Sermons

 The Hospitality of Watching

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
November 29, 2009	I Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36

We are attempting something new this Advent season, this four week season of preparation in anticipation of Christmas. A theme: “hospitality.” You may weary of it by the time Christmas rolls around, which would seem inhospitable, but I hope not.

Some of our Sunday morning adult faith development will focus on it, as will our church-wide event on the evening of December 13, called “La Posada,” featuring a re-enactment of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, a series of inhospitalities leading up to a grand hospitality.

And we will focus on this theme as well in worship, taking the lectionary texts for the season and looking at them through the lens of this notion. I am hopeful that it doesn’t force things too much, but after 11 weeks with John Calvin, who can tell.

Calvin, by the way, who we won’t discuss in Advent, would have had nothing to do with this. For one, a liturgical season like Advent or Lent would have seemed entirely too Roman Catholic for him. That’s one way we’ve advanced beyond some things Calvinist, because Advent is not so much Catholic, as biblical. The Bible, including the passages we will experience these four Sundays, is filled with themes like waiting and preparing and expecting and anticipating. Also, Calvin plowed through the Bible day-by-day – you could have showed up at his Geneva church on Christmas Day and have had no idea that the Christ child had just been born.

But to Advent, and this theme, “hospitality.” It matters to us for many reasons.

One is our very imminent capital campaign construction experience – really just weeks away. You will remember that one of the driving motivators for all of this construction craziness was hospitality – making this place more hospitable, more welcoming, to us as a congregation, to visitors, to whoever may enter our doors. That means a worship experience where we can see and hear better, a dining facility and kitchen that can accommodate more, and more comfortably, a building where any and all with any and all mobility challenges can get in and get around. That is hospitality on a basic level, more than good manners, but putting our money where our mouth is in terms of our calling and quest to be a welcoming church.

We will receive that in reverse, by the way, as our neighbors to the east, the Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, open their facility to us, a remarkably accommodating act of hospitality.

But deeper than that is the call to be welcoming and hospitable. It has always been the church’s calling, but it is timely for us. We are learning more and more – the big church out there and Third Church as well – that this is something we need to pay attention to. How we welcome people in. How we welcome them once they show up. Who we are and how we share who we are. The barriers, some unintentional and some not so, perhaps, that prevent people from entering – physically or spiritually – and inviting them to encounter the full grace and joy of this gospel experience that we’ve experienced. It functions on many levels: the language we use, the practices we’ve established, the dynamic – like someone marrying into a family – of knowing the customs and culture.

“Tell me about your church,” I will ask whenever I visit other congregations. Long-time members will always describe them as friendly. I’ve never had a church express to me that they were unfriendly. That wouldn’t be a very effective marketing strategy, I would presume.

But what does that look like? Does it mean we welcome visitors? Yes. Does it mean we seek to re-connect with those who may have – for any numbers of reasons, omission or commission – drifted away? Yes. Does it mean we make our events open and accessible to those unfamiliar with us? Yes. Does it mean we think about ourselves, who we are, how we live, in ways that open us to new experiences and new horizons? Yes.

And even so, this is about more than being friendly, more than about good manners and etiquette, as important as those are.

Hospitality is a hot topic. Many writers and leaders and bloggers are writing about it these days – Google “hospitality” and you will find an amazing array of writing. These writers know that the American church is experiencing a kind of evolution and revolution, from what was to something new. Not much of the old model will be transferred to the new. The old model presumed church, that people went and knew the customs and practices. The new model does not presume that, but rather reminds us to take nothing for granted.

So we will pay attention. And by paying attention, we will discover, or re-discover, something very near to the heart of the gospel, and certainly near to the heart of the Christmas story.

We will discover that:

* When we extend hospitality, hospitality is extended to us.
* When we serve, we end up being served – whether in a volunteer capacity or teaching capacity or a spiritual capacity.
* When we invest – our time, our energy, our material resources – we are paid dividends. And those are gifts, gifts from God.

Because what we will really discover is that:

* When we extend hospitality, we extend God’s hospitality.
* When we receive hospitality, we receive God’s hospitality.
* When we welcome people into God’s home, we are welcomed into God’s heart.

