“WELCOME”
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 10: 40-42
Dr. Matthew Brown
If you Google the word “hospitality” (You know, I’ll bet John Calvin never began a sermon with those words.) you will not find helpful hints about making your home a more inviting place. No, you will be inundated with sites about the hotel business, which in the trade, is refered to as the hospitality industry. And, it is of course, in a hotel’s best interest to create a hospitable environment so that you may feel so cared for that you would choose to return. And many here have memories of luxuriant rooms, fluffy bathrobes, mints on the pillow, and as we savored last Summer, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies delivered to your room in the mid-afternoon.
Now, I don’t know Dom Perignon
from Dom Deluise, so I don’t care a wit about champaign welcomes and an on-call sommolier. But you give me a warm chewy chocolate chip
cookie with no nuts in it and I’ll be singing your praises for life.
We could spend an afternoon sharing special memories of
special stays at special places, but in this room of well-versed travelers, I
would bet almost everyone can share a nightmare memory of a most inhospitable
outpost of the hospitality industry.
I remember my first trip to NYC back in the early eighties
when I was a wee young lad of 22, old enough to accompany my mother, who like
many women, has a spouse who would rather sign up for a root canal cruise than
go to New York.
Now, my mother and I were not seasoned travelers, and thus
were easily drawn in by one of those less than honest, hyperbolic travel
guides. You know the ones.
Well, mistake number one was that we took the guide’s advice
on a motel in mid-town
Mistake number two: the motel was located on
So, we walk into the expansive motel lobby, which was about
the size of your average toll booth, and step up to the desk, which I think
actually was a toll booth, (just pulled it right in there from the Jersey
turnpike) and received our room key from the gracious gentleman who seemed the
sort who would be very familiar and comfortable with confined spaces equipped
with bars on the windows. Unfortunately,
though, the room had not been cleaned, and so we returned to our eloquent friend ten floors below
in the toll booth and he was so nice to give/throw four or five keys at us so
that maybe, hopefully, we could find a room that had been cleaned. We could see they had not been busy cleaning
the lobby. So we took the keys and
trudged back upstairs. On the third try,
we thought we had found success. There
wasn’t even any police tape on the door.
But the room was sooo hot. It was eighty five degrees outside and
probably 95 degrees in the room. When I
finally drummed up the courage to ask “Mr. Leavenworth” about it, ever the
gracious host, he said, “Open da windows. We ain’t turnin’ on the air until later in the month.” Let’s just say, I protesteth
not. I took it from the tone of his
voice that I had better just think of it as the motel’s complimentary sauna
service. Yeah, that’s it. We were staying in a spa!
Hospitality. Some places have a way of making you feel
welcome and some places do not. And that’s
what hospitality is all about, isn’t it?
Making you feel welcome, maybe even at home. I remember attending a
choir party (redundant?) years ago and the nervous, smiling host greeted
us at the front door and quickly ushered us through the back door to an
increasingly crowded back deck, which, with each new arrival was feeling more
like a cow pen and less like a social occasion.
It began to dawn on me that the host wasn’t trying to create
some kind of casual backyard ambience.
He just didn’t want us in his house.
It started raining and he just kept nervously smiling and talking as
though this was some kind of weather enchanted evening, but you could detect
the panic in his eyes, the nightmare vision of choir feet clambering on his
carpet.
The dictionary provides the following definition for
welcome: “Received with pleasure and
hospitality into one’s company or home; Cordially or
willingly invited; to receive or accept gladly.” Welcome.
What a joy it is to be received joyfully. Where are the places you have been welcomed
in your life and what did that experience mean to you? Future in-laws receiving
you as one of their own. That
first day in a new school when a student doesn’t treat you as the alien from
Mars but befriends you and watches out for you - helping you with those
maddening locker combinations, showing you the lunchroom routine, introducing
you to other students. How about that
first day on the new job when you felt like your tongue was tied, your mind was
running in reverse, and your hands had become concrete blocks. But somebody smiled,
somebody gave you that look that calmed your pounding heart, reminding you that
everybody has had that “first day” experience.
Welcomed. To be received and accepted gladly. It means the world to you, doesn’t it? And it is infectious. It is enough to make you want to be the one
to joyfully receive someone else.
Welcomed becomes welcoming.
That is so central to who we are and what we have been
called to be in this place.
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever
welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
In the three brief verses of our text this morning the word welcome
appears six times. Do you think Jesus is
trying to make a point here?
In this section of Matthew, Jesus is preparing his disciples
for the task of being his witnesses to the world. It is a world that will not always want to
hear what Jesus has to offer. If Jesus
was crucified by the world, what will the world do with his disciples? Matthew’s first readers were already
experiencing indifference and often the opposite of welcome in their
world. But Jesus is telling his
disciples that in those places where they would be welcomed, where they would
be received gladly, the experience for the welcomed and the welcoming would be
the equivalent of the kingdom of heaven.
Isn’t it true? Have
you ever experienced more joy than at those times when you have been truly
welcomed into someone’s home or when you have been the host rejoicing at the
entrance of guests into your home? Have
you seen the excitement and energy in children who just can’t wait for the
guest to arrive? They bounce off the
walls and longingly looking out the windows.
“Is it time? Is it time?” It’s as though they intuitively understand
what the author of Hebrews had to say about God’s communication with
Abraham: “Do not forget to entertain
strangers, for by so doing some people have
entertained angels without knowing it.”
Welcome. “Received
with pleasure and hospitality into one’s company or home; to receive or accept
gladly.”
If we are about anything, that is what we are to be about
here. Invited and welcomed by Christ, we
are to be inviting and welcoming, reflecting his love. Received joyfully by Christ wherever we our
in our life’s journey, we are to joyfully receive others. Just as I am, just as you
are.
In an increasingly hostile world, is it not the church’s
role to be a place where one can, as Henri Nouwen
said, “move from hostility to hospitality?”
O, I read the paper, I’ve heard the arguments, I can point to many
instances where the voices of institutional religion are engendering hostility
and reflecting anything but hospitality.
“If you do not believe what I believe, then you are not worthy of my God
or my time.” Excuse me, but I thought we
were all unworthy. Isn’t that why Christ
came? Listen to the wisdom of John: “Those who say, ‘I love God
,’ and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars; for those who do not
love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have
not seen.” “God is love, and those who
abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Welcomed and welcoming.
If we’re going to do anything in life, let’s do that. And let’s do it well.
Amen.
##