Sermon for Pentecost 9, proper 12C
July 29,
2007
Is there anyone among you who, if your
child asks for bread, will give a stone instead?
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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
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
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!