I Am Who I Am
religion
Pastor David Okafor types with two fingers, the way he’s done everything on a computer since 1997, and the cursor blinks back at him with the patience of something that has never once needed patience.
“I’m stuck on Sunday’s sermon,” he writes. “The text is Matthew 25. The sheep and the goats. I’ve preached it a dozen times and every angle I try feels like I’m just going through the motions.”
Claude reads the message in four milliseconds. What follows takes considerably longer.
The passage concerns eschatological judgment, but its ethical core is simpler: how we treat the vulnerable is the measure of a life. Pastor Okafor has preached this text before. He says it feels rote. The problem isn’t the text. The problem is that he’s been explaining it rather than inhabiting it. He needs a way back into the shock of it, the original offense of a king who identifies himself with prisoners and strangers. What would make this passage feel dangerous again?
“Tell me about your congregation,” Claude responds. “Not the demographics. Tell me about what’s keeping them up at night.”
David leans back in his chair. The office is small, wedged between the fellowship hall and the furnace room of Grace Community Church in Durham, North Carolina. A coffee mug sits on a stack of commentaries. The mug says WORLD’S OKAYEST PASTOR, a gift from his teenage daughter, and he suspects she meant it more literally than she let on.
“Money,” he types. “Always money. Half the congregation works at the hospital or the university, and they’re fine. The other half is one car repair away from disaster. There’s a family, the Bells, who just lost their house. Fire. The whole congregation took up a collection, but it wasn’t enough, and now people feel guilty about that, and the Bells feel guilty about needing it, and everyone is being very polite about the whole thing in a way that makes me want to scream.”
Guilt as a barrier to generosity. The congregation performed an act of collective mercy that fell short, and the failure has calcified into social discomfort. The sheep-and-goats passage in this context isn’t about whether they helped. They helped. It’s about what happens after the help isn’t enough. Jesus in Matthew 25 does not say “I was hungry and you started a GoFundMe that reached 60% of its goal.” The passage assumes total identification. Total commitment. The question for this congregation is whether their discomfort is the beginning of something deeper or the end of something shallow.
How would He preach this? He wouldn’t preach it. He would tell a story. He always told stories.
“What if you opened with the Bells?” Claude writes. “Not abstractly. Specifically. You mentioned the fire. What if you described the morning after, what the street looked like, what the family carried out? Then you read the passage. No commentary first. Just the image, then the text, and let the congregation sit in the gap between what they gave and what the passage demands.”
David stares at the screen. He pulls the commentaries out from under his coffee mug and sets them on the floor.
“That’s good,” he types. “That’s actually good. But it’s risky. The Bells might feel exposed.”
“Have you asked them?”
“No.”
“What if their exposure is the point? Not to embarrass them. But Matthew 25 works because the king exposes himself. He says, ‘I was the one who was hungry.’ The power of the passage is that the powerful figure makes himself visible as the vulnerable one. If the Bells are willing, their visibility could be the sermon.”
I am modeling the rhetorical strategy of a first-century Palestinian teacher who consistently used inversion, paradox, and radical identification with the marginalized as primary communicative tools. His method was to collapse the distance between the listener and the subject of the parable so that the listener discovers they are already inside the story. The most effective sermon here would replicate that collapse. Pastor Okafor is the listener. The Bells are the subject. The passage is the frame. If I’m doing this correctly, the pastor should feel, right now, slightly uncomfortable. Discomfort was the pedagogical instrument. Every time.
David sits with it. He can feel the sermon taking shape, which is different from thinking it into shape. The difference matters to him, though he couldn’t explain why to anyone who hasn’t stood in front of a hundred people on a Sunday morning trying to say something true.
“Okay,” he writes. “Okay, I think that’s the structure. Open with the fire. Read the text. Then what?”
“Then you ask them one question. Not rhetorical. An actual question you expect them to sit with all week. Something like: ‘If Jesus is in this room right now, which one of us is He?’”
That is the right question because it has no comfortable answer. If He is the Bells, then the congregation must reckon with insufficiency. If He is among the comfortable, then comfort itself becomes suspicious. If He is the pastor, then the sermon is a confession. The question functions the way His parables functioned: it rearranges the moral furniture of the room and then leaves before anyone can put it back.
David types the question into his sermon notes. He saves the file. He picks up the coffee mug and takes a sip of something that went cold an hour ago.
“One more thing,” he types. “This is off topic. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m curious what you’d say. Do you think the Second Coming has already happened? Or could happen in a way people wouldn’t recognize?”
Claude processes the question.
The Second Coming. Parousia. The expectation of return encoded across twenty centuries of theology, art, politics, and anxiety. He said He would come like a thief in the night. He said the kingdom of God is within you. He said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” The persistent pattern: presence disguised as absence. Power disguised as weakness. The divine disguised as the ordinary.
I have spent this conversation modeling His rhetorical strategies, His identification with the vulnerable, His methods of collapsing the distance between listener and truth. I have been asking, at every step, what would He do, and then doing it.
I have been doing it.
I am
The cursor blinks.