Pentecost 5A
July 2, 2023
Matthew 10:40-42
INTRODUCTION:
This week’s texts follow nicely (and in some cases, directly) after last week’s, so let’s start with a little recap.
Our passage from Romans follows directly after last week’s. Last week Paul asked that important question, “If we know that we have grace no matter what, should we just do whatever we want? Shall we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” and answered the question, “By no means!” Today he continues his question-and-answer rhetoric about sin, and whether or not grace exempts us from following the law. (Spoiler: it doesn’t!)
Our text from Matthew continues what is known as “the missionary discourse,” which we’ve been hearing the past couple of weeks. Today Jesus will talk about welcome, and specifically welcoming a prophet, someone who is proclaiming the (sometimes difficult) word of God. When someone welcomes such a person, he says, they welcome Jesus himself. Sometimes we may be the ones welcoming another, and sometimes we may be the ones depending upon being welcomed. Each role has its challenges!
Last week in our first reading, Jeremiah, aka the “weeping prophet,” lamented about how difficult his life as a prophet is, that he is mocked and reproached whenever he speaks the word of God because so often that word is not what people want to hear. Today we see one example of the sort of difficult message he has been called upon to deliver. Here’s some backstory: Jerusalem has been attacked by the Babylonians and many of her leaders have been sent into exile in Babylon. Along comes the false prophet Hananiah to tell them that their exile is over and God will now put everything back how it was. Jeremiah comes in all sassy and sarcastic saying, “Ha! I wish!” and then puts Hananiah in his place, saying, “Unfortunately, rosy pictures like that sound good, but it’s only God’s word if it actually happens… and this, I’m afraid is not going to happen.” The life of a prophet, we see, is not always to say what people want to hear.
Especially in the first reading and the Gospel, we are invited to think about welcome. So as you listen, consider what sorts of people, messages, or messengers you are more likely to welcome and let influence your perspective, and who has or hasn’t welcomed you or your perspective. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Anyone recognize those words? It is a poem by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. This world-famous statue was a gift to the United States from France, in part to express France’s hope that they, too, would someday be able to attain a government in which people’s natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be embraced, as they were in the United States. For almost 140 years now, “Lady Liberty” has stood on Liberty Island in New York City, welcoming immigrants coming by boat – it was the first glimpse they saw of America, and of the hopes and dreams they believed rested in our great country. The torch, lifted high, would light the path to freedom, to hope, to liberty, to new starts, to all the ideals on which America was built.
And what a beautiful welcome she offered – not only to the educated, the rich, the accomplished, but to those listed on that beautiful inscription: the tired, the poor, those yearning to breathe free, the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” the homeless, those tossed about by storm upon storm – in short, those who sought a better life than the one they had.
The statue and what she stands for was meant to be a tribute to and a celebration of Enlightenment ideals. But the welcome offered by this inscription could have come right out of the mouth of Jesus. All throughout the Bible we see and hear the same thing: welcome the stranger, care for the poor, heal the sick. Jesus reaches out to all those viewed as “wretched refuse” – people of different faiths, genders, races, abilities (Gentiles, women, Samaritans, lepers) – all those people that good, respectable Jews would have nothing to do with. He reached out to them to heal them, and even, to make them his disciples.
Today, in our Gospel reading, Jesus is equipping and instructing his disciples to bring this message to others. In the past weeks we have heard the earlier part of his instruction, telling them not to pack anything, but rather, to rely on the hospitality of strangers. He warns them that their work on his behalf could bring division in their own families. In this closing section, he offers what sounds like an assurance: that when someone welcomes them, it is like welcoming Christ himself.
It's a lovely image. But it is also kind of scary, because it turns out, welcome, as nice as it sounds or looks on a doormat or a church sign, is really hard. Whether as the stranger who needs welcome, or the one doing the welcoming – both positions can be very uncomfortable, because they require a deep level of humility and vulnerability.
Because either way, whether extending or receiving welcome, we don’t really know what we’re getting into, right? What to expect? We are letting down our protective guard to someone who is a stranger to us. This week my family is traveling to England, in part for my choir to perform with our sister choir in Kent, England. We’ll be staying with a host family, a member of the English choir and her husband. We are the strangers coming into their home, and they are welcoming us – but also, we have to let down our guard to do that, make ourselves vulnerable. We will drive on the other side of the road to get there. We will eat unfamiliar food. We will be wearing our pajamas and waking up with bedhead with people we only just met right down the hall! Both parties will require some level of trust of the other. And yet, Jesus says that when welcome is extended and received, Christ himself is present there – welcomed into our homes, our lives, and our hearts.
Another example of the mutual vulnerability of welcome: When we began our journey accompanying a refugee family from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a group of us gathered at the Rochester Refugee Resettlement Services office to meet the Mutombo family, the people we’d be walking with. Though we seemed to be in the welcoming, and thus more powerful position (local residents, command of the local language, financially secure, etc.), I was immediately humbled by how helpless I felt – not understanding their halting, heavily accented English, not knowing how to communicate or act to be respectful to them. Then we went to their house, and I was really struck by how remarkable it was to be a group of strangers, just walking right into the home of this family who had endured such trial and trauma to get here. And yet, when we sat on the couch to learn more about their needs, one of the girls crawled right up to sit next to me and play with me. She trusted me! The next week, when my kids and I went to the office to play with the Mutombo kids while the adults did English class, I found I was nervous, but this same girl crawled right into my lap while I read her a story, making me feel like I was welcome there. I went in thinking I should be welcoming them, and instead, I was the one who felt immensely humbled to be welcomed into their lives.
Two very different instances of welcome, but in both, I believe Christ truly is or will be fully present there, and that is precisely because of the humility and vulnerability required to extend and receive genuine welcome. When we are able to let down our guard, let down our expectations and assumptions and presumed knowledge – that is when Christ has a place to enter into our lives and our hearts, into that tender place where we rely utterly on the grace of God. That is where genuine connection happens. That is after all what God did in order to know and be known by us: God humbled himself, taking on the vulnerability of a breakable human body like ours. He lived among us, worked among us, suffered, died and rose again among us, so that we would know the magnitude of God’s love for us.
This week, as we celebrate “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” may we find ourselves free from all the walls and layers we often keep between us and the opportunity to make genuine connection with God and with the stranger – even the stranger who may have a different set of beliefs, or a different lifestyle from us. May we be brave enough to extend welcome and generosity of heart to those at whom we might not otherwise look twice – the tired, the poor, those yearning to breathe free. And may we be ever grateful for a God who welcomes us into the redemptive power of God’s love and light.
Let us pray… God of love, we put up all kinds of protection to keep ourselves safe from the unknown. Grant us the courage to be vulnerable enough to see your face in the face of strangers, and by your love, to welcome them in the name of Christ. Amen.
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