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[Music] [Music] Have you found Jesus? Your message for the moment with Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Will you join with me in giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word

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as it is recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew at the 25th chapter, beginning the reading at the verse which is numbered 31. "When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.

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Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, O blessed of my Father,

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inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'

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Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?'

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And the King will answer him, 'Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, he did it to me.' Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

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For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me,

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sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to thee?' Then he will answer them, 'Truly I say to you,

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as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.' And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. And may the same God who inspired these words

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incline our hearts to their understanding. Let us pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. Bruno Walter was one of the great symphonic conductors of our time. In an interview just a few months before his death, he was asked what he thought of younger conductors,

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and among other things he said, he said this, 'I am regularly astonished with the courage which they display in approaching even the greatest works of music while they are still quite young. I myself never thought of conducting any of the major symphonies of Mozart

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until I was at least fifty years old. I find them attacking them while they are in their twenties.' Bruno Walter was perhaps the greatest interpreter of Mozart in our time, and perhaps we can get an insight into his greatness

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by the hesitancy with which he approached the most noble works of Mozart. I find myself tonight remembering this comment of Walter's because I want to approach with you a passage of scripture which is so important and so great in its significance

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that I have never had the courage to approach it before. While I've been tempted many times to preach about the last parable in Matthew 25, I have never spoken of it until tonight. And I ask that you will approach it with the same gentleness that I do,

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that together we might try to get at least a modicum of what Christ is offering to us here. The story is so clear that it does not need to be retold. We are familiar, I am sure, with the details.

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And I want to consider the parable under the theme, "Have you found Jesus?" Because it seems to me that the parable begins by saying to us that if we want to find Jesus, we will find him with the least of the brethren.

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Jesus was a Jew. That means he was part of a minority group. Not only that, but he was a poor Jew. There were many Jews in his earthly day who had amassed great affluence.

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He was not one of those. He was, therefore, not only part of a minority group, but he was in the poverty part of that minority group. In addition to this, he was part of a minority in the midst of a society

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which was ruled by a group whose cultural and social understandings were different than his own. I refer, of course, to the conquering Romans. Jesus then understood what it was to be amongst the least of the brethren,

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for that is where he lived his life. As a Jew, as a poor man, in the midst of a society ruled over by individuals who did not share his understanding of life. This was true of Jesus yesterday.

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But I would submit to you that it's also true of Jesus today. That Jesus is still to be found among the least of the brethren. I think this is one of the great truths of the resurrection. A truth which we miss most often when we think of that cardinal doctrine of our faith.

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You see, when God came to us in the person of Jesus, it was as if he planted his trailer right in the middle of our lawn. Now, we might have been able to accept that. But what happened then was he got out of the trailer and he began talking about

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how important it was to give yourself in love and sacrificial service to the most unattractive elements of society. And as soon as Jesus, God incarnate, began to do that, he got into trouble with the powers that be.

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I think if Jesus would have spent his whole ministry mouthing pious platitudes, he would never have gotten into any difficulty. But the fact of the matter is that he called men to a service of the poor and the needy and the separated and the afraid.

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And he called them to that saying that you will do this or you will have no part in the kingdom. And those who were part of the establishment didn't like to hear that. So they shut him up. Or tried to.

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On a cross. Now today, when Jesus speaking through the lips of his people talks about going to the least of the brethren, there are still those who try to shut him up.

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But they don't do it with a cross. Instead they do it with a church. They try to lock him in a sanctuary. They try to stash him somewhere in heaven,

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sing hymns to him and anthems, read the scripture, pray prayers, but leave him in church and not take him out into the midst of the traffic of life.

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Two thousand years ago they tried to close him off with a stone rolled across the entrance to a tomb. Today, we use carved wood in a sanctuary door. But oft times the intent is exactly the same. To deny his message, which is

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to give ourselves in love to the least of the brethren. We don't want to hear that. But the great truth of the resurrection is that that cross did not keep Jesus, that tomb did not contain Jesus,

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just as today no sanctuary will house him, no matter how wide or lofty it is. He moves out into life. He moves out into life through people who surrender to him and are changed by him.

