Sermon: Welcome
(Mark 9:30-37)
September 16, 2012
Rev. Christine Ng
“Then
they came to Capernaum ...”
Let
me set the stage for you. After travelling on the road through Galilee, they
came to Capernaum and went into a house. Jesus, his twelve closest disciples,
all male, and others who were following him. The house probably wasn’t very
big, so crowded with guests.
And
when they were inside, Jesus turns to his disciples and asks: “’What were you
arguing about on the way?’ But they were silent.” I imagine them hanging their
heads, a bit of a blush forming under their tanned middle eastern skin. If
you’ve ever been caught passing a note in grade school, you probably know how
they felt.
But
just as my teachers usually knew what we were doing when they called us out,
Jesus must have known as well, because with a heavy sigh – not reported in the
text but that I always hear when I read this story – with a heavy sigh he
begins to teach about precisely what they had been arguing about: Which of them is the greatest. And
everything else he stays in this text relates to that.
Jesus
sits down – the formal posture of teachers of that culture – and he calls the
twelve, his closest disciples around him. The twelve were now in school. Weary
from the journey, I imagine them sitting around him in a small room. And Jesus
says to them: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of
all.” After all their arguing, I’m sure this is not what they wanted to hear.
The
Greek word translated here as “servant,” is diakonos,
from which we get our English word “deacon,” and which later came to refer to a
person in ministry. But in the Greek of the day it meant someone who served
meals, and the “servant” of all would have been the lowest servant on the totem
poll – the servant who had to serve even the rest of the servants, and got to
eat only what was left after everyone else had eaten.
I
imagine the faces of the twelve when Jesus said this. A little sour perhaps, or
puzzled. They didn’t understand – in the Gospel of Mark they never understand.
So
Jesus needs an example, a visual aid. So he takes a child. That’s all it says
in the text: “he took a little child.” But it can’t have been that simple.
There wouldn’t have been any children near him, surrounded as he was by the
twelve. And given the likely small size of the house and the room they were in,
it is unlikely there were even any in the room.
So
Jesus probably had to get up, step through his disciples and go into another
room or perhaps even outside to find a little child, pick her up and carry her
back into the room, through the disciples, to sit back down among them with her
in his arms, and say: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,
and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Welcome,
welcome, welcome, welcome. He says it four times – in case they missed it the
first three. It’s all about welcome.
They
were arguing about the wrong thing. It’s not about hierarchy. It’s not about
who is the least and who is the greatest. In the kingdom all of that gets turned
upside down so the one who is truly the “greatest,” the Messiah, the Anointed
One, hangs on the cross. Instead, it’s about welcome.
Welcome
– which in many older versions translate as “receive,” as in “receiving” a person
into one’s home. Acting as their host. I like the word “welcome” used in most
modern translations, but I also like the older word “receive” – which carries
with it the sense of something given that we receive as a gift.
So
Jesus is saying, when I meant that those who would be first must be the servant
of all, I meant all – even treating
one such as this little child as a gift, or an honored guest welcomed into your
home that it is your responsibility as host to take care of.
This is one of those texts that we
tend to see as just one of those “cute” stories about Jesus and children. But
this isn’t a “cute” story at all. The disciples would have made the connection
between the “little child” and the “servant,” because the words in Greek were
very similar, but also because children at the time were nonentities. The
lowest of the low. Someday they would be something, someday they would be
productive members of the household, if
they lived to adulthood, but in the meantime they were on par with a slave –
and indeed, calling an adult a “child” at that time was a serious insult.
But
here was Jesus, teaching that welcoming this nobody was the same as welcoming
not only Jesus himself, but God. If the disciples faces showed confusion or
distaste before, I bet that now it was more like jaw dropping shock.
In-con-ceiv-able.
It’s
not about being the greatest, Jesus said, at least not in the way you mean. It’s about welcome. It’s
about hospitality. It’s about encountering the stranger, the other, and
literally and figuratively accepting them into your heart and your home. All of
them, every one – no matter who they are or where they are on life’s journey.
I
like the way St. Benedict put it, the founder of the Benedictine Order where
Christian hospitality is perhaps the most important spiritual discipline they
practice: “All guests who present
themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.”
Jesus’
radical teaching in this text has broad implications for aspects of our life as
Christians and as a Christian church. For example, this suggests that one of
the most important ministries we do is to welcome people at the door of our
church. Why is it, then, that in this church – like most churches – it’s so
hard to get people to sign up to be ushers and greeters? And yet it’s a simple
thing everyone can do.
Writer
Kathleen Norris writes about a nun with Alzheimer’s who, everyday, insists on
being placed in her wheelchair at the entrance to the monastery’s nursing home
wing so she can greet everyone who comes. She’s not certain anymore about what
she is welcoming people to, but the practice of hospitality, of welcome, is so
deeply ingrained in her that it has become her whole life.
