Today’s Gospel reading was short and sweet. Even giving a cup of water, in Jesus name, comes with reward, regardless of what the person you give it to does with the water. Today’s reading shows the truly miraculous power of generosity and relationship building. It shows how giving to others grows the kingdom of God, whether you offer time, talent, or treasure. Whether you give prophecy, peace, or presence. Yet this passage comes at the tail end of Jesus' challenging instructions to the 12 apostles, right after the reading we had last Sunday. Where Jesus says that he has come to bring conflict between sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Fights within the household, like the Real Housewives of Galilee. So what is happening here? Well, Jesus has told us how the gospel breaks apart families by insisting on more appropriate boundaries in relationships and on our growth in holiness. Now Jesus shows the other side of the coin and starts to reveal the new kind of family he is creating, called the church. Old relationships can become broken and strained by our growing faith. But new relationships are forged and grow through the generosity the gospel imparts to our hearts.
Jesus tells us about a family system made through God’s generosity and welcome. The church was made by being a community of radical hospitality. One that includes all our gifts. We are to welcome those we meet as they are; as prophets, as righteous people, as the little ones of God. And we in turn have to allow ourselves to be welcomed in our entirety. This welcome challenges us to grow, to live with more love as we find the presence of Christ in all. The church is the community built out of Jesus' radical hospitality, hospitality that gives without expecting to receive. Hospitality that’s selfless, with generosity that imposes risks upon those who offer it. But that is held safe by the support of our community and the boundaries Christ has modeled for us.
I was raised to believe in the value of Hospitality. As a child, I remember Sunday dinners were always a time when my parents would invite people from church back for lunch with us. I spent many Sunday afternoons getting to know the new people at our church as we ate together. My love of hospitality grew greatly through my first experiences living away from my parents when I worked for the Iona Community. The retreat centers they run on Iona value hospitality that intentionally includes their guests, volunteers, and longer-term staff.
They have a practice on Sundays after service of giving everyone a homemade oat cake as they leave the service and inviting them to share it with a stranger at coffee hour. We don’t have oat cakes, but we do have coffee hour, and I would encourage you to stay and get to know one another. Try serving coffee to the person behind you in the line and see what happens. The process of giving to one another can be rewarding for the giver and welcoming for the guest. When we start to get to know each other, it can be quite surface-level.
The radical hospitality that Jesus is calling us to goes deeper. It is riskier, more challenging to who we are; it will require that we get to know and be known by strangers. When I was a volunteer on Iona, we used to joke about getting T-shirts printed with the answers to the questions that everyone asked us. Conversation starters that became painful and closed down connection. Mine could have said: “I’m here for six weeks, working in housekeeping. I normally live in Edinburgh, where I’m a student. Now can we talk about something more interesting?” A hospitable welcome is good, but it’s not normally in the first conversation that deep connections are made; it can take a long time and a lot of talking. To truly discover something of a person, who they are able to be and what they have to give to God, that takes risky conversation, which normally takes time. Jesus' radical hospitality involves going beyond the surface questions into vulnerability. Vulnerability that we ourselves may be seen and changed through our relationship with someone else.
One welcome I was challenged to be vulnerable with as a volunteer of the Iona community was getting to know the LGBTQ community within the church. It is fair to say those Christians I knew as a teenager who were gay remained squirrely in the closet, and would not have identified with more flamboyant expressions of Pride that were all that was allowed in my youth. Yes, some gay people don’t like rainbows, and they want to be seen wholly as they are. Just like heterosexual people who enjoy theater, drag queens, and Julie Andrews, and they want to be seen fully for who they are. When we narrow the expression of personhood into boxes, we inadvertently exclude parts of people. Jesus' practice of radical hospitality opened boxes, enabling people to be welcomed truly as themselves.
When I was first on Iona, same-sex marriage was not legal in the USA or the UK, and was not permitted by my childhood church, the Church of England. Marriage was a box that excluded homosexuality and so excluded the faithful love of many gay couples. After practicing radical hospitality in Jesus' name, the Iona community found itself alongside those who had been excluded, alongside the gay community. This led them to conclude that homophobia was not just wrong, but a sin against the image of God found in our LGBTQ siblings. I remember talking to the then warden at the Abbey, who is Anglican clergy about this, and he shared his joy at being able to bless same-sex marriages in the name of Jesus through the Iona Community. To be able to accept people as wholly who they are and bless the love that is in them, is such an important expression of the radical hospitality that creates the family of God, creates the church.
The church's willingness to accept the LGBTQ community has enabled the full breadth of experience and expression within both communities showing our true colors, not just rainbow parades, but ordinary Christian couples and families that just happen to be gay. Radical hospitality doesn’t have to look like inviting the most extreme form of that which scares us into our lives; it looks like welcoming the fullness of our friends to be truly present to us. Radical hospitality calls for seeing and accepting the good in a person in God's name. When we start to do so, we discover that we are built a new kind of family, one built out of love, not blood, understanding not tribalism, generosity not genealogy.
This afternoon we will host the Capital Area Interfaith Pride Service. This is a welcome that stretches us. Some of the parts that are hardest about organizing such an event is trying to cross faith lines in order to celebrate shared values. At this point, the value of including the LGBTQ community in the church's expression of faith is not new to me; after all, both my Bishops are gay men. But crossing denominational and faith lines, trying to pray together is harder. We are so attached to our approach to God. Yet we at Emmanuel have done this before. We have given welcome to new expressions of belief and love for God from each other. We are one church in two denominations; we already know how to worship our way across divides, and it's through hospitality. This afternoon service is an opportunity for us to extend our welcome, to offer radical hospitality to those who are different from us. Acknowledging them as children of God, seen and accepted fully in their wholeness, and in return we will receive the reward of Jesus’ acceptance of us as God’s own children, just as we are. Amen.