Sermons

“Welcoming, Listening, Learning, Rejoicing”

Matthew 10:40-42; Acts 8:26-40 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – July 2, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might experience your welcome and share it with all we meet. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

Given how many times both words are used in our first reading today, I could have easily titled this sermon “Welcome Rewards”. But since that sounds like a hotel chain’s points program, I decided to go with something different. But the word “welcome” is definitely an important part of what we’re talking about this morning, so we’ll hold onto that.

We use the word “welcome” a lot in Disciples churches. We talk about everyone being welcome, not just at church generally, but specifically at the Lord’s table. We talk about what is required to make sure people feel welcome, so that the experience of our church matches up with our description of it. It is clear that welcome has to be more than just words.

But what I want to get at today is something hidden within the concept of welcome, which we’ll then apply to our other scripture lesson and our current moment. Tucked subtly inside the idea of welcome is a shift in perspective. To talk about welcome implies that someone is the host and someone is the guest or the new person. This could mean that one side has an advantage, being on their home turf, and the other side is a bit off balance, the way we think about it with sports teams. But that’s not how it works with welcome, because if welcoming is happening, the host has chosen to set aside their own comfort and use their familiarity with their surroundings and access to the resources there for the sake of the guest. There is an attempt to shift perspective by putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Rather than tending to their own needs, the hosts offer whatever is at their disposal to make the guests feel at home. When welcoming is done well, the effect is to neutralize what we might otherwise call the “home field advantage”?

The concept of welcome is an important one for us to embrace as a congregation. Those who have been here a while have an obligation to make newcomers feel welcome, by virtue of claiming to follow Jesus. But beyond the realm of the individual congregation, the deeper we get into our faith, the less clear it becomes who is the host and who is the guest. If we are too focused on our role as the host, we may place ourselves in the stories we find in scripture into characters that are not actually a good match for us.

Let’s look at the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch with this in mind. This story does a great job of confusing who is the host and who is the guest. The Ethiopian official is a clearly a willing student, and Philip is obviously the teacher. But the story takes place on a “wilderness road” so no one is truly at home. And though the Ethiopian is the student, he may also be the host, since it is his chariot where the lesson takes place, and Philip enters it only at his invitation to come and sit beside him. Which of these characters do you relate to more strongly?

Because we are the church, there is perhaps a tendency to see ourselves in the actions of the early apostles like Philip. They are the ones, after all, that we are supposed to be imitating. But it seems likely to me that we are much more like the Ethiopian, needing to have scripture explained to us, needing to be introduced again and again to Jesus, requiring an invitation into the family of God. This is an important dynamic to explore as we embark on a new adventure of becoming a “teaching church”. In case it isn’t clear, a “teaching church” is the phrase we use for a congregation that has taken on the responsibility of sponsoring an intern. We are now one week into our eight-week experience with Rachel, and after that we will be welcoming RJ Lucchesi, a seminarian at Claremont School of Theology who will be doing his field education here at VLM. Rachel isn’t technically a ministerial intern, but she is going to be a good warm-up for us as we learn what it means to be a “teaching church”. It turns out that the name can be a bit misleading.

Of all the people in this room right now, who do you think is most qualified to speak to the realities of a wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza? The answer to that question, of course, is Rachel. We have welcomed her; the next steps are for us to listen to her and learn from her. Who is the host? Who is the guest? Who is the teacher? Who is the student? Rachel has a lot to teach us about her experience as a Christian living in Palestine, in the town where Jesus was born. But she also has a lot to teach us about ourselves and our impact as Americans on the realities of her life. Far too often, we approach the Bible holding onto the conceit that we are the main character, neglecting to set aside our egos and our own agendas so that we can begin to understand what God is really communicating there. If we could instead, like the Ethiopian official, set ourselves aside and truly ask “Who is this story about?” we may discover that the depth and breadth of our faith expands beyond our wildest imaginings.

Welcoming, listening, and learning are all huge parts of what it means to be a “teaching church”. When a congregation agrees to host a seminary intern, after all, we’re committing to help prepare a future leader of the church. So it makes sense that we will learn as much from RJ as he will learn from us. Much of what Rachel will be doing here this summer is what our Global Ministries office calls the “ministry of presence”. She is just going to hang out with us, and as we get to know each other, we will learn about her life and grow to care about her experience deeply, just as she will learn about our lives and come to think of San Diego as another home. This is why I keep telling you to invite her to lunch or dinner or to come along on an outing. I want you to spend time with her, welcoming, listening and learning. She is both our guest and our teacher. We are her hosts and her students. Which is to say, it’s all mixed up together in mutual growth and respectful relationship, and we’re all going to have a wonderful time!

There is one more word in the title of this sermon that we haven’t gotten to yet. The story in Acts tells us that as soon as the Ethiopian official had been baptized, the Spirit snatched Philip away to Azotus, and the Ethiopian “went on his way rejoicing.” And, indeed, he had much to celebrate! We don’t know if this man was a Jew or a proselyte, though we can assume he must have been one or the other, since he had traveled all the way to Jerusalem to worship. But because of his identity as a eunuch, he would never have been fully welcome in the temple there.

But now, because of Philip’s sudden appearance and visit in the chariot, the Ethiopian official had had scripture explained to him, had been introduced to Jesus, and had been welcomed into the family of God through baptism! Indeed, he’s not the only one with something to celebrate: this story is one of the ways the Book of Acts moves into the new reality that the gospel is going to be shared to “the ends of the earth,” that is, that the good news of Jesus Christ was not just for first-century Jewish people, but for all of us. The Ethiopian official’s welcome is our welcome too.

One of the reasons why our congregation is a Global Missions Church is precisely because of something this story points to: our understanding of God is deepened when we open up our hearts to Christians in other parts of the world. To share our faith with brothers and sisters in Palestine or Congo or Japan, to listen and learn from them does, in fact, give us reason for rejoicing, because our faith becomes that much richer. We see the face of God more clearly when our perspective is broadened like this, and that is something to celebrate.

Even as we see God more clearly, that line between host and guest gets fuzzier and fuzzier. When we come to the Table each week, we remind ourselves that no matter who set the table, Christ Jesus is the host. And yet, there in Matthew, he is telling us that whoever welcomes his disciples is welcoming him. He is our host, yet he also wants to be our guest. All of us are called, as the advent hymn proclaims, to “fling wide the portals of our hearts” and welcome Jesus into our lives. Whether that means getting baptized, or attending a book study, or taking a new friend to the beach – however we do it, if we do it for the sake of Christ, it is also Christ that we are welcoming and listening to and learning from. And it will be a cause for rejoicing. Let us give thanks that we have been invited into this journey! Alleluia and Amen.