Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 20, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

There’s a very well-kept secret about the Roman Catholic Church that I want to tell you about. Even though I graduated from a Roman Catholic Seminary, I, perhaps like you, when I hear the Roman Catholic Church mentioned, think first of all of a reactionary, patriarchal hierarchy and the priest child abuse scandal. That’s unfortunate, because while all of that is tragically true, there is a whole lot more to Roman Catholicism than those things; and much of that whole lot more is very good. One of those very good things that even Catholics who know about it will tell you is the best kept secret about the Catholic Church is called the Catholic Social Teaching. It is a collection of teachings about society and social justice that come from a series of Papal pronouncements going back to the late 19th century. It’s principles include such things as the inherent dignity of every human person, responsible stewardship of God’s creation, and the promotion of peace and disarmament.

It also contains two principles that are firmly grounded in the Gospel passage we just heard, Matthew’s great judgment of the nations scent with its famous line: "Just as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." One of those principles is economic justice. This principle holds that the economy must serve the people, not the other way around. It also holds that workers have the right to productive work, to fair wages, and to organize to protect those rights. And it says: No one is allowed to amass excessive wealth when others lack the basic necessities of life.

The Catholic Social Teaching has another principle that is even more squarely grounded in today’s Gospel passage than is the principle of economic justice. That principle is called "the option for the poor," or sometimes "the preferential option for the poor." It is the notion, that we probably don’t want to hear, that God really does like poor people better than rich people. It is often summed up with the line "the moral test of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members." That is the line that sprang immediately into my mind when I read the judgment of the nations parable in preparation for this morning’s service. It is a line well worth thinking and praying about.

And it is an inescapable conclusion from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It certainly follows from today’s lesson. Whatever problems we may have with the judgmentalism of the way Matthew presents the point, and even if we can’t quite figure out what Matthew has against goats, the lesson is clear. We show our love for Jesus Christ by the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. Matthew uses the examples of those who suffer hunger and thirst, who lack clothing, who are sick, and who are in prison. The list is illustrative not exhaustive. It indicates God’s care, and God’s call to us to care, for all who are in need, who are marginalized, who are as we say today at risk. That’s the lesson of this passage, and this passage doesn’t stand alone. It is supported by everything we know about Jesus. He said: "Blessed are you who are poor." Luke 6:20 These are the people to whom he reached out. He reached out most of all to those on society’s margins, those whom society scorned and rejected, those whom society blamed for their own poverty or illness. Care for them and you care for Him. Do not care for them and you do not care for Him, no matter how much you may claim to love him. For Christians, the moral test of a society is indeed how it treats its most vulnerable members.

Friends, to say the least, that’s not very good news for us. If the way a society treats its most vulnerable members is the moral test of a society, we fail our moral test and fail it badly. We do a shameful job of caring for the most vulnerable among us. I can throw some statistics at you if you like (or even if you don’t). And remember: All of this takes place in what we so proudly call the richest country on earth. 35.9 million people, including 12.9 million children, live below the poverty line. And a lot of us think the government sets the poverty line artificially low to keep the numbers down. Even so, that’s approaching 10% of the US population. (U.S. census data) In 2004 emergency food requests in 27 major US cities increased an average of 14%, and 20% of those requests went unmet. (US Conference of Mayors) 600,000 people are homeless at any one time (US Census Bureau), and 2.3 million adults and children are likely to experience some period of homelessness in a given year. (helpusa.org) 20 to 25% of the homeless are mentally ill. (library.thinkquest.org) Many of the mentally ill are homeless because of an intentional policy we adopted years ago of "deinstitutionalization," We closed most of our mental hospitals. They were supposed to be replaced by a system of community based mental health care, but we have never adequately funded that system. It’s a bleak picture, and I could go on and on with more statistics and historical data that would make it sound even worse. But those are just numbers. Let me tell you about a personal experience I’ve had of the way our society treats our vulnerable members.

