Treating Guests as God (Sermon preached on July 24, 2012)

Sermon preached at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital at the weekly Ecumenical/Interfaith Worship Service

Readings from Genesis 18:1-15, Matthew 25:31-46 and from an interpretation of the Qur’an Surah 51:26-28 and Surah 76:8 

Good afternoon. I suspect you might have guessed what I want to talk about today: Hospitality! The introduction and the readings and the songs were all a bit of a give away weren’t they? And where better to talk about hospitality, than in a hospital? After all, the word hospital comes from the Latin hospes, which meant stranger, guest, or even foreigner, so a hospital was a place where the stranger could stay and be looked after.

Although we only heard Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts today, hospitality is an important element in many more faiths. In Buddhism for example hospitality (called sakkāra) is the act of being welcoming and helpful to guests, strangers, and travelers - whatever their caste, religious affiliation or status. Offering hospitality is also fundamental to Hindu culture and providing food and shelter to a needy stranger was a traditional duty of the householder. In fact what is, I am told, a popular Hindu proverb sounds almost as if it had been written as a summary of the Scriptures we heard today: "The uninvited guest should be treated as good as God."

For in the texts we heard a moment ago the guests are God, or at least of supernatural status. If we look first at the story of Abraham and the strangers we will notice some differences between the Biblical and Qur’anic versions. In Genesis Abraham runs, and hastens, and tells Sarah to be quick in making the cakes – frantic would be a good word to describe him. In Surah 15 on the other hand Abraham goes quietly, almost reverently, into his household to prepare the meal. But the stories still have much in common. Abraham and Sarah are generous in their hospitality for they offer not just survival rations of food and water, but a feast with a fatted calf. And their hospitality is shown not only in the food they prepare, but also in the time and care they give to addressing their guests’ weariness and thirst.

In Matthew’s story, as in Surah 76, the righteous are not hospitable out of fear or because they wanted to ingratiate themselves with God. In Matthew they are surprised to find themselves at God’s right hand. They do not know why or what they had done to deserve this honor. The Qur’an tells us specifically that the pious act only for the sake of Allah, and not for reward or gratitude. In both cases care of the needy is not an optional extra; instead it is defined as the very essence of faith.

Let us not forget that when these sacred texts were written, hospitality often meant the difference between life and death: there were no motels or Seven Elevens in the Judean or Arabian deserts, no hospitals, no prison visitors or chaplains, and no food stamps. And even today the hospitality of a hospital is quite literally often a matter of life and death, as is shelter for the homeless in the depths of winter or the heights of summer. But the theologian Henri Nouwen goes beyond these very practical definitions. For him hospitality is a virtue, a virtue that allows us to “break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger” – and to the stranger’s ideas and insights. For him hospitality becomes a means of healing. We practice this healing by paying attention to the other without intention and by offering community and companionship.

Our faiths agree that we are not called to be hospitable out of fear of retribution or the desire for a reward. Not because we should be afraid that the unexpected, and perhaps even inconvenient, stranger might be God. Where our faiths differ is on the proper reason for this common command or core duty. For some simply because it is God’s will, for others out of respect for the One who created all people and for that creation, some might see it as an act reflecting God’s love, or because there is an element of the divine in us all.

But the result is the same: We do not fear that every guest is God, but we still treat them as if they were.   

Amen

God and the world (sermon preached on May 20, 2012)

Sermon preached at the Church of the Ascension, May 20, 2012

Easter 7: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; I John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19

When I looked at the readings for today I must admit that for a moment I was tempted to take the reading from Acts as my text. My process to become an ordained minister is certainly a lot more complicated than the process Peter managed. Mine involves a whole succession of interviews and letters and and medical reports and papers – quite apart from the requirement to go away for two years and complete a Masters degree in Divinity and pass General Ordination Exams. The idea of just drawing lots to choose and ordain someone seemed strangely attractive…..

