Pastor Darren: I start today with a little bit of advice.
Pastor Darren: If you find yourself teaching this passage with a bunch of young people teenagers, let's say, maybe even you're on retreat with a bunch of teenagers and maybe even it is the culminating talk of the retreat and you're at the campfire and everybody's really pulled together and you're trying to solidify that theme and you begin to teach this passage and amidst all the I was hungry and you gave me something to eat.
Pastor Darren: I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink you mistakenly say I was naked and you visited me.
Pastor Darren: That is going to lose the teenager crowd.
Pastor Darren: That is going to elicit laughs and joy and any real hope that you might have driven your point home about the value of service will be lost.
Pastor Darren: You may as well just pull out the s'mores material and go for it.
Pastor Darren: That's just my advice to you if you are teaching this.
Pastor Darren: The irony is it's a pretty good story to open a sermon 25 years later.
Pastor Darren: Pretty good, I guess.
Pastor Darren: Matthew 25, somewhat familiar passage, I think, probably people who have journeyed for a bit with their Bible and happened on this.
Pastor Darren: It's a significant teaching from Jesus and Matthew, pretty straightforward too.
Pastor Darren: We're supposed to serve others, right?
Pastor Darren: Nothing too provocative there.
Pastor Darren: We kind of know that was one of Jesus's things, right.
Pastor Darren: But it is interesting when you actually dig in like you might getting ready for a sermon and like one question you might ask we got these sheep and these goats and we're all like dang, I don't want to be a goat, and it throws you into this place of well, where's grace then?
Pastor Darren: That unconditional love?
Pastor Darren: Where did it find its place?
Pastor Darren: Is there no redemption for the goats among us?
Pastor Darren: A second question is what's the nature of this blessing right, with the king separating sheep and goats, the sheep who served others and the goats who did not serve others?
Pastor Darren: Is God handing out judgments?
Pastor Darren: Is that how this works?
Pastor Darren: Is God handing out judgments?
Pastor Darren: Is that how this works?
Pastor Darren: Or is it something like maybe some sense of the work being the blessing itself, the serving of others being its own blessing?
Pastor Darren: It may help us answer this question of God's grace.
Pastor Darren: In this passage, that grace, that unconditional love, is still there.
Pastor Darren: It's just us.
Pastor Darren: We cheated ourselves if we chose this goat route because we didn't get the blessing of being able to serve, to know what that feels like, to know what that relationship feels like.
Pastor Darren: Now another interesting question about this passage, and we're doing like Bible study, to start this thing.
Pastor Darren: Some of y'all really like Bible study.
Pastor Darren: So here's, you're getting a little bit of it.
Pastor Darren: And another interesting question, this last line.
Pastor Darren: The king says truly, I tell you, just as you did it to the least of one of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.
Pastor Darren: Interesting little caveat there To those who did it to the least of those in my family, you did it to me.
Pastor Darren: Who's that family?
Pastor Darren: Would that be the Christians?
Pastor Darren: Is it the Christian family?
Pastor Darren: Is he implying that this king's family is just Christians?
Pastor Darren: Right, and we know the king is supposed to be talking about God and God's kingdom, meaning the whole world.
Pastor Darren: So is he talking about just the Christians or was he really implying the king's family, god's family, being all of humanity?
Pastor Darren: Are we to only serve the least of just the Christians?
Pastor Darren: It's an interesting distinction to me.
Pastor Darren: As I'm reading it I'm like, oh well, that's disappointing.
Pastor Darren: You complicated this, matthew, you got it in there.
Pastor Darren: And Matthew, for those of us who study our Gospels we know he's a little more hierarchical, he's a little more tied to the Judaic origins, so these kinds of distinctions sometimes are a little easier for him.
Pastor Darren: But it's to me a little bit of a scary distinction, because we're creating this kind of separation, this illusion of a hierarchy amongst humanity that one is better than another.
Pastor Darren: And my problem, my concern, my anxiety does this lead to some real division in a culture, in a community, in a society, a division where everybody thinks, well, they're in the right, right, we're in the king's family, you're not in the king's.
Pastor Darren: Well, you know why you're not in the king's family.
Pastor Darren: It's because you do that.
Pastor Darren: Well, wait a minute, I'm in the king's family because I do this, and you can see how the divisions would start.
Pastor Darren: And it may look a little bit like our culture looks today.
Pastor Darren: I don't know, but I would put this passage up against a story, maybe from Luke's gospel, the story of the Good Samaritan.
Pastor Darren: Some of you, many of you, another famous story we'll remember.
