In one of Walt Whitman's poems there are words that have reached me deeply, and I want to share these with you:

Each of us is inevitable,
Each of us limitless,
Each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allowed the eternal purport of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

I want you to hear these words and to meditate on them, especially that last sentence: Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

At the heart of Matthew 25, verses 31-46, is the core of the moral teaching of Jesus Christ. This passage reveals for us the very essence, the very beautiful vision of the love in the heart and in the soul of Jesus Christ. The one who is able to see that there are no limitations, no boundaries, no impediments to the love of God-this God who indeed cares for all of creation by caring deeply and profoundly for the neediest of God's children, God's family.

This passage is not so much about the kingship of Jesus, for Jesus really is no monarch. This passage is not so much about the kingship of Jesus because kingship is a designation of human construction. It is a passage, instead, about the "kindom" of God, about all those who are kin to God, and, therefore, and please hear this therefore, who are kin to each other. You and I are kin to each other. This passage is not about the condemnation of God as it really is about the universal vision of the love of God, about the very scope of God's love in Jesus for the whole world.

It was Jesus who said after taking a child into his arms, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me but the One who sent me." I want you to see yourself as such a child in the arms of Jesus, being welcomed profoundly and truly and authentically by the universal love of God in Jesus Christ. For Jesus, we are all the children of God, all of us-no one excluded. In the "kindom" of Jesus, which is to say in the heart of Jesus, there is but one human family. It is the family of God, and you and I belong to it. In this universal vision of love, there is but one human race and we are all in it together-each one of us. All boundaries and all borders that have served as demarcations for differences-exterior differences, external differences-are wiped clean when we understand and grasp that there is a universality to the love of God in Jesus Christ. In him the difference, the core difference, lies not in the exteriors of our bodies and features in what our human eyes see or in the exteriors of our religions and creeds and doctrines, but in the difference between those who know, who profoundly know, and who practice the universal love of God. The judgment we hear in this passage, the judgment that is rendered, is against those who would betray their very own kin, their very own brothers and sisters. For in betraying their very own kin, the mystery here is that they betray themselves and even more tragically, that they betray God, the very one who sent Jesus into our world to reveal the love of God for all human beings, for all people everywhere, everywhere.

What is then the call in this text? It is the call to a universal love, but it is also the call to a universal expression of love. My father has taught me that one thing is to say, "I love you;" another thing is to show it. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Gospel of embodiment, of incarnation, of making visible the invisible, of making concrete in human affairs, in human relationships, the love of God, not as something distant and apart from us, but the love of God as revealed in the very depths of our hearts, in the very depths of our minds, and even dare we say, in the very depths of our human bodies. Foundational to this expression of love, this universal expression of love in all the corners of the earth, for it must reach all the corners of the earth, is the truth that no split exists between the finite and the infinite, between you and God, between God and all human beings, that there is no split between the spiritual and the physical, between the high and the low, between the invisible and the visible, that all separation and splits are an illusion, a perceiving of reality simply to the naked eye and not to the vision of the soul. For in the soul, in our soul, in the soul of the world, and in the soul of God, my friends, there are no divisions, there are no separations. We are all indeed one.

The deepest expression of this truth on this side of life is a spirituality in which there is no split as well between your devotion and your deed and no split between mystery and commandment and no split between piety and ethics and no split between being and doing.

In the wonderful words of Leo Baech, Jewish theologian who wrote the book Judaism and Christianity:

Floods of mystery full of commandments and floods of commandments full of mystery issue from God.

He says that this is no mere synthesis, no mere superficial connection, and neither is it a syncretism. No! Leo Baech says instead that this is a unity which involves no mere connection but a revelation: One thing is grasped and experienced through the other, and each receives its meaning only from the other. Mystery and commandment-misterio and mandamiento-are not merely connected and interwoven but proclaim each other and give each other their distinctive essences.

My friends, my dear friends, there is no split between devotion and deed, between piety and ethics, between mystery and commandment, between your being and your doing. Like mystery and commandment, interwoven as they are, Jesus is one with the hungry and the thirsty, is one with the stranger and the prisoner, is one with the naked and the sick. To care for these is to care for Jesus. To care for them is to reach back into the very essence of life and to touch the God who takes shape in the hungry, in the thirsty, in the naked, in the sick, in the stranger, in the prisoner. "And then the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, who are members of my family, you did it to me.'"

What do we need then to do to change our world? What do we need to change our world, our environments, our relationships, our society, our church? Certainly not more knowledge, for more knowledge does not guarantee justice, the doing of what is right in our very lives. Certainly what we need is not more action, more doing for the sake of doing. No! What we need is a universal unity of love, a togetherness, a togetherness that transcends all of our frontiers, the frontiers of our mind and of our heart, the frontiers of our creeds and doctrines, the frontiers of our ideas and concepts. This is a radical call to transcend all of those externals that keep you and me apart, that keep us separated and split.

What is it that will change our world? Teilhard de Chardin says, "We can progress only by unity: this, as we have seen, is the law of life." What we need, he says, is a heart-to-heart, to come to each other and to speak to each other from our hearts and to open our hearts to each other in that love which transcends the differences in our lives. This is our true and common attraction. This is the force of life. This is the force of God. This is the force of the universe that brings us together, that holds us together even as we expand forward in creativity in wondrous manifestations, in glorious power, in common knowledge, and in common goals. It is this wonderful universal unity of the heart, of the heart, that counts, for you and I-for all of us in all places and at all times-are all kin in a "kindom" where all is in God and where God is most certainly in all.

Let us pray.

Gracious God, in whom we have our life and our being, bring us together each day in that place where we find our common ground in you, in that place where we transcend all our differences and love one another with a love that was in the heart of Jesus the Christ. We give you thanks and we pray in his name. Amen.