Tag: welcome

Stranger: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 8:26-40.

This may sound odd, but every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. 

Most of us tend to build our lives in pursuit of familiarity and predictability. We establish relationships and routines and structures that allow us to feel safe and known wherever we go.

But especially if we have been in a place for a long while, and we have become very comfortable and familiar with the people around us, every so often it’s good to feel like a stranger—to remember what a humbling experience it can be, how vulnerable it is, standing at the edge of a room and hoping that someone will be kind enough to take notice of us. 

I experienced this one afternoon last August shortly after I came to Ohio. Not at Saint Anne, mind you—my role here meant that I felt known and seen here from day one. But  a few weeks after I started, I decided to go down into Cincinnati to attend an open house event for a nonprofit organization that has no connection to the church. 

I was interested in learning more about their work and thought it would be good to go and check it out. I went by myself, and as soon as I showed up, a feeling hit me that I hadn’t felt in a very long time: that feeling I used to have on the first day of school after moving to a new town. The slightly awkward feeling when you walk into a place where everyone else seems to know each other and you are just sort of standing there looking for a way in, feeling like you have a big blinking sign around your neck that says “stranger.”

Now, maybe some of you are life-of the-party types who can easily walk into a room and make 5 friends immediately. If so, I am in awe of you, because while I love people, and I love learning about people and connecting with people, I am also, somewhere buried underneath all of these vestments, still carrying with me a bit of that quiet kid on the first day of school. I used to think this was a bad thing, a weakness on my part, but I don’t anymore. 

Because every so often, it’s good to feel like a stranger. It’s good because it reminds me to look for and have compassion for those people brave enough to show up in a new space, to try a new thing, to go it alone when they must. 

And my own moments of feeling this way have, I pray, helped me stay mindful of the people who stand at the edges of those rooms in which I am very comfortable and confident. This is, I think, a spiritual practice we should all work at: looking for the strangers in our midst, and welcoming them, and even, sometimes, daring to go out and be a stranger ourselves. 

Especially because in so many of our Scriptural stories, we discover that God loves a stranger, and that often God shows up as a stranger, too. 

Consider this morning’s reading from Acts. Consider this man who is a eunuch—one who lives his entire life in an ambiguous posture. On one hand, he is a man who cannot have children or engage in traditional male gender norms, and so he is deemed a non-threatening and useful servant for a royal household, which affords him some privilege and comfort. 

On the other hand, he is a person who stands at the periphery of every room he enters—a stranger in his own culture, and a stranger, too, in Jerusalem, where he has just traveled to worship at the Temple. The Israelites, you see, had long excluded eunuchs from their assembly, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

So I was thinking this week about this man who was a eunuch.

I imagined him arriving in Jerusalem in his royal chariot alone, and for all his finery, feeling like a kid on the first day of school: looking for a kind face somewhere in the crowd, wondering if this God who had called him to a new place would place a welcoming figure in his path. 

I imagined him standing in the firelight of a courtyard in the cool night, watching families eat and laugh and pray and gather–families he would never be part of, families who did not see him standing there waiting, hoping for an invitation to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

And then I thought of him traveling back to Ethiopia on the wilderness road, reading the scroll of Isaiah, maybe with tears in his eyes, seeing his own life staring back at him on the page: “like a lamb silent before its shearer, he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.”

And as he read, asking himself—How did Isaiah know? How did this prophet know exactly how I have felt every day of my life, quiet and humiliated and unsure? And what is on the other side of this, this feeling perpetually like a stranger in my own life, standing at the edge of my own existence? 

But God loves a stranger. So wouldn’t you know, there is Philip by the side of the road. 

God suddenly shows up, in the form of another stranger, with good news of the Son of God who was, himself, a stranger to his own people; and who ventured into the gates of death as a solitary stranger bearing his cross, pierced with nails; and who emerged back from death as a stranger pierced with light, offering a new type of belonging for anyone and everyone who has ever felt alone in this world. 

So yes, it is good, once in a while, to be a stranger–to feel your heart tremble with the longing to be a part of something, to stand awkwardly, looking for kindness in the eyes of those whom you do not know. 