Pastor Darren: It's the story of the man who gets robbed and beaten, left for dead, on his trip right, and other folks who are supposedly the ones who would help him.
Pastor Darren: Don't help him, but who helps him?
Pastor Darren: The good Samaritan.
Pastor Darren: And I'll remind you, we were kind of rivals, slash enemies, with the Samaritans.
Pastor Darren: So for the Samaritan to stop was actually not expected.
Pastor Darren: That was contrary, that's counterintuitive.
Pastor Darren: And so Jesus was pointing out, when he asked the question, who was the real neighbor, and it was the good Samaritan, the one who helped him out.
Pastor Darren: But Samaritan the one who helped him out.
Pastor Darren: It really does help us get a fuller idea, I think, of what Jesus means when he says we got to love our neighbor, and who our neighbor is.
Pastor Darren: It's not just members of the king's family, but it's all of us, even our rivals, even our enemies.
Pastor Darren: Nobody should be bereft of the love that we have been given to share with the world, in whatever forms we share that love, in whatever forms we offer it to others.
Pastor Darren: We wouldn't want to pretend that everybody's all lovey-dovey.
Pastor Darren: We know the world can be challenging, but there's always a form of love that we can share, you know.
Pastor Darren: Taken with this emphasis, it's easy to me why people find comfort in this passage about helping the least.
Pastor Darren: We like the idea that the least are being taken care of.
Pastor Darren: Even in our current cultural environment, where we have concerns about whether we can afford to care for everyone, it's very few of us, I think, who don't want the needy to get the basics.
Pastor Darren: We want to know people are being taken care of.
Pastor Darren: We like this ethos, we like this belief.
Pastor Darren: I think also that is why we like this teaching, because we all recognize that in some ways, in certain aspects of our lives and in our hearts, in our journey, we are the least of these.
Pastor Darren: We know what our own vulnerabilities are.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's not water, maybe it's not food, but maybe it's love, maybe it's confidence, security.
Pastor Darren: We know there are times when we are the least of these, or at least feel to be the least of these, and so we're comforted by this passage that says the least of these are going to be cared for, they're going to be looked after.
Pastor Darren: It lands me right back to this guiding vision of the United Methodist Church here in 2025.
Pastor Darren: And we tackle the second piece today serving joyfully.
Pastor Darren: Serving joyfully, pay your taxes Joyfully, clean your room Joyfully, do all the detail work Joyfully.
Pastor Darren: Doesn't it feel a little bit like that?
Pastor Darren: Serving Wait a minute, Okay, we do it because we're supposed to, but don't put this marker on it.
Pastor Darren: I don't have to be happy about it, am I right?
Pastor Darren: Clearly, we're being urged by the United Methodist Church and through this passage, really from Christ, from Christianity, really from Christ from Christianity, to serve others.
Pastor Darren: So in the journey, it took me to a story of my own life.
Pastor Darren: I did a lot of youth work.
Pastor Darren: I was one of those.
Pastor Darren: For a while I thought I might be a lifer.
Pastor Darren: You know that was what I was going to do, that was my calling.
Pastor Darren: And then I got tired of sleeping on the floor at lock-ins, got to recognize your call.
Pastor Darren: But one year, many years back I'm in the 90s, right when Nancy was doing her work here with your youth and we would go and take our church youth to Sierra Service Project, which I think you did a few times.
Pastor Darren: I think that is part of your history here.
Pastor Darren: Yeah right, sierra Service Project great program.
Pastor Darren: You go off and you work on Native American reservations.
Pastor Darren: You do work on their homes to get them more safe, get them more sealed and protected, and you learn about another culture too, which is kind of cool.
Pastor Darren: Well, I remember when I first learned about Sierra Service Project and I was reading through and I says, oh and look, they pay you $150 to go to this thing.
Pastor Darren: Then you read a little further and like, oh, no, you pay them $150 for the capacity, for the ability to go and serve.
Pastor Darren: So I ended up.
Pastor Darren: I thought, well, this will never work.
Pastor Darren: But then I ended up at a church that goes every year, right.
Pastor Darren: So I start going and I'm okay, I get this, I get this.
Pastor Darren: I feel the warmth in my heart from this.
Pastor Darren: I feel like our young people are learning the value of this.
Pastor Darren: I feel the warmth in my heart from this.
Pastor Darren: I feel like our young people are learning the value of this.
Pastor Darren: So we went to SSP every single year, and there was one year I had been going enough that some of my kids were now going to be going to their fourth SSP and I thought, okay, I can feel they're ready for some movement, right, something.
Pastor Darren: What's the next step we could take here?
