Sermon preached by Rev. Wesley King on Sunday, March 1, 2026
And now hear this reading from Matthew’s Gospel, the 25th chapter:
"For I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me into your home, and I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you cared for me. I was in prison and you visited me."
Then the righteous ones will reply, "Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink, or a stranger and show you hospitality? When did we see you naked and give you clothing, or come and see you when you were in prison?"
And the King will say, "I will tell you the truth: when you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me."
Friends, for the Word of God that is in scripture, for the Word of God among us, and for the Word of God within us: Thanks be to God. Let’s pray together.
God of good news, speak louder to us than the news updates. Speak louder than these mental distractions. Speak louder than our anger. Speak louder than our fear. God, speak loudly to us today because we long to hear good news once more. We hope and we pray. Amen.
I too am tired this morning. I got back from Philadelphia last night pretty late. This weekend I presented a paper that I wrote on interfaith coalition building and policymaking at a conference in Philadelphia that was titled Liberating Our Democracy. This event and other events are strategically planned this spring as we lead up to America’s 250th birthday, also known as the semisesquicentennial. And if you can say that, I’ll give you 50 bucks. If you can spell it, I’ll give you a hundred.
This conference began with a land acknowledgment, as many events or organizations do nowadays—churches do that, agencies do that. But this conference had the Tadodaho, who is a spiritual leader of the Onondaga Nation. And this gentleman gave this Thanksgiving address to kick off our time together. We were told ahead of time that these Thanksgiving addresses can be anywhere from seven minutes to two hours. So, I kind of sunk back into my chair for what might be a long winter nap.
He began speaking, and I obviously wasn't able to understand what he was saying, and he went on for about seven to ten minutes. So, he was really gracious for us. But then he told us what he actually said, because he was speaking in his native tongue. He said he was giving a Thanksgiving address that has been passed down through his people’s bloodline for centuries.
In this Thanksgiving address, the speaker gives thanks to the Creator for each and every person that is gathered there. They give thanks for their family, for the earth, for the plants, for the waters and the skies, for the weather and the animals; for the thunders, whom he called his grandfather; the sun, whom he called his elder brother; the moon, whom he called his grandmother; and for the stars, whom he named as his ancestors. He also said that this Thanksgiving address gives thanks for the gifts brought by their white brothers and sisters.
Now, before we try and sanitize this and "Disney-fy" this story, that isn’t all that he and his wife shared. Both of them are from the Onondaga Nation, the Snipe Clan specifically. His wife works for the American Indian Law Alliance, and they fight for the rights of indigenous peoples in America.
They shared stories of how both sets of their grandparents, and their grandparents' parents, and their grandparents' grandparents attended these boarding schools where they were trained by white settlers. They were not allowed to speak their native tongue. They were not allowed to wear their traditional garb. They were not allowed to do anything that resembled their heritage or their culture. Not only were they not allowed to do it, they were punished if they did.
She also shared how her nation had a three-party system that our government is modeled after. But we often don’t hear that story—except she mentioned that in her nation, in her tribal government, it is egalitarian and the women have actual rights. She recalled this story where the Onondaga tribe met with white colonists and they asked, "Where are your women? How are you going to make decisions?" In fact, she mentioned that the tribe that she belongs to—in that tribe, the women choose the chief and also remove the chief when he’s doing a bad job. It sounded pretty good to me.
She told this story of her grandmother who wouldn’t speak in her native language because if other people were around, she got scared. She had this PTSD moment where she got scared of what happened to her in those boarding schools. She shared that that trauma they experienced then trickled down into the younger generations in the form of self-hatred and erasure of their own culture. And then she said something that really struck me: "These boarding schools taught them Christianity."
And all I could think about was these people who had stolen these people’s land and had beaten their heritage and culture out of them were teaching them how to love their neighbor. They’re teaching them Matthew 25 and completely missing the whole thing.
Like Disney sanitized the colonizer story in Pocahontas—despite the fact that it has a killer soundtrack—I think we can all agree we too have sanitized the Golden Rule. We’ve taken "love your neighbor as yourself" to mean be nice, be polite, be civil. And all those things are good and well, but that isn’t what Jesus lays out when he talks about loving your neighbor in Matthew 25.
He shows in Matthew 25 that in order to love your neighbor, you have to do something about the atrocities and the injustice that they are facing. To love your neighbor, you have to feed them. To love your neighbor, you have to clothe them. To love your neighbor, you have to care for them. Why? Because loving God and loving neighbor are intrinsically connected. We cannot truly love God if we are not loving our neighbor. Loving our neighbor is a form of loving God by honoring the divine image in each and every person. Jesus says, "I am them and they are me."
But just as the characters in this parable didn’t get it, Jesus' disciples didn’t get it either. Going back to Luke’s passage, Reverend Dr. Brian Blount tells the story this way. He says:
"Simon, a Pharisee, a religious man who lives his life according to the law—God’s laws—invites Jesus into his home. And customarily, such a host would greet such guests with acts of hospitality: the washing of feet that have been soiled by dusty roadways, the anointing of oil as respite from the heat of the day, a kiss of welcome. And though Simon receives Jesus, he provides no such greeting. Impertinent and audacious, having heard that the great teacher is in Simon’s house, this woman—likely an unsolicited sex worker—invades the space."
