The Cup of Water

preached Sunday, November 11, 2007 at Christ's Church for Brooklyn

“It’s Getting Better All the Time.” The first sermon series Joe preached asked the question, Melvin Udall’s question, “Is this as good as it gets?” And of course this second sermon series is a sort of answer…No! It’s not as good as it gets…it’s getting better, getting better all the time.

Which is why it’s weird, today, to preach a sermon on justice. Sermons on justice tend to be prophetic. They tend to be a little angry. They tend to be expressions of the kind of “holy discontent” Joe talked about in his first sermon here, expressions of the “I know this cannot be as good as it gets because this sucks!” variety. In fact, my confession for today is that—on this matter—I don’t see how “it’s getting better all the time,” at least, not if “better” means “getting more just.”

So why “justice,” now? It took me awhile to get my mind around this and what I finally realized was that I wasn’t supposed to preach a sermon on justice.

I was supposed to preach a sermon on being just.

What’s the difference, you might say. Just this: that talking about justice, as a concept, however powerfully and prophetically done, is talking about a final state of affairs that is so beyond us, so vastly different from what we know and expect of ourselves and each other, that we automatically talk about it passively. We wait for it. The day of the Lord, when everything will be made right. We wait for it, because the job is too big and too complicated and too difficult for us to understand or accomplish. The eschaton, the end of the ages, the Judgment Day, when Jesus comes back to judge the righteous and the wicked, and the righteous will be rewarded and all tears will be wiped away, and justice will reign. We wait for it, because it’s God’s job to come down and establish the justice and righteousness of God’s kingdom on earth.

But is it?

[Read text: Matt 25.31-36; unison, 37-39; 40-43; unison, 44; 45-6.]

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory…” Here we are, then, at the Judgment Day: and Jesus, who’s the Son of Man and who’s also a shepherd and also a king, Matthew got a little mixed with his metaphors here but it’s all good, is putting some people or maybe sheep over here on his right, some people or maybe goats over here on his left. And we all know what that means: the good people get what they deserve, and the bad people get what they deserve…now that’s “justice.” Praise God for the Judgment Day when finally everyone gets what they really deserve! When God finally gets around to sorting it all out properly! It was a long wait, but this was worth waiting for!

Is this God’s justice? Is this what this story’s all about?

I gotta tell you, I don’t think so. And it’s not just that I’m theologically uncomfortable with traditional doctrines of hell and eternal punishment (although, I confess, I am). No, there’s a lot about justice in this story, but it’s not located at the end. God’s justice is present, but it’s not about the end result. It’s not about who goes to eternal this or that. God’s justice is present, or absent, in the words and actions and lives of all those people gathered there in front of the throne of glory. It’s about who’s been just and who hasn’t…and no one in the story understands that.

No one gets it. Not even the good people on the right, and certainly not the bad people on the left. Not anyone. And not us either—who read this story and hear a parable of judgment and hellfire and brimstone and consider that God’s justice done. God’s justice is not the separating of the sheep from the goats, is not the reward of eternal life or eternal punishment. God’s justice is not about the judgment day, the end result, the tallying up.

God’s justice in this story is the cup of water.

And God’s justice is being done by people who don’t even know that that’s what they’re doing. Because they’re not concerned with “justice.” They’re not concerned with the final tally, the end result, with making sure that everyone gets exactly what they deserve in the end. They’re too busy being just, right now, in the moment.

They’re too busy meeting the needs they see all around them—those concrete, nonnegotiable, universal human needs that so heartbreakingly often go unmet. Food. Clean water. Shelter. Health care. Human sympathy and contact. “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison?” Never. They never did. And every single time they encountered another human being in need. That’s Jesus’ answer, of course. “Just as you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.”

I’ve often heard this answer used to teach the lesson that we should strive to see Jesus in every person we meet. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t. It would probably mean a great deal of improvement in our social relations with a great many people if we could really do that. But I don’t think that’s what’s really going on in this exchange between the righteous and Jesus here. Jesus doesn’t say, “gotcha! that was just me in disguise, there.” No; instead, Jesus calls them “the least” in the world. Not the powerful Son of God, the king, in disguise. They really are the “least.” But these righteous cared for them anyway. Not because they saw Jesus, but because they saw need.

And what I hear in Jesus’ answer is that it doesn’t matter that they never saw Jesus in those hungry, thirsty, naked sick imprisoned people. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t see what they were doing as a service to God. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t think of themselves as God’s agents of divine justice and righteousness on earth. In fact, it seems to be to their credit that they didn’t, that they weren’t caught up in these questions. It seems to be to their credit that they were too busy being just to bother with questions about God’s justice, and who deserves help and who doesn’t, (and what in the end, will I deserve?) It seems to be to their credit that they were too busy being just to worry about when God’s justice will finally arrive, when everything will be finally made right, when they will finally get their reward, how long they will have to wait.

