Sermons

Holy Hospitality

June 26, 2011
Second Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman

Sometimes during the week I find a quiet spot in the sanctuary of Christ Church to pray and meditate. From time to time I make note of the people coming and going, those who step into this space for respite from whatever else might be happening in their lives. Over the years I’ve noticed how repeaters, generally at the same time of day, move through a personalized spiritual discipline that might involve lighting a candle and kneeling at the rail, or reading from scripture, or just sitting quietly for five or ten minutes.

There are churches in Manhattan that attract the attention of architectural tourists, people who wander into a space to check it out the way they might check out the national pavilions at Epcot in Disney World. We attract our share of these tourists. But if you were to pay attention on any given day, you would soon realize that the large majority of the foot traffic here is not about visiting a museum or stumbling into a surprising space by curious passersby.

Instead you’ll become aware of how this space serves as a spiritual sanctuary, how the portal which opens from the sidewalk serves as an invitation to step from one frame of reference into another. Sitting quietly, observing the activity and allowing yourself to settle into its ambience, you sense how the encrusted walls and vaulted ceiling seem to speak of ancient things, or at least, very much older and very much bigger things than what’s found in the hurly-burly of everyday life in the big city—the managing of careers and relationships and children and money and every sort of problem. People come in, do their spiritual thing, and go out. I’ve heard deep groans of inward pain from otherwise very put-together men and women of all ages. Sometimes, if I’m alert, I will offer a prayer for the person who lights a candle or sits in the dark space behind a pillar.

The massive structure built of stone and brick and decorated with ancient iconography provides comfort for many, evidently evoking a profound sense of order that underneath the uncertainty of life, just maybe, all’s well with the world after all. “Let not your heart be troubled,” the wall reads above the pulpit. And on the other side, “Wait on the Lord/ Be of good courage,” also inscribed in stone. Wandering in, pilgrims can find solace and a re-ordering of their priorities for the day based on something more substantial than the sale at Bloomingdales, the gyrating market or the price of gas.

This is one of the ministries we provide for the city—the sheer massive physical presence of our homestead with our doors flung wide in a gesture of hospitality to all comers. I suppose that given the look and feel of the place this could seem a rather passive, conservative ministry. But then, what it conserves is an ancient tradition spanning millennia, referencing a primordial order and offering this to a post-modern city of astonishing diversity, energy and complexity that’s flush with an overly exuberant sense of its own self-importance.

With the look and feel of “a long time ago, in a land far, far away,” our sanctuary’s subversive message has a counter-intuitive impact on the spiritual seeker. It’s easy to overlook this when we think about all the ways we could serve our neighbors. But it’s no small matter that we offer them the gracious hospitality of our home that reveals a larger story than words alone can manage. It just might put the ground beneath our neighbors’ feet. I tell you, I believe I’ve actually witnessed that small miracle.

Hold that in mind as I relate an article from Ode Magazine entitled, “Who would Jesus Trust?” which begins this way: “‘Love thy neighbor,’ Jesus counseled. But Christians appear to have forgotten this message, at least in the United States.” According to a study conducted by Cornell University, the more religious people say they are the less likely they are to trust their Muslim neighbors.

Forty-two percent of Americans who consider themselves “very religious” think American Muslims should inform government authorities of their movements, compared to only fifteen percent of Americans who identify themselves as “not very religious.” Similar numbers are reported for those who believe that mosques should be permanently monitored and those who support government infiltration in Islamic organizations—the more passionate the reported religious conviction, the greater level of distrust.

What this suggests is that religious conviction can lead to small-scale thinking and acting, or worse, to active distrust of others. Instead of making persons bigger, more generous, their religion can make them smaller. And we know this is true. We’ve all experienced this at some point along the way. If we were completely honest, most of us would admit that tendency exists inside of us, the tendency to shut down the doors of our hearts and minds.

