Christ calls us to build relationships of mutuality, in which we both offer and receive care.

Vicar Bristol Reading
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 13 A
Text: Matthew 10:40-42

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace be with you, in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It feels complicated to be community with one another right now.

COVID-19 forces tough decisions about who you can visit with, how close you can get, and how long you can stay. You have to calculate risk for every social interaction, no matter how minor. To ask: How do I stay safe and keep others safe? How can I love my neighbors while staying physically distant?

Increased awareness of police violence is causing people to re-consider what community safety might look like, to ask new questions about how we can take care of one another, especially those who are most vulnerable? How can we support movements toward systemic change and also support those who are affected by the resulting unrest? How can we raise our voices for justice and also open our ears for learning?

These are complicated and challenging questions, but they’re ones we can’t avoid. We need to wade into the public conversation about how to create community that is just and safe for everyone. We need to be part of this conversation because, as Jesus’ words remind us, caring for one another is part of the deal when you commit to a Gospel-centered life.

Offering hospitality and welcome to another is like offering hospitality to God! That’s what Jesus teaches his disciples. The acts of hospitality don’t have to be fancy. They can be as simple as offering a cup of cold water to a weary desert wanderer.

Cold water isn’t as scarce in our world as it was in Jesus’ world, when the arid climate of the Middle East could only be survived through access to rare natural springs, deep wells, or carefully guarded cisterns. But it’s worth asking: what resources do need to be shared in order for us to live out Christ’s vision of hospitality right now? To what do people need access in order to survive in our world? Sufficient pay? Safe housing? Affordable healthcare? Adequate education?

And what are the small acts, the cups of cold water, that each of us can offer to help move our society in that direction? A cup of cold water could look like donated diapers or laundry detergent. Welcome could look like wearing a mask or staying home. Hospitality could look like showing up for a neighborhood meeting. We offer what we can to whom we can whenever we can.

To be clear, though, Jesus doesn’t only call his followers to offer hospitality; he calls them to receive hospitality as well. He doesn’t just say, “When you welcome others, you welcome me.” He says, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me.” He says this to his disciples as he sends them out into the community to proclaim the message of the Gospel. Whoever welcomes you welcomes me and therefore welcomes God.

Scripture is adamant that those who love God are called to love neighbor: to give generously, to resist escalating violence, to protect the most vulnerable. But here, in this teaching, Jesus emphasizes that sometimes Christ-followers will themselves be the ones in need of welcome. Sometimes they will be the ones thirsty and exhausted, reaching out for a mercifully offered cup of cold water.

Earlier, Jesus told the disciples that when they go out into the world to proclaim the good news, they should intentionally go empty-handed. Don’t take any extra supplies, he said. No money, no extra clothes (Matthew 10:7-10). The disciples would be dependent on the generosity and hospitality of others. That will make them vulnerable. Jesus even uses the term “little ones” to describe the position this will put them in (Matthew 10:42). It will make them like children, in need of care from others.

That’s the thing about real hospitality: it requires vulnerability. Both sides have to take a risk. It’s risky to offer hospitality: to welcome others to your home, your table, your heart. It’s also risky to receive hospitality: to entrust your wellbeing, even your life, to others.

And Jesus harbors no illusions. He warns the disciples: Sometimes you will not be welcomed and cared for. Sometimes you’ll be rejected and mistreated, as Jesus himself was. That’s the inherent risk of vulnerability: you might get hurt. The message of the Gospel can be countercultural, even subversive. Walking the way of Jesus isn’t always going to make you popular. Actually, Jesus pretty much guarantees that it will cause tension in even the most intimate of relationships. Jesus uses uncomfortable language about dividing families and households (Matthew 10:35-37). To bear the Gospel is to bear the cross.

But the vulnerability also creates the opportunity for deeper relationships.

The relationship created by authentic hospitality is not transactional. It can’t be. When you invite someone into your home for a meal, you don’t expect them to pay you for it. They can pay it forward, but they can’t pay it back. It’s offered freely, out of joy. It’s received freely, with gratitude. Otherwise it isn’t hospitality.

This is why the work of actively dismantling systems of oppression is part of the Christian vocation.

When we say that there cannot be peace without justice, we are saying that equity is the foundation for authentic community. Creating a community in which everyone can flourish will require sacrifice and risk. Relationships of mutual vulnerability are foundational: Every person able to receive hospitality, and every person able to offer hospitality. Enough cold water to go around.