This teaching also suggests that our
ritual of friendship, where we get up and greet everyone gathered here in
friendship and Christian love is one of the most important elements of our
worship service – not just what someone in another church affectionately called
“hugging time,” or something that takes too much time out of “real” worship or
makes us go past noon. Given what Jesus says to the disciples here, what more
important thing do we have to do than to welcome Jesus, to welcome God in?
Because as Barbara Brown Taylor wrote, “encountering another human being is as
close to God as “we” may ever get.
But
I am struck in this passage not just by what Jesus said, but by what he did to
model this welcome. He went out, reached out through the disciples huddled
around him. He didn’t just sit in the middle of the circle and make a vague
hand gesture inviting a child to come to him. The verbs are more active than
that. He “took a little child,” so he had to find one first – out beyond the
circle of his male disciples – possibly out beyond the room or even the walls
of the house – and in brought the child in – back past all those disciples who
were raised to believe children were nonentities.
Welcome
for Jesus meant more than greeting the people who come to the door. And that
makes sense. If you’ve always been told that you’re place was on the margins,
on the outside, in the kitchen, on the back of the bus – if you’ve always been
made to feel that you didn’t belong, that you we’re not welcome – why would you
present yourself at the front door in the first place?
The
real practice of hospitality to those at the margins, to those on the outside,
to those who have been considered low status, unclean, other begins with
reaching out to them, going where they are, and letting them know that they are
invited, and they are welcome.
And
that’s what we’re doing today, as a church, by participating in the Dallas
Pride Parade. I know some see it as outreach, or evangelism, or membership
development – and it is all that. But for me, the most important thing about
participating in this parade is Christian hospitality. It’s reaching out beyond
our circle to a group that has been told over and over by Christians, in the
strongest of terms, that they are not accepted – and letting them know that
here is a place they are welcome, as all are welcome. It’s doing more than
saying the words, “open and affirming,” it’s taking action to live out those
words as Jesus taught.
And
the harder a people have been pushed away, the harder we need to work to reach
out to them. Now, in this time when the lives and rights of LGBT people have
become a political football, when the vilest of rhetoric against them comes out
of very high profile churches, now is an important time to meet LGBT people
where they are, and express God’s love and Christ’s welcome.
Maybe some of those we will greet today will come to visit,
maybe not. It’s about spiritual growth, not numerical growth.
I
became most aware of the hurdles LGBT people face in this allegedly Christian
nation when I was in seminary. Mine was a nondenominational seminary, where we
had students from across the theological and denominational spectrum. The only
requirement was that in seminary discourse must remain civil and respectful. Most
of the time that wasn’t an issue, because we didn’t discuss topics like
homosexuality every day. But one day it came up – and I learned that two of my
conservative Lutheran brethren sincerely believed not simply that the Bible
disapproved of homosexuality, but that in their minds homosexuality was a
greater sin than murder. They said it very civilly, and were genuinely
concerned for the souls of their gay classmates, but that was it. If the death
penalty is appropriate for murder – and they believed it was – it was
appropriate for homosexuality as well.
I
couldn’t wrap my head around that. I still can’t. And when talk like that moves
out into the public political discourse, as it has on some occasions in recent
years, it makes me very sad, and
very afraid for the soul of our country.
Because
the issue of welcome, of being willing to encounter, to receive, accept the
other, those different from ourselves, those we may have been raised to believe
are lesser or lower than ourselves, is at the heart of the challenges facing
our world today.
Bosnian-born
theologian Miroslav Volf says, “It may not be too much to claim that the future
of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference.” And
certainly we can see the consequences of a failure in the events in the Middle
East that have dominated the news this week. Seen the inability to encounter or
welcome difference both in those who made the hateful anti-Islam video and
those who would use it as an excuse for violence and murder. Using God as an
excuse to harm others.
But
my faith teaches me that what we have most in common is more important than any
artificial distinctions we would use to divide us – and what we have in common
is our humanity, and that in rejecting another human being, we reject God.
But
like most spiritual disciplines it takes true Christian hospitality practice –
and it must begin somewhere. Jesus Christ has shown us the way – and it is up
to us, as Christians, to model that to the rest of the world.
It
must begin somewhere: with a child brought into the center of a group of adult
male disciples, with greeting a stranger at the door, or in the pew behind you
– by reaching out to a vilified community with a message of God’s love and
welcome – by keeping hands and hearts open as we continue on our journey.
Welcome
– such a powerful word. It’s not just a word for doormats – it’s what it means
to live out our faith. Welcome.
Amen.
