The Kingdom of God is like Turpin Christmas Eve—A Sermon on Hospitality

I preached this sermon to the good people of Lutheran Church of the Incarnation, as part of continued drop-in sabbatical coverage for their pastor.

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Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Last week, I was in my Southern California hometown of Encinitas with my fiancé and our families, doing some wedding planning and celebrating, including a bridal shower hosted by my aunts. There were seven of us staying at my parents’ house—my mom and dad, me, Jonathan, Jonathan’s mom and dad, and Jonathan’s brother. My dad kept laughing as we filled up the dishwasher, again, that there was a lot more action in the kitchen with 7 eaters instead of their usual 2. It was a fun week, packed with appointments but also with plenty of scheduled time to sit in the backyard and look at the ocean. We ate a lot of homemade guacamole. My mom knows how to host.

My mom and her mom (and by extension my aunts)  are who taught me about hospitality. Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, graduations, weddings, births, deaths, every occasion has been honored and celebrated in their homes, with our entire extended family gathered in from all over the place.

When we say “all are welcome” we’re not kidding—everybody is welcome any time, any place, whether we were expecting you or not. We’ll pull up a chair, no worries. We were already cooking way more food than remotely necessary, so there’s plenty to spare. We are like this, because we would never want someone to arrive and feel like they weren’t important. We work behind the scenes to ensure that there’s always plenty, and all contingencies have been accounted for.

We all pitch in to make this possible—on Christmas Eve, for example, Aunt Jackie makes the mashed potatoes, Uncle Greg keeps tabs on the meat, I bring the pies, Uncle Mark plays Santa, my dad pours the wine, my teen cousins fill the water glasses, my Aunt Cathy blesses the meal, the young adult cousins wrangle the babies, my brother leads the carol-singing...

Sure, we could function without one of these, but we’d be out of sorts. Since we’ve all put the evening together, we all revel in the chaos of all the kiddos running wild during the gift exchange, and the reminiscences of our 92-year-old traditions. Every Christmas Eve, I think, “the kingdom of God is like this.”

I think that for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I would love to spend eternity with my all my favorite people. But I especially think that the kingdom of God is like Turpin Family Christmas Eve because everyone has a place in it. Everyone who is there is loved and cherished, and their contribution to the success of the evening—whether that’s preparing food, or exchanging gifts, or bouncing a baby cousin while his mom scarfs down her spanakopita, or washing the dishes at the end!—no matter how small, is significant. 

Our gratitude on Christmas Eve is intertwined, as we all worked and played together to celebrate. The house at which it’s hosted is certainly a key part of the equation, but it would be an empty house if we weren’t there together. Those who cooked the meal are highly valued, but they’d be wasting their time if there was no one there to eat it. And those who make their way through the kitchen at the exact right moment to hand Aunt Suzanne the potholder she needs are the unsung heroes of the feast.

I don’t know if this sounds like Christmas Eve at your house—but I pray that it is at least a familiar scene. I don’t know what role you play in the foreground or background of your community life, but since you’re here today, I know you at least have one. In our gospel lesson for this morning, Jesus is speaking right to this. It’s so short and sweet, I’m just going to read it out to you again.

It is written: "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” (Matthew 10:40-42).

When we show hospitality to our siblings in Christ, we show hospitality to Christ himself. These few words call to mind some more famous words from the Gospel According to Matthew. The righteous ask Jesus, “‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’” and Jesus answered, “‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:37-40).

When we show hospitality to our siblings in Christ, we show hospitality to Christ himself. Here at LCI, you may have a hospitality committee, or something of that nature. Some good folks who make sure that visitors are welcome—especially visiting pastors—and when there’s an event of some kind, they’re making it happen. Perhaps you are part of this committee, or perhaps several different groups of folks share these responsibilities.  

Whatever you are doing, here, to bring about the kingdom of God, it is part of the mission and you are important. If you are pouring the coffee after the service, you are important. If you are registering kids for day camp, you are important. If you are formatting the name tags, you are important. If you are vacuuming the fellowship hall, you are important. If you are updating the website, you are important. If you are folding the bulletins, you are important. If you are tuning the piano, you are important. All of the good work that happens “behind the scenes” in the church is important.

It can feel sometimes like the heavy lifting is done by the pastors, or the bishops, or the people on the synod staff. While all those are doing good and necessary work, “the reward is not simply for the preachers and prophets among us but also for those whose calling is simply to pour the drinks and play the host.” [1] Every piece of the puzzle is critical.

And it doesn’t stop here at church! I saw someone online this week call this the gospel of “five welcomes and five whoevers.” What five welcomes can we offer? To which five whoevers? There are some types of welcome and some types of whoevers that we’re much more comfortable with than others. This plays out on every scale—from visitors at church to immigrants to the United States.

All of us have opportunities to show hospitality to our loved ones and to strangers every day as we go about our lives. We can chose to be open to engaging new kinds of people in new kinds of ways, or we can be closed off. We can choose to share of what we have, or we can hoard it. We can engage our broader communities—the city of Davis, the university, the state of California—to stand for more welcome, more often, for more whoevers.

It is not necessary to do this in big and flashy ways. Our work of hospitality need not be so consequential that it makes the front page of the newspaper every week in order to advance the work of God’s kingdom. “The divine mission is as much about the unnamed people who provide a thirsty servant a cold drink of water as the familiar names that dot the pages of church histories." [1] 

You are important. Your work is meaningful. Everyone around you is important, and the work of everyone around you is meaningful. We are all in this together, working to bring about the reign of God. Each and every contribution is valuable. Each and every person is valuable. This value is not earned or meted out in such a way that anyone is ever exchanging their value for the value of another. Your belovedness comes to you direct from the source, from God your creator. Your life in this community—at LCI, and in your family, and in the work you do or the school you’re in or the retirement you enjoy—is yours because you are God’s.

