Proper 11, Year C: Why do we Welcome?

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Proper 11, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector

We’ve all seen the sign on every Episcopal Church which reads, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You,” and it’s a noble impulse to want to become a more welcoming community. But where does the impulse to welcome come from? Is it just part of being nice, good people who do the right thing, or is there something in the very character of God with us, for us, and ahead of us that draws into welcoming? The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas, son of a Texas bricklayer, was asked what he learned in Sunday school. He replied in that alto Dallas drawl of his, “Jesus was nice and we should be nice too.” Hauerwas’s point was not that there is anything wrong with being nice (as Jerry Seinfeld would say), but that being nice doesn’t quite capture the drama, the adventure, the grand sweep and the stunning scope of the Christian life, the life of discipleship, the life of being made beautiful by the Beautiful One, Christ Jesus. Becoming a little nicer is great. Goodness knows a little civility in the currently fractious political environment would go a long way. But the Christian life is about new creation, the transfiguring of our ordinary hum drum daily lives by the light of Christ’s love for us that we might be that light for others. The Christian life is properly understood as becoming Christ, putting on the mind of Christ, seeing with his eyes, touching with his hands, hearing with his ears. Nice is nice, but it’s not becoming Christ.

Which brings me back to welcoming. Why do we welcome? We don’t welcome as a strategy to fill the pews. We don’t welcome as a tactic to increase our stewardship. We don’t welcome as part of buffing up our image as nice, respectable, Episcopalians. We welcome because we have been welcomed into God’s very life through the gift of his only son. We welcome because God has already welcomed us. Welcoming is how God operates. Radical hospitality is another way of saying God is Love. “God proves his love for us,” Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans, “in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” While we are trudging back from the life among the pig pods and rehearsing our apology, God rushes to greet us and wraps us in the arms of His saving embrace before we can even finish our sales pitch. God is welcome and becoming more and more like God fully revealed in Christ means becoming welcome.

In our reading from Genesis, we have perhaps the paradigmatic story of welcome, and indiscriminate hospitality. It is a hot dry day in the desert and Abraham is sitting under the shade of an oak tree at Mamre. His wife Sarah is inside the family tent sheltering from the midday sun. She is not happy. She is over one hundred years old and she is barren. Her servant woman Hagar is younger and more attractive than she and more fertile. Abraham is brooding about his unhappy wife and the future of Israel when suddenly a shadow flits across the sunlit ground in front of him. He looks up to see three foreigners standing before him and he is filled with fear. Why have they come? he wonders. To kill him and his family? There are, after all, three of them and he has two women to protect, his wife and his servant girl. Should he fight the strangers? But instead of reaching for a weapon or closing his tent, Abraham finds himself running towards the visitors. He greets them, bows to the ground and invites them to a meal. He had Sarah to knead three measures of the best flour for loaves while he catches a calf and prepares it with curds and milk. Then Abraham stands under the oak tree and watches his guests eat. When they have finished the strangers announce that when they will return in a year Sarah will be with child. The barren Sarah, standing inside the entrance to the tent laughs when she hears this; for it is quite impossible for her to be with child.

Abraham clearly had a choice to make. He could huddle up in his tent and pretend he didn’t notice the strangers (like those folks who turn off their porch light and retreat to basement when the Christmas carolers come around), or he could leave the confines of his tent, step out into the open, and greet the stranger. Abraham could be a locked a door or an open door, a buttoned-down tent, or a breezy wide-open place of hospitality and welcome. When he finds himself running out to greet the strangers, bowing down to them and inviting them to a meal, something unpredictable, something graced, happens. God happens. Right there in the desert under the heat of the noonday sun, the strangers are revealed as angels of the Lord. Abraham’s open door of hospitality allows him to see the strangers not as threats, not people to defend against, but as portals to encounter with the divine. Water and a little meal become a great, abundant feast.

If we think back to last week’s readings about the Good Samaritan, we see that same dynamic at work. We could think of ourselves in the ditch by the side of the road and Christ as the Good Samaritan who comes to meet us, bind up our wounds, make us whole and foots the entire bill. But we could also read the parable in a way that it is Christ we meet when we are called to the side of the road, when we have been graced with enough holy folly to allow ourselves to get sidetracked and go towards the one from whom we’ve been taught to recoil. Christ’s face is suddenly seen in the tossed aside ditch dweller, beaten and robbed. “What is my thought?” Mother Teresa of Calcutta asks. “I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, This is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve because I love Jesus.”

Scripture is filled to overflowing with stories like this. Think of Moses turning aside, taking off his sandals and encountering God in the burning bush. Think of Mary at the Annunciation and her encounter with the Angel Gabriel. Our lives are littered with sacred interruptions, unforeseen calls to divine encounter in the least likely of places. Our lives are a banquet of ordinary annunciations, quotidian invitations to transfiguring encounter with God. But for those annunciations and invitations to take root and bear fruit we have to consent to God’s presence and action, we have to utter the little mustard seed of our yes, we have to open the door of the tent, leave our father-in-law’s goats and stray off the beaten path, take a detour towards Christ the Stranger beaten in the ditch.

Thomas Friedman wrote a column back in 2006 called, “The Taxi Driver” for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. In it he tells of a cab ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Paris. He writes, “After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod. There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.” He goes on to cite Linda Stone the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet Age, “continuous partial attention.” Continuously partial attention is what blinds us to the stranger, to the invitation to the banquet, to the angel who’s saying that Christ is waiting to be born in and through our lives with our consent.

That’s the real take-home of the Mary and Martha story. Do whatever you are doing while you are doing it. If you are serving just serve. If you are listening just listen. This isn’t some story about actives versus contemplatives couched in first-century sibling rivalry and an argument about who’s going to do the dishes. It’s about being centered on Jesus in whatever we are doing—stillness in action and action in stillness. As our prayer flowers into simply being, so our action flowers into simply doing. All the dramas and the tape-loops, the shoulds and shouldn’ts fall away, and we become a single, whole integrated house Martha and Mary each playing a part with Jesus at its center—Martha serving with the self-forgetfulness of Mary, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Just be. Just do. And watch for those shadows flitting across the open door of your tent. They might just be angels announcing a way out of no way, fruitfulness out of barrenness, the water of life in the midst of life’s deserts.