But no, it’s the reading from the Gospel according to John that I want to focus on.  This is part of what is called the final discourse, a long speech by Jesus that starts at the Last Supper and finishes in the Garden of Gethsamene – so it is positioned just before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. This particular section is part of a prayer that takes up all of chapter 17 though it’s a bit difficult to tell as we’ve lost the beginning. So although the disciples, and we, are listening in, it is addressed to God the Father. Some writers have compared it to the Lord’s Prayer that we find in Luke and Matthew. Just like the “Our Father” it is addressed to the Father, it speaks of Jesus glorifying (another way of saying hallowing) God’s name, of Jesus doing God’s will (“finishing the work that you gave me to do”), “on earth and in heaven (in God’s presence)” and of protecting the disciples from evil (evil one). I think it is quite possible that this very long prayer and the much shorter prayers in Matthew and Luke really do have the same source. All four gospel authors are after all writing about the same life and the same events.

But sometimes I have the feeling that John’s guiding principle in writing this Gospel seems to be, why use one word when ten will do! That makes reading and understanding him quite difficult at times, he repeats himself, he even seems to contradict himself as well. I mean just look at what he has to say about the disciples’ relationship to the world in these thirteen verses: “they do not belong to the world “(14), “yet I am not asking you to take them out of the world” (15) and “I have sent them into the world” (18). What does he mean? Let me try and summarize the main themes of this passage:

1.      The disciples, who as we know could sometimes be a bit dense and slow to understand, now know all about Jesus and who he is, they believe in him. Through him they, and we as listeners or readers, know all about God, and they and we now understand that Jesus is from and of God.

2.      Jesus is about to return to God, in fact sometimes this passage reads as if the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension have already happened. As Jesus is about to leave this world he prays for the disciples’ protection from the evil of the world, from the hatred and rejection they will experience in their mission.

3.      Finally he dedicates or commissions the disciples, and all followers of Christ who hear or read this passage, sending them into the world to bear witness, but sending them into a world to which they do not fully belong.

There is a real sense of tension between belonging to Jesus and belonging to the world, a real sense of an inevitable conflict between Jesus’ followers and the world, something that they had really experienced by the time this was written down. Just like the kingdom or people of Israel, the disciples are to be sanctified or made holy: set apart for God’s purposes. We often talk about being in, but not of the world. Trying to work out what this means has been an ongoing issue in the history of the Church. And that has often meant the whole church or just parts of it tending to one or the other extreme.

For example as a reaction to the excess of wealth and power of the church of his time, St. Francis renounced all worldly goods and influence (including clean clothing it appears). Another monastic order, the Carthusians, not only tried to withdraw from the world, but from each other by living in a kind of voluntary solitary confinement and in silence. This didn’t end with the Reformation. The Anabaptists, today’s Mennonites, completely denied that secular authorities could be Christian, and would not allow their members to hold any position of government authority.

On the other hand we have Christian groupings that have had no problem with getting involved in the world, even to the extent of accepting worldly power and habits. Military religious orders – like the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights - were willing to fight and to kill to establish and defend Christian kingdoms. In the Papal States religious and secular authority were indistinguishable, and in today’s England the state still influences some senior church appointments on the one, and Anglican Bishops are part of parliament influencing legislation on the other hand. I would put religious groups that focus solely on social, environmental or political goals in this category too.

There are dangers in both extremes, in either too much activity or too much withdrawal. The Scottish theologian William Barclay wrote:  “The rhythm of Christian life is the alternate meeting with God in the secret place, and serving people in the marketplace.” Withdrawal from the world and from the needs of the world is not the answer for all Christians, though there is a place for those who do and by doing so offer us places and methods to meet God “in the secret place.” But the prayer in John’s Gospel is quite clear: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” On this mission from God to the world however the disciples’ and our task as their successors is not to accept and absorb the world’s values, but to bear witness to Christ, to Christian values and to the word that is truth.