It is good to do this because, what we must realize is that God is doing this every day in our midst—God is showing up at the margins, in those who feel excluded and uncertain, in the guests brave enough to enter through the doors of our church for the first time or after a very long time. God is standing just outside the firelight in the cool night, watching us eat and laugh and pray and hoping that we will welcome him in every form he takes. That we will invite God to pull up a seat, to join in, to be known. 

God is in the eunuchs and in all the people of our own time and place who do not know where they fit in—the people who love differently, who express their gender identity differently, the ones who come from different backgrounds, the ones who have done things they regret, the ones who aren’t sure what they believe, the ones who don’t believe in themselves, and the ones who have lost everything and yet still long to be part of something. 

And if we do nothing else here, I hope we will look for them. I hope we will not just say hello to them when they come to worship, but that we will then ask them to pull up a seat at coffee hour, or take them to lunch. That we will go out into the community and look for them and find ways to remind them that they are not alone, that we are all in this together. 

And, once in a while, I hope that we will become them, too—that we will venture into those new places where we are the stranger, to let our hearts be pierced by vulnerability, knowing that when we do so, we might be the face of God for the ones kind enough to notice us. 

…

After his impromptu baptism, all we know about the man who was a eunuch is that he went on his way rejoicing. Rejoicing because he knew, now, that God saw and loved him. Rejoicing because, perhaps for the first time in his whole life, he was seen as something more than a stranger. 

Rejoicing because now he knew that the very things that had made him feel different and excluded and less-than were now, precisely, the things that God would use in him to help others. Rejoicing because now it was his turn to go and find those at the periphery, to build his own fires in the cool night, and to say, I know what it feels like to be alone. Come closer. You are welcome here. You belong here. 

For the great mystery of God’s love is this: sometimes it is good to feel like a stranger, if only to look into each other’s eyes and realize that, in truth, none of us actually are.

Hospitality: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 2, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 22:1-14 and Matthew 10-40-42.

About a year and a half ago, a woman came to Trinity seeking some assistance. As most of you know, we are regularly visited by folks in our community who, for one reason or another, have come upon hard times and who need a little help. When they show up we try, as best we can, to assist them with the essentials—food, laundry, a bit of money to help with an emergency expense. Many of you contribute to these initiatives. 

This woman was in a similar situation; she’d started a job at a fast food restaurant and wouldn’t get paid for a week or two, and needed some funds to cover her bills. But it wasn’t her request for help that stood out to me, or even her story, which had more than its share of heartbreak and hardship. What stood out was a question that she asked me—a question that nobody else who has come to the doors has ever asked me, before or since. After giving her what I could, she looked past me as if gazing down the hallway into the building, and then she said, “the people who go to this church—what do they think of people like me?  Would I be welcome here?”

Would I be welcome here? She was asking, in other words, would people like me, people who embody an uncomfortable truth, people whose lives do not fit a neat and tidy narrative—would a person like that be welcome here? I’m not exaggerating when I say that it felt, in that moment, as if Christ himself was asking the question of me and of us: the people who go to this church—what do they think of me? 

Now, of course I told her what a warm and welcoming community we have here at Trinity, and that she could worship with us any time, and I meant that. But the question has stayed with me ever since, perhaps because of its raw vulnerability, or perhaps because, in asking it, she was really getting to the heart of what we are supposed to be about in this house of God: true, sometimes uncomfortable hospitality.

Because it’s all too easy to say that we should love God and love our neighbor until we realize that God and that neighbor might deeply challenge us, and that loving them is going to ask something precious of us—something we were not prepared to relinquish. Our resources sometimes, yes, but also our comfort, our complacency, and our preconceived notions about the world.

We in the Episcopal church take seriously the notion, stated in today’s Gospel, that whoever welcomes the stranger welcomes the Lord himself. And we strive, as best we can, to create space for all who hunger, for all who seek, to say, “yes, you are welcome here, whoever you are, whoever you have been, whoever you are becoming. You are welcome.” And that is a gift that this community offers willingly. 

But hospitality is a risky sort of gift, because it doesn’t always go according to plan. We might set out to welcome a guest with the best of intentions, with our house well in order, with the banquet arranged just so, only to discover that when those guests arrive, they demand more than we bargained for—not more of our material goods, but more of ourselves. A true, and deep, and holy hospitality is not just about opening our doors, but about opening our hearts, and our lives, to the possibility of truly seeing and thus being changed by the one who comes knocking.

