Sermon for June 28, 2020 4th Sunday after Pentecost House of Prayer Lutheran Church

Matthew 10:40-42; Romans 6:12-23 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone

When I first became a pastor, I was sent to Pennsylvania and spent 13 years there. I lived in a beautiful area full of mountains, valleys, forests, farms, and charming small towns. Being a kid from New York City, though, when I arrived I wasn’t sure if I would really belong. But I interviewed with the call committee, and little by little I saw how God was opening a door for me there, and how my new congregation, Messiah Lutheran, and I, were a good fit for each other. As I got to know the members of Messiah, many of them told me that the reason they went to church there was because they felt welcomed for who they are. And I experienced that myself from the folks of Messiah. It was a welcoming church. Looking back, that’s probably where I began to learn that “friendly” and “welcoming” don’t mean the same thing.

Almost every church will tell you they are “friendly”, and it’s probably true of just about every church. But friendliness is only a fraction of what it means to be welcoming. Don’t get me wrong here--I think being friendly is a good thing--but the bigger question is “friendly to whom?” A church might have plenty of friendly individuals. But being welcoming is more than an individual’s initiative at being friendly--being welcoming is a culture of a whole group that looks outward to others. It’s a larger system that influences its members to act in a certain way, maybe without them even fully realizing it.

What does it look like to be welcoming? To offer true hospitality? Does their friendliness extend beyond themselves? Beyond people who don’t already know and like each other? To people who might be different in some way? Do they make space for people to be authentically who God made them to be? Do they go deeper than exchanging pleasantries? Do they show up for people in their time of need, support and encourage them? Do they reach out to others beyond their own circle in their time of need, with no expectation of reward? Do they examine themselves in a loving yet critical way, to put themselves in the shoes of someone who is experiencing their church for the first time? Try to anticipate their needs? Their questions? To listen to their stories and take their experiences seriously, especially if those are different from their own? Those are some of the bigger and deeper things that move a church beyond being simply “friendly” to being “welcoming”.

In the three short verses of today’s gospel reading, Matthew 10:40-42, Jesus gives us a lot to chew on when it comes to a biblical understanding of “welcoming” and hospitality. In this chapter of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been teaching his 12 disciples, instructing them about how to do things “in Jesus’ name” since he is about to “send them out” for the first time. They are still novices at this point, they’ve got a lot to learn. And the way Jesus finishes this particular “small group curriculum” is by teaching about “welcome”: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

The first thing to learn about how to be welcoming of others, Jesus says, is learning how to be welcomed by others yourself! You need to let others teach you first before you can do it effectively yourself. We don’t begin by assuming we’ve got it all figured out, but instead by making ourselves “outsiders” who are vulnerable enough to be in a position not of influence but of need. Then to see how we feel when we receive a helpful welcome or an unhelpful welcome, and learn from that and put that into our own practice.

The example Jesus uses about how the disciples might put what they learned into practice comes in verse 42: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple--truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” Something as small as offering a cup of cold water can be a big gesture of welcome, if the person is thirsty and doesn’t have access to water on their own. A cup of cold water won’t solve all the world's problems, it’s not the end goal, because even the person who drinks it will get thirsty again--but it still matters. It’s life-giving. It means you’ve taken the time and listened to what this person truly needs, and you have some empathy for why they’re not able in this moment to quench their own thirst. And the reason you know how to make that life-giving gesture of welcome is because you were once in a similar position of vulnerability when you needed to be welcomed by someone else. If you’ve ever been the one who needed the cold cup of water, it’s easier to know when to give a cup to someone else.

In modern terminology we call this way of learning the “action/reflection model”. You learn what you are supposed to do from others, then you do it yourself, then you reflect back on the experience to see what you learned and what changes you need to make, then you teach others. This is the basic way of being a disciple.

The word “disciple” means “student”. God called and equipped each of us in baptism to be disciples, students, always learning from Jesus and the people Jesus puts in our lives. Being a disciple will make us feel uncomfortable at times--pushed out of our comfort zones, and stretching the ways we’re accustomed to understanding the world--and that is okay. You don’t grow if you’re not being stretched. Yet to truly let God grow you requires a great deal of humility and vulnerability, because it means we need to acknowledge our own shortcomings and even the need to to change.

So this points us to something else about discipleship: you need to be open to change. If you want to grow in discipleship as a welcoming church, you need to accept change. And the hardest part about change isn’t necessarily the change itself, because things change all the time, and we keep going on. The hardest thing about change is the feelings of loss that often come with it. And our sinful human nature always wants to deny that loss is happening--we always just want things to go back to normal, even though that is never an option--because life always moves forward, until you arrive at a “new normal”. So, what we do with our feelings of loss, and how we help others with their feelings of loss, is a key issue of following Jesus. If we don’t learn how to grieve our losses courageously, then we can’t follow Jesus effectively when he wants to lead us toward something new.

This is all really challenging, because our culture views vulnerability and humbleness as weakness instead of as openness to God’s work within us. And our culture views loss as a kind of “alien invasion” that disrupts normal life instead of understanding that loss simply is normal life. There are no shortcuts around any of this, so any growth in discipleship-- whether that’s becoming a more welcoming church, or connecting more to the Franklin community, or making a greater commitment to mission and outreach, or developing our prayer and spiritual life, or loving our neighbors in a pandemic, or dismantling the racism within myself or within the larger society that I’ve contributed to often without even realizing it, or you name it--all aspects of discipleship involve having the humility to learn from Jesus and others, changing our understanding and actions in some way, and allowing ourselves to grieve the losses we feel when moving from an “old normal” to a “new normal”.

Sometimes the losses are small and it’s not hard, sometimes they are big and really difficult; but whatever they are we need to acknowledge the losses as real, and trust that Jesus is ready to welcome us on the other side with God’s grace, mercy, and love--and he’s ready to keep teaching us how to welcome others.

So remember the wonderful promise our crucified and risen Lord Jesus has for us when we open our hearts in faith and vulnerability: God is always in the business of bringing new life and salvation out of loss and death. Jesus’ grace and forgiveness sets us free to be people of God. Amen.