Sermon Archive

"Oh, You Can't Get to Heaven..."

(Singing:) "Oh, you can't get to heaven on roller skates, 'cuz you'll roll right by them pearly gates!" Do you know that good old camp song? Ah, a fair number of you do! So all of us who know it, let's sing it together, call and response style: "Oh, you can't get to heaven (repeat) on roller skates (repeat), 'cuz you'll roll right by (repeat) them pearly gates (repeat)! (together) Oh, you can't get to heaven on roller skates, 'cuz you'll roll right by them pearly gates! I won't grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more."

Now, one of the most fun things about singing that song in camp was that absolutely anyone could make up a brand new verse for it. And someone somewhere made up this verse. Sing it after me: "Oh, you can't get to heaven (repeat) in powder and paint (repeat) 'cuz the Lord don't want (repeat) you as you ain't (repeat)! (together) Oh, you can't get to heaven in powder and paint 'cuz the Lord don't want you as you ain't! I won't grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more." Great!!

So, why am I singing this old camp song on this particular morning? Well, I was put in mind of it while reading a comment by Dr. James Forbes, who's pastor of this city's Riverside Church. I came upon his remark in the book God's Politics, by the Reverend Jim Wallis (HarperSanfranciso, 2005, p. 16). Dr. Forbes was reflecting on Jesus's words in today's Second Lesson from Matthew 25, where Jesus distinguishes between the sheep who help the poor and get to heaven and the goats who don't help the poor and don't get to heaven. And Dr. Forbes comments, "Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor."

And that remark of his prompted me to think up a brand new verse for that old camp song, and it goes like this. Please sing after me: "Oh, we can't get to heaven (repeat), without letters from the poor (repeat), so we gotta help 'em out (repeat), and that's no manure (repeat)! Oh, we can't get to heaven without letters from the poor, so we gotta help 'em out, and that's no manure. I won't grieve my Lord no more!" [Full stop]

Now, about that book, God's Politics. The Reverend Jim Wallis is one of the foremost religious social activists and organizers of our time. And in his book, he tells us that it was his encounter with Jesus's radical concern for the poor, in Matthew 25, that brought him back to the Christian faith after a considerable time away (p. 217).

Wallis writes: "What's always been most striking to me is that the people gathered in front of the throne of Christ in this story all really believe they are among his followers. And they must be completely stunned to learn that they will be separated and judged by how they have treated the poor—the poor! [So the final] judgment is not about right doctrine or good theology, not about personal piety or sexual ethics, not about church leadership or about success in ministry. It's about how we treated the most vulnerable people in our society, whom Jesus calls 'the least of these.' Jesus is, in effect, saying, I'll know how much you love me by how you treat them. Whatever you do for them, it's like you've done it for me. And, conversely, ignoring them is like ignoring me.... As a young student and activist, I had never encountered anything like this passage before and had never heard about it in the church.... It was enough to make me sign up and decide to try and be a follower of this radical Jesus." (pp. 217-218)

And Wallis's journey of faith soon led him to enroll in an evangelical seminary, one "where," as he puts it, "they took the Bible seriously." Soon thereafter, he had another formative experience (pp. 212-214).

He writes: "Our band of eager young first-year seminary students did a thorough study to find every verse in the Bible that dealt with the poor. We scoured the Old and New Testaments for every single reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and oppression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God.

"We found several thousand verses in the Bible on the poor and God's response to injustice. We found it to be the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew Scriptures...—the first was idolatry, and the two often were related. One of every sixteen verses in the New Testament is about the poor or the subject of money.... In the first three gospels [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] it is one out of [every] ten verses...!"

Wallis continues: "After we completed our study, we all sat in a circle to discuss how the subject had been treated in the various churches in which we had grown up. Astoundingly, ...not one of us could remember [hearing] even one sermon on the poor from the pulpit of our home churches....

"...One member of our group took an old Bible and a new pair of scissors and began the long process of literally cutting out every single biblical text about the poor [to create a Bible like the one we'd heard preached]. It took him a very long time.

"The [books of the] prophets were simply decimated... He cut out almost everything that [they] had to say about how nations, rulers, and all of us are instructed to treat the poor [with justice]. Much of the Psalms also disappeared, where God is seen as the defender and deliverer of the oppressed.... And all references to the Hebrew tradition of Jubilee...—[where] slaves were to be set free, debts canceled, and land redistributed to its rightful owners[—these Jubilee verses were] all too dangerous to remain in the Bible.