So the message does not say choose Christ or the world, but choose Christ and the world. Christianity is quite good at holding seeming opposites together: God and Man; God’s Kingdom now and still to come; God’s Kingdom in the world and not of the world. One way of illustrating what I believe this means is to think of two dimensions: vertical and horizontal.

The vertical dimension is what connects us to God. This is the connection Jesus renewed by becoming human, the connection God maintains through the Holy Spirit. We care for this connection in prayer, in meditation, in reading or hearing scripture, and of course in worship.

The horizontal dimension is what connects us to one another and the world; it stands for community, for concern and care for one another, for being engaged in social, environmental and political issues.

It would be very wrong indeed to try and separate these two dimensions. Jesus didn’t, when he was asked to name the most important commandment, he named two, one that I’m calling “vertical,” to love God with all our heart and mind and soul, and one that I am calling “horizontal,” to love our neighbor as ourselves. And what do we get if we put these two together? We get the Cross, the ultimate symbol of Christianity. (Hold up a cross)

That is what the cross stands for: Jesus the Son reconnecting us to God both through his incarnation and through his sacrifice for the whole world on the cross, and Jesus’ life, his teaching and actions reconnecting us to one another through our responsibility to care for and to love one another.

The mission Christ gave his church, that’s all of us by the way, is to hold these two dimensions together. We are the hinge so to speak. That is what he empowered and challenged us to do: to work for unity, to overcome the separation from each other and from God that sometimes seems to be our second nature. That was the mission for which he was sent into the world, and that is what we have been sent into the world to do too. Or to put it even more simply in the words of the “shorter” Lord’s Prayer we all know so well: Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.

Amen

Never Too Late (sermon preached on April 15, 2012)

Sermon preached at St. David's Episcopal Church, Washingtin DC on Sunday, 15^th April

Acts 4:32-35, 1 John 1:1-2:2, John 20:19-31 

One of the ways I learned the names we attribute to the authors of the four gospels was through a traditional English bedtime prayer:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head;
One to watch and one to pray
And two to keep all harm away

What I find interesting about this prayer is how Holy Scripture, as represented by the four evangelists, is invoked for blessing and protection. It is as if the gospel books had some sort of power over us! Which they should do, even today, not protecting us while we sleep, but instead, when we use them correctly, and as they were intended, having power over how we live and worship. I also like the image of the four gospels as four corners: The bed cannot stand without all four and we need all four books as a stable foundation for our Christian faith and practice.   

For the four gospels are not in any way identical, even if we don’t always hear and notice the differences as we read from them successively over our three year lectionary period. Three of the books, the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke, are very similar in content and style and share a lot of their narrative - we call them the “Synoptic Gospels” from the Greek for “seen together”. Yet even they, written between 10 and 20 years apart from each other, have different emphases and focus. The fourth Gospel, the Gospel according to John, which we read from today, is even more different in style, has many different stories (for example the wedding at Cana), no parables, but instead lots of long discourses. I have even seen it compared to a sermon, not that you would be very happy with a sermon of some 35 closely typed pages! Yet however different the gospel books may be on the surface, they also all have much in common. They are a record of what their authors considered to be the important events in Jesus’ earthly life and ministry, especially Jesus’ death and resurrection. But they do not just recount these events out of some historical or biographical interest, just so we know what happened then. Instead the gospel authors interpret the events for their audience; they re-form the stories to function as signs, they address concerns and questions that had arisen in the early Christian communities, they contain a message for all  times, both for the author’s contemporaries, in ‘John’s’ case somewhere between sixty-five and seventy-five years after the crucifixion, and for us today.

The two meetings we heard about in today’s Gospel reading both take place on the first day of the week, on Sunday. The first was on the Sunday immediately following Jesus’ death, the second on the Sunday one week later, which is today, one week after Easter Day! So our service today is just one in a long succession of meetings, Sunday after Sunday that connects us directly to Jesus and the disciples, a succession of meetings bringing their message with them.

