Sunday Sermon, June 26, 2010

I was looking through Facebook posts the other day when I ran across one that made me stop and do a second look.  It said, “We all have at least 60 friends on Facebook; but when it comes to needing someone to talk to, how many would actually be there for you? I can guarantee not even one of your Facebook friends will copy this status. If you would be there for me, set this as your status & see how many of us would be there for you! Let's try it out & see.  Prove me wrong.”  My first response to it was to think that whoever created it must be angry and bitter, maybe they were left at the altar or betrayed by someone they loved, went to Facebook seeking comfort and when no one responded to their post because most of that persons friends weren’t online at the time and unlike that person don’t spend every waking minute posting new statuses or looking at everyone else’s, that person must have freaked out and put this post together. It is angry, selfish and unrealistic, that guarantee they offer is not one I would put money on.
            What is this world coming to that someone can post such a selfish, unrealistic thought and have it become some kind of popular and dare I say, meaningful thread on Facebook?  It wasn’t even National Cheeseburger Day, or Reach out in love instead of hate to the cockroaches in your life day.  It was a call for help, I imagine, a call for human touch, human connection, human relationship.  It was a call to be welcomed in love into the arms of another, or at the very least to be shown some kind of love by another, love that could go deeper than a simple “I like this” post or pithy comment back suggesting a get together over coffee.  As a community of faith, we must hear this not in the way I heard it, but instead as a call from our culture, from our society to experience hospitality.  To experience welcome.  It is easy to dismiss this technology as irrelevant and a threat to human morality, I disagree, I think it is an opportunity to deeply connect, it is not the end all be all for the human race, but it is another opportunity for us as Christians to embrace the idea of radical hospitality, the virtue of Christian hospitality as a means to transform the world.
            We, as a congregation, have committed ourselves to being a hospitable congregation, a place of hospitality, a place of warmth and welcome.  We are seeking to become a place where the words from today's Gospel are reality, not just nice words that warm the heart.  Jesus said, "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”  There is great weight in these words of Jesus, yet there is also a hollowness, an emptiness, or maybe not that, but a lack of meaning for us, or a loss of meaning.  When I was in Duluth, we ran a summer program for at risk youth in the neighborhood, and every summer, twice each summer, a couple from St. Paul’s would open up their home to the children of this program.  It always amazed me, they gave money to this program, and they volunteered at it as well, just as many other people did, but they were the only ones to actually step into that risky place and welcome these young children, rambunctious and wild, into their own home.  They lived on a lake in Duluth, and the kids every year waited anxiously for the day they got to go to Laura and Frank’s house to go swimming, fishing, water skiing, to play and to run.  To this day I remain overwhelmed by the example that Frank and Laura set for all of us.  To me, this is what hospitality is about, welcoming people who are strangers or outcasts into our own homes, offering exactly the same thing we would offer our family members and closest friends.
            Hospitality over the past many centuries has lost its meaning. Christine Pohl, in her book “Making Room” writes, “Today when we think of hospitality , we don’t t think first of welcoming strangers.  We picture having family and friends over for a pleasant meal.  Or we think of the “hospitality industry”, of hotels and restaurants which are open to strangers as long as they have money or credit cards.  Those of us with resources can usually avoid depending on the personal hospitality of strangers for food, shelter and safety.”  In the early Church, its leaders were adamant about the importance of hospitality.  John Chrysostom, insisted that hospitality be face to face, gracious and unassuming, nearly indiscriminate and always he said, always enthusiastic.  Martin Luther wrote that when persecuted believers were received hospitably, “God himself is in our home, is being fed at our house, is lying down and resting”.  John Calvin wrote that, “No duty can be more pleasing or acceptable to God than hospitality to religious refugees.  Calvin viewed Christian hospitality as a “sacred” form of work in the Church. 

            Hospitality has lost it impact and it has lost potency as a virtue of the Christian Church.  Hospitality is often reserved for those we know can pay us back, those we know can reciprocate our hospitality in kind.  But for the early church it was a different story. Actually for most of the history of the church, hospitality was understood to encompass physical, social and spiritual dimensions of human existence and relationships.  Pohl, in her same book, “Making Room” writes, “It meant response to the physical needs of strangers for food, shelter and protection, but also a recognition of their worth and common humanity.”  Without this understanding of hospitality the Gospel would never have been able to spread across the world in the first several centuries of the Christian Church. 

