Sermon 9/14/08
Radical Hospitality: Welcome Home - John 15:1-8, 1 John 4:7-21
(view lectionary notes for this text)
Last week, we talked about what we know about God, what we know about who we are, and what we have to show for who we are and what we know: good fruit Jesus calls it. We’re known by the fruit we bear. Over the next several weeks, we’ll look at Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, as we seek to ask ourselves if we are a fruitful congregation? How can we be more fruitful? How can we show others and show God who we are? We’ll talk for two weeks at a time about Radical Hospitality, Passionate Worship, Intentional Faith Development, Risk-Taking Mission and Service, and Extravagant Generosity. We focus both on the nouns: Hospitality, Worship, Faith Development, Mission and Service, and Generosity, and on the descriptive adjectives that make these practices something different than what we’ve always been doing: Radical, Passionate, Intentional, Risk-Taking, and Extravagant. This week and next, we start with hospitality – radical hospitality.
What is hospitality? Hospitality is being welcoming and inviting, receiving and caring for guests. At church, at home, we seek to offer hospitality to those who enter our doors. Last summer, just before I move to Franklin Lakes, my friend Sue – my roommate all through college – and her husband Jeremy – who lived across the hall from us freshman year – came to visit. If you’ve had guests in your home before, you know that there is a certain amount of hospitality required when you are entertaining guests, a certain amount of preparation you must do to be ready to receive visitors and welcome them into your home. Even for guests who are family members of very close friends, even for those who know us and are relaxed around us, we tend to get ready when they come to visit and stay in our home. I wanted to get ready for Sue and Jeremy, and I needed to do a bit of cleaning. This, let me tell you, was a bit of challenge: you might remember that I was in a cast last summer. Cleaning wasn’t easy. So, for a small fee, I enlisted the help of my brother Tim. He washed the dishes, took out the garbage, straightened the office, vacuumed up the abundant cat hair, put fresh linens in the guest bedroom, and my mom, for free, picked up some groceries. I made sure Sue and Jeremy had good directions to the house, and freed up my schedule and even finished my sermon a little earlier than usual so I could spend the evening with them when they arrived. All of this is hospitality, being welcoming to guests. It is basic courtesy at the least, and can be an act of true kindness and warmth at best.
And hospitality – being welcoming – is biblical. The scriptures, particularly the Old Testament writings, stress the importance of being welcoming to the stranger, the foreigner. People were meant to welcome whoever might show up at their door need shelter, whether they were family, friends, or complete strangers. The reasoning was two-fold – the Israelites had themselves been foreigners living in other lands, and they were meant to remember what it was like to need a warm, hospitable welcome. And they also had a sense that in welcoming others, they were possibly welcoming God into their homes, entertaining the divine in disguise. They had to be welcoming, because you never knew when God might show up at your house for a stay.
As a congregation, we can certainly relate to this experience, right? There are congregations that are welcoming to strangers, to visitors, and congregations that are not so welcoming. And which kind of congregation are we? Well, of course, we are a hospitable congregation, right? I do believe, even if we are not perfectly welcoming all the time, that we really are sincere in our efforts in hospitality. We try to think of different ways to be welcoming. We try to embrace people and greet them warmly, and make them feel like this congregation could be their home too. We try to prepare for guests, as you might prepare for visitors to your home. We’re ready to receive those who come to this place of worship.
But hospitality – radical hospitality – requires something more, something deeper. I’ve told you about preparing to receive guests. Let me tell you about preparing to travel instead. When I was in seminary at Drew, I visited Ghana in West Africa for 3 ½ weeks. The trip was part of my requirements for my degree – a cross-cultural experience – and since it came with course credit, I also had to attend a pre-departure course. A lot of the focus of the course was how to be hospitable – even as the ones who were visiting, who were strangers, who were going into the homes of others. We learned about how you should exchange greetings, what kind of gifts to bring for your host families, how to behave at meals, how not to put out our host families who would undoubtedly be bending over backwards to please us. Even though we were the visitors, we still had to practice hospitality, to let our host families feel at home in their own home, and to communicate that we were at home in their home too.
When we think about being welcoming, we must remember that radical hospitality means that we take our welcome with us. Our welcome isn’t something people find when they come here, it’s something we take out with us when we go, so that wherever we are, we’re offering hospitality in the name of Jesus Christ. Jesus never encouraged his own disciples to wait around until others came to them to share the message of God’s kingdom and God’s love. He sent them out to be welcoming. They went where the people were who needed to hear the good news, who needed to know that they could experience God’s love and God’s kingdom already, right now. We are not just called to be members of this congregation. We are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ. And if we are disciples, that means we can’t just wait for people to show up here to share the good news with them, and to tell them about God’s kingdom, and to let them know about God’s unconditional love. If they’ve made it inside these doors, people have probably already figured out that they are looking for something, seeking out for God. So we can and should welcome those who come here. But disciples must also be ready to be sent out, to share hospitality in a different way.
How do we learn how to do this? To offer hospitality here in this place, and to carry it with us in our hearts as we go out? Last week, we celebrated Homecoming Sunday, a welcoming back of everyone to this church home, from wherever we’ve been. A welcome home. We’ll continue, this fall, to think about homecoming and welcoming. Today’s scripture lessons, from the first letter of John and from the gospel John, help us focus in on the hospitality, the “being at home” God has in mind. From our gospel lesson, we find one of Jesus’ “I am” statements. Throughout John, Jesus speaks about his identity in everyday images that his contemporaries could related too, instead of describing himself in the sometimes-distant theological language. Jesus presents us with an image that ties into the land and the people that were close to him. “I am the true vine,” Jesus declares. “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” God is the vinegrower. Jesus talks about how the branches – us – can’t have live if they are separated from the vine – himself. And as branches, we’re meant to be the bearers of much fruit – fruit that we’re able to grow because we abide in him as he abides in us. We literally take our life from the vine, and through Christ, we can become fruit-bearing disciples.
