* a sermon preached at New Hope Lutheran Church on July 2, 2017 *

Since sermons are primarily intended to be heard, you can listen along here.

Texts for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost:
Romans 6:12-23 + Matthew 10:40-42

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Please pray with me:

Welcoming God,
Your word of hospitality is wider and deeper than we imagine,
And though we try, we often fall short of extending that word.
Remind us again this morning that we were once recipients of hospitality,
And give us courage to show that same love to all whom we encounter.
Amen.

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There’s a church in the Briarforest neighborhood of Houston that has a ministry that’s been going on for over 20 years. Every week a handful of people from the church get together and they make sandwiches. Then they take them out to the area around the church and bless the folks who are homeless in the area with a meal and some cold water.
If you talk to the Pastor about it, the Pastor will tell you, “I don’t invite people to church, I invite them to make sandwiches.”

Incredible…
Church, for them, is less about coming together and existing for themselves, and more about what a lived-out faith looks like.
When I asked the Pastor about how their ministry got started and why they started doing it, the Pastor said, “It just seemed like the least we could do.”

These past 3 weeks, our Gospel readings have all come from the same chunk of the Gospel of Matthew known as the Discipleship, or Mission, Discourse. In it, we’ve heard a pretty clear outline about what a disciple is and what a life of discipleship looks like. The past 3 weeks began and end today with hospitality.
We started with how disciples are to be welcomed in ministry.
2 weeks ago we heard that disciples are to travel lightly, bringing peace to the places that will receive them, but shaking the dust off their feet on the places that won’t. With Jesus expressing words of caution about the ministry disciples are undertaking.
Then this week, the discourse ends with how disciples are to be welcoming.
And last week, we heard we heard about the perils of discipleship, the call to pick up your cross and follow Jesus on the path of discipleship.

And I wonder if hospitality doesn’t sometimes feel like a heavy cross to carry. Not only because it requires you to open yourself to someone or a group of someones who may not think, talk, believe, vote, speak, or worship like you; but also because, as a church, as a community of faith, we have to be honest about what we’re inviting people into.
Because if we’re being hospitable and inviting people into a place that is genuinely and authentically church, I think we have to be honest, certainly with the people we’re inviting, but maybe most especially with ourselves, that as a church, we expect that God is actually present…that we really and truly believe that God is moving and active and bringing about God’s reign of peace and justice…a kingdom that sees through the way things are and instead visions and works toward the way things could be…a reign that rejects violence as a viable solution and establishes equality, and equity, and justice, and righteousness as its foundation.
If we’re inviting people to join us on the path of discipleship, then we need to be honest about what discipleship looks like and where that path leads. Like I said last week, the path of discipleship is the way of the cross, and that is a way to death—dying to yourself and living for others, losing your life to gain it.

Seen this way then, church, there’s a deeply consequential connection between hospitality and discipleship, right? Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
How we show hospitality to others is a direct reflection on how we treat God.
I said it a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating here: if it’s true that all of humanity is made in the image of God, like we hear in the Creation narrative, then how we treat one another, how we treat those who are seeking our hospitality, is a direct reflection on what we think about God.

In a day and age when individualism and exceptionalism are celebrated and lifted up as the highest ideals to aspire to, it seems to me that the call to discipleship is a call to recognize the ways in which we’re connected.
And more than connected, to recognize the ways in which we’re in-ter-dependent upon one another, the ways in which injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, the ways in which the oppression of anyone anywhere is oppressive of everyone everywhere.

But if our oppression is bound up together, then so is our liberation, by God.

 

And hospitality isn’t really that difficult. It doesn’t require much of you, mostly a posture of welcome and invitation. A cup of water, like we heard this morning, is literally the least amount of hospitality you could give. It hardly requires anything of you. To do any less would be to do nothing.
And yet, this is what gets lifted up as a model, right?

So, what does hospitality look like for us? How do we begin to adopt this posture of welcome?
It’s interesting, as I look across the many ministries we have at New Hope, so many have a component of them that involves food. And don’t get me wrong, I love to eat, but I think there’s deeper meaning there. Isn’t it interesting that one of the things that we hear about Jesus doing a lot of is eating? Sharing meals together is one of the great acts of hospitality.
One former member of New Hope tells the story about being totally new to the area, taking a chance on a little congregation in Missouri City and being invited over to another member’s home for lunch. On her first Sunday visiting. That’s the kind of radical hospitality that transforms lives, church.
Every church says they’re welcoming and hospitable. Few actually are.
So where are we currently showing that kind of radical hospitality?

In a few short weeks, we’ll welcome a group from El Salvador, and we’ll have an opportunity to open our arms and show hospitality.
We have visitors in our pews more Sundays than not. Are we being hospitable and welcoming in a way that isn’t in your face and overbearing, but is, at the same time, open and honest about the kind of Christian community we’re trying to be, the kind of life of discipleship that we’re trying to follow?

And what if we take the question of welcome and hospitality further? What about our LGBTQ siblings? What about our neighbors who are people of color? How are we showing invitation, welcome, and hospitality to members of oppressed and marginalized groups?

I’m talking about deep, consequential hospitality and radical and inclusive welcome. That’s the kind of stuff that transforms.
If sin is separation from God and from one another, than to be inhospitable is sinful. The prophet Ezekiel notes that “This was the sin of your sister, Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” And like we heard from Jesus 2 weeks ago, “It will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for the one who is inhospitable.”
Friends, hospitality is more than a lovely ideal or a nice thing to put on signs, hospitality a vital part of being a disciple.

And if being inhospitable is sinful, then St. Paul’s words in Romans carry new meaning, right? “No longer be bound by sin.” We often relegate Paul’s message, especially his letter to the Romans, into morality, but consider Paul’s words in relation to righteousness or justice that he so often writes about.
Then the call to no longer live sinful lives is a call to live lives that are transformed.
A transformed life doesn’t live to sin out of some sense of morality; a transformed life doesn’t live to sin because it has no need to sin, it has no use for ways of living that are separated from God and from other people.

We heard last week from Paul, through your baptism, you died to sin.
You are no longer beholden to, no longer enslaved by sin. Your identity is no longer defined by sin. Your identity is rooted in your baptism. Your identity is that of a saved, redeemed, and sanctified child of God, reconciled to God’s own self. So what are you going to do with that?
Therefore, Paul says this morning, be enslaved by God. Be bound up in your calling as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

And this is the great liberating word of the Gospel. That you are no longer defined by or beholden to the ways of sin that draw you from God.
You are freed to live a life worthy of the calling you have received from God.
You are free to live lives of radical hospitality and inclusive welcome. Lives that are full and reflective of the same limitless and extravagant love that God has for you.

It seems to me, that in light of this incredible gift we’ve been given, this amazing grace of God that loves us in spite of our sin and promises us salvation here and now in this time and place, that being extravagantly hospitable and showing radically inclusive love to those we encounter is the least we could do.