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When you encounter individuals who say they have been changed by Jesus, observe their lives. If their lives are unchanged, then there's nothing changed in them. For it's not your talk that counts,

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it's your walk that matters. And when Jesus enters into a man, he affects where that man walks and why he walks that way. I do not care how many victory circles you've sat in, how many aisles you've come down at the invitation of one ardent evangelist or another.

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This is of relative unimportance. What is important is, are you changed? Or, have you changed Jesus so that he has become some comfortable kind of savior

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who demands of you nothing and offers to you whatever it is you most want to have. If you want to find him today, just as if you had wanted to find him twenty centuries ago,

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you've got to go to the least of the brethren. For this Jesus lives, and he lives with the least. Martin of Tours, one of the great heroes of the faith,

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on a winter day came into a town only to be accosted by a beggar who asked for food. Martin of Tours had no food. All he had was his tattered cloak. He took the cloak and tore it in half and gave one half to the beggar and retained the other half for himself.

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That night he dreamed a dream. And in the dream he saw all the company of heaven gathered together about Jesus Christ seated upon his throne. And the Lord Christ in the midst of all this splendor was wearing a tattered cloak, and one of the angels said to him, "Lord, why is it that you wear this thing?"

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And Jesus replied, "Why, my friend Martin gave it to me." It is when you encounter the least that you encounter the Lord. Now the second thing which I think the parable makes very clear to us is this, that you not only confine Jesus with the least,

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but you also confine Jesus with those who love and are serving the least. You will notice in the parable that those who are rewarded with eternity with Christ are those who have been ministering to the least of the brethren. Now this might lead us to believe, quite mistakenly,

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that these people are given the reward of heaven because they have been serving the poor and the lonely and the separated and the afraid. But this is not the case. For when we study the parable we observe that these individuals did not do these things because they understood themselves to be doing them for Jesus.

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When Jesus says, "You fed me," they say, "When?" When Jesus said, "You clothed me," they say, "Where?" When Jesus says, "You visited me," they say, "When was this?" They do these things, you see, out of a love for the least.

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They do not do them to gain honor points with the Lord. So it is that the kingdom of heaven which they are promised and given as a reward for what they have done is not something which they have sought to earn. It is something which comes to them as the result of Christ living in them.

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Just as they're giving themselves to the poor is the expression of Christ living in them. That is to say, they do what they do not in order to get to Christ, but because Christ is already in them. I had a friend who, a few years ago,

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worked for two years as the administrator of a leprosarium in India. His function at this leprosarium was to determine who would be admitted and who would not be admitted. There were three requirements for admittance. First, of course, you had to be a leper.

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Second, there had to be room in the hospital to accommodate you. And third, you had to be destitute. If you had the money to pay for your treatment, then you could go to a regular hospital. This facility was available only for those who had no other recourse.

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One Sunday morning in the leper worship service in this hospital, an offering was being taken to aid a portion of India which had suffered terribly from the ravages of flood. And as my friend sat in his chair, assisting in the leadership of worship, a very old woman, terribly scarred with leprosy, came forward

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and silently and very humbly placed a single silver rupee on the floor beside his chair. Now, why did she do what she did? She was not offering this money in order that she might get into the hospital. She was already in the hospital.

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She was not offering this money in order to gain medical treatment for her sores or spiritual balm for her soul. She was already being treated medicinally, and she had already heard the gospel and accepted it. She was not offering this money in order to gain these things.

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It was because she had these things that she was offering everything that she had to benefit those who were going through the ravages of this flood. What I am saying is that in this parable we are called to confront this reality, that it is our faith alone that saves us, but that the faith that saves us is never alone.

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It invariably works itself out in acts of mercy to the least of the brethren. Individuals who encounter Jesus are changed, and when they are changed, that change expresses itself in the service of others. So if you want to find Jesus, you can find him with the least,

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or you can find him with those who are ministering to the least, for he is living in the hearts of those people, and they do what they do, not for the applause of men, and not for the applause of angels, but because the Lord has taken up residence within them.

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They bear burdens, why? Because they are fulfilling the law of Christ. They take up their cross, why? Because their Lord has said to them, "Take up your cross and follow me." These, then, it seems to me, are the two very obvious truths with which the parable begins.

