The Park Road Pulpit

  Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church 

      Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors

Giving Thanks in Sheep’s Clothing

Matthew 25.31-46

Russ Dean, November 24, 2002

A fable of Aesop[1]:

A Wolf found great difficulty in getting at the sheep owing to the vigilance of the shepherd and his dogs. But one day it found the skin of a sheep that had been flayed and thrown aside, so it put it on over its own pelt and strolled down among the sheep. The Lamb that belonged to the sheep, whose skin the Wolf was wearing, began to follow the Wolf in the Sheep's clothing; so, leading the Lamb a little apart, he soon made a meal off her, and for some time he succeeded in deceiving the sheep, and enjoying hearty meals.

Appearances are deceptive.

            I am a Calvinist. Or, so I like to say. It makes my kind of Baptists really confused, even down-right mad! And when I explain this to Presbyterians (the real Calvinists) they aren’t so wild about it either. In case you don’t understand, here’s the easy version of the story.

            John Calvin was one of the “Protestant Reformers.” He was born in France in 1509 and had a well-trained intellect and a serious bone to pick with the Catholic Church. He continued the protest which Martin Luther had begun against Rome. Like Luther, Calvin thought the Catholics believed too much in “works,” that is, that you had to do certain things just to get into heaven. Because of his interpretation of scripture, Calvin couldn’t buy this whole idea of a “works-righteousness.”

            As Calvin understood the Apostle Paul, anything that you did in order to get to heaven, was considered a “work.” Paul said to the Ephesians, “For by grace are ye saved through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast.[2]” I quote from the Old English of King James that I memorized as a young Baptist. We are saved by “Grace alone, through faith alone.” Those were the fighting words of the reformation. You won’t get to heaven by going to church enough. By praying enough. By reading your Bible enough. By serving at the homeless shelter enough. By giving money enough. No, we are saved by “grace alone, through faith alone.” And all the Baptists said, “Amen.”

            And then Calvin went to meddlin’ with “predestination.” And lots of folks got nervous. When Calvin said anything could be a “work,” he meant ANYTHING – including the act of conversion itself. One old preacher said, “God votes for you. The devil votes against you. And it’s up to you to cast the deciding vote.”[3] Even though this kind of preaching still works in most Baptist churches, for Calvin, even this “decision,” even the act of “turning to God,” itself, was a “work.” This was the key, for Calvin believed that we could never separate the selfish desire to “save ourselves” from that act of conversion. And the heart of a faith, based on the self-giving love of God in Jesus Christ, could never be motivated by selfishness. If you have to cast the deciding vote, then, for Calvin, the decisive act of your salvation is, in fact, in your hands.

            He would not tolerate that.

            Salvation, according to Calvin, is God’s business. PERIOD! In his doctrine of predestination, this fact, the sovereignty of God, is supreme. Because he could not ignore the reality of sin in the world and his own life, because he would not ignore the persistent theme of judgment throughout scripture, Calvin reckoned it this way: if someone is going to be judged then God should, in fact only God could, be responsible for that fate. With Calvin’s too-grim understanding of the “total depravity” of humanity, if God chose to “save” only one person in all of history, he reasoned, this would be enough to prove the magnificent grace of a righteous God.

            I am a Calvinist. Or, so I like to say, because only when I began to glimpse, by way of the much-maligned doctrine of predestination, that salvation is God’s business, alone, that it is true Grace, only then did I recognized in my own life a faith that was bent on working. Doing. Striving. Reaching. Groping. Grasping for God. I could quote Ephesians, say “grace” all day, but I found in the heart of my faith a child, timid and fearful, cowering in the face of an angry God.

            As I understand it, sheep are a little like that. Timid. Afraid. Not very intelligent creatures. Followers. Passive animals almost devoid of any discerning capacity. Sheep rarely take initiative, and when they do, it often gets them in trouble. Thus they are dependent on the shepherd’s staff with that crook in the end. They need the shepherd, who needs the staff to correct, to rebuke, to redirect, to protect, to save.

