come as you are

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

ORDINARY SUNDAY 13 (JUNE 28^th) 2020

READINGS:

Genesis 22: 1-14

Psalm 13

Romans 6: 12-23

Matthew 10: 40-42

‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. ⁴¹ 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; ⁴² 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.’

In a passage peculiar to Matthew, Jesus draws a long bow. In theological terms John’s gospel-account makes it clear that the absolute correlation between the words and the actions of Jesus – to the extent that John calls him “Word” – was the hallmark of his public ministry. The same can be said of few of the rest of us. I wrestle almost daily with the credibility gap between the ideals I espouse and the realities I practise, and quietly thank God for the rites of confession that are a part of our routines of worship. We have sinned in thought, word, and action, we solemnly intone, sometimes adding the observation “in what we have done and in what we have left undone.” Amen, alas.

The integrity of Jesus, even reaching to his execution and beyond, was such that his earliest followers could accept Matthew’s recounting of the words we just heard: “whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,” welcomes God. The hope Jesus expresses is that to receive his followers, too, was to receive him and therefore to receive God and the grace which is God’s primary word of welcome: “come, receive.” Few of us, and probably few even of the first followers of Jesus in the New Testament era, would claim to be perfect renditions of Jesus or his gospel. In John’s gospel-account though we see the clear belief of Jesus that the primary work of the Spirit was to make all that we need of Jesus to be available to his followers throughout space and time. We may not be very good bearers of the gospel or its Christ, the New Testament writers seem to indicate, but we are the ones God has called to the task.

Which, I emphasize each time I refer to it, does not mean that those who don’t share our faith or our gospel are in some way irretrievably lost, as so many Christians seem to emphasize. Whatever “lost” means in the context of Christianity, it is not the final word emanating from the mouth of the creating, redeeming loving God. But more of that another time.

So, according to Matthew’s account, to welcome Jesus is to welcome the gospel – and to welcome the gospel is to welcome Jesus. To welcome gospel is to hear and receive God’s word of grace. God’s welcome: “come as you are” as Loretto sister Deidre Brown wrote in her hymn popular in the 1980s:

Come as you are, that’s how I love you

Come as you are, trust me again

Nothing can change, the love that I bear you

All will be well, just come as you are.

But Matthew wants to push the point further in his recording of Jesus’ words. We come, but there’s also a sense in which we become. As I often note though I have long since lost the source, it has been James K. Baxter who made this powerfully clear: he speaks of us becoming the body and blood of Christ in the world into which we are called. Matthew might want to put it in a different way: we become a (but not, I think “the”) vehicle, a channel of grace through which God exercises grace, love, hospitality. I often fail abysmally, yet even so … even so we are those God has touched and commanded to share Christlove with the world around us, however abysmally.

Yet how? I fear not only as individuals but as Church we do it poorly. We are called to exercise the almost unlimited embrace, the almost unlimited hospitality of God.  I say “almost” because in the New Testament there are one or two hints of a bridge too far. But they are not the bridge too far so often drawn by the church. The lines in the sand are not the skin-colour or clothing or theological correctnesses or sexual choices or impetuses of the people we are called to embrace and welcome. The one or two lines in the sand are drawn for those within the church whose behaviour reaches beyond the pale. Few in the New Testament are marked down in such a way: the boundaries of love and compassion are broad and wide indeed.

But we live in a very different age to that of Matthew. In some ways the centuries that dwell between us and the New Testament, are more unfamiliar still. For centuries we expected the world to tremble and obey. We’ve lost, and never should have had that expectation. Our Christian history, though sometimes not as bad as some critics will make out, is brutally scarred with misbehaviour, complacency, even predation (as the Royal Commission rightly but tragically reminds us). As a result, and rightly so, we are being forced back to the bedrock of our faith: our empty hands and words of welcome. 

Our task is to find out what we can offer and to offer it with such openness that we do become, as Jesus sought, one with him. Our task is to implore the Spirit to renew us in credibility, authenticity, simplicity. Our task is to learn again the languages of love: to learn graciousness and hospitality. To learn to the awe and the reverence for God, the sense of joy and delight in our encounters with God that have not altogether been the hallmark of Christian living through the centuries. To do this is to begin to “give a cup of cold water” to a society whose chemical addictions, cycles of suicide rates, of race- and gender- and sexuality-based intolerances suggest the thirst is great indeed. The task though begins and ends in prayer, and our turning again and again to the one who offers us the hospitalities of eternity in the first place.