we can’t get to that meal. But, during the whole history of the church, that meal became the focal point for creating the water for the sacrament of Baptism, the oil for the sacrament of Confirmation, and the place where the treasured scriptures were read – so that everything else in our faith emanates from that meal. We still will always have those other things even when we don’t have Eucharist. And so it’s all still rooted in this feeding of the sheep.

As we face those times in our own lives, in the life of our church, in the life of our society, where the wheels have fallen off the cart, it is saving for us to say, “Jesus take the wheel.”