Wadhams United Church of Christ
2569 County Route 10, Wadhams, NY 12993
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Sermon by Steve Smith Order of Service
June 29, 2008 1 John 4:7-8
Welcoming customs date back to a time when people didn’t travel as much, so having a visitor arrive was a major event. I remember visiting an interpretive center in southern Maryland one time, and one of the docents, dressed for the time period and in character as the town’s mayor, joined us at the counter of the inn, where we had stopped to get some refreshments. “Ye must be wealthy people, then,” he said to me. “How’s that?” I said in my startled state. “Ye must be wealthy people, if ye can afford to go traipsin’ about the countryside.” He gave me a backward glance as he left us, probably to make sure that I received his message: as a visitor, I was a suspicious character.
Fortunately, some cultures view the arrival of guests as a reason to celebrate. The Polynesian Islands and Hawaii have long been known for the custom of welcoming guests with a lei, or a garland of flowers. In some villages in Indonesia, the musicians gather to play the music, while the women start a dance to lead their visitors into town. In East Java, you can experience the welcome of the Gandrung Dance. The word “Gandrung” comes from a Javanese word that means “desperately in love.” But if you go there, you should remind yourself that the dancers aren’t desperately in love with you, they are in love with the goddess of the rice paddy who blesses them with enough food to survive.
Travelite India, a tourism agency for India, promises “kid glove handling” for their “up market clientele.” My hunch is that it requires enormous bank accounts to be considered “up market clientele.” In other words, you and I will never get this kind of treatment from them. If you book your trip through them, you will be met at the hotel by ladies clothed in traditional, colorful local costumes. They will greet you with floral garlands and perform an ancient candle-lighting ceremony to demonstrate that you are a very important person to them. The ritual is fulfilled when they mark your forehead with a traditional symbol of eternal wisdom, indicating, I guess, that you have shown the wisdom of the gods in deciding to book your travel with them.
In our country, welcoming customs have changed a little bit since 9/11. Because of those changes, foreign tourism has dropped by a dramatic 17%. Fortunately, our government has been sensitive to the needs of our tourism industry, so that when these foreign visitors now arrive on our soil, they are treated to a welcoming video produced by an international powerhouse of hospitality. I’m not making this up: the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State teamed up with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts to produce an impressive video to show our visitors while they are standing in line to be processed by Customs and Immigration.
Like most of Disney’s work, it’s a masterpiece of montages designed to demonstrate how friendly, generous, and welcoming we Americans really are. Unfortunately, the customs agents behind the counters are quite adept at dispelling that fantasy with the harsh reality of post-9/11 travel. A 2006 survey found those visitors were more worried about the customs agents than they were about terrorists. Apparently, their worries are well-founded: a full one third of them found the agents so rude, abrasive, and insulting that they planned never to return. So the message comes full-circle, that here in America, if you’re a foreigner to these parts, we consider you to be a suspicious character.
The kind of welcome that people receive actually provides a glimpse into the openness of the people they are meeting and the group or culture they are reaching out to in their efforts to forge connections and community. In the setting of a church, the concept of a welcome takes on even greater meaning, because people view the church as a way to connect with God through the people in that congregation. Jesus had to work to get his disciples to turn their thoughts away from their narcissistic self-absorption (“Jesus likes me more than you!”) and toward the different people they would be encountering on their journey through life. Needless to say, this was quite a shift for them, as it is for most of us, and they would continue to struggle with this for some time to come: like, nearly two thousand years. Quite honestly, I expect this to be an issue for the rest of my life on earth, because we all come together hoping to get our needs met, and sometimes visitors get in the way of that happening for us.
So to put the Luke passage in perspective, Jesus comes down off a mountain-top experience to encounter someone in desperate need, announces a key component of his mission here on earth, and his followers respond to his initiative by verbally sparring with each other over who is going to get the most acclaim and prestige out of this new initiative. Fortunately, Jesus had a lot more patience than all of us put together, and refrained from some well-deserved head-knocking, and loved his disciples anyway. That would be the welcome lesson that each and every one of them would carry with them until their dying days: that Jesus loved them, even with their obvious shortcomings. They would look back at these days ruefully, regretting how they had wasted their time with this spiritual master by absorbing themselves in the most fascinating subject they could imagine: the person in the mirror.
Likewise, I can look back regretfully at earlier periods of my life and recognize the signs of my own neurotic preoccupation with myself and my own needs. I suppose the same could be said of most of us. Where we sometimes experience the disconnect is in failing to remind ourselves that Jesus loves us anyway, and that there can be an incredible transformation that takes place as we learn to live in the divine reality, that we are loved, even with our obvious shortcomings. It had happened to the ragtag group Jesus had called as his disciples, and it can continue to happen to us as we grow in grace and wisdom.
In this chapter of John’s letters that we read today, the author makes use of the same Greek word a total of 28 times in 21 short verses. Do you suppose he was trying to emphasize something with a group of people who were struggling to move beyond their neurotic preoccupation with that wonderful person in the mirror? The Greek word is agape, and it’s one of those colorless words outside of its New Testament context. What makes it so rich and vibrant is the way the New Testament authors laid it alongside the Old Testament concept of God’s unfailing love, the love that endures forever that we quoted in our responsive psalm.
It was one of those words that emerged in ancient Palestine and completely captivated people who were longing for love, who were desperate to find a love that valued them and affirmed their worth as human beings. But it was more than one of the buzz words that emerge in our culture on a fairly continuous basis, as people search for a new way to express themselves in a contemporary fashion. When I was growing up, words like “cool” and “neat” fit into that category. Five years ago, people were using the word “sweet” to express something similar. Who knows what they’re using now.
