Sermon: The Hospitality of God

Sermon: The Hospitality of God

Preached July 22, 2018 at Highlands United Presbyterian Church, Jacksonville, FL

Listen: 

Well, good morning, it’s good to be back with you! It’s been 3 summers since I was last with you, and I was very grateful for the invitation to step into your pulpit again. It was also the last time I preached, so as I began to prepare, I had to remind myself of how to start. Hopefully, I’m not too rusty. But rest assured, my dad and sister and grandma are here with me today, so they’ll hold me accountable. And I’d be glad to hear compliments after, and you can tell any criticism to my grandma.

When I begin preparing a sermon, I first pore over the lectionary passages, this journey through the scriptures that we go through on Sunday mornings. And after seeing Psalm 23 in the readings for today, I thought I would be preaching about shepherds. Indeed, the readings for today tell us not just about the good shepherd, but about David the shepherd who God made king, about leaders who failed to shepherd their people and who God will replace, and we see Jesus look out over a hungering crowd as sheep without a shepherd.

So, shepherds. That is what I’m not preaching about today.

See, when we sit with scriptures, and give it time to start working into our bones, the Holy Spirit can surprise us. If you’ve been considering starting a new practice of scripture reading, I’d encourage you to look to the lectionary. There are daily readings as well as the weekly Sunday readings, and one place you can find them is right at the top of the PCUSA website. By design, the assigned passages from the Old and New Testaments will share thematic similarities and spark your imagination. When you read, let the words into your imagination, don’t jump immediately to deriving lessons or making conclusions. Let the words enter your emotions and strike the chords of your soul. Give it time and space, let it make a home in you. Because that is exactly what God is up to: making a home within and among us.

And that is what I am preaching about today: the Hospitality of God. The main questions for us are: how is God making a home for us in the world and how is the Spirit calling us to live that hospitality?

 

Promised a Home

We begin with 2nd Samuel, where we find King David, fresh off military victory, enthroned as the King over all Israel, in his palace of cedar, safely delivered by God from his enemies. He looks around him at this house of splendor, and the first thing he thinks is: “God has got to get him one of these!”

In hindsight, we can see how badly David would miss what really makes a good home throughout his life. From that palace of cedar, David manipulated political power to take women as property and kill anyone in his way, and his own family fell into civil war. I wonder if there aren’t some roots of those failings in this lack of vision, in his inability to see what kind of home God really wanted to make for his people in the world, not one made of cedar and wealth and power.

Now you’d think that the prophet Nathan would help him rethink this. After all, a prophet is supposed to speak truth to power. And later in their time together he will indeed challenge David. But this is his first appearance, perhaps early in his service to David, and whether through lack of vision or failure of nerves, Nathan goes right along with David’s idea. “Go, do all that you have in mind, for the Lord is with you.” I think we could all use prophets in our lives that question us a little more than that.  

So David and Nathan haven’t got it, and the Lord interrupts Nathan’s sleep that very night to set things straight about who will be making a home for who.

“Are YOU going to build a house for ME?” God asks. “In all of our years of wandering, did I ever ask the leaders of Israel to build me a palace of cedar?” God’s really delivering the rhetorical questions here. “I lived in a tent, did it make me any less God?”

He says to David, I brought you up, I made you safe and renowned, and not just that, but I will make a home for my people, a place they can be safe and undisturbed.

So God is telling David, the kind of house I build, the kind of hospitality that I practice, is not one made of human, perishable materials, but is made of love, safety, presence. God is creating a family, a household that will endure the ages.

And this is the story we see throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, whenever God talks to his people, whenever he gives them promises, there’s always the hint that the promises are not just for them but for everyone. Because God’s hospitality is more expansive than we can imagine.

I was thinking about this idea of God making his people safe as I was watching the new documentary about Mr. Rogers in theaters right now, about his Children’s television show and his legacy. One of his enduring legacies is the way he showed that children should have a safe place to be who they are, to grow up with community and love, and that this was the kind of house children needed. I think this is embodied in a song he sang on his show: “It’s you I like. It’s not the things you wear. It’s not the way you do your hair. But it’s you I like. The way you are right now. The way deep down inside you. Not the things that hide you. Not your toys, they’re just beside you. But it’s you I like. Every part of you. Your skin. Your eyes. Your feelings. Whether old or new, I hope that you’ll remember, even when you’re feeling blue, that it’s you I like. It’s you yourself. It’s you. It’s you I like.”

