Welcome
Matthew 10:40-42
Click here to view the worship service for June 28th 2020.
Welcome is one of those things that people of faith almost instinctively understand to be part of what it means to follow Jesus. After all, Jesus spent a good part of his public ministry welcoming all kinds of people, particularly the kind of people that weren’t always welcomed everywhere. He welcomed as students not necessarily the best and the brightest, the ones who showed the greatest potential and promise, but rather simple fishermen whose lack of education would have most likely disqualified them in other settings. He welcomed women, even relying on them for support instead of relegating them to the second-class status they were often subject to as their father’s or husband’s property. While others would go out of their way to avoid contact with non-Jewish Gentiles, or Samaritans, Jesus would engage them in conversation and tell stories in which they were the hero. Lepers who were cast out and considered untouchable by their communities, Jesus embraced and healed. Instead of ignoring, or being fearful of those in the grip of something demonic, Jesus cast those demons out and restored the afflicted to the people around them. Tax collectors, often assumed to be crooked and corrupt, could often be found as guests at Jesus’ table. As could women with no other choice for survival than selling their own bodies. One of the persistent charges made by his critics was that Jesus was scandalously indiscriminate when it came to who he welcomed. It was as though all the conventions that were used to classify and determine a person’s worthiness were absolutely meaningless to him. It’s at once refreshing and also pretty annoying. Because any time we seek to draw a line between the people we think of as one of us, and the people we refer to as “them,” Jesus is always on the other side of that line. Without fail, Jesus is for losers. That’s what he says in the verse immediately preceding this morning’s reading, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
That actually sounds like pretty good news right about now, because it definitely feels like we have lost something with this novel coronavirus that has turned everything upside down. We have lost the ability to gather in our worship space on Sunday mornings, turning instead to the internet to connect with one another in the presence of God. We have lost the simple act of human touch. I was talking to someone the other day who lives alone, who because of the shutdown and social distancing hadn’t been touched by anyone in almost three months until going in for a dentist’s appointment. “I don’t particularly like going to the dentist,” they said, “ but I was just so grateful that someone was touching me.” Many have lost jobs, or businesses. Most of us have lost any confidence we may have once had in knowing what will come next, or what things will look like on the other side of where we are. None of that loss feels like particularly good news. If I’m being honest, most days I find my self at loose ends trying to make the best of a situation in which I feel completely unmoored. Which I think may actually be what Jesus is getting at. It’s only when we have lost the very things that we use to give us a sense of who we are- intellect, family roles, culture, health, affiliations and allegiances, virtue, reputation, career- everything that contributes to the lives we make or find for ourselves; only when we have lost, or let go of all of that for the sake of what Jesus has to show us will find the kind of life that is not what we make, but is instead pure gift. The kind of life that finds us.
So much of the language about welcome that you tend to hear around faith communities has to do with who we welcome and how we seek to do that. A couple of years ago we spent several Sundays talking about the spiritual practice of welcome and hospitality. Last year we got to put that into action when we partnered with Lutheran Family Services to welcome close to a thousand asylum seekers who had been released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. We’re used to thinking about ourselves as the ones who are called to welcome everyone as Christ does, with open arms. We’re pretty comfortable in that role. Or at lease more comfortable than we are in the role of being the one who is welcomed. That’s because when we think of ourselves as the ones doing the welcoming, it means that we drive the narrative. We’re the ones who are in control. One of the gifts and challenges of this time is that we have been driven from our safe havens. We no longer get to be a church that sits around waiting for people to come to us so that we can welcome them. We have lost that too. For now. The church has left the building.
Jesus’ final words to those whom he sends out to proclaim the good news about the realm of God’s love actively present to make all things new are about welcome. To be sent out, to leave the building means that we are no longer in the drivers seat. We no longer get to sit back and congratulate ourselves on what a welcoming community of faith we are. To be sent out means that we have lost the upper hand and are entirely dependent on the kind of welcome we receive from those to whom we are sent, those to whom we have been called to carry the kind of good news that revives the weary and strengthens the fainthearted. I’m not gonna lie. That can be super scary. It’s much easier to passively wait for people to come to us. Much easier to wait for them to muster the courage to walk through our doors into a strange community filled with dozens of existing friendships, some of which date back decades. It’s even easier to wait to see if they come back before truly welcoming them; wait to see if it’s worth the effort. Only Jesus doesn’t offer us easier. None of his words can be construed to endorse a model where we rest in the ease of what we’ve always done and who we’ve seemingly always done it with. Instead what he insists on is our leaving the ease of our own comfort to encounter a world that is hungry for good news, desperate to experience a fresh start and to know that they are loved; that they are lovable. When that is what we carry out into the world, instead of all those other things that we would use to make a life for ourselves, when what we carry is what Jesus sends us with, then those who welcome us are really welcoming him. And in welcoming Jesus and all that he represents, what they are welcoming and receiving into their own lives is the life that finds us all.
To some the good news of God’s love that makes things new sounds like a prophetic announcement that challenges and upends unjust systems and structures. To receive such an announcement is to be enlisted in the kind of revolution that Mary sings about in Luke’s gospel, one in which the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up, one in which the hungry are filled with good things and the rich are sent away empty. Such revolutions come at a cost, as any prophet can tell you. What is good news to some can sound like very bad news to others. Upending the status quo means that nothing can be the same. Upending the status quo means that we will necessarily lose the lives we may have made for ourselves.
For others the good news about the nearness of God’s realm promises the present power of God’s love to set things right, to bind up the brokenhearted and set free people held captive to grief, pain, addiction, and so much more. To receive such a promise is to walk in integrity. It means finding an alignment between who we are and what God wants. And in finding that alignment we discover a peace that is beyond our understanding because it isn’t one of our own making, it come entirely from being in synch with what God is up to around us.
For as grand as all that sounds, revolutions and righteousness, most of the time the opportunities to welcome and be welcomed come in the small moments and gestures that are shared: a kind word spoken and received with gratitude, a smile behind a facemask that communicates the care we have for one another during this pandemic, a cup of cold water offered on a hot day. It’s in the ordinary stuff of life that the kingdom most often comes near. The reward isn’t some pay out later, the reward is in the ordinary that is made extraordinary when we welcome and are welcomed by one another; when we see in even the smallest of gestures God’s realm breaking through. A reward like that can never be lost because once we see it, we cannot unsee it. Once we experience it, we know a little more of the story of salvation as it unfolds, and we discover that much more of the life that finds us as pure gift. Amen