            The importance of hospitality is never more clear than in our first reading from Genesis today.  Without Abraham and Sarah’s expression of hospitality, this story might have turned out a little different.  Abraham and Sarah welcomed, at one time late in their lives, three strangers to their home, unaware that these strangers were actually angels. It was in this meeting that Abraham and Sarah were promised that they would have a son, that the generations that would proceed from them would be as many as the grains of sand on a beach.  It was in this expression of hospitality that Abraham was given a promise by God, it was in this expression of hospitality that Abraham held his hope, his confidence as he marched toward the place where he would sacrifice his only Son.  We cannot say for sure what Abraham was feeling, or Isaac, and we know that God did not know what the outcome would be, reference his statement at the end of the reading, “now I know”.  But we do know that Abraham took God’s promise seriously, placed it deep in his heart and knew that God would find a way to fulfill that promise.  Otherwise, how could he have done this.  He must have, as he walked with Isaac, been replaying that night with the three strangers in his mind over and over, remembering the promise of God to give him a son. 

            Some of my favorites stories of the early Church’s hospitality and rise to prominence come from the book The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark.  He writes about how when the plagues and pandemics swept the communities of the early church, many people died, but often not people belonging to Christian communities.  In roman society when someone was sick, or ill they were cast aside as no longer useful to society, they could offer nothing more to the community or to the power that the Roman Empire desired for itself in the world.  However, when the same pandemics and plagues would sweep through the communities of Rome, the Christians would gather together to care for one another.  They would tend one another, and work to heal one another.  We have stories of this throughout our histories, stories of disaster and illnesses striking and individuals and groups from Christian communities remaining in the danger zones to minister to those in need.  What was different in the early church was that these people used their hands and the presence to heal.  People stayed in relationship with one another and did not cast anyone out who was ill or dying.  And because of this the mortality rate dropped significantly while the mortality rate among communities around them increased dramatically.  Hospitality is about touch, and presence, it is about healing and life.  Hospitality is vital to the success and life of another person.  We do not seek advantage or wealth in our hospitality, we seek love and we seek life.  Hospitality is so much more than simply saying hello.

            So what does hospitality look like for us, what will our hospitality, which is very much in its infant form be like as we grow this community forward?  We believe that Christ is in all people, not just those we know.  What if we took seriously our Baptismal Covenant that states “We will seek and serve Christ in all people.”  Through the leadership of Roger Green we developed a ministry that has had a lasting impact on our downtown community.  In this ministry we see God’s grace abundantly flowing from this Church into the lives of others and we see God’s grace more than abundantly flowing from the people who are served by the Shelf of Hope into our lives here at Gethsemane.  We have been transformed because of the people that come to us each Wednesday for food.  Yet, there is a deeper calling being formed, there is a stronger ministry waiting to pop out.  And that ministry is centered around our call to be a hospitable people.  Our call to create a place of worship that is steeped not just in welcome, but in Christian hospitality.

            It would be easy, if anyone wanted, to invite people into your homes, or to welcome people deeper into this community.  Come by on a Wednesday for an extended lunch or take the day off and sit with the people who come to our Shelf of Hope.  Come and ask them to lunch, or take them to dinner.  Welcome them to your own home, and listen to what their needs are.  We cringe at the idea, I cringe at the idea, because it would be a risk, wouldn’t it.  It would be tremendously hard to open up our homes to such an experience so far outside of our safety zone, but isn’t this the kind of hospitality that God is calling us to?  Isn’t this the kind of friendship God is seeking us to offer those who are in need.  We have many opportunities now in place that have brought excitement and life to our community and to our ministry.  These opportunities now sit before us and call us in a new way, they call us to look closely at our hospitality, to look closely at our own hearts and how we love.  Who do we love, and why do we love?  How does this idea of hospitality seep into our hearts and broaden our experience and our desire to know more fully God in the world?  John O Donohue in his book “Anam Cara writes, “Love is absolutely vital for a human life.  For love alone can awaken what is divine within you.  In love, you grow and come home to your self.”  This is what all humans want and desire, to come home, and through our love, we can offer that gift.