Pastor Darren: And so we started looking at a Mexico mission and we were up in Northern California.
Pastor Darren: So that included more of a drive than it would have been from here.
Pastor Darren: But a Mexico mission split my youth group.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to take my older kids to Mexico.
Pastor Darren: My younger kids we're all going to go to SSP again, and that year we took it was 63, I think unique people on mission in that summer, and so I wear it.
Pastor Darren: It's a stripe I got.
Pastor Darren: We took a lot of people on mission.
Pastor Darren: Here's how I plan this out though young and foolish, we go to SSP.
Pastor Darren: We come back on a Saturday.
Pastor Darren: I sleep in my own bed one night and on Sunday we drive to Mexico Back-to-back missions.
Pastor Darren: Second one, a mission we hadn't done before, so it's a first go.
Pastor Darren: So we take our younger kids, we're all up at SSP.
Pastor Darren: It's a really good trip, the kinds of things you would do.
Pastor Darren: We learned about roofing, we learned about building wheelchair ramps, we learned about building decks.
Pastor Darren: We're doing drywall in the houses, a lot of painting actually, because that's something that doesn't take too much training to be able to do.
Pastor Darren: But we're getting into these homes and especially the kids are looking and they're seeing the need and then they're getting to fill that need.
Pastor Darren: So it really was every year just such a good experience.
Pastor Darren: But we come back, we have some car troubles, the whole deal, you know.
Pastor Darren: And I get back.
Pastor Darren: It's Saturday and I'm sitting on my couch and I'm thinking I got to go to Mexico tomorrow after this whole SSP adventure.
Pastor Darren: Right, and I think we were in Paradise Valley that year, which is the desert, and I was on roofing, so I was roofing in like 105 degree weather.
Pastor Darren: So I'm like, all right, here we go, tough guy's going to make this work.
Pastor Darren: So we show up on the Saturday, I get one night in my bed.
Pastor Darren: The next morning we brought both groups together into church, we celebrated the younger ones coming back, we sent off the older ones, we all hop into vans and we start cruising down Interstate 5, coming down to go to Mexico, and we start realizing that hot air is blowing through the vents onto everybody.
Pastor Darren: In my big bus, you know.
Pastor Darren: So, all nine, 10 people that are behind me, and there's one of these, uh, uh, well, 15 passengers with the van with the back bent, taken out.
Pastor Darren: That's really hot, right, and we're like what's going on?
Pastor Darren: What's going on?
Pastor Darren: Meanwhile, driver, this guy is blowing.
Pastor Darren: Fine, I'm getting cold air, it's great.
Pastor Darren: Well, the teenagers behind me are like, oh, it's all fine.
Pastor Darren: But I look back, they're taking their shirts off, they're sitting there in the back like, hey, it's hot.
Pastor Darren: And what am I going to say?
Pastor Darren: It's really hot.
Pastor Darren: And you know, put your jackets on.
Pastor Darren: I can't say this.
Pastor Darren: So we get down.
Pastor Darren: We're halfway down.
Pastor Darren: We stay at my folks' house.
Pastor Darren: There's 25 people in my folks' house.
Pastor Darren: How many beds do you have in your house?
Pastor Darren: They had about the same amount in my parents house, right, and so we're staying there.
Pastor Darren: We took them down to the community pool.
Pastor Darren: We hosed them all off, so they were, you know, clean them up.
Pastor Darren: But I had to go down, take the van down, to figure out what the heck was going on with the cool air and the hot air.
Pastor Darren: And so finally, I'm talking to the Chevron guy and he asks me this question right?
Pastor Darren: He says, all right, there's a flap in there, it's broken.
Pastor Darren: You've got to choose.
Pastor Darren: Do you want all hot or all cold?
Pastor Darren: I almost punched him in the face.
Pastor Darren: It was July and we're going to Mexico, punched him in the face.
Pastor Darren: It was July and we're going to Mexico.
Pastor Darren: Cold please, I said without sarcasm.
Pastor Darren: But then we go down.
Pastor Darren: You know, and I've never done this thing I'm taking a bunch of kids into Mexico.
Pastor Darren: They've got this thing.
Pastor Darren: They escort you over.
Pastor Darren: You're like, okay, I hope this all works well.
Pastor Darren: And we get in and everything seems to be going all right.
Pastor Darren: And then we get to the site, get in and everything seems to be going all right.
Pastor Darren: And then we get to the site right, the site where we're going to more ministries you camp, so we have all of the equipment you need to camp, right.
Pastor Darren: And you walk in and it's just this clearing, maybe football size clearing and they're like okay, just find a spot on dirt and I'm looking around, I'm not a camper, I had campers with me, I'm not a camper.