Womanist theologian Emilie Townes puts it this way: “With compassionate welcome, Jesus calls us to put our love in jeopardy so that its blessings are made manifest in our lives and in the lives of others.” This can add a new set of questions to your considerations of how to be community in these unusual times: How are you practicing the vulnerability of both offering and receiving hospitality? How are you putting your love in jeopardy, taking risks in order to build relationships of mutuality?

They aren’t easy questions and they won’t yield easy answers. But here’s the good news: the risk is worth it.

The way of vulnerable love is the way of life! We know that because we see that in Jesus Christ, who shows us the face of God. Jesus Christ, who was willing to give up everything for the sake of love, even his life. And somehow, miraculously and mysteriously, through that sacrificial death comes new life. Not easy life; not painless life. But real, lasting life.

When you practice loving others with vulnerable, sacrificial love, you are following in the way of Christ. You are taking up the cross. You are bearing the Gospel. You are fulfilling the vocation sealed by the Holy Spirit at your baptism – a baptism that baptized you into Christ’s suffering and death and also into Christ’s resurrection and life. In Christ you are freed by the love of God, for the love of neighbor.

There is enough cold water to go around. We live from a spirit of abundance and thanksgiving, not of scarcity and fear. We proclaim, as our ancestor Abraham did, that God will provide (Genesis 22:14). We rejoice, as the Psalmist did, that God has dealt bountifully with us (Psalm 13:6).

And if God has given us such bounty, it is our work to actively, intentionally, courageously share that bounty with others. It is our work to tear down barriers that prevent anyone from living into the flourishing God intends for them. It is our work to build the relationships of mutual trust that are needed for a just community. So take the risk to be Christ’s love in the world, and trust that others will also be Christ’s love to you.

Amen.

We are called to die in our baptism to all that keeps us from hearing Ishmael’s cries, to all that leads us to disregard others in the family, and in Christ’s resurrection we are given the life to do this.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 12 A
Texts: Genesis 21:8-21; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Ishmael laughed.

That was his “crime.” He laughed, exactly like Sarah. He laughed, the same word as his brother Isaac’s name. Ishmael laughed. And Sarah, now finally able to laugh with a promised son, and Abraham, the father of both boys, drove Ishmael and his mother into the wilderness.

Both Jewish and Christian tradition often claim Ishmael’s laughter mocked Isaac. But the text doesn’t support that. The verb with the “mocking” sense is similar, but not the same, to the word used here that’s always translated “laughing.”

Ishmael’s crime was his existence. Now that Isaac was born, Ishmael was a threat to his inheritance. Maybe he wouldn’t challenge Isaac inheriting all. Maybe he would. But this child of a slave is thrown out of the only family he’d ever known, sent to die in the wilderness.

That’s the important truth in this story.

Yes, God blesses Ishmael, saves him and his mother. Makes him a great nation in his own right. But that doesn’t change that he was thrown away from his family.

Maybe Sarah was worried about Ishmael’s influence on Isaac; she admits she was worried about the inheritance. But that doesn’t change that she cut off her son from his life.

Sure, Abraham sent water and bread with Hagar. But that doesn’t change that he rejected his first-born son, and justified it by saying God was OK with it.

When George Floyd’s life was being choked out in those eight minutes and 46 seconds of horror, near the end he cried out for his mother. It’s unbearable. In the wilderness, when the water and bread ran out, Hagar put Ishmael under a bush and walked away to sit. She couldn’t bear to watch the death of her child.

That’s the true story here: one child is loved and favored, and one child is trash to be thrown away, where only his mother cares whether he lives or he dies. And God.

We can’t judge Sarah and Abraham. But we must learn from this for our own lives.

That the tradition justifies throwing Ishmael and Hagar away should be a warning to us how easily we justify our beliefs and our actions, even when they harm another. Seeing the actual, horrible truth of Ishmael’s story as the Bible reveals it, is the only honest way to see this story.

And the same is true today. We need to clearly see the truth of our world and our part in it. That in the United States nearly 1,000 people are killed by police every year, compared to ten or fewer a year in other Western countries. That unarmed people who are black are killed by police in the United States at a rate four times that of unarmed people who are white. That the voices of Ishmael in our society cry out in anger and frustration and grief at yet another death, day after day, week after week. Parents of children, sons of mothers, brothers, husbands, are killed with impunity, cast out from the family into the wilderness to die.