For five and a half years, up to February, 2003, I worked as a staff attorney at the Legal Action Center, a legal services program of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington in Seattle’s Central District. We provided free legal representation to low income tenants in eviction cases. A big part of that job was telephone screening of the people who called us for help. A typical call went something like this:

Caller:    I just got an eviction notice for not paying my rent.
Atty: Did you pay the rent?
Caller: No.
Atty: Why not?
Caller: I lost my job because my child got sick and I had no one to care for her so I missed work:
Tom: Or:
Caller: I got hurt at work, and Labor and Industries screwed up my benefits and hasn’t paid me, so I couldn’t pay my rent.
Tom: Or:
Caller: The government has been tailing me, following me with unmarked white cars and black helicopters hovering over my house, And they’ve bugged my phone and put cameras and microphones in my walls. and I can’t go out to work or they’ll swoop down on me, haul me away, and no one will ever hear from me again.
Tom: The attorney would then determine that the eviction notice was properly worded and served and the conversation would continue:
Atty: I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you. Your landlord is entitled to evict you.
Caller: But it’s not my fault!
Atty: I know. It doesn’t matter. The law doesn’t care.
Caller: Is there some place that can give me money?
Tom: The attorney would give the caller a couple of referrals, then:
Caller: I’ve already tried them, and they tell me I don’t qualify and that they’re out of money anyway.
Atty: Then I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do.
Caller: So I’m going to get evicted and thrown out on the street even though I didn’t do anything wrong?
Atty: I’m afraid so.
Tom: And they were, and the ranks of the homeless grew.

Believe me, those were the hardest calls I had to take, and I and the other people in our office had to take them all the time.

Friends, there are millions of poor vulnerable people among us, and our society treats them with a callous heartlessness. The law embodies that heartlessness, and the social safety net, which has always been grossly inadequate, keeps getting smaller all the time as we slash social programs, trying to balance the budget, or at least to reduce the deficit, on the backs of those least able to bear the burden. And if you don’t believe that, just look at what Congress did last week. We’ve stood the Kingdom of God on its head. We give the wealthy what I understand to be the lightest tax burden in the industrialized world, do next to nothing for the poor, allow 45.8 million people among us to go without health insurance (US Census Bureau, 2004), and we all benefit from an economic system that depends on the existence of a class of workers at home and abroad who don’t make anything close to a living wage. It’s a scandal. It’s an outrage. It is, to use a good Christian word we don’t hear much anymore, sinful. And Jesus will have none of it.

Let me ask you something: Did you hear the voice of Jesus in Laurie’s voice as she played my hypothetical caller just now? Did I? Do you see the face of Jesus in the homeless man begging on the street corner? Do I? Do you see Jesus in the undocumented alien mother who is afraid to take her seriously ill child to the emergency room out of fear she’ll be reported to the immigration authorities and returned to a place where her child may well starve to death? Do I? Do you hear Jesus’ voice in the ravings of the mentally ill man whose disease is untreated because we won’t fund an adequate mental health system? Do I? If I’m honest, I have to admit that most of the time I don’t. I suspect that maybe you don’t either.

And yet those are precisely the people with whom Jesus identified himself in Matthew’s parable of the judgment of the nations. In so far as you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me. In so far as you did not do it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did not do it to me. There’s only one conclusion: They are Jesus to us. They are the moral equivalent for us of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

It’s a scary thought. It’s scary because we sure don’t think that way, and we sure don’t act on that identification of Jesus and the poor. Matthew’s great judgment scene tells us that God is not happy with our failure, our refusal, to do so. God is happy neither with us as a society nor with us as individuals. That’s about the scariest thought there could be, or it would be if didn’t also know that we live in God’s grace. We know that in Christ Jesus God forgives our sinful treatment of the poor and the vulnerable among us. That is great good news of course, but it’s no excuse. If we mean it when we say we’re Christians, we need to start seeing Jesus’ face in theirs; and we need to call our government to policies that reflect what the Catholic Social Teaching calls it duty to respect the dignity of every person, to work for the common good, and to care for the poor. The Catholic Church is right about that. We’d do well to learn from them. Amen.