June 26, 2011
Text: Matthew 10:40-42
Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.
Today is the second Sunday of Pentecost, the liturgical season in which we consider the work of the Holy Spirit as it creates churches -- collective bodies of Christ which will continue the work of Jesus beyond his lifetime.
The particular text which we have just heard might be called “Instructions for Mission.”
In this section of Matthew, Jesus is preparing his disciples to go out and practice what they have learned from him. He sends them out with NOTHING but the power of the Spirit to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons. Take no money or extra clothing, he says, and let the Spirit guide you to a place where you will be welcome. Jesus warns them “to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” because they will be “like sheep in the midst of wolves.”
All of that advice precedes our text for today.
Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.
The practice of radical welcome has been a hallmark of the Potter’s House, where we are gathered today. For more than 50 years, this coffeehouse has been an outpost on the street for many ministries of Church of the Saviour. The 8th Day Church is one of the nine little churches in this network, some of which worship here at the Potter’s House on different days. And if you look around at the diversity of this congregation, you will see signs of that radical welcome in our faces, in our dress, in our age and life experience. To me, that is a sign that Jesus is welcomed here, and if Jesus, then also the one who sent him.
But what did Matthew mean when he said “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward”? What could that mean? All the prophets I can think of were shunned, or scorned, and ultimately killed. Let’s face it – the world does not want to hear the words of a prophet.
Nor does the world want to change in the direction of a prophet’s critique. Isaiah and Jeremiah knew that. Jesus knew that and the disciples were afraid they knew what was coming for them too. The rewards for a prophet are lonely and hard. In our day, Martin Luther King Jr. knew that too. The world is hostile to a message of radical welcome and inclusion.
Our society is built on separation, private ownership and individualism. Capitalism is frankly based on exploiting both land and labor for private gain. The notion of inclusiveness, collaboration and collective action is often tainted with a suspicious scent which people label in all kinds of ways.
You and I live with this tension every day. We live in a world where we are making individual choices all the time – about how we will spend our time, energy and money. We can love Jesus and promise to follow him and the next minute we can feel spent, used and resentful because others aren’t doing their share. We are here in this room because we come from a tradition at Church of the Saviour which emphasizes personal responsibility for living out of call and yet we know that we can’t do it alone.
Dottie introduced me as the director of Faith At Work, and for many years, that was both my job and my call. I loved my work and knew that God had called me to that organization. In 2002, my husband, Peter, and I began to lead a yearly work pilgrimage to the highlands of Guatemala for Faith At Work. Each summer, we would join the men of a different village to dig the foundation for a primary school to help fulfill the promise of primary education for indigenous people made in the Peace Accords which ended their civil war in 1996.
We worked with a Guatemalan NGO called PAVA, which focused on schools, bridges and water projects in the District of Chimaltenango. Each year, the opening ceremonies would feature a speech by the outstanding student of the existing school – usually a one-room corn-stalk structure with no windows, stuffed with as many as 50 students. In every case, the star pupil was a girl! The Mayans will not send their girls away to school – it is too dangerous for them. But if there is a local school, those families will sacrifice a lot to see that their children, boys and girls, learn to read and write in Spanish, the language of the dominant culture in Guatemala. By having a school in the village, they are more likely to retain their local culture as well.
I retired from FAW at the end of 2007, and soon that organization began to take a new direction with a new name. Peter and I handed off leadership of the pilgrimage and were making other mission plans when their board decided that the Guatemalan Pilgrimage no longer fit their mission. As you can imagine, we got on our knees and prayed for direction. Aeren Martinez, whom some of you know well, had been on several of those FAW pilgrimages. Now she has moved to Austin TX and joined the board of PAVA. Aeren said she would be willing to be our liason and Seekers Church, the CoS community where we are members, agreed to sponsor the pilgrimage and provide financial support as well. So, on July 9 this year, Peter and I will be joining 22 other pilgrims from around the country to do manual labor in a small village near Tecpan. Please pray for us and our mission there.
I tell you this story because it’s an example of how one person’s sense of call can involve others. Indeed, I would say that it must involve others because the world is too hostile and too strong to sustain a difficult mission alone. Every one of you has an example of this --- how call comes to one person, but it must be shared in order to find a sustainable form in the world. Matthew reminds us that God’s call can be as large as a new direction for society or as small as a cup of cold water for someone who is nearly invisible, one of the “little ones” to use Matthew’s phrase. But big or small, an individual call must become the nucleus for a collective body of Christ in order to sustain the mission over time.
Right now, I believe that the little congregations that make up the network of Church of the Saviour are facing the same issue. Will we go our separate ways? Follow our separate calls in the places where we have put down institutional roots? Or will we find a way to stay connected? Share the wealth of our common heritage with the next generation?
This afternoon, some of us sitting in this room will be meeting at Dayspring to agree on guidelines which will help us select a tenant for the Wellspring buildings. In order to be good stewards of the money they received from the sale of 2025, Dayspring Church invited participation from the other churches in this discernment process. About 20 people have made a commitment to meet once a month until we can feel a collective “yes” and bring it to the Ecumenical Council for approval. We are experimenting with a new process of discernment and I have no idea whether we will be successful, but our intention is clear: to listen for what the Spirit is saying at this time for the Wellspring buildings.
Let me conclude with a challenge for you as members of the Eighth Day Community: that you consciously name your connections with the other communities of Church of the Saviour and pray regularly about the form that will emerge around our one remaining common property, which is the Dayspring Farm. Amen.