Far from Home A Sermon by Rich Holmes on Mark 9:33-37 Delivered on September 23, 2018 at Northminster Presbyterian Church One time, I was told a story that is supposedly a true story, although I hope it s not. There was a suburban middle class church somewhere in America which every Sunday had a message on the sign out front which said Everyone Welcome. Now, this church was as white as the driven snow, and one day a black couple decided to visit and sit among all the white people in the pews. The very next Sunday that message Everyone Welcome was taken down. On the way out the door that day, someone asked the pastor why that message was taken down. He replied Some of our visitors were taking it a bit too literally. As I say, I hope that story isn t true. But whether true or not, that story reminds us that even though not every church in this country is a welcoming church, every church that I know of at least claims to be welcoming; every church that I know of claims to value hospitality. Whether they practice hospitality or not, it would be pretty unusual to see a church with a sign which said Not everyone is welcome. No one then would argue that hospitality is not an important Christian virtue. It is a central Christian virtue, and it is right up there with other virtues like Forgiveness, Humility, Faith, Hope, and Love. And Jesus today tells us that it is so important, that whoever welcomes even a little child in his name welcomes him. Now, of course, I don t know anyone here at Northminster who doesn t love little children. We are always overjoyed whenever little kids are in our sanctuary, and last week, I saw smiles on everyone s faces when I baptized little Jackson Webber and I carried him around the sanctuary. But I don t think Jesus point is just about little children. It is easy to welcome cute little children, but I think Jesus point is about the weakest 1
and most vulnerable members of society. Hospitality is so important Jesus tells us that even if you welcome the weakest and most vulnerable members of society you welcome me. And if you welcome me, he tells us, you don t just welcome me, you welcome the one who sent me. I think that every culture that has ever been has had a sense that some places are home and other places are not home. If there is a human culture which exists that doesn t have this sense, I don t know about it. And this isn t just true of humans it is even true of animals. Who hasn t had a dog or a cat and taken it to a strange place and noticed that the animal needs to sniff around and investigate everything unfamiliar and who hasn t noticed that this animal didn t quite seem itself when it was in this new place? It may refuse to eat or drink for a time, and be especially on edge. But while every human and even many animals have a sense that some places are home and some are not, something strikes me as interesting or even strange, that I have given a lot of thought to this week. What is strange to me is that not every society has considered hospitality to be very important. Making your guests feel like your home is their home is not something every society has valued. If anyone ever thought about what it takes to make a good person it was Aristotle, but hospitality is not even listed among Aristotle s virtues. The closest he comes to it is friendliness or maybe generosity. Plato didn t list hospitality as a virtue either, neither did Aquinas. And I can t help but wonder why that is. Well, I don t know why this is, but what I think is that hospitality is never considered too important if you grow up in a society that doesn t know anything about the experience of being far from home. If the need for hospitality is not part of the story of your people, then why would they value hospitality? And for the people of God, the reason I believe welcoming others 2
matters so much, is because it is part of our story that we ourselves needed someone to welcome us. Part of the story of the people of God is that the people of God were strangers and foreigners in Egypt, so we welcome the stranger in our midst. Our Old Testament lesson today tells God s people The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as you love yourself Why? For you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Now, I could be wrong in what I say about the difference between societies that value hospitality and those that don t, but I guess the reason I think this way goes back to the time I was living in England for six months when I was about twenty-two. Now during those six months I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and some of the best memories of my life come from that period. But while I had a wonderful time, I also became quite homesick and I felt very much like a foreigner. And because I was living in a foreign land, I can tell you in all sincerity, that I suddenly looked at anyone else who was a foreigner in that land differently. And by foreigners I don t mean other Americans because of course all of us who were Americans were foreigners in that land too, but what I mean is people who would be foreigners in America, suddenly I looked at them differently. Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Ethiopians, Iranians, Egyptians, Turks, Greeks, I looked at all of them and I saw a look in their eyes that was the same look I had in my eyes. A sort of lost look, I guess it was. Now, I don t pretend to be the exemplar of hospitality. I don t pretend that I have always made my home to be a welcome place for anyone and everyone all the time. But if you ever find me not practicing hospitality, I know how you can make me ashamed. I know how you can make me ashamed by saying to me, remember what it was like when you were a stranger. Remember what it was like when you were a foreigner, living in a land that was not your home. 3
Well, maybe you have never had an experience like that. And it may be that while I have no doubt that you understand what I am talking about you don t really feel any sort of connection to God s people who were strangers in the land of Egypt many thousands of years ago. And you wonder, how is that experience your experience? Well, I want to answer that question by telling you something that you would not have heard in a sermon decades ago. I want to answer that question by telling you something you would not have heard in a sermon for some of you when you were a kid or for others of you when you were a young woman or a young man. What I want to tell you is that being a Christian, the experience of belonging to God and to Christ in this day and age is the experience of living in a foreign land. Now at one time that was not so. At one time it was very easy to confuse being a Christian with being an American. Now, I am not saying that there was ever a time when this nation or any nation for that matter was truly a Christian nation. But for a long time, it was easy to at least pretend that America was a Christian nation. But I think we all know that we can t pretend any longer. From now on if you take your baptism seriously, and you take this Jesus stuff seriously, then you can t help but feel as though you are walking around in a society and a culture in which you don t belong. Now, if you choose not to take your Christian faith seriously you will fit in great in this society of ours. You will value the kinds of things that most people in our society value. You will value the pursuit of wealth and material things before all else. You will listen to people and respect them based on how much money they have and not what their character is like. You will decide that there is no problem in this world that a little violence and warfare cannot solve or at the very least belittling, humiliating and insulting cannot solve. These are the values of the society we live in, and I don t have to tell you that, you 4
know that. But if you take all this Jesus stuff seriously, then I think you will find that you don t fit in very well with this world. You don t belong. You are a foreigner, a stranger. You have your allegiance not in this society or the kingdoms of this world, but you have your allegiance in the kingdom of heaven. So if being told that you were strangers in the land of Egypt don t seem to have any meaning to you, maybe it would help to remember that you are strangers in the land of Egypt now. Maybe it would help to remember that if you take this Jesus stuff seriously, you are strangers in a land that you don t belong to, right now. When I was a kid, my mom and dad taught me as they probably taught you, not to talk to strangers. I don t know that people say that so much anymore, and in fact, I saw a child psychologist talking about child abductions one time, and she said the problem with telling small children not to talk to strangers is that they don t know what a stranger is. To them, strangers are people who look frightening, scary, and it is much better advice to simply tell small children to not talk to anyone they don t know. Because otherwise they might talk to someone who looks friendly, and think that they aren t a threat and they aren t a stranger. Well, no matter what you may look like, how affable you are, or how you may come across, I can tell you from experience that to be a stranger is to feel like a threat. It is to feel subhuman, and for that reason whenever you have been made to feel welcome and feel at home when you were a stranger was to make you feel human again. And if you have ever felt like a stranger, if you have ever felt like a stranger who longed to be welcomed somewhere, then how can you not welcome the stranger yourself. That is the message that the bible has for us when it comes to this business of hospitality. 5
Jesus says whoever welcomes a little child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me, but the one who sent me. 6