13th Sunday after Pentecost

"Therefore...." It's one of the biggest words in the Bible. Therefore, since that, then this. In the Bible, "therefore" is the hinge on which Jesus' life hangs, and the hinge on which ours hang as well.

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses -- surrounded by our ancestors like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, like Moses and Gideon and David and all those who lived faithful and godly lives in the past -- let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. And therefore, since, in Jesus, we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and keep on loving each other as brothers. Let us never forget to welcome the stranger among us and to keep in mind those who are in prison as if we were their fellow prisoners. And let us remember those who are mistreated as if we ourselves were suffering."

There is no word in Scripture more persistent than "therefore." Therefore, welcome the stranger and the outcast, and care for the poor, those on the margins of society, those in prison, and those who suffer.

"When you reap the harvest of your land," God reminds us early on in the Torah, "do not reap to the very edges of your fields. And don't gather the last gleanings; leave them for the poor and the alien," says the Lord.

"Make hospitality your special care," St. Paul reminds us later, "not only welcoming the stranger and the alien, but caring for him as well, because such welcome and care is what gospel life is all about."

And here it is again today, both in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is at the home of a prominent pharisee, and he says to this important man, his host, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner party, don't invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors. If you do, they may invite you back, and in such a way will you be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and you will be blessed. For although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just."

But perhaps my favorite example of hospitality, of gospel welcoming and of gospel care, of the good news acted out, comes from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has just called his first disciples. He has healed some people, and he has gone off to pray for a while and has told his disciples that the reason he is here is to share the good news of God. And a man with leprosy comes to Jesus, and on his knees the man begs Jesus, "Master, if you are willing, you can make me clean." And Jesus was "filled with compassion," says Mark. And he reaches out his hand and touches the man and says, "I am willing; be clean." And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was cured.

What usually gets our attention in this event is the healing, Jesus using divine power to heal. But we spend too little time on the how of it. How did Jesus do it? And the answer is: by extending hospitality. By making hospitality his special care. By embracing the stranger and outcast as a brother. By remembering the mistreated as if he himself were the one who was suffering. "Hospitality" is, after all, related "hospice" and "hospital," places where one finds respite, relief, healing.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, and not only listen to what he says, but pay attention to what he does.

We've got to remember something about the leper in those days. A leper had no rights whatsoever. Because his disease was so loathsome, he was literally cast out from society, cast out from the possibility of contact with any other persons. He had no right to be on the road at all when others were there, no right even to speak to Jesus. Wherever he went, he was supposed to shout, "Get out of the way! I'm unclean!"

Translated, that meant, "If you get near me or touch me, you will become like me, unclean, an outcast, unfit for human fellowship, and dying."

This practice, by the way, was not limited to the world of Jews. The ostracism of lepers continued in the Christian Church, where lepers were still unwelcome well into the middle ages. In medieval churches there were tiny slits in the walls called "lepers' windows," through which the outcast could stand outside and observe the prayers inside.

But the leper we find in Mark falls on his knees right in front of Jesus. It was a bold, presumptuous act. And he begs Jesus, "Sir, if you are willing, you can change my life. You can make me fit for society, fit for human companionship again, fit for love."

And Jesus, "filled with compassion" -- that is, Jesus, suffering with the man; Jesus, "filled with warm indignation," the new English Bible says -- Jesus made hospitality his special care. Jesus, filling himself with the man's own suffering, indignant at a world that would dismiss or ignore a child of God in such a way, Jesus breaks all the rules and throws caution to the wind. And in the Name and Person of God, he reaches out and touches the untouchable, and so embraces him, the unclean, the outcast, the dying, and draws him into fellowship with himself, into hospitality, into a "hospital," a place of respite and healing.

And that's the how of it. That's the divine how of Jesus' healing. That's what made the man whole. It was the hospitality of Jesus that did it. It was when Jesus brought the man, who had by the customs of men no right to his fellowship, into the circle of fellowship with him that the man was healed, made whole, made a person.

"But leprosy was contagious," you say. "Leprosy disfigured a person terribly, and there was no known treatment or cure for it." Right. In other words, one took a great personal risk if he made contact with a leper. And that's the point of this event in Jesus' life, and the point of dozens of others as well. Hospitality always runs a risk, because it's an act of love.

We need to remember that hospitality in the Bible is different from what we sometimes mean by hospitality. Hospitality in the Bible is different from entertaining, as we sometimes understand entertaining. Sometimes for us, as it was for the pharisees who were looking to sit at the places of honor, sometimes entertaining is little more than an opportunity to show off the big house and the fine silver and the upscale neighborhood, or to cultivate a business relationship. But hospitality in the Bible -- gospel hospitality, hospitality as Paul and the author of Hebrews speak about it, hospitality as Jesus lived it -- is making one to feel at home among you. And that is always risky, because it's an act of love.

Love is always risky. And taking that risk is what God does for us.

Who is the leper? Who are the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind invited to dinner in the Bible? They are you and me. That's what Luke and Mark and Paul and the author of Hebrews are all getting at. When Luke and Paul and Jesus talk about inviting folks to a banquet, they're not talking about social etiquette or table manners. They're talking about the way it is with God and man, about the fact that we are the poor, the blind, the lame, all invited to this Table here this morning.

They are saying that God loves us. The are saying that Jesus loves us so much, broken and sinful and unclean as we are, and his compassion for us is so great, that at great risk to himself he reaches out to embrace us with his own arms to bring us back into fellowship with him, so that we too might be whole.

Therefore.... Therefore, ought we not act in this same healing manner toward one another? What else could the Incarnation possibly be about?