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That to find Jesus you must go to the least, or to those who are loving the least. But there is a third dimension to the parable, and one which, in honesty, we must confront. If the first two of our observations are correct, then it follows logically that Jesus will not be found with those who do not love the least.

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And that, of course, is exactly what the parable says. Those who do not feed the hungry, who do not visit the imprisoned, who do not serve those who need service, are told that they are separated from him, and that they are separated from him for eternity.

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Now notice that the basis of the separation is not on theological positions. It is not on prestige within the family of the people of God. The separation is not made on the basis of wealth or of testimony. It is not made on the basis of the number of gifts that a person possesses, or talents that that person has.

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It is not made on the number of Sunday school classes attended or verses memorized. As a matter of fact, it comes as quite a surprise to some of these individuals to discover that they are in the group that is being separated out. They thought it was right to brighten the corner where they are,

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and they suddenly discover that what their Lord wants is for them to brighten the corner where somebody else is. And that what he is saying to them is this, if you know the lonely and are not ministering to them, if you know the frightened or the hungry or the imprisoned or the broken or the diseased or the hurt in any way, body, mind, or spirit, and are not going to them, and not just to your friends, mind you, but to the least of the brethren,

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then you are practicing a kind of area code theology which deals only with those within your dialing parameters. When I am calling you, says Jesus, to a concern for those who would feel altogether not at home in the circle in which you move. May I be bold enough to put it this crassly, that perhaps when Jesus sees a sign on a bumper sticker which reads "Honk if you love the Lord," he might respond with the words of the prophet read a few minutes ago, "Take away from me the noise of your honking.

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Instead, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Give yourself to the least of the brethren." It seems to me that we regularly use three excuses to separate ourselves from this responsibility. Some of us separate ourselves by saying that we understand our responsibility as Christians to be to convert people

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and not to minister to their physical needs, and after they're converted, everything will work out all right. Now, the illogical nature of that argument can be illustrated in this way. The owners of the slaves before the Civil War were diligent in seeing that all of their slaves were converted. They were never diligent in seeing that they were freed.

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The fact of the matter is that we are very ready, oft times, to go to people with the bread of life while their stomachs are so contorted with hunger because they haven't the bread that sustains physical life that they can't hear one word we have to say. Now, we cannot use the excuse that we offer the gospel and only the gospel.

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For the gospel is good news, and good news to a hungry man is food, and good news to a lonely man is a friend, and good news to a broken man is healing, and good news to the imprisoned is freedom, and good news to the blind is sight. That's the good news we are to carry. A good news which heals the body and the soul.

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Now, another excuse that we often use to avoid our responsibility to the least of the brethren is this. We say we would be willing to become involved in this, but they oft times do things that we don't approve of and give themselves to efforts and involvements with which we find ourselves in serious disagreement. And I'm sure that's true.

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But I think tonight of a young Mexican boy who came up to the United States some 20 years ago, went into a hamburger stand in Southern California, didn't notice the sign in the window which said "Whites Only," was cursed and driven out of the restaurant, went back to Mexico, got involved in a criminal activity, was arrested and imprisoned, escaped from prison.

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After escaping from prison, happened to find a Bible, read it, was converted, gave himself up, went back to prison, completed his term, got married, had children, came up to the United States again, much had happened now in the area of civil rights, no more signs around that said "Whites Only." And he went into a small diner with his family and the waitress started to serve them,

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and then the manager came out of the back of the place and began to curse and swear and started to drive them out. And he'd had it, and so he stood up and he said, "Look, you can't talk to me like that because I'm a human being!" Only to hear the owner of a little diner say, "No, you're not a human being, you're a migrant worker." So this little man went out and determined that he would not lay aside his dignity.

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And from that day until this, he has given himself to the cause of the migrant worker. His name is Cesar Chavez, and there are many, many in the fellowship of faithful people who have condemned him and judged him and rebuked him and censored him. And some have done it just because they want cheap lettuce on their table. But others have done it because he doesn't always play according to our rules,

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because he's made mistakes, because his judgments have sometimes been very, very wrong. I invite these people to confront the man as he is, to see him in the ascetic life he lives, taking no salary, taking nothing to support himself as he carries out this ministry which he understands to be his. I invite them to see him in that, and to see him serving the least of the brethren, himself part of that fellowship.

