Sermon for Pentecost 9, proper 12C

July 29, 2007

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

 

                                                                                                                                                                             

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone instead?

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

 

The Lord’s Prayer contains the whole of Christian teaching in code – just as the whole of a living creature is encoded in its genes. Every kind of prayer is found there, too, from sheer adoration to contemplation to penitence to petition, and the whole thing is intercession, since the petitions are all for us and not for me. But this marvel of teaching is too vast for a sermon, so let me tell you this story:

Years ago, an old friend became ill in Mexico City. He was vomiting and has terrible diarrhœa. He was so sick that he collapsed on the street. A young boy found him and got his mother, who took my friend to their little house – poor but not miserable – on a hillside somewhere in the vast city, where they nursed him back to health. Needless to say, he was immensely grateful, and promised to stay in touch with them. Later that day, he found himself in one of those legendary, human-sardine-can squeezes of humanity on a MX City subway. He couldn’t move at all. He couldn’t even bring his hand down to check, but he knew that his wallet was gone. Someone had taken it. He didn’t care about the money ~ or even the passport, which could be replaced. But he could not replace the address of the family that had helped him. And he had been so disoriented, that he had no idea how to find the house again.

I tell this story because it occurred to me that for the past month, hospitality has been one underlying theme in the readings. It shows up again today in the desperate, breadless man, whose guest arrives, unexpected, in the middle of the night. Hospitality is SO important that he rouses his neighbor, pounding on his outer door until he gets up, waking the children, takes down the heavy beams barring his door, and gives his neighbor what he wants. This little story is paired with the importunity of Abraham’s bargaining with God over Sodom. (really on behalf of his kinsman, Lot, who was in danger of being incinerated, too, because he lived in Sodom).  The Lord’s story seems to be intended as a lesson in the virtue of perseverance – especially in prayer. But, isn’t it interesting that the metaphor is about hospitality?

Hospitality must have been so important that everyone would have understood: it was way more shameful to offer nothing to a guest ~ however unexpected ~ than to bother ones neighbors in a most disruptive way. Even the disgruntled neighbor would have to admit that his neighbor’s hospitality was more important than his family’s nocturnal peace and quiet. Hospitality was that important. Perhaps this is more than an anthropological curiosity ~ an interesting factoid about certain ancient and foreign cultures. The appearance of hospitality again and again in these stories indicates something (the inhospitality of the Samaritan villages who knew that Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem, the comparison of any village that did not receive the disciples to Sodom, who would get off easier, then the Good Samaritan whose rescue was crowned by the hospitality of paying for his recuperation, and finally the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah at Mamre, when the Holy and Life-giving Trinity visited the father of Faith and his aged wife, “with whom it had ceased to be after the way of women”, and promised her a child in thanksgiving for their hospitality) ~ this recurrent theme points to something deeper than a cultural quirk, something fundamental about human existence and the Mystery of God.

For are we not all God’s guests? We are so used to thinking of the earth as our home. (We even call it that in one of our Eucharistic prayers). But are we not, in fact only temporary visitors? Is not our whole life merely a short visit to God’s house, where we have arrived unannounced and unexpected, and where the Host as gone to great lengths to provide for us? Are we not God’s guests? Well, we sure don’t act like guests, do we? We act as though we owned the place! All in all, we are pretty bad guests: we presume on our Host’s hospitality; we figure we have it coming; and we are usually not very thankful, as a guest ought to be, because we think we belong here.

God understands this. We are like children. The whole point of our three-day stay in God’s house is to learn ~ gradually to learn to feel thankful. So that when it’s time to leave, we really do know and feel that it has ALL been a gift ~ all grace ~ and an expression of God’s hospitality. Those who get there, we call saints. Those who don’t will get there sooner or later, as they “go from strength to strength, ever increasing in God’s love and service.” For God’s hospitality never ends, and it isn’t over for us when we die. Goid will not give stones to those who ask for bread, or serpents to those who ask for fish. We are god’s guests, even if we be less than perfectly grateful in this life. Because children are even more important than guests, and we don’t expect them to be particularly grateful – at least not when they are little kids. And we are God’s children, sleeping at her bosom, just as in the house next door in the story.

That is the significance of addressing God as Father. ABBA, Daddy, Papa. Or  MAMA, because God is not limited by our gender-bound language. God delights in us as a Mother delights in the child at her breast. Like a good mother or father, God doesn’t require gratitude for the hospitality shown to the children. But when it appears, God’s kingdom comes on earth ~ at least in this little piece of earth called one’s heart.

The Lord’s Prayer contains all the truth and mystery of the Christian way to God. And please notice that the pronouns are all plural: our Father, give us ….our daily bread, deliver us from evil. Not my Father, not give me. Jesus has not taught us to pray alone, and as Christians, we do not know how to do that. We only know how to say Our Father….deliver us from evil. What evil? Nothingness, non-being, eternal death. We pray to be delivered from the loss of things eternal that results from clinging to things temporal ~ in other words, from trying to save our life deliver us from being devoured by the evil one, that is, by our own ego, which the Apostle called this corruptible and mortal flesh. Deliver us from turning back to the self-centeredness of tiny children. For if we must receive the reign of God like them, it means that we must receive it in the trust and hope of a child, not that we must turn back to selfishness. It means that we recognize that I am not God’s only child. To be saved from the time of trial means to be saved from the constant danger of giving in to Me and forgetting that Life comes only from Our Father. And to be delivered from evil is to be liberated from the infantile illusion that regards Me as the owner of the house, and the rightful center of its activity, the illusion of rightful entitlement to all the house has to offer, including the drowsy neighbors three loaves of bread.

But, in fact, I am entitled to nothing. We may confidently expect that Bread, because God has promised it ~ both the daily and the supersubstantial Bread ~ but we may expect it only as members of the Body that says Our Father, in whose fellowship we receive that Bread, having forgiven those we thought owed us anything, which is a negative way of saying that we have recognized that I am owed nothing, but that I owe everything. And furthermore, having actually come to trust that the unpayable debt has been repudiated, cancelled, erased ~ nailed to the Cross.

The fruit of God’s hospitality is gratitude, which is to say, New Life. Thank you, eucaristv. This has the power to transfigure the world. Like my friend of the Mexican adventure, there is no hope of repaying the hospitality, or even of really thanking the ones who helped him. What he can do ~ what we can do ~ is to pass it on. We can live in imitation of the same overflowing generosity that created the world in the first place, so that God’s kingdom really may come and God’s will be done on earth as in heaven.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!