Like many Episcopal Church parishes in old blue-collar neighborhoods, St. Andrew's, a big-city parish in a big city I used to know, is one of those places that may seem to some to be collapsing along with the rest of Western civilization. Since 1929, it has never been solvent. The neighborhood has now largely changed around it. Now it is left to the blacks and the Latinos, while many of its former upscale members have fled to pursue the "American Dream" in other places.

But we went anyway, and we found ourselves in a congregation of maybe sixty people: wild-looking black teenagers who, we discovered at coffee hour, started coming to St. Andrew's as little children when they followed behind the parade through the neighborhood at the parish's Corpus Christ festival; old white couples, faithful through forty or fifty years of urban change; homosexuals; the lonely; the odd -- a full catch of humble humanity. Humblest of all, there were a dozen or so severely retarded adults from the group home across the street.

The Peace -- you should be warned in case you decide to go some day -- is passed with a vengeance at St. Andrew's. Everyone hugs everyone. It went on for an incredible five or ten minutes, and we found ourselves in the midst of it. We found ourselves in the arms of Herman, a retarded man of maybe 40 with the tiny head of a child. We also found out later that Herman, who wanted us to zip up his fly for him, always bursts into tears when he receives communion. They said that Herman has spoken an intelligible word only once: "happy," at the moment of his baptism. Happy there at St. Andrew's; happy in the Body of Christ's Church.

And when we left St. Andrew's, we realized that at the eucharistic banquet of Christ, the Peace of the Lord is not an intrusive hello among friends and brothers and sisters, relatives and rich neighbors, but a radical encounter with the depths of the reality of man and of God, a risk, a humble embrace with Herman, the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind.

A radical encounter with the depths of the reality of man and of God. That's who we see at every communion rail: Calloused hands and calloused hearts; soft hands and soft heads and soft hearts; broken legs and broken hearts; joyful spirits and broken spirits. We find some who bounce up for God's bread and wine with the legs and hearts of children, and some who wish they could, but who now can hardly make it into the building and into a pew. We find some with the joy of a new marriage or a new child, and some with souls heavy with secrets and sin, all coming just as we are to a common feast -- one bread and one cup, no seat higher or lower than another -- all coming with the hope that here at God's Table we will find God's blessing.

It has been a long time since we've heard Bill's story, and some of you have never heard it. So it's time to tell it again, because Bill's story is our story, and God's.

It was a church very much like Our Saviour, a proper church, largely white, middle-and upper-middle class, and conservative. A parish that knew that God loves them, and therefore knew they were called to risk God's love with the stranger among them, with the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind. It was Becky Pippert's church, and her story.

The church was down the street from Reed College. In time, the church concluded that God was calling them to a ministry to the students at the college. When they heard that the college meal plan did not include a Sunday evening meal, the church began to serve a free Sunday evening meal for students. The students didn't even have to come to worship to get the free meal. That's important to college students sometimes. And maybe important to some in the church as well.

One of the students was Bill. In the three years she had known him, Becky Pippert says, she never knew Bill to wear but one pair of jeans, and always the same T-shirt. Both apparently stood stiff in the corner at night where Bill had left them, she imagines, and waited for him to step into them in the morning.

Bill's hair was marvelous. It stood straight out from his head, orange on one side, blue on the other, as if Bill had stuck his finger in a socket and received a charge of electricity that never left him. And, Becky insists, in three years she had never seen Bill wear shoes. Rain, sleet, or snow, especially rain in Portland, Bill went without shoes. Even so, says Becky, at Reed College in those days you wouldn't particularly notice Bill. You'd have had to work to pick him out in a crowd there.

In his third year, Bill came to know Jesus. And when Sunday came, the Sunday after he came to know Jesus, Bill decided to go to church, not to the free evening meal, but to the Sunday morning worship. Becky imagins that it happened something like this: that Bill woke up and said to himself, "I'm a Christian now. It's Sunday, and I think Christians go to church on Sundays. Far out! I think I'll go."

He arrived late, and the church was crowded. So Bill began walking up the aisle, looking for a seat. But there weren't any seats left. And while Bill was walking up the aisle looking for a seat that wasn't there, everyone else was looking at Bill. Some began to whisper, "Who is it? What is it?"

And some began to think, though many said they were ashamed of it later, "I knew it! I knew that if we began to open the parish hall doors to those students on Sunday evenings, it wouldn't be long before people like this would be here on Sunday morning."

Well, Bill continued to make his way up the aisle. And the atmosphere became more and more tense until, when Bill got to the front, finding no seat in the pews, he acted as no one had ever been known to act in that church. He just sat down on the floor, right in front of the altar. Many were visibly shocked and thought, "This is the house of God, not a place for someone just to come in and sit down on the floor during the worship service!"

All this took place just before the sermon, and the pastor was a little unsure what to do himself. But just as he was about to begin his sermon, he saw one of the ushers, one of the long-time pillars of the parish, making his way up the aisle behind Bill. He walked unsteadily, with a cane, in his three-piece suit, with his pocket watch in his vest. He was one of the men who had built the church and made it what it was, a rather formal man who always addressed you with a stiff, "How do you do?", a man who obviously lived at least a galaxy's distance from Bill.

And as the usher was making his way, slowly and with arthritic difficulty, up the aisle behind Bill, the tension grew even greater. And people were thinking, "You can't blame him. You can't blame him for what he's about to do. He has been a faithful member of this parish for years, and he can't possibly be expected to understand a young man like this. You can't blame him for what he's about to do."

It took an eternity for the usher to reach the altar, and by the time he did the tension was so thick you could hear a tissue drop. And then he dropped his cane and, with great difficulty, lowered his arthritic knees to the floor, and there for the next hour worshiped the Lord God on the floor with Bill.

And the pastor began his sermon by saying, "You will never remember what I am about to say. But what you have just seen, you will never forget."

Therefore.... Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses....

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.