Sermons

 The Hospitality of Blessing

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
December 20, 2009	Luke 1:26-56

If nothing else this Advent season, as we have been preparing for Christmas, I hope you will remember the word “hospitality.” Simple concept with extraordinarily complex implications.

In a new posthumous work called Just Hospitality, theologian Letty Russell wrote that “I understand hospitality as the practice of God’s welcome embodied in our actions as we reach across differences to participate with God in bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.” (Page 2)

That bears repeating: “the practice of God’s welcome embodied in our actions as we reach across differences to participate with God in bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.”

Why has this been important for us to consider, or at least for me to foist upon you, over these past several weeks? Our world is in crisis. It needs healing and justice. Despite our ability to connect technologically all around the world in an instant, our differences – generational, ethnic, economic, religious – seem as great as they ever have. God – the God we worship, who claims us – is often portrayed in just the opposite manner, not as a God of welcome, but a God of exclusion, of ideological division, of side-taking and petty infighting.

How can we practice God’s welcome and participate with God in acts of healing and justice? And what on earth does this have to do with Christmas?

Traditional seminary courses on preaching often taught that sermons should have three points. I never took that course – but three points I have this day. Here they are.

* Christmas hospitality is about welcoming yourself into God’s hospitality.
* Christmas hospitality is about the church practicing what it preaches in its own life.
* Christmas hospitality is about healing the world on behalf of this hospitable.

1-2-3 God. Self, church, world.

Have you seen “Glee?” It’s a great new show. Time magazine recently included an essay on “Glee,” wondering if its seemingly anti-church posture really carried deeper Christian lessons. The next week, a letter to the editor opined something to the effect that they could learn more about faith from one episode of “Glee” than 20 dry, boring sermons on a Sunday morning. So I stand on guard.

“Glee" is about high school, which, to me, makes it about life. How we fit in, or don’t. How we are part of the popular group, or not. How we cope with whatever makes us different, or don’t. With “Glee,” though, you often get a big musical production number breaking out in the middle of it all, and even the outsiders can be a bit snarky at times.

“Glee” reminds us that we all struggle with who we are, how we fit in, our quest to be accepted. That struggle never ends – in fact, if gets more complex as we move, seek relationships, seek our futures. Hospitality here is called grace – the glee club is the illustration – the unmerited and undeserved welcome that God gives to all of us, reminding us that we are children of God, created in God’s image.

Paul Tillich, the great 20th century theologian, stated in his well-known sermon: "Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. ... It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear…when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Tillich continues: Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

That hospitality, welcoming yourself into God’s welcome, accepting that you are accepted, will make all the difference as you live your life. And it will allow you to practice hospitality toward others.

First in the church. It would seem so obvious that the church is the last stand for hospitality in our fractured culture. But it isn’t always the case. The church’s record isn’t all that great on these matters. What stands in the way?

* Human foibles.
* Intensely big fights about extraordinarily small things.
* Difficulty in changing.
* Lack of relevance.
* Teaching that turns to dogma that turns to barriers.
* Customs and practices that seem familiar to us, so we don’t bother to explain them to the unfamiliar.

I better stop there!

In a great book called Christianity for the Rest of Us, Diana Butler Bass calls for a return to hospitality as a central practice of the church. All is not lost, but the church must return to some very old ways.

Bass writes that in our 21st century culture, we are wayfarers and strangers, and that the church is one place, perhaps the only place, where we can find true welcome. Contemporary Americans are nomads, she writes, what Henri Nouwen calls “a world of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God.”

The kind of Christianity we should practice therefore, Bass writes, is a faith of travelers, of pilgrims on the way. Hospitality becomes the key practice in a community of pilgrims. Not a committee. Not a program. Not a recruitment effort. But a practice, a place to “imitate God’s welcome…a living icon of wholeness in God.”

Of course in a church like this, there are programmatic implications – how we worship, how we learn together, how we seek to serve, how we invite and welcome, most of all. But those are merely by-products of this vision.