As some of you may know, Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian minister, which we Presbyterians always love to tell people and make sure they know. You can hear that theology of God’s loving safety for children. I think it’s not just for children but for all of us, and we see that in this old testament passage with David, that even as a grown man, God wanted David to feel safe.

I’m also reminded of a moment I had with son a couple weeks ago. Will is seven years old and he was taking a bath. He usually takes baths by himself, but sometimes he gets a little lonely for company. I was pretty tired on this particular night, I was looking for a bit of a break during his bath, and I was lying down in my bed, and I heard Will’s voice call out, “Dad, Dad, I want to show you something.” So I said, “Yeah, just go ahead and finish your bath, and then you can show me.” And he says, “No, no, come here. I have to show it to you!” So I say back, “Oh, ok, buddy, but maybe just finish your bath first.” And he said, “Dad…for your SON?”

He really hit me right in the gut there. So I got up and went to him, and of course, he just really wanted me to be there. He showed me something and we chatted for a couple minutes. And then, I’m going to be honest, I kind of backed out of the bathroom, to try to take a couple more minutes of rest. I get back to my bed and lay down, and I hear his voice again: “Dad, come back!”  And I said, “Oh, buddy, I’m so tired, I just want to rest for a couple minutes.” And he came back: “Dad, for your SWEET BOY?” He really got me.

What he was looking for was that safe loving presence that our children treasure, but that we do too, in the presence of a friend, a family member, the hospitality that makes us feel truly at home. Maybe even sometimes from unexpected people, people  who aren’t as near to us, who as the Ephesians reading today put it, are far off.

I have a friend Ranna who is Muslim and Palestinian and lives here in Jacksonville. One day, out of the blue, she gave me a gift. The gift was wood, oil, sand, and water from the Holy Land, a land holy to her as a Muslim but which she knew was holy to me too as a Christian. And in that moment I felt the hospitality of God from someone who was far off from me, at least in terms of culture and religion.

So I think that when God is correcting David and Nathan, saying, “I am the one who builds the house,” he is also saying, I don’t build houses out of cedar and wealth and power the way you do. I build it out of love and community.

 

Called to Hospitality

So I think our Old Testament reading from Samuel shows us God’s promise, and now as we turn to our Gospel reading, we see how God is going to involve us in making a home of the world.

In our gospel reading today, Jesus is with his disciples and looking for a time to rest with them. They’ve been very busy. They could be forgiven for being exhausted. The disciples have been off preaching through the countryside. Jesus has just suffered through seeing his cousin and forebear John the Baptist murdered by the powers that be. This is what has happened just as they are trying to go off to rest.

Now it’s good for us to rest and we should never be ashamed of needing rest. We are humans. God created the Sabbath for rest. We should rest when we can. We should rest well. But this story shows us that sometimes need comes to us that isn’t mindful of the fact that we may be exhausted.

So Jesus and the disciples, ready to go off to rest, are approached by this hungering crowd, which eventually becomes 5000 strong. Jesus looks on the crowd with compassion and he teaches the people. But the people have physical needs too. They need food. They’re hungry.

But when Jesus finishes teaching, the disciples say, send them away to get food. Jesus says, No, you feed them.

The disciple’s response is very understandable, totally reasonable. We don’t have the money for that. We can’t afford that. We don’t have the resources to feed a crowd of 5000 people.

Jesus says, What do you have? And that’s where they start.

The miracle happens, and it can seem far off for us today. But it is for us today, it is for us to believe that the miracle of God’s hospitality can do far more than we can imagine.

My heart has been broken recently, as I am sure many of you have felt, as we’ve seen very difficult images coming from the U.S. border with Mexico. Children being separated from their parents. Unaccompanied children living in tent cities and living in terrible conditions.

In the response to that, I had the chance to worship with a Hispanic Christian community in Jacksonville who are grieving these realities. Who themselves told stories of the difficulty of trying to come to this nation. Families trying to stay together but split apart. People looking for something they need, looking for compassion.

