proper-6-2020.md

June 14, 2020

Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6): – Church of Our Saviour & St. Paul’s

Old story about how “you can’t get there from here.”

Back in the 70’s there was a comedy team that produced a series of comic albums with the title “Bert and I”. They were set in the “down east” part of the country, Maine and environs. There was one story that I have not forgotten – largely because I have retold it from time to time.

A visitor is passing through town and stops to ask for directions. He receives a monologue that goes something like, “Waaall, ye go down here a piece and ya turn right at the big oak tree thaar, and the you go a ways …” After a series of such directions the voice says, “Ya know, come to think of it, you caaan’t get thaar from heeer.”

I thought of that story as I reflected on this week’s scripture readings and the gospel in particular. The church makes a gear shift change between last week and this week. We ended Trinity Sunday at the end of Matthew’s gospel. It is the Great Commission. Jesus has gathered his disciples and sends them out into the world to teach in his name and baptize new disciples and ends with a promise: “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.”

We have followed a cycle of thematic messages that stretches from Thanksgiving to Pentecost – or better, from Advent through the Easter Season, up to Trinity Sunday.

It feels to me something like a symphonic piece where the orchestra works through a basic theme, with different instruments, different modulations, and so on. We have traveled from birth to inauguration of the work of the Messiah up through his final death scene and ultimate deliverance – that scene we saw last week where Jesus returns to a mountain top scene and delivers the great commission.

Today we begin a season of messages that lasts until Thanksgiving. It is in the most general way about mission, about Jesus’ mission, beginning in Nazareth. We follow for some months now, Jesus’ own ministry.

The general lesson for us is that we should follow in his footsteps, that his ministry is our ministry.

If we are sent on a mission, it is appropriate that we be com-missioned.

As I understood that commissioning, we are sent as a community, all of us together. We are not to divide ourselves between those who have it figured out and those who don’t, between those who are poor and those who are powerful, between those who are despised and those who have millions of followers on Twitter.

That gets me back round to where I started. With the story about how do we get to where we’re going? Can we get there going the route we’re on?

We thought we knew where we were going

For centuries we have figured we knew what that great commissioning was for.

It explained how it was that a rag-tag group of Jesus’ followers turned into a world religion.

We just understood that that Great Commission was about spreading the word of Christ – as understood by those who were spreading it – to those who hadn’t heard, didn’t know the word of Christ as we understood it.

It was the basis for colonizing the New World.

Ultimately it was the motivation for sending missionaries to Africa and for growing our churches year by year.

We have focused on numbers, success measured by growth, reaching the unchurched, converting the barbarians, … but I wonder about that story from Bert and I.

What if we couldn’t get to our destination by going on the route we had chosen?

Abraham

I think about how our first reading today and I wonder if it can give us clues about we go about this mission for which we’ve been commissioned.

The Genesis reading is about a person and a time far removed from Jesus’ time or ours. The person is Abraham. He had been visited by 3 strangers – aliens, some folks not from around here. They had a strange promise from God to pass on to Abraham and Sarah. So strange they couldn’t really take it seriously. Sarah laughed.

But Abraham opened himself to the promise because he welcomed those strangers into his tent. He offered them hospitality, though he had no idea what it was all about. He just knew that’s what he had to do.

The promise from God delivered by those 3 strangers was that Abraham and Sarah would have a son and through them their offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky, the grains of sand on the beach.

I guess that’s in part where we got the notion that our Great Commission is to increase our numbers.

My first important lessons about Middle-eastern hospitality came from my Old Testament professor in seminary. His name was Joseph Hunt. I think of him as a saint – but I won’t make this about him at the moment. He had lived and traveled among the Bedouin in the middle east and when he told stories about the power, the depth, and the importance of hospitality there, we believed him.

Hospitality was a quality of life there which very often meant the difference between life and death. Hospitality was more important than family feuds and war and peace between tribes and nations.

I learned about a similar approach to hospitality from a priest friend who thought that Wyoming was heaven on earth. [Well, there are some things about Wyoming that are pretty amazing – but this is not about Wyoming.] The people of Wyoming are proverbially fiercely independent. They go their own way and don’t treat fools kindly. Their nearest neighbor may live 20-30 miles away. But … there is a kind of fierce hospitality to be found in Wyoming, because the people there know that at any moment their life might depend on that neighbor.

Abraham offered hospitality to 3 strangers because he knew that it might well be strangers who would deliver the promise of God that would tell him where he was supposed to go.

I believe that God is like someone who would offered homemade chicken pot pie to a stranger. That may sound a little strange, but the thought that God would be at work in front of an oven and a stove, preparing a kind of meal for ordinary sorts of people – well that just makes perfect sense to me. I have like chicken pot pies since I was a youth. But I’ve only just learned in the past year that my wife makes the best chicken pot pie in the world. And she shared it with a virtual stranger the other day.

In heaven God serves Chicken Pot Pie – I’m sure of it – to strangers.

Jesus sent the 12 out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He said to go into the houses you meet and if they offer hospitality let God’s promise shine within it. If they don’t offer hospitality – well, just go on.

He commissioned them / us to pass on the good news – the Gospel – so that God’s grace is at hand and anyone witnessing would not want to miss it.

The Great Commission as I hear it is not about numbers, it’s not about balance sheets of some sort or another. It’s not about being the biggest and the best. It’s about recognizing that in 3 strangers from a foreign land may come the best news ever. It’s about embracing a promise that seems far-fetched and beyond anything but laughter – because it might well be God talking to us. Getting to our destination may well be like preparing Chicken Pot Pie.

A churning couple of weeks

These past couple of weeks our country has entered a kind of “George Floyd” moment. Folks that I know have either been unable to turn their eyes away from the news or have been so overwhelmed that they have turned the news off.

We have been commissioned. We, the church, have a mission. To our own country. Abraham’s radical hospitality can give us a clue about how to go about that. He knew that it was in what seemed outlandish and strange that God’s promise might well be found.

² Don’t neglect to open up your homes to guests, because by doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13

Abraham received the word of God through the strangers. Jesus’ disciples received it directly from Jesus. In both cases, the mission was to go out to make it known that God’s work of grace was always at work, for healing, for reconciling, for justice among the people. Jesus said:

‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.

One of the preachers this past week said that though we struggle and travail, God will prevail. You see he had read the end of the story.

The lion and the lamb lie down together. Isaiah.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Jesus.

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? God to Abraham.

I have heard the message clearly these past few weeks. The destination toward which we travel is clear enough. It is to rest in the hospitality of God – I think of it as accompanied by Chicken Pot Pie.

There may be pain and suffering along the way, but we need one another for the journey. All of us count. None of us has all the answers.

The routes we have taken in the past did not work. They were not going to get us to the destination to which we have been called.

And the profoundly good news is that God will get us there in the end.

And our song is Hallelujah, Anyhow.

Notes

• lectionary – Proper 6
• Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) & Ps. 100
• or Exodus 19:2-8 & Ps. 116:1,10-17
• Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35—10:8,(9-23)

Abraham, Oaks of Mamre, promise, hospitality for 3 men, Sarah laughing, bore a son

justified by faith, while we still were sinners Christ died for us

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. … See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. … ” you will be persecuted