Jesus launched his divine initiative with the word “love” by describing his mission in those terms. As the disciples grew in their understanding of what it meant to live and flourish in the rich soil of that love, they spread it throughout the ancient world in their message and in their lifestyle. But before they could do that, they needed to understand Jesus’ initiative in a new and completely different way. You may remember Jesus saying to his disciples, A new command I give you: to love one another. But if you go back into the Old Testament, you can find that commandment spelled out in a number of different settings, so there was nothing new about it.
I believe that Jesus was inviting them to look at the old commandments in a different way. In this new thing that God was doing, God was no longer imposing moral and ethical edicts from the outside and enforcing them with punishment and the fear of punishment. In this new initiative that Jesus was launching, God wanted to have us internalize the message, and the message was one of radical, life-changing love. Here is where my opening words about welcoming people intersect with this divine initiative: once we experience the life-changing nature of this love, it transforms the way we look at ourselves and the world around us.
Once we ruefully recognize the time we have wasted when we could have spent it in closer contact with our spiritual master, we will be motivated to make each moment count for something more. When we come down off our spiritual mountain-top experiences to encounter someone in desperate need, we will be able to look at this person as someone who desperately needs a touch of the love we have just feasted on. By the light of that new perspective, we will no longer deem them a troublesome intrusion into our day, but will be open to seeing them as a divine appointment that God has orchestrated for us. Once we have encountered this divine welcome, and find our sense of calling disturbed by the squabbling of others, we will be able to entertain the notion that we don’t necessarily have to knock some heads together (as much as we might want to), but that God is simply calling us to refrain from hurting these folks.
As much as I admire the excellence in hospitality that the experts from Disney bring to everything they do, I believe that God does a much better job of it. I’ve stood in their lines at Disney World, and been awed at how they handle huge numbers of people in a professional manner, and make each of us feel welcome. I’ve shuffled along with everyone else while watching something to distract me from the reality of being in a long line. But if Disney does it well, God does it even better. Because Disney World is only someplace I visit; I don’t live there. Polynesia, Hawaii, and East Java might have quaint and amusing welcoming customs, but I don’t ever expect to even visit there.
No, the welcoming center I’m trying to point toward is located right where I’m living. It’s bigger than me and you and those wonderful people we see in the mirror every day. It can’t be contained by the walls and roof of this church or any church in the world. It’s as big and as prevalent as the very basic human need to be loved and valued for who we are. It’s an extravagant welcome that God extends to us, even though God knows all about the things that shame us still. It’s a call to come down off the high holy mountains where we prefer to linger in the holy glow and do a few things to spread the love around. It’s a call to step aside from our differences of opinion and invest ourselves in the love that will redefine other lives while it transforms us.
My understanding of God is that God has chosen to be self-limiting in many regards. God will not coerce us, but will wait for us to exercise our free will to participate in this divine initiative. Even more importantly, God has chosen to demonstrate that love to others through the likes of people like me, and you, and all the other people in this world who stumble and stagger toward their calling to be individual welcoming centers in a world desperate for love. But these welcoming centers won’t be adorned with contrived images of a feigned love. Instead, the centerpiece will be very real: the very real love of God come alive in us; the very real love of God that captivated us and transformed us; the very real love of God made all the more real and all the more vital as we give more and more of it away.
Order of Service June 29 , 2008 Back to Sermon
"NC" refers to The New Century Hymnal, The Pilgrim Press (1995)
Welcome, Announcements, Joys and Concerns
A Candle for Peace NC #573 (vs 3)
Call to Worship
Leader: God of loving welcome, embrace us this day.
People: As you welcome us into this house of worship, so we welcome your presence in our lives.
Leader: Live in us; breathe in us; be in us.
People: Let your warm hospitality flow through us, that others may see your welcome in our eyes and sense your love in our presence.
Leader: Welcoming God, there are many who need your welcome, who yearn for a taste of your love.
People: Help us give of ourselves with the same generous spirit you have shown us.
Leader: In our giving, may we welcome as we have been welcomed.
People: In our sharing, may we love as we have been loved.
Leader: Let welcoming love guide our worship, and may it guide our way in the world.
Hymn NC #13 O My Soul, Bless Your Creator
Responsive Prayer
Leader: God of loving welcome, turn to us and be gracious, for we are weak and in need of your help.
People: We admit that we are not always as kind and accepting as you call us to be. We yearn to extend the hand of friendship, but tend to shy away.
Leader: We seek community and love, but then offer only small parts of ourselves.
People: We cry for peace on earth, but in our families or communities, we sometimes fight battles to impose our will on others.
Leader: When we are afraid, strengthen us to bravely reach out to others.
People: When we are angry, love us that we may be kind and forgiving.
Leader: Where we are sad, comfort us that we may seek new joy.
People: When we are in doubt, encourage us with your steadfast faithfulness.
Leader: Comfort us, O God, and revive our souls, that we may have the endurance to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.
People: Guide us to walk in your ways, that we may truly love and accept others, even as we have been loved and accepted by you.
Pastoral Prayer, Lords Prayer Hymn NC #558 O How Glorious, Full of WonderPsalm 136, Luke 9:37-48, 1 John 4:7-12
Sermon The Welcoming Center
Offering, Doxology, Dedication
Hymn NC #80 Savior, Again to Your Dear Name
Benediction
Leader: Whoever gives even a tiny cup of cold water to a small child is doing the work of God.
People: God of welcoming love, we behold your works and are amazed at the many gifts you bring into our lives.
Leader: Help us to share with all our neighbors the love we have received this day.
People: When we give as we have received, we share in God’s work and in God’s community of love.
Leader: As you leave, take the blessing of God, the love of Jesus, & the fellowship of the Spirit with you.
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