The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
September 2, 2007
Proper 17 – C
Ecclesiasticus 10:7-18
Hebrews 13:1-8
Luke 14:1, 7-14
“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
therefore the hinge on which ours hang as well.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses
– surrounded by ancestors of
faith like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, like Moses and Gideon and David
– therefore, 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 continue to love 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,
the lonely, those in prison, and those who suffer.
Therefore, “make hospitality your special care,”
And here it is again today –
hospitality –
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, my favorite example of gospel love being actually lived 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 has come among them 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 reached out his hand and touched the man and said, “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 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,” in
English, is, after all, related to “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.
If we are to appreciate the full power of Jesus’ hospitality in this episode in
Mark, we’ve got to remember something about the leper in those days.
A leper had no rights whatsoever.
Because his disease was so loathsome, the leper 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, an
outcast, unclean, 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 the 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 righteous
society 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 shudder.
“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 all the others as well.
Hospitality always runs a risk, because it’s an act of love, and to love
is always to run a risk.
But let’s ratchet up the ante a little more, because hospitality in the Bible is
different from what we sometimes mean by hospitality in English.
Hospitality in the Bible is different from entertaining, as we often use
the word “entertaining.” Sometimes
for us, as it was for the pharisees who were looking to sit at the places of
honor, sometimes for us 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 Jesus lived it, hospitality as Paul
and the author of Hebrews speak about it
– is, literally, “The
love of foreigners (philoxenias) do
not neglect.” (Hebrews 13:2) It is
making the stranger at home with you, which is of the essence of love.
And that is always risky, because 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 fellowship of the saints, about the way it is
with God and man, about the fact that it is the poor, the lonely, the blind, the
lame, who are all invited to this Table here this morning, and they are us.
Luke and Paul and Jesus are saying that God loves us and wants us to join him
for dinner. They are saying that
God 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?
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. We find some who
bring 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. And all coming to the
coffee hour with the same hope.
But there is an ironic twist to this that we find in one of Jesus’ parables that
Robert Capon calls a parable of judgment.
Jesus tells how it will be at that heavenly banquet when the Son of Man
comes into his kingdom. The King
will sit on his throne, Jesus says, and he will say to those on his right,
”Come, you who are blessed by my Father, enter the kingdom and take you place at
the banquet, for I was a stranger (xenos)
, and you loved me; you invited me in.”
But he will say to those on his left, ”Depart from me, you who are
cursed, for I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me.”
And those on his his left will say, “Lord, we don’t remember not
welcoming you when we didn’t welcome that stranger.
Why, if we had known it was you....”
It has been a long time since we’ve heard Bill’s story, and some of you have
never heard it, so I’m going to tell it again, because Bill’s story is our
story, and God’s.
Bill’s story took place in a very proper church, a large Presbyterian Church,
and there is no church more proper than a Presbyterian church unless it’s an
Episcopal Church –
largely white, middle-and upper-middle class, and conservative.
It was a church that knew that God loves them and
– therefore
– a church that knew they
were called to risk love by welcoming the stranger among them, by
looking for opportunities to embrace
the poor, the lonely, the maimed, the lame and the blind.
It was Becky Pippert’s church.
She’s the one from whom I heard this story.
The church was down the street from
But 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, she imagined, stood stiff in the corner at night where Bill had
left them, where they waited for him to step into them in the morning.
Bill’s hair was a sight. It stood
straight out from his head, orange on one side, blue on the other, as if Bill
had stuck his finger in an electric socket and received a shock that left his
hair permanently teased. And, Becky
insists, in three years she had never seen Bill wear shoes.
Rain, sleet, or snow, especially rain in
In his third year, after hearing Becky Pippert talk so much about Jesus, Bill
decided he wanted to become a Christian.
So Becky invited Bill to come to church some Sunday to meet Jesus.
And sure enough one Sunday Bill decided to go to church, not to the free
evening meal for students on Sunday night, but to the very proper Sunday morning
worship. Becky imagines that it
happened something like this: that
Bill woke up and said to himself, “I’m a Christian now.
It’s Sunday, and I hear that Christians go to church on Sundays, where
they all love each other and embrace each other as brothers and sisters.
Far out! I think I’ll go.”
Bill
arrived late, and the church was crowded.
He got there just as the pastor was about to begin his sermon, and Bill
began walking up the aisle, looking for place to sit.
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, “I knew it!
I knew that if we opened 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 pulpit.
Many were visibly shocked and thought, “This is the house of God, not a
place for someone just to come in and sit on the floor during the worship
service!”
The pastor, who had just stepped into the pulpit, was a little unsure what to do
himself. And just as he was about
to begin his sermon, he and everyone else 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. A retired
banker, he was one of the men who had built that 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 in a world at least a galaxy’s distance from Bill’s
world.
And as the old man made his way up the aisle behind Bill, slowly and with
arthritic difficulty, the tension grew even greater.
And Becky confesses that she, too, just kept her seat and thought, “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 is of a different
generation and can’t possibly be expected to understand a young man like Bill.
You can’t blame him for what he’s about to do.”
It took an eternity for the usher to reach the pulpit and, by the time he did,
the tension was so thick you could hear a handkerchief drop.
And then the old man 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 this morning. But what
you have just seen, you will never forget.”
For here was a genuine rarity in church.
Here was a man who actually recognized Jesus when he showed up as
promised. Here was a man who not
only noticed Bill, but who looked for an opportunity to be hospitable, who went
out of his way, as St. Paul urges, to risk love by welcoming the stranger.
Perhaps he remembered Jesus’ warning about the heavenly banquet, for at every
service in the church, friends, there is a Bill who is Jesus in different dress,
hoping to be received.
Therefore....
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.