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Really, can we quibble about rules when it comes to standing beside someone like him? I don't think so. And I don't think we excuse ourselves successfully either when we say, "Well, we'd like to help, but you see, we're just ignorant of what's going on, and so we don't know when to help or where to help." The fact of the matter is, we may not know all the details of any social conflagration that's burning away at the edges of our society,

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but we see Jesus on the cross. And if we see Jesus on the cross, then we are called to involvement at whatever level we are. This parable which Matthew relates to us is related only in this one of the Gospels. It does not appear in the other three. Whenever Matthew uses a parable, he uses it to call Israel to account.

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And what he is doing in the presentation of this parable is what Jesus did before him, calling Israel to stand before the cross. This is Jesus' last teaching before he goes to the cross. And Matthew understands the cross to be nothing less than the beginning of the glorification of Jesus. [silence]

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We've come to a new understanding of Matthew in the last few years because of a very ancient document called the Letter of Enoch, which was only recently deciphered and understood in its depth. Enoch suggested that Jesus began his judgment of all men at the cross. It's not a judgment off someplace in the future.

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When he returns, it is a judgment that begins today. So when Mark talks about Jesus coming in clouds of glory, he's thinking about the end time. But when Matthew talks about Jesus coming in clouds of glory, he suggests that that judgment, which Jesus renders as king, begins at the cross.

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He says that judgment begins now. It proceeds, and he uses an interesting Greek particle here, "from now on." That's the reason when Jesus is honored as Messiah in Matthew 16. The very next thing that Matthew records for us is Jesus' words, "If you want to follow me, then take up your cross."

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Jesus would have us stand before the cross today, not at some time in the future, but now. And he brings all peoples together. That's carefully noted in the parable. All nations must confront that cross, and as they confront that cross, they make a decision.

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They are divided. They will go the way of the cross, or they will turn away from it. They will give themselves to the least of the brethren, or they will deny them. They will be of the sheep, or they will be of the goats. Jesus is saying to us, "You're on a kind of spaceship made of mud, and it's hurtling through time and space.

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And certain people who are living on that spaceship don't have enough to eat. And certain people never get a window seat. And several people never get to sit down. And some people get shoved to the rear of the spaceship.

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And I'm calling you to confront this reality and to decide, are you one of the ones that pushes them to the rear? Are you one of the ones that pulls them away from the window? Are you one of the ones who eats so that they do not eat?

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Or are you one of the ones who gives himself to them, even to the point of a cross? And I want to know today. Across the centuries, men have been divided in many ways. In primitive times, they were divided into the savage and the more savage.

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In the golden age of Greece, there were the Grecians and the barbarians. In the Hebraic culture, there were the Jews and the Gentiles. But ever since the cross, in the eyes of the only begotten Son of God, the division between men, a division so clear that he can describe it in terms of sheep and goats,

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and the sheep in Palestine are white and the goats are black. In other words, it's a white and black matter. Many problems that we confront in life are not so easily deciphered. You know the little poem, "If good is white and black is bad, then all my choices are gray or plaid."

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Not so for him. He beholds men and he says, "As you do it to the least, you do it to me. And as you turn away from the least, you turn from me. If you would reign with me, it will be from a cross."

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That is what I think the parable says. That at least is what it says to me. And our time is gone. But I must ask you, before you leave this room tonight,

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settle the question. Have you found Jesus? That is, have you been changed so that you are ready to serve the least? If you have not found him, it is not because he is lost.

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It is because you are. Find him tonight, then, and know what it is to love as he loved. And enter into the joy of your Lord. Let us pray.

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Our Father, if any word has been spoken which is true, then write it forever on the tablets of our memories. And if any word has been spoken which is not true, then drop it into the deepest seas of our forgetfulness.

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For we would remember only that which is of thee. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you

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and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves to the least of the brethren his peace. Amen.

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