Sermons

 The Hospitality of Expecting

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
December 13, 2009	Zephaniah 3:14-20, Luke 3:7-18

Whether you’ve RSVP’d or not, you can still come to tonight’s La Posada. We’ve engaged in some Spanish tutorials around the office these past few weeks, so I can tell you with some certainty that “la posada” means “the inn,” or more loosely, “shelter.” It’s a Hispanic tradition, sometimes called “las posadas,” re-creating and re-enacting the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, marked too frequently by the message “no room in the inn,” until, well, you know the rest of the story.

It will be a good event regardless, but it will also be a hands-on sermon illustration of our Advent theme: hospitality. Ana Maria Pineda tells of the practice of various Hispanic immigrant groups in San Francisco – church bells ringing, shops bustling with activity, streets overflowing with people, moving from house to house or station to station. She writes: “Although Las Posadas is a beautiful, engaging ritual, the reality it addresses is a painful one: the reality of human need and exclusion. When the ritual takes place in the mission District of San Francisco, many of the participants – once refugees themselves – remember their own experience as strangers. Through the ritual, the community affirms the goodness of taking people in, and those who once needed posada are reminded to offer it to others. (“Hospitality,” in Practicing Our Faith, edited by Dorothy Bass, pages 29 and ff)

We have been overlaying the traditional lectionary texts for Advent over this theme – the hospitality of watching and the hospitality of preparing. Today it is the hospitality of expecting. What is most obvious, of course, is that Mary is now expecting a child. For any who have experienced it firsthand, and all of us who have experienced it through the expectations of others, we know what such expectation can bring.

But there are other expectations at work in this holy season of anticipation. Two familiar phrases – “we’ve been expecting you” and “it was not what we expected” – come into interesting and telling tension. We seek to exceed, or at least meet, expectations, but we want those expectations to be what people expected.

Two prophetic voices demonstrate it for us. John the Baptist’s “brood of vipers” is not language for an Andy Williams Christmas special, but there can be no question that John understands that God is about to do something new. Prepare for it. Anticipate it. Expect it. Change your ways, give the excess you have to those in need, prune away what ensnares you and hinders you. The people were filled with expectation, we are told, and even wondered if John was the Messiah. I am not, he said. Not even close. He is coming. Expect it. Hospitality here is about how we escort out the things that get in the way of our receiving this good news, and welcoming in that which opens our hearts, our lives, the choices we make, the values we embrace, to what God is doing in us and the world.

The prophet Zephaniah, some centuries before, described what that would look like. We will be renewed in love. Disaster will be removed. The lame will be saved and the outcast gathered. Shame will be turned into praise. And then this: “I will bring you home.” I will bring you home. Zephaniah was considering a return from exile to the land, but it is deeper and broader than that. The prophet insists, in concert with the full sweep of the biblical witness, that God’s vision for us is homecoming, being welcomed home to God. We should expect it.

Advent is not about false expectations or unrealistic ones. It is also not about misplaced wishful thinking. Henri Nouwen wrote that “Advent does not lead us to nervous tension stemming from expectation of something spectacular to happen. On the contrary, it leads us to a growing inner stillness and joy allowing me to realize that he for whom I am waiting has already arrived and speaks to me in the silence of my heart.” (Genesee Diary, pages 209-210)

The one for whom we are waiting has already arrived. Hospitality leads us to that stillness, of body, of heart, of spirit. And it leads us to seek it for others, so that our hearts, and theirs, can be prepared to welcome in this expected good news.

We are wanderers and nomads – whether physically or psychologically or spiritually. La Posada mirrors that other fundamental biblical narrative, the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. And with them, as with Mary and Joseph, as with us, it is not nomadic wandering without purpose, but a journey, a pilgrimage to a place, a new reality, healing, transformation.

We join Mary and Joseph, traveling from place to place, knocking on doors. No room, we hear. No room to be our best selves, no room to find healed relationships, no room to place our grief, our fatigue, our fear, our anxiety. No room to address the hurts of the world, to make peace, to respect difference, to make a difference.

But this is an outcast-gathering God we worship. So we knock and we knock, we prepare, we live in expectation. And then a door is opened, finally, a door is opened, and a voice welcomes us in – come in, welcome. Welcome to who God intends you to be, welcome to renewal, welcome to something very new and very ancient, welcome so that you can welcome others, be my voice in the world, my hands and hearts in the world, welcome, no longer a nomad or aimless wanderer, welcome pilgrim, welcome traveler, welcome, I’ve been expecting you.

It is that welcome, that expected welcome, that divine hospitality, about which the angels will sing, around which the shepherds will gather, to which the magi will travel. It is that welcome that will inspire the best of writers and poets, painters and sculptors, and composers, and to which choirs will sing, simply and profoundly, “Gloria.” Amen. (Followed by Chancel Choir offering of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Gloria.”)