I think we sometimes reassure ourselves with reasonable responses. We think, there’s a border and we have to think about how we manage the border. And that’s ok. But as Christians, I think we can’t ignore that Jesus looks on a hungering crowd and doesn’t make any qualifications. He says, Feed them.

And there are those who don’t have reasonable responses, and this is something we need to pay attention to also. My friend Basma who is from Iraq, she is Muslim and wears a head scarf, and so stands out as different. Recently, someone on the street shouted at her to “Go Home.” This is a common experience of many people of different traditions and cultures, who don’t look like what a very prejudiced view calls American. Of course, this is Basma’s home and it’s a home she is making. She’s working with immigrants and refugees. She’s practicing the hospitality of God. And yet there are those who would scream out to her with such hate.

So, our calling is to hear Jesus when he says, Bring them all to me, and let’s feed them all. We may not know exactly how to work that out yet, but as Christians, it is absolutely our calling to go and do.

When I think of hospitality, I think of my friends Sel and Angie, who were in the news recently for their generosity. They are Muslims and welcomed friends in Jacksonville into their home for dinners in the month of Ramadan. This is the month each year when Muslims fast during daylight hours from food and drink, yes, even water. It’s a trial, especially during summer months. Yet at the exhausting end of most days that month, Sel and Angie welcomed a dozen or more people to share a meal with them called Iftar, the breaking of their fast at sundown. Sitting around table were people of all zip codes and nations, of many religions or none, voters and elected officials of every political stripe. Hundreds of people experienced Sel and Angie’s hospitality.

And I love how expansive it was, showing forth the beautiful diversity of Jacksonville. It broke out of the chains of that narrow hospitality extended only to people who are like us. Sometimes I hear people say that we should talk to people who are different than us, who believe differently, who vote differently. You know, they say, like Republicans and Democrats or Trump voters and Hillary voters. As if those categories, as if Republicans and Democrats were the only two categories of humanity. As if one group of middle class or affluent white Christian americans talking to another group of middle class or affluent white Christian americans fully embodies the hospitality of God. Now of course it’s good for that conversation to happen too, but I think God is calling us to a far more expansive hospitality. There is power in the hospitality of God when we cross far off borders.

And that’s what Sel and Angie embraced, what their religion of Islam inspired in them. They were like Jesus. Sel and Angie will tell you, they didn’t see borders or religions or political parties. They saw the hungering crowd, hungering for peace and togetherness. And they knew they were the hungering crowd too, that they needed to be together too. That’s the truth of what God is up to-We are both disciples and crowd, both promised hospitality and called to offer it generously. God is bringing together those who are near and those who are far off together, God is bringing those who are strangers and aliens to each other together.

 

Our Promise and Calling

Friends, the hospitality of God is our promise and our call. God is making a home in the world for each of us, a home made not of perishable things like cedar and power and wealth, but one made of the enduring safety which comes from love and community. This is the promise for each of us, but the good news is that’s not all God is up to.  

God is making a home for all people in the world, people of every zip code and nation. The hospitality of God knows no borders. Where any children have need of safety, to know they are loved, to be cared for as family, the hospitality of God is for them. Where any people have need, the hospitality of God is for them. God doesn’t need a house of Cedar, but children, they need more than a tent. They need a home, a place to be safe with their families, and so do all God’s children.

So the hospitality of God is our promise AND our calling. Like the Disciples, Jesus calls us to have compassion and send no one away. Even if we’re tired. Even if we’ve done good things and been faithful servants. Sometimes it’s not time to rest yet, because it’s time to help others find a safe place where they can rest.

And if it seems like there isn’t enough; enough time, enough energy, enough money, enough bread, trust that God’s hospitality is far greater than we can imagine or hope for. We only have to start.

Start by reaching out with love to people we know. Start by welcoming strangers into our homes and churches. Start by advocating for immigrants and refugees and others in need with our elected officials. And vote too, we can vote those values of hospitality. We only have to start.

We are partners in this work but it is God’s promise. This is what God is up to, making a home of the world for all the people.

Let’s say it loud and love big so the hospitality of God will be known in our own hearts, in this community, and to the ends of the earth. Amen? Amen.