We need to see this. We need to hear this. But it will take the death of some things in us.

This is what Paul needs the Romans to understand.

He tells them that in baptism they were buried with Christ, that their baptism is into Christ’s death. There is something in them that needs to die for them to live as Christ, to walk in “newness of life.”

The Roman churches had Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians at odds with each other, not eating together, breaking fellowship. Both sides knew they were right and the other side wrong. But Paul says, you are one in Christ, the only identity that matters.

So go ahead, Gentile Christians, Paul says, don’t keep kosher, and freely eat meat that might have been offered to idols. But your belief that you’re right and your siblings are wrong, your looking down on them for what you see as ignorance, your willingness to break this community: that needs to die in Christ.

And go ahead, Jewish Christians, Paul says, follow the laws of Moses and keep kosher. But your belief that you’re right and your siblings are wrong, your looking down on them for what you see as unfaithfulness, your willingness to break this community: that needs to die in Christ.

Your baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, Paul says, means the death of all that keeps you from seeing and treating others as family – even in your diverse differences.

Now you also see why Jesus says what he does today.

Jesus knows that following him, taking up your cross, being willing to die to what in you is not of Christ will mean dying to important things. It might separate you from others, even close relationships. Matthew’s community lived this, experienced the rupture of families over following Christ, and needed these words of encouragement by Jesus in their Gospel.

And that’s our hard discernment ahead. What does God need to die in us so that we can walk in newness of life and see and treat all God’s children as family? Today it’s more than just the body of Christ at stake. We can’t break family ties with any of God’s children. Will we take up our cross even if that dying costs us whatever it costs us? Loss of being right, loss of having the answers, loss of a comfortable existence? Loss of income? What are we willing to let die to ensure all in the family are kept alive and well?

What this will mean for Mount Olive is hard to fully know right now.

But we can’t just go on letting our siblings of color die week after week with no answer or no commitment to change. We can’t turn away as Ishmael grieves every day in the wilderness, dying while we laugh with our families.

We’ll have to be willing to let go of our need to make ourselves feel better – even our need to help in ways that might not be what our siblings need. We’ll have to take hard looks at how we use language, how we live as a community, to see the pieces of white supremacy that exist in our life together. That sounds harsh, but as we listen to our neighbors, that’s what we hear. That this society is built to endorse and support white people at the expense of others, and that this is even in our community of faith.

There is much we need to learn together. But many in our midst can help.

For those of us who are like me, white, identifying as male, and straight, we must be silent and listen. Every door has opened for us all our lives, and most of us haven’t been thrown out into the wilderness. But many of our community have, and can help. Those of us who are women, you know what it is to be discriminated against, to be objectified and threatened, to be paid less for the same work, to be mansplained by someone less smart than you. You can help us all hear and see Ishmael now, too.

Those of us who are LGBTQ, you know what it is to be marginalized, thrown out of families, even have your life threatened or treated as trash. The Pulse nightclub shooting was only four years ago this week, and even though you can now be married and the Supreme Court made an important ruling this week, you know the pain of the wilderness. You can help us all hear and see Ishmael now, too.

And those of us of our community whose skin isn’t white, you know firsthand what it is to fear and to grieve, you, most of all, can help us all hear  and see Ishmael’s cries in the wilderness right now.

Because that’s what’s missing in the story from Genesis today, Ishmael’s voice. We hear Sarah and Abraham, Hagar, even God. But we don’t hear Ishmael as he’s thrown out of his family and left to die.

We need to hear him, and together we will.

Ishmael laughed. And God heard.

Ishmael means “God hears,” so God heard the one named “God hears” and saved him. God still hears Ishmael’s voice. God doesn’t throw anybody out of the family.

And following Christ, taking up our cross, means we learn to hear what God hears, see as God sees. We see and hear the Ishmaels who cry out as brothers, sisters, family. We listen together for what needs to die in us so that all might remain in the family, loved and safe.

And the good news is that this is all possible because of Christ’s resurrection. Resurrection life is poured into us in baptism, so as the old dies, the new is able to come. Paul says Christ is raised so that we all might walk in newness of life right now. For the sake of Ishmael. For the sake of the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen