It’s an Adventure

Summary

June 13, 2021
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
“It’s an Adventure”
Scripture Reference: Matthew 10:40-42

‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.’ 

Things got a little awkward near the end of the sermon of the Korean seminarian. He was a classmate giving his required practice sermon to be critiqued by his peers and the professor.   His delivery was fine; his exegesis, interpretation showed care and work; but his conclusion was tough. He was appealing to us, his peers, to start a life of faith in Jesus. Start now, as in just now— begin to believe.

The dust settled from his sermon; the questions started. Are you preaching to us, to a church, to a community group? The question was valid because his sermon suggested that his audience did not yet know Jesus; they had only a vague and cloudy understanding of Jesus; their Jesus was a cultural idol not the real Jesus, the living Resurrected One who is the Lord and Savior.

“I was preaching to all,” he said with a quake in his voice.

The answer was vague enough to make us wonder— sometimes the challenge of cross-cultural, language translation begs clarification. So, we started to ask more questions. Is this what you meant to say to us? With a little bit of pressing, he said, “I have come to America because Christians here are not really Christians; you all need to be saved.”

There was more awkward silence when the professor suggested to the student that such a view, while obviously held in earnest, was just a bit judgmental. Who was he to determine the validity or falsity of fellow Christians? All I remember at this point was that he doubled down. He questioned the faith of the professor. This was a good time to exit was the common consensus of the students.

Growing up in a tradition and a church that quite often saw other denominations and other traditions as false or phony Christians, the student’s belief was not a shocker to me. That he owned up to it in a preaching class with his peers in seminary, that did surprise me.

I don’t get this vibe very often, the “you are not a real Christian unless” tone, except at funerals. Not always, but maybe once a year, I will get this from a son or a nephew or a cousin. I didn’t call the mourners to accept Jesus as their Lord and savior before the casket, asking them “are you ready to meet Jesus?” and this lack of an invitation to salvation prompts them to lecture and challenge my obvious apostacy.

You might have a family member who considers your Presbyterianism as a false form of Christian faith. I do; it’s ugly and uncomfortable, but this is a problem as old as dirt. We are not ready to welcome others when other is different or not enough for us and we can be especially picky when it comes to matters of religion.

Jesus says, whoever welcome you, welcomes me. This is the first of five final instructions he will give to the disciples before they venture out to preach and teach and heal. The first one seems easy enough, if you are welcomed, then the person has welcomed me. Then there is the question of welcoming Jesus directly, and then welcoming the prophet and the righteous. The last one is to give water to a little one. None of these five final instructions for the church seem all that tough, but here is where things really fall apart.

These five teachings is where we bring condemnation and judgement, folks get killed in the name of the God of love. Here is where people cry and say things like, “this is a church; how can we be so harsh?” Again, looking at these five you might think, “here?” “A glass of water?”

Let’s start with the easiest one, welcoming the prophet. Now that one should not strike anyone as too far-fetched as a challenge and a controversy. Prophets are put to death; they are never welcomed in their own town; they live on the outskirts because people just don’t like them.

We don’t like them because they push our buttons, challenge our iniquities, call us out on what we have turned a blind eye.

When I think of prophets, living prophets in our country, I think of Angela Davis. If you wanted to light up every bulb of controversy with a lived legacy of activism and advocacy, this is the person. When I started in ministry (1994) there were still people in the church, 23 years after the PCUSA had a huge controversy over a donation to her legal defenses by a General Assembly taskforce on Race, when I started her name even decades later, even after her acquittal, even after black clergy donated money to the denomination so there would be no question of “denomination funds used to support a communist,” even then, her name was unspeakable. Now, fifty years after her trail, fifty years after the controversy over the donation, maybe now we can mention her name.

And what did she say that was controversial? She said, the justice system treated people of color in an unjust way, there was a growing sense, a rising tide of mass incarceration, and that often times law enforcement was targeting and persecuting black citizens. Today that doesn’t sound all too radical. But in 1971 Angela Davis was fired from UCLA as a professor for making such claims.

Today, her insight about the potential for mass incarceration is obviously prophetic. In 1971, let us say, her message was not welcomed. We don’t welcome prophets.

The righteous person, welcoming the righteous person, is less easy to see at first, but with a few examples from Jesus’ life, moments where he welcomed the righteous the challenge is clear. When Jesus says to the centurion, your faith is the greatest in Israel, he was welcoming a good person who was hated; the synagogue leader he follows and revives her daughter, this could have easily been seen as a controversy given that the leaders of the synagogues were plotting his death; but the ones that comes to mind as the clearest example is Zacchaeus and Matthew as tax collectors. Welcoming the good person, the righteous person, if we are a peer, a friend, not hard. But the righteous person who represents power or prestige, that can be really tough.