From the epistle lesson, John picks up the theme of abiding in one another, God and God’s children. John focuses his passage on God’s nature – God is love. We love because God is love and we’re born of this loving God. If we don’t love, we don’t know God. The best love we can know is in God’s loving us, and because we know this love, we ought to love one another. When we do this, even though we can’t see God, John says, we get something better – God lives in us, and God’s love dwells within us. So God is love, John says, in case we missed it, and abiding in love we abide in God because God is – that’s right – love. Not just any love – perfect love – love that is so perfect that there is not fear in this love. And we love because God loves us first. And we can’t love God if we don’t really love our brothers and sisters, John says logically, because we can’t even see God, and we can see our brothers and sisters. How could we more easily love that which we can’t even see? So, if we claim to love God, we know how to show it: in loving others.
You’ll notice that in both passages today, the word “abide” appears repeatedly – six times in the epistle, eight in the gospel. The repetition helps signal us of the importance of the concept. The word ‘abide’ here is from the Greek word meno^, which means literally, “to stay at home.” It has the sense of ‘lasting’ or ‘remaining’ – not stirring from where one is settled. So when Jesus and John speak of “abiding,” we can think of them as speaking about ‘remaining at home.’ If we go back through the passages and substitute this phrase where we see the word ‘abide,’ we get a clearer picture of what these passages are about. In First John we would read, “God is love, and those who remain at home in love remain at home in God, and God remains at home in them.” In the gospel, we would hear Jesus saying, “Remain at home in me as I remain at home in you . . . those who remain at home in me and I in them bear much fruit.”
To abide in someone – to let someone abide in you – these acts suggest intimate relationships. To offer abiding love is to offer deep hospitality. Think again about my story about getting ready for company. Sometimes, when you have company over, or you visit someone at their house, sometimes you are just that – company. But other times, someone will say to you, “please, make yourself at home.” And sometimes they truly mean it. And when they say this, what they mean is, “be yourself here. Act here as you would act at your own home. My home is your home.” What does it mean to make God at home in us? God grows us, shapes us, prunes us. So the message from the scriptures today is clear: God tells us repeatedly that we are meant to feel at home in God’s heart. We’re meant to be ourselves. To be welcome family. To be able to kick our shoes off and act like we’re not just visiting, but ready to settle in and stay awhile. And what God wants in return is the same welcome from us. God wants to be welcomed into our lives, our homes, our hearts too. God wants not to be an occasional visitor, but someone always there, remaining, always, within us.
We abide in God and God abides in us. A great arrangement, right? But if the deal is so nice – God living us and us living in God and all – why do we seem so reluctant to make God at home in our lives? Well, it turns out that God has some very specific ideas about what it means to be at home in our lives. If we turn back to our gospel lesson, we read Jesus reminding us that God is the vinedresser. When we welcome God into our homes – our hearts – God isn’t content just to lounge around the house. God, it seems, does a little housework. We read, “God removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” If we are the branches to Christ’s vine, then it sounds very much like God wants to come in and change us. God wants to come into our homes, our hearts, and rearrange all the furniture, redecorate. God wants to clean out and throw away when we’d rather be pack rats. Suddenly, we’re not sure if we want God as a guest after all. Are we willing to invite someone into our homes, and let them change everything? Can we invite God in, and then allow God to be the one in control? The thought of giving up control might make us a bit afraid of what God might do to the parts of our lives we’d rather not have ‘pruned,’ as Jesus so nicely puts it. But God promises that even if it feels like we’re being torn up, actually, we’re being built up, into stronger, healthier branches, branches that bear good fruit. With God dwelling within us, John promises that love is perfected in us, and that we, perfected by God’s love, find boldness.
But there’s still more to challenge us. Even when we let God in, welcome God to abide in us, and us in God, even when we boldly let God prune us and shape us, God is not done with us yet. That’s because as part of this family, this ever-expanding family, our relationship with God is never just about God and us – it’s never just the two of us. How we love God and how God loves us always involves our love for our brothers and sisters too. This house that we’ve invited God to stay in with us – God has taken the liberty of inviting over some guests – namely, everybody else.
Jesus says that we are part of the vine – we’re the branches, growing out of Christ, our common ground. That means that the same vine that nourishes and sustains me is the vine that nourishes and sustains you and is the vine that nourishes and sustains others. We’re connected. In fact, John argues, we can’t even claim to love God unless we first claim to love our brothers and sisters. We love God by loving others. God remains at home in us when we invite others to be at home in our hearts as well. When it comes to being part of the vine, we might get more excited about pruning and removing branches if we think we get to be in charge of pruning our neighbors’ branches. It is easy for us to look at others and figure out how we could clean up their lives. We know what they need to do to be better people. But we’re forgetting our place – God is the vinedresser. We are the branches. And branches don’t cut off other branches.
Hospitality, then, is all about being at home: we’re at home with God, God is making a home within us, and we’re called to carry this abiding love, this “at-homeness” with us, so that others, too, find themselves welcomed by our love and God’s. Are you at home with God? Is God at home in you? Do you carry God’s abiding love with you? “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Amen.