            Through the Christian age, Christians have been encouraged to be like sheep. Ironic, isn’t it? Ironic that we would be challenged to be hapless and helpless, in need of protecting and saving, by a “shepherd” who was hardly “sheepish” by any standard. The barnyard metaphor notwithstanding, “sheep” are hardly ever put to death. Not by a heavy-handed government like Rome. Not by an authoritarian religious establishment like that of first-century Judaism. No, sheep are perfect citizens. Sheep make ideal parishioners.

I have known many sheep in my life. Jesus, my friends, was no sheep.[4]

            By the time my family moved to South Carolina, my Granddaddy Phillips was already too ill to give any attention to his two goats, who were named Billy and Jimmy. He kept them in the back yard, but his yard and his carpenter’s shop were long since in disrepair. The goats, however, seemed to be just fine. In fact, they had pretty well taken over the place. “A goat will do that, you know!?”[5] I remember seeing Jimmy standing on top of the workbench in that shop, just for the fun of it I guess, sniffing around at that ceiling, sagging and cracking. I can see Billy, now, craning his neck, out of a broken window-pane chewing on the miles of Kudzu and Honeysuckle vines that grew out of control.

Goats are strong-willed. Curious. Ornery creatures. Independent. Combative. They have an insatiable appetite. They are all-around nuisances in their world. (They actually remind me of some of you. Please, take this as a compliment!)

How different would our world be if, instead of passive and pitiful, Christians, like Jesus, were strong-willed. Curious. Ornery creatures. Independent. Combative. If they had an insatiable appetite for righteousness.[6] All-around nuisances in our world.

I have known a few goats in my life. Surely, my friends, Jesus was one of them.[7]

Maybe the sheep’s clothing was added, later.[8]

            Dr. Merwyn Johnson[9], who taught me to appreciate Calvin, taught me that the doctrine of predestination was not predicated out of Calvin’s desire to understand, theologically, how and who God saves or damns. For Calvin, predestination was a pastoral issue, because he was dealing with a number of parishioners who could not truly accept the love of God. Because they could never “relax in God’s grace,” their lives were timid, fearful, moralistic, mechanical. They were sheep, bleating always, “Have I done enough, God?” “Will you be pleased, now, God?”

            “Calvin was willing to suffer the embarrassment of the extreme implications of his theology to maintain this one thing: Salvation is the gift of God.”[10] Our lives are not to be lived toward that, but in response to that. In free, unadulterated lives of pure thanksgiving.

            This morning I stopped for a cup of coffee at the Exxon station. Getting into my truck, a young woman said, “Hey… If I give you a couple dollars, would you take me to my mother’s house? I don’t want to have to walk.” It was cold out, but the address was further from the church than a preacher needed to be going with a blonde in tight-fitting blue jeans at 6:15 a.m. About half-way to the church, though, guilt turned me around with the phrase “the least of these.” But back at the corner he was gone. Christ, that is, in long, stringy hair, tennis shoes, blue jeans. Maybe I missed him this morning.

            Robert Farrar Capon says,

[Jesus] states flatly that everybody with no exceptions, will find him nowhere but in the brokenness of the world in the last, the lost, the least. the little, and the dead. There, and nowhere else, is where he works to save.[11]

            Whatever work is needed, God has already done. Our responsibility, as God’s flock, is to find the places where God is in this world, and in grateful thanksgiving, to be involved right there, with the last, the lost, the little, and the least.[12]

            Whatever clothing is needed, be confident, God will add when it is needed.[13]

            May it be so!

PASTORAL PRAYER

            Forgive us, O God, when we are not true to ourselves,

                        when we wear all sorts of costumes and disguises.

            Open our eyes to the self that is within,

                        the self that is full of you

                        and in the free, thanksgiving, of grateful lives

                                    teach us to live today,

                                                that sheep and goats and wolves among us

                                                that sheep and goats and wolves within us

                                                            might know you.

            Amen!