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.
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