Me, I worry about these questions. Why? Because I’m a theologian. It’s my job to ask these questions and try to answer them. I ask these questions about justice and injustice, sitting in my office chair, in my home—my comfy, comfy Manhattan apartment. I think about all the injustice I have witnessed, heard about, read about. I think about the year I lived in Changsha, China, an American foreign teacher with a cushy job, a good salary, a travel allowance and a brand-new apartment provided with heat and A/C and a washing machine and no utility bill to pay…and how, from my kitchen window, I could see the construction workers from the countryside camping out under a tarp to sleep and washing themselves under a water spigot outside in the mornings, outside that nice new apartment they’d built for me. I remember how overwhelming that sight was, and how helpless it made me feel. What could I do for them? How could I even figure out what they really needed? How could I talk to people about how unjust it was that people would consider such a job good luck—coming into the city for months at a time, camping out in the heat and the cold away from their families, enduring cold and loneliness and, who knows what, for their lives were a mystery to me. How could I talk to people about the reasons behind such a situation? And what were those reasons? I wonder, why? Why are things this way? How did they get so messed up? How did we human beings make such a mess? And I wonder, how do we fix it? And what am I supposed to do?

Everything I see leads me to this sense of how immense the task is. Of how many people, in so many places, in Brooklyn and beyond, are squeezed and gripped and crushed by these systems and forces that I don’t understand, that seem to require the sacrifice of others on the altar of success and productivity and getting ahead in the world. And I freeze. Where do I start. What do I do. How do I do it. It’s too big for me. I don’t even understand how it all works really, so how can I act? Some people can’t see the forest for the trees; me, I can’t see the trees for the forest. I get lost in the hugeness of the problems I see. And I want to cry out, God, where are you? Why don’t you get down here and do your job already? There are hungry people here, thirsty people, lonely and sick and dying people, we need justice! How long do we have to wait?

I used to think that, somewhere out there, there were amazing and heroic people who understood these difficult things; these people knew what was going on, understood the big picture, understood the history and the politics and the economics and the red tape and knew the answers, and how to cut through the red tape to get stuff done. I used to think that my best shot would be to find those people, and learn from them, learn what they knew that I didn’t. And what happened is that I did find some of them. I found them here. Some of them are here today and some of them would be here, except that they’re off elsewhere, being just…

But what they know, that I’m still learning, is that in some sense being just is simple. It’s as simple as handing a cup of water to a thirsty person. And even though they’re completely aware of the enormous systems of injustice we human beings have somehow woven together, that seem so impervious to our tiny actions, these amazing heroic people, these righteous people, are out there handing out cups of water anyway.

Talk to these people. Learn what they do. If you don’t know what to do, ask them. They can tell you, not because they understand things so much better, but because they have learned that no matter how small you feel, or how little you think you know, you can do something. Because being just is sometimes as simple as a cup of water.

Casey’s blog used to have a quote from Ghandi up at the top. She’s changed it now, to something disappointingly philosophical by Kant, but it used to read, “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” A cup of water. It’s not the cure for all the injustice of this world. In that sense, it’s insignificant. But it is very important that you give it.

This kind of action takes faith. It takes faith because we don’t see how these cups of water make a dent in the injustice that grips our world. There’s no end to the needs that cry out to be met. The list is long. Just listen to the text: hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, lonely, imprisoned people. That’s a lot of need. It takes faith because we don’t get to see that big picture, we don’t see how that Day, when all needs will be met and all injustices righted, can possibly come. We don’t see how it’s getting better all the time.

Maybe you’ve felt, as I have this week, that this effort for the H2O project is small, insignificant in the face of all the need, all the injustices facing us. Maybe you’ve felt, as I have occasionally this week, that giving up coffee, or whatever it is you’ve given up, is just purely symbolic. Maybe you’ve felt, as I have, frustrated and a bit angry by all of this sacrifice, suspicious that in the end, it just isn’t enough. But Jesus says to us: I was thirsty, and you gave me water. We won’t see the thirsty people who receive the water our dollars help provide. We won’t be there in person to hand them that cup of water. We have to act in faith. That’s what being just requires.

It takes faith to believe that no matter how insignificant our acts of justice may seem to be, they are important. That no matter how small they are, they do have an effect. That what we do for the least of these, counts. That when we go about the daily, godly business of being just, those cups of water mean something. And they do. For the people who receive them, they mean life triumphs over death. For the people who receive them, they mean good triumphs over evil. For the people who receive them, they mean justice. They mean God’s righteousness.

We forget that. I forget that, when I sit in my apartment and think about injustice, asking my theological questions, feeling overwhelmed by the realities outside my window. I forget that no matter how enormous the problem of systemic human injustice is, each cup of water is a victory over it. Not total. Not once and for all. But real. For those who receive that cup of water, it is the triumph of God’s justice and righteousness—a taste, a foretaste, of what that ultimate day of triumph will be.

That’s what we learn from Jesus here. Justice doesn’t wait for the Judgment Day. Justice isn’t the business of the king. Justice is not meted out on brass scales at the end of the age. Justice is not something we receive. It’s something we do: not justice, but being just. In ways big, sometimes, but mostly, small. Being just is meted out in cups of water, in canned goods, in donated coats and hand-knitted caps for newborn babies, in long hours at hospitals and ESL classrooms and support groups. And in skipped sodas and caffe lattes and gallons of milk and beers, and coins collected in a blue plastic cup: all to give that insignificant, all-important cup of water to the least of these, who need it so badly.

And maybe, just maybe, that cup of water will enable someone to say, yes, Lord: things are getting better. Getting better, one person at a time.