Pastor Darren: And I looked around and I went what have you done?
Pastor Darren: You brought all these kids to this crazy place, and you know.
Pastor Darren: So I'll be honest with you.
Pastor Darren: I grabbed a chair, I sat down and I said I need to sit for a while.
Pastor Darren: You guys get started.
Pastor Darren: Cool thing happens, though.
Pastor Darren: That thing was set up in a half hour.
Pastor Darren: They had dinner going in about 45 minutes.
Pastor Darren: They all came together.
Pastor Darren: This crew of young people and the adults that I brought down really came together.
Pastor Darren: It was really pretty cool, right.
Pastor Darren: And so the next day we start on our work adventure with the more industries you're doing kind of real work.
Pastor Darren: We had to lay a slab, then we were going to build up walls and then have stucco walls and then we were going to have a roll roofing kind of roof.
Pastor Darren: But we're building a building.
Pastor Darren: We're not fixing stuff, we're building something.
Pastor Darren: I remember day one we had extra large crew because it was our first go and I decided I'd rather do that than do two houses, right?
Pastor Darren: So we get about two-thirds done with this slab that needs to be built and it starts getting dark and I'm looking at my kids again figuring.
Pastor Darren: We got to drive back to our work site and I foolishly asked the workers.
Pastor Darren: I said, well, can we stop at two-thirds and then we'll do the rest of the slab tomorrow?
Pastor Darren: Any builders out here?
Pastor Darren: How dumb a question was that one.
Pastor Darren: Right there, you start a slab, you got to finish the slab.
Pastor Darren: That's just how it works, right?
Pastor Darren: But we hammer it out and we're doing the thing and we're mixing concrete.
Pastor Darren: Next day we get our structure together and putting all the things in and finally we're climbing on the roof and we're putting all the roofing on.
Pastor Darren: We do the stucco.
Pastor Darren: It was just an amazing adventure because we thought we had seen need on the Native American reservations.
Pastor Darren: Right, we thought that was real need.
Pastor Darren: Then we went to Mexico and we're like holy smoke, there are houses that had garage doors.
Pastor Darren: There are houses that had garage doors, likely from up here in the States, that were roofs that they had just put on the top of what was going on.
Pastor Darren: And obviously you're not going to seal a house that way.
Pastor Darren: You're just sort of shielding yourself.
Pastor Darren: And it was such an eye-opener I remember distinctly at our work site.
Pastor Darren: They pointed to a big, tall fence that we were maybe 50 yards away from and they said to me that's America.
Pastor Darren: It was the weirdest thing, because we have this such a huge distinction between Mexico and the United States, and then to be staring at the literal distinction, which was just this tall fence, that we as human beings decided should go there.
Pastor Darren: It was just such an eye-opener to the way our world has worked and the way it's been established.
Pastor Darren: But we had a great time.
Pastor Darren: We were camping in the evening and cooking and then we were working all day.
Pastor Darren: We got this house pieced together.
Pastor Darren: We ended up coming back on schedule, which was cool, and had a little fun on the way home, went to Laguna, laguna, maine Beach, played a little basketball, even got all the way home and I remember after the first week I was like I need a break.
Pastor Darren: I got to take a couple of days when we finished the second trip, got back on a Saturday, had church worship on a Sunday.
Pastor Darren: I showed up to work Monday morning ready to go.
Pastor Darren: I think there's some secret that Christians have, and some other groups too, but we Christians we're kind of focused on it a little bit.
Pastor Darren: The secret is we know the joy in serving others.
Pastor Darren: We know the blessing that comes to us when we serve others.
Pastor Darren: We know the best way to get a blessing is to be a blessing.
Pastor Darren: So when I see something like we need to serve joyfully, I don't hear it with that sort of odd connotation you need to clean your room joyfully.
Pastor Darren: You need to get your house in order joyfully.
Pastor Darren: You need to take your car into the mechanic joyfully.
Pastor Darren: I don't hear it like that.
Pastor Darren: I hear it as a reminder of the joy that comes from being part of the team that delivers joy, that delivers wholeness, that delivers healing, that delivers love to the rest of the world.
Pastor Darren: We know there's joy in recognizing and having an experience of being part of the body of Christ and the empowerment that comes from feeling that I'm not just working alone here.
Pastor Darren: I'm part of this movement that's blessing this world, that's building this kingdom, that's strengthening the love with which God has given us to share, serving joyfully.
Pastor Darren: It can feel like a command, but we know differently, don't we?
Pastor Darren: Amen.