But we have to be ready for it. We have to anticipate it. We have to prepare for it, watch for it. That is what Advent is all about. Our spirits and hearts and lives need some preparation time. Like birth itself, it doesn’t just happen – there is a kind of sacred gestation period that gets the world, and us, ready.

We watch for it.

Paul writes to the church at Thessalonica about the day when he and they will see each other face-to-face.

And Jesus, fully human and fully adult on this first Sunday of Advent, tells of his return. There will be signs. There will be fear. When all of this begins to happen, stand up, raise your heads, pay attention, he says. He then uses the familiar image of leaves and trees – when we see them we know what season it is. When you see these things happening, he says, you know I am near.

He is talking about his second coming, but he might be watching in retrospect for his first coming. He then tells his followers to be on guard. Watch.

It sounds ominous, and perhaps it is. But the true hospitality of faith compels us to be ready, to watch all that is going on in our lives, in the life of the world, so that when events unfold before us, anticipated or unanticipated, we are ready.

Paying attention matters. Watchfulness. Awareness.

Our attention could be drawn elsewhere, to the frenzy of December, marked this weekend by Black Friday and all that it brings. Beverly Gaventa writes that “waiting and watching are not easy, precisely because other things do interfere… (Most Christians) do find themselves threatened by ‘the worries of this life.’ Provisions for family, difficulties related to work, concerns about the affairs of government, clamoring after power and status – both things worthy and things trivial have a way of clouding the vision to that the impending kingdom of God remains somehow just out of sight.” But if we pay attention, Gaventa says, “Nothing will ever be the same again. Watch!” (Texts for Preaching: Year A, page 9)

We don’t watch so well. We either believe that nothing will show up, or we are sure we know what will show up. Both sets of expectations are transformed this Advent.

So we watch expectantly, but not anxiously. Hospitality means that there is an open, welcoming space, whether here in the church or in the observatories of our souls, so that when we finally see that unexpected thing for which we have been watching, we may be surprised, but we are not caught off guard.

I don’t know the places in your lives where you have been a part of the inner circle. I don’t know the places when you have been an outsider. As I reflect on those experiences in my own life, whether as a child or an adult, I know that what has transformed them had been an event or ethic or person that has transformed expectations, has defied convention.

What we are called to insist upon in this Advent season is such transformation is at the heart of who God is. Repeatedly, in Old Testament and New, God welcomes the stranger and sojourner and implores us to do the same. By welcoming the outcast into the circle, by inviting the unwanted to dinner, by insisting there are no differences, no real differences, between any of us, God’s radical hospitality trumps every human division, every human boundary, that separates and divides us. Our task is to work with God – first to accept our own welcome, and then to extend that welcome to others.

Perhaps it is a lost art, a lost gift. “Recovering this ancient tradition,” Robert Kruschwitz writes, “is essential in a world that has grown defensive and harsh.”

And we know it is difficult. “In a world of terrorism and war, school shootings, and road rage, it is no wonder that concern for security often triumphs over hospitality to the stranger,” Paul Wadell writes. He then asks “But is that the kind of community the Church should be?” (See “Introduction,” to Christian Reflection, 25, Baylor University)

That is exactly the question for us. Who are we, and who are we called to be. Having been welcomed as strangers by a welcoming Christ, we are mandated and compelled to do the same in our broken and fearful world.

In her work called Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine Pohl writes that “hospitality becomes the means by which we see the world and others as they actually are, as marked by the image of God. Hospitality enables recognition, and this recognition affords the dignity that can be so easily hidden within those in need of hospitality. We begin actually to notice the stranger in our midst and to see Christ…”

Watch. Recognize. Notice. Something about vision in all of this, vision that truly sees, that truly comprehends, the world, and what God is doing in it.

Arthur Sutherland writes that “hospitality is the practice by which the church stands or falls…that hospitality makes the church, so much so that the church disappears without it.” (In A Christian Theology of Hospitality)

If that’s so, then we have our work cut out for us. But we do so not without a story, not without resources, not without a season to prepare, not without a vision. Our central job is to watch for it, to allow that vision to become our vision, to welcome as we have been welcomed.

“Welcome home” becomes our mantra and prayer, and providing such a home – for every aching body and every wounded soul – our joyous task. Watch – do you see what I see? Amen.