When the woman at the doors asked me that question, “would I be welcome here” I have to be honest that a part of myself wondered—would she? Would she be fully, truly welcomed? Not just acknowledged with a polite smile, but embraced, in all of her complexity and pain? Are any of us? It’s a question, at least for me, without a neat and tidy answer, because, in truth, I think we can all be a bit afraid of the unfamiliar. We can all shy away from people whose lives seem so very unlike our own, especially those whose naked grief and brokenness demands an accounting of our own hidden wounds. 

And yet, if I am to be hospitable, truly hospitable, then I know that I must go beyond politeness and venture into the far scarier and more uncertain landscape of true communion, where our wounds and our dreams and our stories brush up against one another, all so different on the surface, yet all so similar. It is not for the faint of heart, this type of hospitality, but it is the also the very thing for which our hearts were made.

And though you might not immediately see it, this invitation into risky hospitality is the unspoken theme of today’s dark and luminous reading from Genesis, one of the strangest and most compelling passages in all of scripture, in which Abraham must prepare an altar for his son, Isaac, to be offered, like a lamb, as a sacrifice to the inscrutable mystery of God. 

It is a horrifying story. It is an inconceivable demand. And that’s good; the fact that we recoil from the story reveals our own innate tendency toward compassion. 

But if we can take a step back from the emotional intensity of the narrative and consider how it fits into the broader story of Abraham’s experience of God, I think it also says something very important about this question of true, costly hospitality; of welcoming the stranger—the challenging stranger—into our midst.

Let me explain. Abraham’s story is based, in many ways, on the idea of being hospitable. You will remember (we just heard it in church a couple weeks ago) that Abraham and Sarah, who were childless in their old age, were granted as a divine blessing their son, Isaac, after offering hospitality to God, who appeared to them as three travelers seeking respite. They prepared a meal for the Lord and then they were promised a son. And if this were the whole story, if they lived happily ever after, it would be quite neat and tidy—they acted hospitably, virtuously, and they reaped the rewards of doing so. 

But nothing in life is that simple, and nothing in Scripture is either. So we have this unsettling chapter today—one that hits hard for anyone who has lost someone or something very dear to them—with God coming to Abraham again and asking for something far more costly than a meal and a bit of shelter. Here, God demands Abraham’s willingness to offer up his very identity, his love, his hope. Here, on this cold and lonely mountaintop, far from his home, being hospitable to God, preparing a table for him is, for Abraham, the opposite of neat and tidy. It is earth shattering. It is heart-rending. And as he builds the altar of wood, as the wind whistles over the rocks, one can almost hear a question carried down from heaven—Abraham, what do you think of me now? Am I still welcome here? Will you hold fast to the promise, even now, even when it will seemingly cost you everything?

Now, of course, God does not actually demand Isaac’s life in the end; he desires mercy, not sacrifice, even if he has a terrifying way of showing it here. But in this story, which is less of a handbook for father-son relationships and really more like a parable, we are reminded in shocking terms that opening our homes and our hearts to God in our midst—to offer hospitality in that deep and true way, is not always a cozy get together. Sometimes it is a door thrown open to the truth, to the storm, bearing with it liberating wind and life-giving water and dreadful lightning all at once. 

Sometimes being hospitable is finding the courage to stand in the threshold and to see there, in the whirlwind, the totality of life—the blessing and the curse, the beauty and the burden and the risk and the redemptive promise, and to somehow say, “yes.” 

Yes, I open myself to whoever and whatever comes. Yes, I will risk caring for another, even though I know I must lose them someday. I will embrace what I do not understand. I will love past the point of calculation, I will be welcoming past the point of self-serving virtue, I will greet you, whoever you are, woman knocking at the door, God knocking at the door, and I will hear your story and I’ll tell you mine and if you ask me what the people in this church think; if you would be welcome here, I will say, 

I hope so, because if you are not, then none of us is. For the love of God is costly, so very costly, but it is also fierce and free. It is all-encompassing, and there are no outsiders inside this place. 

So come. Come to this table and behold the gift given abundantly—yes, a Son sacrificed upon a lonely altar, in the end, by not given by us to a angry God but given by God to a hungry humanity—given to you. Given for you. The once and eternal hospitality of God, terrifying, magnificent, transformative, and complete. 

Yes, we are all welcome here. 

And it will save us. And it will change us.

So brace yourself.