But as our active hospitality here indicates, at Christ Church we claim that Jesus lives an opposite ethic. He welcomed all comers. Often he went out of his way to include those who were otherwise rejected by the pious religionists of his day. And he taught his followers to do the same. This is a fundamental theme of Jesus’ ministry—divine hospitality. We heard it repeated in our passage from Matthew today. Jesus speaks of welcoming, urging his friends to engage in an action even so small as offering a cup of cold water to one of the little ones…

As I understand the rigor of my religious conviction, followers of Jesus are to live an ethic of hospitality—welcoming the stranger, offering the cup of water—because, in Jesus, that is what has been offered to us. All of us have been gently included into his realm. Not because we were more deserving, not because of a unique birthright, or some special quality that separates us from those deemed less worthy of God’s gracious hospitality. All of us at one time were strangers, outsiders, and we have been brought into the family, as it were.

At Christ Church we keep our focus on these essentials. We do this because we believe everything else that matters flows from God’s hospitality. In a sense, that is the core of what we say about God. When we sing Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me we’re proclaiming the heart of the gospel message: no one stands outside of God’s loving embrace and those that throw their lot in with God will find their character evolving into an ever larger, more generous love, even as the composer of that beloved hymn did when awakening from a commitment to the living hell of slavery.

As John Newton’s life revealed, for the sincere Christian this awakening can involve an excruciating change of heart about entrenched biases as an enlarging spiritual awareness begins to dawn. By the way, the word excruciating is derived from the Latin, excruciat, meaning “tormented,” which is based on crux, meaning “cross.” When we’re involved in an excruciating change of mind or transformation we are, as it were, bearing our cross, our crucifixion. But then the Christian also knows that beyond crucifixion lies resurrection, something promised that’s otherwise incomprehensible.

The larger church has been experiencing an excrutiat around issues of sexuality for a long while now. Our own United Methodist Church is deeply conflicted about this. At our General Conference three years ago when, feeling exhausted late at night after a grueling day of haranguing debate and I heard a bishop of our church rise to righteously proclaim that homosexuals were “the spawn of Satan,” I wept, because that statement is exactly antithetical to the hospitality of the God of grace that I know who has so lovingly received me into his kingdom despite my many inadequacies. I wept because of so many persons known to me who live lives of beauty and integrity, faithfully loving God and neighbor evidently more carefully and successfully than the bishop who rose to shut the door on the house of God.

Isn’t it sadly telling, that evidently mimicking the statistical tendencies I referenced earlier, the secular state has now stepped ahead of much of the church in the hospitable reception of some members of the family.

But here I want to return to the beauty of this space and the hospitality that we offer here. And you will note there is no one at the door checking credentials. No one at the door stipulating who belongs to Satan and who belongs to God, for we know that at the end of the day there is no one who truly cannot belong to God, no one truly who stands outside the realm of grace. Of course this gracious kingdom ethic certainly does not stipulate that everything we do is righteous, or holy, for indeed that is not the case. We often consort with the lesser angels of our nature in ways that can lead to awful and destructive ends. But the kingdom ethic does stipulate that in our given humanity we share the same sacred genetics, the same divine pattern, the same love that will not let us go.

Now friends, the bishop invoking the faulty theology of the spawn of Satan is no less welcome here than you or me, but on the matter of our Lord’s gracious hospitality we will firmly, resolutely stand with Jesus Christ and we’ll walk the excruciating path towards resurrection love. Let’s commit to that as an essential obligation of loving God and neighbor—bracing and challenging and loving one another into a better version of ourselves, a version more closely resembling God’s initial intention.

True enough, all of us bring bad habits and good intentions into this space. Each one of us is a very mixed bag of this and that. But when we choose to act in a manner consistent with our mission, when we sincerely seek to love God and neighbor, our capacities enlarge, our hearts and minds crack open, we discover that what we thought we knew was but the merest fragment of the tiniest bit of what there is to know and we begin to disarm ourselves of our prejudices and our need to control and condemn; and perhaps most especially, we give up our fear. In their place are planted the seeds for the up-building of the kingdom of God. And with open minds and hearts, with a commitment to practicing a holy hospitality, I tell you the chances are better than even we’ll find ourselves hosting Jesus himself.