For our family Thanksgiving celebration this week, my husband asked everyone to come prepared with their favorite “dad joke”.  In case you hadn’t heard, dad jokes are a category of humor that is as likely to cause an eye roll as it is a laugh.  For example:  Did you hear about the fire at the shoe factory?  Many soles were lost.

Get it?  I know, it’s so bad it’s good!  That’s the beauty of dad jokes.  Here’s my favorite:  What did the janitor say when he jumped out of the closet?  Supplies!

These jokes came to mind this week as I was reading our gospel lesson.  Today is Christ the King Sunday, the climax of our liturgical year, when we celebrate our faith that one day Jesus is going to come back to this world.  Only this time it won’t be as a powerless little baby that only a handful of shepherds notice.  Next time, Jesus is going to come back in a way that the whole world will notice.  And, “Supplies!”  Surprise!  According to Matthew, the thing that will matter most at that time isn’t whether we professed our faith in Christ and sang all the right hymns and prayed all the right prayers and memorized enough scripture passages.  The thing that will matter most is whether or not we showed mercy to those in need.

Supplies!  Surprise!  On that day, when Jesus comes again, sadly many souls will be lost.  And it won’t be because there was a fire at the shoe factory.  It will be because we missed the point.  It will be because we were following the ways of the world instead of the ways of the Kingdom of God.

The way Matthew records it, Jesus seems to be saying there are only two choices:  either we make Jesus our King—which means we live according to the rules of the Kingdom of God; or we miss out on the kingdom entirely.  No room for being wishy washy.  No room for being half a disciple.  But it’s not like this is a new concept.  Our Christian faith has its roots in Judaism, whose guiding principles include the Shema:  you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your strength.  That’s the most important command.  And the second most important, Jesus said, is like it:  you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Christ the King Sunday is the culmination of those two guiding principles projected out into the future.  One day, Jesus is going to come again.  And the test will be simple.  Did we love God with all our heart, soul, and strength?  Did we love our neighbors as ourselves?

They are not really two different questions, but rather, two sides of the same coin.  Our epistle lesson today comes from the book of First John.  In the back of the New Testament are three little letters John wrote toward the end of his life.  This is the same John who wrote the gospel of John.  He has lived his life as a faithful disciple and has experienced persecution as a result.  He was sentenced to live in exile on the island of Patmos, which at first sounds to us like a nice vacation.  But exile is lonely.  Exile is financially very challenging.  Exile is a punishment, maybe even a fate worse than death because it is an experience of extended suffering.

So it amazes me that John writes so beautifully and so positively.  He’s had forty or fifty years of experience as a disciple by this point, and now he’s got nothing but time on his hands to look back over his life.  Instead of being bitter, instead of wishing he would have made choices that protected himself from suffering, John has a very different outlook.  Basically, he sums up all he has learned and says, “God is love.”  Therefore, he says, “Let us love one another.”

Again, supplies!  Surprise!  I think if I were exiled to the island of Patmos, far from my family and friends, with no means of support, hard scrabbling just to survive, I might come to a different conclusion—maybe something more along the lines of, “God is hard to figure!”  But not John.  John wrote with confidence that God is love, that the most important thing we can do to express our faith is to love one another, and in fact, if we love one another we make God’s love complete in us.

Last week I met with our pre-schoolers for chapel, and one of them asked me, “Pastor Dorry, what does God look like?”  Some of the boy’s classmates pointed to our stained glass window and said God looks like the Jesus depicted so beautifully in our sanctuary.  I tried to explain that this is one way to picture God, but there is more to God than just the person of Jesus.  And when I say, “tried to explain” I really mean “tried and failed”.  Because with these pre-schoolers, you have to have your answer ready quick, and it better be concise, or you lose their attention almost immediately!  I felt so much pressure, like I was being interviewed for a job!  Quickly I shifted gears and said, “God looks like love.  Anytime you feel love, or show love, that is God.”  That’s a very abstract answer and I really only said it to buy myself some time to come up with something better, but they seemed satisfied with that explanation!

Whew!  What does God look like?  Talk about being put on the spot!  Now that I’ve had more time to think about it, though, I haven’t been able to come up with anything better.  And I think John would agree.  God is love.  And as we love one another, God’s love is made complete.  We get a better picture of God as we love each other.

But the love of God may not be quite the same as say Hallmark card love.  Looking at our gospel lesson, love involves setting expectations and boundaries.  Love involves having standards.  Love doesn’t mean tolerating all behavior.  Some soles will be lost, which is a thought I am afraid to delve into too deeply.  It is not our job to worry about who ultimately gets to be a sheep and who will be deemed a goat.  But it is our job to examine our own lives to be sure we are living according to Kingdom of God values, and not the values of this world.

And loving our neighbors as we love ourselves is the KEY value in the Kingdom of God!  But loving others can be very messy.  Recently I read an article in “Christianity Today” written by Eric McLaughlin, who is a missionary doctor in Burundi, which is Rwanda’s neighboring country to the south.  Eric wrote about how he was returning home from an exhausting three-day conference, anxious to get back to his house before nightfall, when he came upon a motorcycle accident that had happened moments before.  One man was unconscious, and a woman had an open leg fracture.  He wrote about how he really didn’t want to stop and help, because the roads in Burundi are so windy and dangerous, particularly at night, and if he helped them, he might not make it home before dark.  He also wrote how, if he helped, he might become the victim of extortion–witnesses might blame him for the attack unless he gave them money.  And if one of the victims died, he would surely be blamed.

But he had taken an oath as a physician to do no harm, and to offer aid whenever possible.  So he loaded the two victims and one family member into the back of his Toyota RAV4, and was about to go to the nearest hospital when others pleaded with him to turn back and go to a better hospital down the mountain in the city.  He knew they were right, so at his own inconvenience, he went back in the direction away from his house, and drove them to the hospital, adding who knows how much more time before he would make it home.

Only at that hospital, none of the staff would even look at the wounded patients because they did not have money to pay.  It was essentially a private hospital, and they wouldn’t even give him directions to the public one!  Finally he made it to the public hospital, and as medics got the wounded inside, a bystander asked him, “How do you know these people?”

“I don’t,” Eric replied.  “I was just driving by.”

“God bless you.”, the woman responded.

At that, Eric almost cried.  He wrote about how depleted he felt, how exhausted and frustrated and yet responsible he felt for these two strangers.  Part of his motivation was the oath he took as a physician.  But as a Christian, Jesus’ commands to love one another weighed heavily on him.  He kept thinking about the parable of the Good Samaritan.  He thought about the story of the sheep and the goats we read today.  Eric finished his article writing about this experience deepened his appreciation for the sacrificial love of God.   Jesus asks us to love our neighbors even when we’re busy with our own lives.  Even when we feel at our limits.  Even though there will definitely be risk involved.  Even though it doesn’t always turn out well in this life—because this is how God loves us!

Christ the King Sunday is one of the most challenging Sundays of the year.  One the one hand, we rejoice, because we know that no matter what happens in this life, it does not have the last word.  But on the other hand, we tremble, because we know that on our own, our ability to love others as ourselves is not enough.  We are completely dependent upon God’s grace.  That is why I am so glad John wrote this little letter late in his life, to remind us that God is love.  We love because God first loved us.  We can live in the confidence of God’s love, letting God’s love echo beyond us as we seek to love our neighbors.  As we love one another, the world begins to see what God looks like.

So, with that in mind, let me close with one more dad joke.  What’s the difference between a well-dressed man on a unicycle and a poorly-dressed man on a bicycle? Attire.

Amen!