Even small acts of hospitality, like giving someone a cup of cold water, can make all the difference. The readings for this Sunday are very rich. In this sermon I reflect on the generous hospitality I saw at a wedding, and weave together the Gospel, the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, and Paul's letter to the Romans.

Proper 8 Year A

Transcription of a sermon given on

June 26, 2011

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church Arroyo Grande

By Rev. Valerie Hart

In the Gospel reading today Jesus talks about hospitality, and that even small acts of hospitality, like giving someone a cup of cold water, can make a great deal of difference. I had a chance to see that at work this past weekend at a wedding. I didn’t know the bride’s family very well. I had met a few them but I didn’t know the whole family. Something happened that told me a lot about this family.  There was a man at the wedding who had never met anyone else who was attending. He was a stranger. He had been invited to the wedding, but he came having never met in person anyone there. You see the bride was adopted. Her birth dad had given permission for her to find him, so when she became an adult she looked him up. She had contacted him over email and they had communicated a little bit on Facebook and through email, but it never worked for them to meet in person. And then she invited him to her wedding.

Now you can try to imagine what it would be like to be a man meeting your biological daughter for the first time at her wedding. What would it be like walking into a wedding where you didn’t know anyone at all? That takes a lot of courage. What impressed me was that he was made 100% welcome. Everyone from her family, the whole wedding, treated him like family. He was seated at a table with other family members. Many people spoke to him and made him feel comfortable and welcome. To me this said a great deal about bride’s family - about her parents, about their love for one another, about their love for their daughter, and about their love for all people. A little bit of hospitality made all the difference.

Of course it can work the other way as well. As I was reading background material and ideas for the sermon today I read the story of a pastor who spoke about a man in his town that he knew well. A respected businessman, a good man who lived a good and generous life, but he never came to church. So this pastor would keep inviting him to come to church and he would say “nope, not comin’.” So finally the pastor asked him why. This time the man was in a place where he was ready to tell him. He said that when he was eleven years old his family had decided that it would be good for he and his brothers and sisters if they had some religious training. So they took him to Sunday School. He got to Sunday School and he loved it. He loved hearing the great stories of the Bible. He loved the music. He loved coloring. He loved everything about Sunday School and he was all ready to come back. But at the end of the Sunday School class the Sunday School teacher pulled him aside and said to him - in a very nice way I suppose - “You know son when we come to church we always dress in our best. I don’t want to see you coming back to church dressed the way you are today.” And he looked down at his handed down overalls with holes in them, which were his best clothes, and he never came back to church dressed that way. Well he never came back to church until he was dressed in a brand new suit and laid out in a box for his funeral.

I’m sure that that Sunday School teacher meant well. But it wasn’t being hospitable. It wasn’t being welcoming. It wasn’t seeing the need of the child.

Little acts of hospitality can make a huge difference. Even giving a cup of cold water. It is interesting when you read the Gospel that Jesus doesn’t give many “Thou Shalt Nots”. Oh, occasionally he does, but usually he is telling us what he wants us to do. He wants us to love one another as he loves us, to be hospitable to one another, to see the poor, to give a cup of water to the thirsty. He doesn’t dwell on rules and regulations, but on compassion and love.

If we look at the reading from Roman’s that Paul wrote we find that Paul teaches that we are free from the Law through grace. Things have changed. With the resurrection of Christ everything has changed. We no longer are slaves to a bunch of rules. We are not controlled by the “Thou Shalt Nots”. But Paul had a dilemma because there were some people that when he told them that they were free from the law said, “Okay good, I can do whatever I want.” And they were doing things that weren’t good for them or weren’t good for the people around them. Things that weren’t even respectful of their own bodies. And Paul said, “No, no, no, you don’t quite get it. We are free from the arbitrary laws, but we are slaves to Christ and therefore we want to serve Christ.” There are places in Paul’s letters where he delineates what that looks like, especially in the letters to the Corinthians, because it appears that the Corinthians didn’t quite understand the concept of freedom. So he had to delineate some “Thou Shalt Nots”. But what is most important about what Paul says is that we are a new creation. We are a new creation in Christ. Everything changed with the resurrection. Our relationship with God and our relationship with one another have changed, just as everything changed with Abraham. Before Abraham, and even after in some places, human sacrifice was common.  At the beginning of this story Abraham believes he needs to sacrifice his son to God. Because that is what you did. You made sacrifices to your God. You sacrificed that which was most valuable to you and often it was your own child because you wanted to appease God. You wanted to appease the anger of God. It was as if human beings could do something to take care of God. And then God would owe you something. But things changed with Abraham. Abraham was willing to offer his son. He loved God that much, but God said that is not what it is about. I will provide the sacrifice. God doesn’t need anything from human beings. God has everything that God needs. God wants relationship with human beings and with Abraham the relationship with God became one of friendship rather than one of duty and fear.

Then God provided the sacrifice in Christ to take another step in the relationship between God and human beings. This was a new creation, a new way of being with God, an opportunity to live in grace.

Every day we say the Lord’s prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.” Then we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Right there, central in that prayer, is the coming of God’ reign, the time when God will truly rule the earth. When the earth, all of the earth, all of creation will be as God intended for it to be. God will be in charge, a time when God’s will is how people will respond. The resurrection of Christ opened a window to that new world. That is the new creation, where this earth will become what God intended. Where human beings will treat one another the way we are supposed to - with love and compassion.

We are called to be part of the transformation. We are called to bring on the new kingdom.

If you look at history it is pretty amazing that a small band of followers of Jesus in less then 300 years expanded to cover the entire Roman Empire and become a force to be reckoned with, even though they were illegal. Even though they were persecuted. But Christianity spread like crazy. What was it, what was it that made the church grow so much then? It had to do with how the Christians lived their lives. They lived their lives bringing in the new creation. They lived their lives to be the new kingdom. They treated each other with compassion and love. They brought in and welcomed everyone. Hospitality for everyone - male, female, free, slave, rich, poor, gentile, Jew - anywhere, any language.  This was a community that fed one another; it was not like the rest of the Roman Empire. When plague came people were left because their family didn’t want to catch it. They left people to die alone. The Christians, however, took care of one another, nursed one another back to health. When people were hungry they fed one another. When they were alone they were invited into community. They shared what they had. They had a little taste of what the kingdom of God looks like. Where people love one another as Christ loved us. By the way they lived in their communities they taught people about what love looked like. They didn’t have an army. They didn’t have much money. Most of the early Christians were poor. But they had something more powerful. And when you look at the history of the Christian church that goes into different areas, the missions that were often most successful were ones where it was a doctor who brought healing, or they brought food, or in some other way were being hospitable and caring for people.

We are called, each and every one of us, to help bring on the kingdom of God. When we pray the Lord’s prayer it is our responsibility to do what we can to make this world what God intended - to let the reign of God come through us. It comes through those small acts of hospitality. Those times of charity and love when we feed people, when we welcome people, when we comfort people, when we give them even a cup of cold water.