Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 2, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Jeremiah 2:4-13; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
    -Hebrews 13:2

     Here we are home again with you after our month away. There's no place like home, but of course that cuts two ways for us, because the place where we go for our vacation is also our home, as you can tell from the stories we share with you every year about life in St. Lawrence County, New York. And we always have to tear ourselves away from the North Country and our family and our little house on the big river at the end of August in order to come to this home, where believe it or not I have now spent more time than anyplace else on earth except the farm in central New Jersey where I grew up, or at least grew large.

     Well, I don't have any North Country stories to tell you this morning. What's on my mind and my heart today is rather what you might call the South Country of New York, Manhattan Island. We'd only been in Exeter three days when Abby and I climbed into the car again and drove to the big city, and I'm heading there tomorrow too, on account of a dear friend who is trapped in a nasty and terrifying battle with cancer. We'll be asking your prayers for him later. His name is Bill, and we've known each other for 32 years and held each other's hands through various vicissitudes. He presided at our marriage, he's Abby's godfather, he's 54 years old, bright, witty, loyal and generous, and he wants to live, which doesn't seem like an awful lot to ask.

     I say we've been friends for 32 years, which lets you know we go back a long way — which makes you think, well, that's sort of like being family — but on the other hand, it's also true that I was six years out of college, married, a father, and on my second career before I ever laid eyes on the guy or knew he existed. He was a stranger to me. He grew up in Oklahoma City, and that's about as strange as anything I can think of.

     Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, it says here in Hebrews. And the professional preacher can be counted on carefully to explain, as I have often done, how different it was in Biblical times, how perilous it was to be a traveler and what a sacred duty it was to welcome the stranger who typically appeared without warning on your doorstep, weary and hungry and covered with the dust of the road. Like those three men who showed up one day at Abraham's tent, and with huge energy he swept them in and wined and dined them and gave them the best that he had without having any idea that he was entertaining God.

     Hospitality of that sort is but one aspect of the great, broad Biblical theme of compassion and caring for all the vulnerable, the marginal, the weak, anyone who is at some disadvantage compared to you. And that's no trifle, but it occurs to me now that hospitality to strangers is more than that. What hospitality means, when you really think about it, is that someone who has no claim on you suddenly has a claim on you, because you allow it to happen. You not only allow it to happen, you invite it, you welcome it. A stranger gets inside your life, even gets inside you, becomes a part of whoever and whatever you are.

     So is hospitality the same thing as friendship, then? Not quite. Friendship is the bottom line, the end product if you will. Hospitality is the process, the precious process, the clearly God-given process by which strangers become friends. We take that process for a nice and natural thing, but give it the attention it deserves and you'll see what a wonder and a terror it is, impossible ever again to take for granted.

     We're fond of saying in this church, as many churches are fond of saying, that the Communion table is not our table but the Lord's; we are not the hosts, Christ is the host and all of us are invited guests. Which is fine and good as far as it goes, but the trick is, Christ is fundamentally not interested in who is the host and who is the guest. Christ means to abolish altogether the distinction between host and guest and to replace it with something else: plain, ordinary friendship. Or love, if you prefer. Mutual love. Let mutual love continue. Let it be so mutual that it's impossible to tell who invited whom, who hosted whom, who is being generous to whom, who's the giver and who's the receiver.

     Ah, but distinctions, distinctions, we are so committed to our distinctions! This here is my chair. I sit in it every Sunday. It is not your chair. You are in your pew, possibly your summer pew — some of us have summer pews and winter pews, don't we, because the Deacons in their superior spiritual wisdom put up ropes in the summer to discourage us from sitting as far away from each other and as far from the minister as we possibly can — you have your pew, and God have mercy on anybody who overlooks your title to it.

     We watch each other like hawks. We watch each other as Jesus and those Pharisees were watching each other at that dinner, to see how the pecking order worked itself out in the seating arrangements. And Jesus, who is a guest at this dinner, does the rudest thing a guest can possibly do: he comments aloud and bluntly on the behavior of his dinner companions, as I just did on ours, but it's OK if I do it because I'm the pastor and therefore I'm entitled. Status is everything.

     Except that status counts for nothing. When you're invited to a wedding banquet, Jesus says — and he means when you're living as a citizen of God's Kingdom, which he wants us to understand is something like a continual wedding banquet — the only thing that counts for you, according to Jesus, is your humility. By which he does not really mean false modesty, the Nobel Prizewinner pretending to be a nobody until somebody recognizes him or her and the paparazzi start popping. That's just a game. Humility is having nothing to prove in the first place. Humility is not worrying about losing face because you don't have any face to lose.

     And when is it that you and I have no face to lose? At home, of course. Home being the place where everybody knows you much too well to be fooled by any airs you put on, and where your claim on them and their claim on you is just a given. There's no place like home.

     So tomorrow I climb on a train — I've had it up to here with automobiles — and I go home to New York City after having come home to Exeter from our home on the St. Lawrence. Home this time will look a lot like a hospital admitting department and a surgical waiting room. Home is where somebody has a claim on you and it won't let you go and you won't, can't, let go of it. And remember that in a few moments when you are invited to make yourself at home around this table.

     Amen