Immediately the Pharisee, someone who is tasked with conveying God’s love to God’s people, distances himself from her. From his perspective, the "love" in which she traffics commercially, but not virtuously, prohibits her presence from them. But Jesus graciously allows her to draw near. And when she’s close, ironically, she offers Jesus the hospitality that Simon had neglected. She washes, she dries, she anoints, she kisses.
Scandalized, Simon rebukes Jesus, of all people, for letting this woman touch him. Disappointed in Simon, Jesus responds with this parable about the extravagance and ferocity of God’s love. These two people are in debt to this man, just as every one of us is in debt. One debtor owes him a little, but the other owes him a lot. Ridiculously, the man forgives both of them their debts.
"Which debtor," Jesus asks, "will be the most grateful? Which one will respond to the man with the most love?" And of course, we know it’s the one who owed the most. Simon believes that he owes God much less than this woman—this disreputable woman—because he has lived this life of holiness or righteousness in his mind. Simon can never know the ferocity of the woman’s love for God, who loves her back.
According to Jesus, God loves her with this extravagance of grace that cancels all of her sin just as surely as the creditor expunged the lender’s massive debt. Jesus then tells the woman to go in peace. But how can she, though? Living on the streets, she’s found welcome among those who struggle like her. But forgiven, she now needs the welcome that she has given to be shown back to her by whom? A community of Jesus people who often fail to do so. People who should recognize that they too have been graced with the extravagance of God’s fierce and ferocious, unrelenting love, but so often fail to do so.
Since two Ash Wednesdays ago, I’ve been wrestling nonstop with something that we prayed while standing outside of the hearing rooms at the Cordell Hull building at the Capitol. We prayed for the oppressed—yes, obviously. But then we prayed for the oppressors, because they too are victims of oppression.
And it convicted me. That’s really hard for me to do. And don’t get me wrong, we have just cause to criticize and critique these systems and these structures. ICE snatched a blind refugee off the street recently—a blind refugee. And when they realized that they could not charge him with anything because he was here lawfully, they left him about five miles away from his home and he died in the cold.
Despite running on a "no new wars" campaign and calling himself, 79 times, the "peace president," Donald Trump and his administration—and he’s not alone in this—in conjunction with Israel, launched missiles at Iran, one that struck an all-girls school. The last time I checked, the death toll was 85.
Here in Tennessee, pro-life lawmakers are seeking to charge women who have abortions with the death penalty. Lawmakers in Kansas revoked the licenses of trans folks, making them invalid and didn't even give them a grace period to change their licenses back, setting them up to fail.
There’s so much injustice in this world. There’s so much injustice in this country, and in our state, and in our community. But we cannot let up. We cannot back down. We cannot let hate win, or injustice win, or malice win. But friends, as soon as we begin to dehumanize those that oppress, we have become that which we preach against. Audre Lorde said that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
And it’s hard, and it sucks. It goes against our human nature. We want to retaliate. We want to fight back. We want to do to them what they did to us. And we fail at it a lot—or at least I do. But that is why we confess today that God, we long to be people who love our neighbors, but we’ve got a long way to go.
The Tadodaho, the spiritual leader of the Onondaga tribe centuries ago—despite the land theft, despite the colonization of his people, despite the boarding schools that beat the culture and the heritage out of his people, despite the erasure of their history and the replacement of history that centers the white man—he still gave thanks for his white brothers and sisters. Why? Because he understood that they are a part of this mess, too. He understood that this is a part of their world, too. They were made by the same Creator.
What strikes me about these stories is that those who are actually modeling Christ and modeling Christ’s teachings are not the Christians in the story. They’re not the followers of Christ in the story. Instead, it’s those who are following Christ and modeling his teachings that we often discredit, disparage, and cast out. These lessons that we read every Sunday—they’re not for those who don’t know Christ. They’re for us that do and don’t do a good job at showing it.
I know it feels bleak. I know it feels discouraging. I know it feels heavy. I feel it; I’m sure you feel it, too. But if the Tadodaho can love his neighbors despite everything that we did to his people, and if this woman with the alabaster box can love God despite being disparaged by religious people of her day, then surely those of us who call ourselves Christians—those of us who call ourselves disciples of Christ—can learn to love our neighbors better.
Amen. And his call is simple: Feed them, clothe them, care for them, visit them, love them. For when you do, you feed me. When you do, you clothe me. When you do, you care for me. When you do, you visit me. You love me.
The good news is that even when we act with judgment, even when we are guided by fear, even when we turn our back on our neighbors in need, God does not turn God’s back on us. We are instead loved with this extravagant grace, this ferocious love. And we’re seen, and we’re forgiven, and we’re invited to try again. We’re invited to do better.
Thanks be to God for this unending love. And let’s love and learn to love our neighbors better. May it be so. And may we make it so. Amen. Amen.