Just before today’s gospel narrative starts, Peter and John had been to the tomb and seen that it was empty, Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene and told her to go the disciples. She was to tell them that she had seen the Lord and that he was now ascending to God, his Father (John 20:17-18). But judging by the disciples’ reaction, they had either not heard or not understood what Mary had to tell them. They were afraid, which is why they were meeting behind locked doors, and in much doubt. They did not rejoice when Jesus first appeared, when he “came and stood among them,” but only after “he showed them his hands and his side” (John 20:19-20). The second meeting one week later included Thomas. This is not going to be another sermon picking on so-called ‘doubting Thomas’ for not believing until he saw Jesus. That would be unfair. It may well have taken a personal appearance to convince Thomas of Jesus’ resurrection, but that applies to all the other disciples too. Their encounter with Jesus was just a week earlier. It is never too late to encounter the risen Lord - that is one message for us today too.

In this encounter with the disciples Jesus fulfills the promises he had made before his cruel death on the cross, that death that the wounds in his hands and side remind the disciples, and us, of. Jesus had promised to turn the pain of loss into joy, he had promised to give them his peace, and he had promised that they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

As I mentioned earlier, the four gospels are not identical. You know Luke’s story of how the disciples receive the Holy Spirit, the basis for the feast of Pentecost that  we won’t be celebrating for another six weeks. But this is John’s equivalent of that event, his story of how the disciples are commissioned and sent out. Here they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit much more personally and intimately, directly from the risen Lord, just as Jesus had promised before his death. What is common to both versions is that the disciples are re-created by the Holy Spirit. Before this the disciples were sorrowful and afraid, now they are ready to go into the world, even though it will mean persecution and a cruel death for many of them.

Instead of the great crowd in the Pentecost event in Acts here we are the only witnesses. But we are not just witnesses: We share in all that occurs, both through reading this book in our worship, and through our worship. Like the disciples we suffered just over a week ago on Good Friday below the cross. Like the disciples we are often afraid and uncertain. Like the disciples we share in their joy when they see Jesus again, as we celebrated on Easter Day and as we celebrate every Sunday in the Eucharist. Like the disciples we receive the gifts of God’s Peace and of the Holy Spirit. Like the disciples we are sent out into the world with a commission and a mission when the meeting, when the church service is over.

One famous Anglican scholar, C. H. Dodd, said that one purpose of John’s Gospel was to describe “the new life into which the disciples and all Christians are brought through Christ’s death and resurrection.” It isn’t an easy life, and we know that not even the disciples always managed to live up to the ideals described in today’s reading from Acts. They were certainly not always of ‘one heart and soul’ and argued over the mission to the Gentiles. But they did continue to testify to the good news of the’ resurrection with great power,’ and while they did not continue to hold all goods in common for long, care for those in need, based on need and not merit, was and is central to the Christian faith. 

The power and the strength for this new life did not come from within the disciples, but from Christ. It was through Christ’s appearance that all the disciples come to believe, he was the source of the power of the Holy Spirit, and of the knowledge and strength given to the disciples to witness to him: to the risen Lord, the Messiah, the Son of God.  

This knowledge, strength and assurance are ours too. Thomas was not a second-hand disciple, and nor are we. Every reader and hearer of the gospel is included in Christ’s final blessing on “those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (John 20:29)

In the Gospel reading we heard today the other disciples were not able to convince Thomas that they had seen the risen Lord on that first Sunday. Are we able to give our testimony to the resurrection with such great power that all those who have not seen will come to believe? Today is the second Sunday of Easter, the day when the second meeting John narrates, the meeting Thomas joins, takes place. If, someone like Thomas were to join our meeting, our service today, would they experience Christ’s presence here in our worship, in our lives, in the way we interact so powerfully, that they come to believe? Because that is what our worship is called to do and to be. It is to emulate those first Sunday meetings that were filled with the presence, the word, the forgiveness, the sending, and Spirit of the risen Christ.
Amen