Welcome from the pulpit of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania by the Reverend Dr. Agnes W. Norfleet Readings: Matthew 10:40-42 June 29, 2014 1 John 4:7-16 The story was published a few years ago about the resurrection of a church. The newspaper called it: The Miracle on Fifth Street. Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church in downtown Charlotte had been watching its membership slide from more than 1,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 10 in worship most Sundays. The faithful few, all in their 70s or older, decided it was time to close. But when the session s decision to close the church was announced from the pulpit, a startling thing happened. An inter-racial couple in their 30 s came forward to ask if it was too late because they had been
visiting and intended to join the church. They were part of a neighborhood Sunday evening Bible study a diverse group of Christian people, who, for various reasons, had not felt at home in other congregations. The next Sunday, they brought their friends, and more than 40 new people came to worship. On the brink of closure, Caldwell Memorial quickly became one of the fastest-growing churches in the presbytery; in a matter of months, the worshipping congregation went from 10 to over 200. What happened exactly? In their crisis of near-closure, the congregation re-discovered the Christian ministry of hospitality for a new day. That church is now more diverse than ever, with about a quarter of its members being people of color, and with a significant number of gays and lesbians and others who did not feel welcomed elsewhere. They call themselves a diverse urban community of seekers. They host a bilingual preschool for low-income Latino families, have an emergency shelter for 60 homeless women, and rent space to an Islamic school. After long resistance, the church finally changed as the neighborhood did. They remained focused on mission and people were welcoming. When the stranger knocked, they answered, even when that meant things were going to change. You had this cadre of older members, the pastor told the paper, who were not going to leave until they were literally forced out. That translated into their being the most open-minded, and tolerant, and clear-headed folks about what it would take to save the church. They did not let differences get in the way. Ann Alford, a retired banking executive, had grown up in the church but left it 25 years earlier after a divorce and feeling like an outsider. When she read about the revitalization of Caldwell church in the Charlotte Observer, her first thought was This sounds too good to be true, but she put down the Sunday newspaper, and drove to worship. Now an elder, she says: People came up to me right from the get-go and said, Welcome, we re glad you are here. I was captivated by the 2
spirit that was present here the people and the diversity. 1 Jesus says to his disciples, Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me and welcomes the God who sent me. In this season of being Christian together, when the participation in Mainline denominations is in steady decline, it is good for us to remember, even in a church as large as ours, that the Christian practice of welcome is always a source of new life. Our gospel is the concluding part of the Missionary Discourse in Matthew. The disciples had been sent to proclaim the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles and to the people of ancient Israel. They were warned that they went forward as sheep to the wolves that they would encounter people hostile to the gospel. They were instructed not to take anything with them, no silver or gold, to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, to spread God s peace, to shake the dust off their sandals in places where they were not received, and to teach a hard word saying love God above all other loves, and the way of life is found in losing your life for others. So our lesson picks up at the end of this journey. Someone must have asked Jesus: What is our reward at the end of this dangerous mission? Jesus answers simply: By welcoming others you welcome me. You welcome God who sent me! Reward enough!! Welcome. It s such a common word. So casual we walk over it on floor mats. It greets us as we drive into a new state, a new town. People meet us as we enter a place: Welcome to WalMart! Good evening and welcome, table for two? Welcome to the greatest show on earth. These common uses may hide the lovely depth and breadth of this word. In English welcome finds its roots in a compounding of well and come, with slightly different connotations than what we tend to use today. The root of well is something close to wellness or well- 1 Presbyterian-Outlook.org, story published in January 2011. 3
being, but stronger than that, implying desire or pleasure. There is also a link between well and weal, the root of our word wealth, and thus the word offers a kind of blessing. Come finds its roots in Greek, as one who is received. Thus welcome in its earliest sense is an invitation to be received with blessing and to be well. For Jews and Christians, our religious notion of welcome is rooted in ancient practices of hospitality. Welcome of the stranger in the Torah is counted as a measure of the Hebrew community s faithfulness to God. When a community received unknown travelers aliens, foreigners, people of different customs, different clothes, different languages, different gods none of that mattered; by religious law, they were to be welcomed. Opening your home was risky, no doubt. Professor of spirituality, Ana Maria Pineda, reminds us, Just as the human need for hospitality is a constant, so, it seems, is the human fear of the stranger. Nonetheless, such hospitality was central to Hebrew identity because it is central to the character of God. The same was true in early Christian communities. To a church in conflict about what it means to believe in Jesus and how to live that belief faithfully, our reading from First John equates loving one another as being born of God. And in Matthew s gospel, from the mouth of Jesus, we hear this word, Welcome spoken six times in two verses, followed by the simple example of offering a cold drink of water. Common stuff holy manners at the core of the disciplined practice of the early church. As theologian, Arthur Sutherland, has said, Hospitality is the practice by which the church stands or falls. 2 There is concern in our denomination, as in others, about whether the church is standing or falling. For decades we have been arguing about how to be faithful in a culture that is becoming more open to all 2 Martin Copenhaver, Practicing Our Faith: Entertain Angels, 3/14/99. 4
kinds of diversity first in welcome, and then in leadership: From the 1950 s discussion of the full acceptance of divorced people, then racial integration, the leadership of women in the church, and in recent years the full inclusion of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ. You may have heard this news: At the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), performing same-sex marriages in our church was approved in states where such marriages are legal. In my mind, it is a matter of being a fully welcoming church. But that perspective is not shared by all of my colleagues in Philadelphia presbytery. I attended a meeting of pastors last week to debrief and discuss the actions of the General Assembly. Those with more traditional views of marriage are pained by the actions of the Assembly. Pastors who disagree with this action are not being required to perform same-sex marriages, nor are sessions forced to approve them. Some of them however, will still consider leaving our denomination for a more conservative one. But by this action, the door has been opened to all of us to become a more fully inclusive church, where sexual orientation is already no longer a barrier to positions of leadership, and now marriage is a commitment for any who would choose to enter in. Admittedly pained by the division and conflict, still I believe this decision bears witness to Jesus command to be a welcoming community of faith. When we are sent to share the good news of God with others, Jesus says Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me. And by his life and ministry we know he was radically welcoming: he ate his meals with the despised tax collectors who made their money off their own people by collecting taxes for the Roman military occupation; Jesus took little children, who did not belong in fine company, into his arms saying, Forbid them not; he touched the outcast leper; he lifted up the least, and sought and found the lost; he communed with the alien Samaritan. In his day, Jesus broke though every conventional barrier that determined who was in and who was out. Jesus whole life is a 5
demonstration that within the heart of God there is a holy invitation, extended to all of us, which says, Come and be well. Henri Nowen put it this way: Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space; the paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free, free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages. 3 What enables us at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church to create that kind of space? We practice saying, Welcome! Come and be well. There is space for anyone who would enter here to be who you are; to have your doubts; to grow in faith, to meet Jesus Christ through one another. In her book, Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris tells the story of a Roman Catholic nun who, although she had Alzheimer s, still asked to be rolled in her wheelchair, to the door of her nursing home, so she could greet every guest. Said another nun of her sister in ministry, She is no longer certain what she is welcoming people to but hospitality is so deeply ingrained in her that it has become her whole life. 4 This is our life together. Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me, Jesus says to us, And whoever welcomes me, welcomes the One who sent me. Amen. 3 Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. 4 Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, p. 265. 6