Bass writes that “sadly, many Americans experience congregations as judgmental places with strict rules of appearance and behavior.” To behave differently is risky, she says. Rather than looking at people and sizing them up, we are to receive them as guests. We receive them as Christ himself. (See Bass, especially pages 78-86)

What would that look like for us, here, in this church, to organize our life together, and more so, to orient our vision, around such openness and welcome? It would mean that as we accept ourselves and welcome others into this place, we would be sent out as transformed people to transform the world.

Hospitality cannot stop within the parameters of our own hearts and spirits, nor the four walls of this place. In fact, as our understanding of host and guest is transformed when we welcome, it is also transformed as we share that welcome with an ever-broadening circle.

The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Washington serves breakfast to about 200 homeless guests every Sunday morning. It is reported that when guests leave after the meal, a congregational host says, “Thank you for coming.” “But we should thank you,” a homeless man was once reported to respond. “No,” the host quickly responded, “we thank you. You have given to us.”

This hospitality drives us into the world. I love movies, so you know I have to love movies that combine two of my other favorite things, sports and moral lessons thaqt can become sermon illustrations. Here are two. “The Blind Side” and “Invictus,” that both offer examples of hospitality, a transformed understanding of welcome in the face of risk and difference – in this case, race – one with football in the American south and one with rugby in apartheid South Africa.

I understand that these are Hollywood versions, that the real work of such hospitality is harder, riskier, less straightforward. But this welcome we have received, and which we practice in the church, compels us to such risk.

That is what makes race a matter of hospitality, and gun violence, and health care, and immigration, and even war, and every other political hot button that draws lines that divide rather than removes barriers to welcome. Not Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. The political question for us is really a theological one. How do our politics reflect hospitality, so that all of God’s children, whether they are in our circle or not, can experience the welcome that we’ve experienced?

The chief rabbi of London, Sir Jonathan Sacks, wrote in a post-September 11 message: “I used to think that the greatest command in the Bible was ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ I was wrong. Only in one place does the Bible ask us to love our neighbour. In more that thirty places it commands us to love the stranger…It isn’t hard to love our neighbours because by and large our neighbours are people like us. What’s tough is to love the stranger, the person who isn’t like us, who has a different skin colour, or a different faith, or a different background. That’s the real challenge. It was in ancient times. It still is today.” (In Russell, pages 101-102)

What does this have to do with Christmas, and Mary? Well, in fact, everything.

A week ago we re-enacted La Posada – the culture’s inhospitality to Mary and Joseph, and one simple act of hospitality that allowed the events we will remember a few nights from now to unfold.

But first this. Gabriel shows up. Mary is scared. Gabriel explains. Mary is confused. Gabriel explains more. Mary accepts, welcomes this frightening, inexplicable news into her body, her soul, her faith, welcoming God’s love in this way so that God's love might be born to welcome, to become hospitality incarnate, to save the world from its profound inhospitality.

And then, as she visits Elizabeth, she proclaims it in words that we now call the Magnificat, what this divine hospitality will look like when this baby is born. Mercy, humility, the hungry being filled with good things – hospitality that fills the human stomach and hospitality that fills the human spirit.

Mary then stays with Elizabeth for three months, its own form of hospitality, and the story will unfold from there.

United Church of Christ minister Joyce Hollyday and her 16-yer old niece Kaitlyn Filar write about a favorite rock song: “Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open.” The song tells the story of lead singer Scott Stapp learning he was going to be a father. In the song, “he anticipates welcoming his new son ‘with arms wide open’ – naming him, holding him, nurturing him…(hoping) that his son, having been welcomed in this way will grow up to greet the world ‘with arms wide open.’” (See Way to Live, page 213 and following).

That was Mary’s song – arms wide open to God, arms wide open to this transforming possibility, arms wide open to the world.

That would be my wish, and prayer, that you may enjoy an arms-wide-open Christmas, wide open to the self God fully intends you to be, wide open to family and friends and renewed relationships, wide open to building the hospitable church that so needs to be. And then, arms wide open to sharing this Christmas hospitality with a world in dire need.

May you find yourselves home for Christmas, home in this story, home in its promise, home in God’s welcoming, hospitable love. Amen.