Welcoming Jesus, again, doesn’t seem like a stretch, but Jesus will tell his disciples a few days before his death that when you care for the sick, feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, clothe the naked you have done so unto me. Welcoming Jesus then is nice if its “Hippy Jesus” in the paintings where he is surrounded by children and has a big smile; welcoming Jesus who is housed on D Block and is doing time, not so nice.

The challenge started to come clear when I thought of the early church and all its controversies. The letters of Paul are a kind of minefield of exclusion and bitter division, of churches that are not welcoming. Letter after letter is about one part of the church not liking another part of the church. Battles lines were always being drawn.

The Gospel of John and his letters should be read as how the church can be unwelcoming; the gospel and the letters of John are two farewell speeches when Christians were no longer welcomed. The letters of John are when the Christians are being expelled from the synagogue; the Gospel of John is about Christians being expelled from the church because they were no longer welcome. So the idea of someone welcoming the disciple sounds good until you consider how much we exclude and drive away those you would think we should be quick to accept.

The idea of the least amount of hospitality, the drink of water, this is a lovely image, but we have to keep in mind how often people of faith have been faithless with each other. Welcoming is dicey.

For over fifty years the Presbyterian Church tried to find a common voice about what it means to welcome someone who is gay. Fifty years is a long time to argue. In the end, the result was to say, every congregation should make up their own mind; we can’t figure this out, can’t come to a resolution.

And the controversy over welcoming was always a matter of calling for embrace or settling for degrees of tolerance. Folks who are gay can attend, but they can’t be members; then folks who are gay can be members, but not elders or deacons or clergy; and then folks who are gay can take communion and be baptized and buried, but they can’t be married in the church. It was always a degree of tolerance without a true embrace.

All the while there are people saying, it must be embrace or nothing. We have to be welcoming and affirming not haltering and segregating. It is not enough to say, you live how you live, it must also be I love you and I am proud you are a part of my life. It was always a battle between being tolerant or embracing without qualification or segregation.

Angela Davis said this in an interview last year, “It usually takes a long time for radical change.” Part of this week I spent reading statements from the denomination 50 years ago. The statements of the late ‘60s early ‘70s seem tame, almost quaint, yet at the same time these things were to be whispered, kept quiet. If you spoke out loud the response was incendiary; the end was nigh, the church forsaken.

The teaching of Jesus today is a word of caution, a caution we often fail to heed until we stumble and fall. How hard can it be to welcome a disciple with a cup of water? How hard can it be to welcome a righteous person? Prophets? Yah, that can be tough. But what Jesus is saying to us is that welcoming, welcoming and affirming, welcoming as embrace without the restrictions or tolerance— well that is tough. Welcoming the ex-con, the mentally ill, the sick, the hungry? Oh, it turns out we stumble here. Not all the time, but often enough.

This teaching is the last word Jesus gives to the disciples before they head out into the villages of Galilee. He has given them a lot of warnings and instructions, but this last one is where things become wild, the road gets bumpy, filled with mud; this is where our path as disciples becomes an adventure.

He is warning them about themselves for they will need to go from village to village, but they will also need to enter their heart.

When you venture into heart, it may not be an easy path. You may become the one who persecutes, the one who judges, the one who hates once you venture into your heart and discover disdain. Take care, he begs, when you no longer want to welcome. You may become the one who hates, who rejects even though you were given a message of love and embrace.

Life becomes very certain, obvious, when those who are true and those who are false become quite clear. The ones who need to be saved and the ones who do not: each can be clear to us. You and I can become very, very sure.

My classmate from Korea who was certain, so certain he traveled a very long way to say, “you are all wrong and your error and falsity is a sin worthy of hell.” That was the hard part of his sermon. The part I remember.

But when he preached, I kept hearing the certainty of others, the voices of my childhood and I said, “let him be; let him stumble and fall.” In the fall he may see: life is not certainty. If you venture into your heart, this is a wild adventure. To welcome and affirm with acceptance, love and patience, you have venture into your heart to find this place.

What if you and I, what if we too are being called to walk such a path of welcoming and affirming? What if to do so is to be patient not only with others, but with ourselves? To venture into the heart and cast out fears and disdain and certainty, so we can embrace even the prophet. Well, that is quite an adventure. Amen.