5 PENTECOST, YEAR A

SERMON PREACHED BY ANNE STANLEY

CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE

15 JUNE 2008

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Gen. 18:1-15, 21:1-7; Ps. 116:1, 10-17; Rom. 5:1-8; Mt. 9:35-10:8-23

In recent weeks and days, I have spent a great deal of time in hospitals and nursing homes. I visit them regularly in my life and work, but lately it’s been a bit over the top. I’ve also spent a good deal of time reflecting on these places. Places, I’ve decided they are, of hospitality. Hospital/hospitality.

So this sermon is about hospitality. The ministry of hospitality.

Starting with the very point of entrance into these places.  Have you ever thought about the entrance doors, especially of hospitals, doors which sweep open as you approach?  A gesture of welcome, even if you’re perfectly capable of opening a door yourself. These huge doors spread wide open for us to go in.

Abraham saw three strangers approach his tent in the heat of the day. They approached the entrance.  Abraham looked up and rushed to greet them. He “ran” to meet them, says the story in Genesis. Like hospital doors opening wide for us.

And from then on, in the story, it was hospitality at its finest. Abraham made sure his guests’ feet were washed. He urged them to rest up. He made sure they were fed. Notice the hurrying and the activity: Abraham ran to the strangers; he ran again, it says, to get a calf for the meal and the servant hastened to prepare it; Abraham  hastened to his wife, Sarah, to get her to make the bread. Then he stood by as the strangers ate, as if to make sure they had everything they needed. Hospitality at its finest.

Teamwork here—Abraham, Sarah, the servant. And teamwork, too, in the hospitality measured out in the hospitals and nursing homes I’ve noticed lately. I watched last Thursday as David and I moved through the welcoming, automatic doors at Maine Med, as he was greeted by the person behind the desk, as we were  escorted into the preparation-for-surgery room, as one competent and caring person after another came to him and did their thing, as the host of the place, an earnest man named Paul, carefully arranged with me about how to reach me as the day wore on.  As the towel delivery guy and the meal delivery woman smiled as I passed by in the corridors. It was the same at Stephens Hospital a week or so ago, when I saw another patient off to the OR.  Like that, too, at the various nursing homes I visited this past week: people making sure that those they welcomed into their care were indeed made welcome, as they fed them, and cared for them and cleansed them.  And as they looked after the families of patients, bringing snacks, chairs, information. And hugs, when the information was tough to take—hugs for Zeke’s family, hugs for Joe Lane’s family.

 “When he saw the crowds, (Jesus) had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd…Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful….ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest….”

The ministry of hospitality. The ministry of taking care.  The ministry of embodying the kingdom of God, of being the kingdom of God, the ministry of showing the face of Jesus, as we Christians know it to be.

Frederick Beuchner recounts the story an Episcopal priest told him about a Christmas Pageant in that priest’s church:

The manger was down in front…where it always is. Mary was there in a blue mantle and Joseph in a cotton beard. The wise men were there with a handful of shepherds, and of course in the midst of them all the Christ child was there, lying in the straw. The nativity story was read aloud by the priest with carols sung at the appropriate places, and all went like clockwork until it came time for the arrival of the angels of the heavenly host as represented by the children of the congregation, who were robed in white and scattered throughout the pews with their parents.

At the right moment they were supposed to come forward and gather around the manger saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will among men,’ and that is just what they did except there were so many of them that there was a fair amount of crowding and jockeying for position, with the result that one particular angel, a girl about nine years old who was smaller than most of them, ended up so far out on the fringes of things that not even by craning her neck and standing on tiptoe could she see what was going on. ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will among men’ they all sang on cue, and then in the momentary pause that followed, the small girl electrified the entire church by crying out in a voice shrill with irritation and frustration and enormous sadness at having her view blocked, ‘LET JESUS SHOW!!’

Beuchner went on to quote his friend as saying that “one of the best things he ever did in his life was to end everything precisely there….everybody filed out with those unforgettable words ringing in their ears.” LET JESUS SHOW!

It’s so easy to pooh-pooh all the little things that people do for each other, that people do for us, that we do for them, as ordinary and dull and not important.  Or we take these things for granted. Or we are so focused on some big thing that we don’t pay attention to the little bits. But in truth, it’s the little bits that all add up. The little bits are not insignificant. The little bits are the bits that Abraham and Sarah and the servant did.  And they are the bits that Jesus did and tells us to do, too. Whether we speak about Jesus or not, when we exercise our ministry of hospitality, we “give visibility to Jesus’ love for the poor and the weak,” as Henri Nouwen puts it.

Or as that little girl says, we “Let Jesus show!”