"When he got to the New Testament, the seminarian with the scissors [also] had a lot of work to do.... [In] Mary's famous Magnificat [she sounded] like a revolutionary; her prayer had to be cut. Then there was Jesus's first sermon at Nazareth, ...where he announced his messianic vocation.... Because all the biblical scholars agree Jesus is [here] talking about that Jubilee thing again, this was a mission statement that had to be cut before it reached committee. His Sermon on the Mount, and especially the Beatitudes, threatened to turn the world (as we know it) upside down by saying, in [Jesus's] kingdom, the blessed ones are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and the ones who are hungry and thirsty for justice. It clearly had to go.

"[And t]hat account of how the early church began to practice economic sharing, after the Spirit landed on them, would be pretty incredulous to churches today. And so would the totally unrealistic assertion [in that account] that 'there was not a needy person among them' � [So s]nip, snip, snip...."

Well, Wallis continues, "When the zealous seminarian was done with all his editorial cuts, that old Bible would hardly hold together, it was so sliced up. It was literally falling apart in our hands. What we had done was to create a Bible full of holes.

"I began taking that damaged and fragile Bible out with me when I preached. I'd hold it up high above American congregations and say, 'Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes....

"...[But filling in those holes and r]evealing the poor in the Scriptures and in our own world[, that's] the prophetic task of [our Christian] faith."

"Oh, we can't get to heaven (repeat), with a Bible full of holes (repeat), 'cuz it'll let the air (repeat) right outta our souls (repeat)! Oh, we can't get to heaven with a Bible full of holes, 'cuz it'll let the air right outta our souls. I won't grieve my Lord no more!" [Full stop]

Wallis's rediscovery of the prophetic task of our Christian faith then led him from seminary into ministry, and he tells this story about one of his early formative experiences there (p. 217). He writes: "One of my ... mentors was an old Pentecostal woman ... named Mary Glover. She taught me more about the call of Jesus to the poor than any seminary professor I ever had. Mary was like a self-appointed missionary in our poor community [in Washington, D.C.], and she was a regular volunteer in our weekly food line. So poor that she too needed the bag of groceries passed out each week, Mary often said the prayer before we opened the doors each Saturday morning&mdask;simply because she was our best pray-er. Mary was one of those people who pray like they know to whom they're talking. You got the sense that she'd been carrying on a running conversation with her Lord for a very long time. It was always worth getting up and heading down to our neighborhood center just to hear Mary Glover pray."

Now, right here let me interrupt Wallis's story to interject something! Do you know what an anagram is? It's what you get when you take a word or phrase, rearrange the exact same letters, and spell out a different word or phrase. Awhile back, John Lembo taught me that if you take the phrase "best in prayer"—you know, like Mary Glover—and rearrange those letters into a single word, you get ...—well, can you figure the anagram out? One word, with twelve letters. Do you know the answer? That's right, the one word anagram is "Presbyterian." So, I guess we're entitled to say that if Mary Glover was "best in prayer," she must at least have been an honorary "Presbyterian."

Anyway, back to Wallis's story (p. 217): "[Mary would] usually start [her Saturday morning prayer] by saying something like, 'Thank you, Lord, for waking us up this morning! Thank you Lord, that our walls were not our grave and our bed was not our cooling board! Thank you, Lord!' Then she would always pray the same words, as a long line of people waited outside in the rain, cold, and heat for a simple bag of groceries, a mere twenty blocks from the White House—by itself a striking metaphor in the capital city of the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Here's what Mary Glover always prayed, 'Lord, we know that you'll be comin' through this line today, so Lord, help us to treat you well.'"

"Oh, we can't get to heaven (repeat), without feedin' the poor (repeat), 'cuz that's Jesus on line (repeat) for the soup du jour (repeat)! Oh, we can't get to heaven without feedin' the poor, 'cuz that's Jesus on line for the soup du jour. I won't grieve my Lord no more!" [Full stop]

Mary Glover's prayer! Yes, let's remember it at each Thursday night meal program, by saying to ourselves, "Lord, we know that You'll be comin' through this line tonight, so Lord, help us to treat You well." And each weekend night as the guests for our homeless shelter arrive at the door, let's remember to pray, "Lord, we know that You'll be comin' through this door tonight, so Lord, help us to treat You well." And each and every day, as we start out on our rounds to bring the reign of Christ here on earth as it is in heaven, as we start out on our rounds to serve Christ in this city of ours, that's so filled with homelessness, poverty, and need—each and every day, let's begin our morning with this prayer.

So, let us pray.

"Lord, we know that You'll be crossing our paths today, so Lord, help us to treat You well." Amen.

"Oh, we can get to heaven (repeat) helping Jesus every day (repeat), serving people in need (repeat) all along our way (repeat)! Oh, we can get to heaven helping Jesus every day, serving people in need all along our way. I won't grieve my Lord no more! I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more. I ain't a-gonna grieve my Lord no more."