Truly, I tell you. Amen.

Fear/Hope -- Matthew 2:1-12

Grace and peace from God our creator, hope in our redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Today, the eleventh day of Christmas, is the Sunday on which we celebrate the holy day that teeechnically takes place tomorrow—the Epiphany of our Lord! Epiphany is about two things. Two small words with big consequences.

First, let’s talk about fear. Your fear can take you a lot of places you don’t want to go—or hold you back from great things. In the Christmas story, a few people are afraid—Mary, Joseph, the shepherds—but the story goes that angels come to them, proclaiming, “do not fear!” Wouldn’t that be helpful, if you got into a serious predicament and an angel would just hop in and remind you not to fear? Although, I’d probably be a little more like the shepherds and be afraid of the angels, on top of the fear I already had. So much for that.

King Herod, in our story this morning, is squarely in the fear category. He has heard through the grape vine that a baby has been born that may or may not be a king of some kind. This is confusing and surprising, so Herod called his favorite wise men for some assistance. They told him when and where this child had been born; Herod sent them to see this baby king and report back. Out of fear, Herod feels that his kingship, his power, his glory, is going to be usurped, some day, by a child who has just been born.

I’m not totally sure what the minimum age was for the King of Judea, but even if we wager conservatively that it’s 15 years old, Herod has about 14 years and 364 days to figure out how to keep his crown, and, frankly, he’ll probably die by some other force in that amount of time anyway, since he was almost 70 years old when Jesus was born. Spoiler alert: he dies of kidney failure like five years later.

But! When the wise men do not return—influenced by yet another angel in a dream, who tells them to go home by a different road, luckily—Herod is debilitated by fear, again. So afraid of his power being usurped a generation later, he has every child around Jesus’ age murdered, just to be safe.

I don’t think that you’ve ever decided, out of fear, to have your nation’s children murdered—I don’t think any of us in this room have Herod’s authority on that kind of thing. But what have we allowed ourselves to do out of fear? What rash decisions have we made that, upon further reflection, were far outside the scope of what was necessary? What accusations have we wildly thrown? When have we come to not even recognize ourselves? Fear is very real.

There’s a Presbyterian preacher named John Buchanan who deeply inspires me. My favorite thing he ever wrote has a lot to say about fear. He says that the reason the Bible talks so much about fear (the shepherds fear the angels; the disciples fear the consequences of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem; and in this morning’s Isaiah text, the prophet speaks of weak hands and feeble knees—his people are afraid) is because “fear is such an enemy of life. It’s hard to love when you’re afraid. It’s hard to care passionately about anything when you’re afraid. It’s impossible to be joyful about anything when you’re afraid. Fear limits life, constrains life, pollutes life.”

In last week’s Gospel, from the story according to John, we heard it proclaimed that a light has shined in the darkness! It hearkened back to when God’s voice moved over the waters, over the chaos of the deep, and when there, too, a light shined. But just before that light, and surrounding that light, there is, of course, darkness. We do not turn on a light in an already well-lit space. The light of Christ does not come into a world already saturated by brightness, but instead comes into an immeasurable darkness.

There is plenty to fear in the world around us, and we do a good job of living in fear, scarcity, and hopelessness. But the other small world with big consequences that shows up on this the Epiphany of our Lord is hope. We might think of hope as being passive—we say that we hope something for someone when the situation is beyond our control: hope you do well on that math test! Hope you like your new haircut! Hope it doesn’t rain on your beach day! But hope is not passive. Hope is living and breathing and working hard. Hope is what carries us through. This story of the hope of the life of a child is what carries us through.

There’s a movie out right now called Saving Mr. Banks—it’s the story of the complications that surrounded making of the film Mary Poppins. I won’t spoil anything for you, I don’t think, by mentioning this beautiful line said by Tom Hanks, who plays Walt Disney. He’s talking to PL Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, explaining what’s so important about telling her story. He says that his job is to create hope with imagination because, “That’s what we storytellers do. We instill hope again and again and again.” That’s why we tell this same story year after year—the story never gets old because our need for hope in the midst of our despair never ends.

Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany are seasons that pay particular attention to the relationship between darkness and light, despair and hope. Christmas proclaimed the presence of the light. Epiphany calls us to spread the light on the journey.

And how? The best way I have heard it said is through the words of the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, one of my favorite civil rights activists. He wrote a short, powerful poem called the Work of Christmas, and I’d just like to read it to you.

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among brothers,

To make music in the heart.

That’s where we go from here. There’s something in this call for everyone. You have the gifts and skills required to either find the lost, or heal the broken, or feed the hungry, or release the prisoner, or rebuild the nations, or bring peace among brothers, or make music in the heart.

If you thought about it long enough, you probably already work toward more than one of those things. It is because you have been filled with the light of the Christ that you can go forward, hopeful, into a world full of people who feel defeated. Our ability to hold on to hope actually, physically, literally, deeply, fully shapes the options we have for the future.

If we do not have hope that our participation in the life of this world has any bearing on its improvement, why would we ever act? Why would we ever consider the consequences of our actions? It is our call to live in the hope of the birth of the child, the life of the man, Jesus, the death and resurrection and ascension of the Christ. “The future of humanity lies in the hands of those who are strong enough to provide coming generations with reasons for living and hoping.”

John Buchanan writes that, “to live hopefully is to work hard; to hope relentlessly is to throw yourself into the struggle for the realization of hope. To hope for justice and peace is to work for it. To hope for a time when all the children are fed is to do more than complain about the irony of hungry children in this land of abundance, it is to find some children to feed. Peace, we are regularly reminded, is hard work. Hope lives in the midst of darkness in every age. It will not be defeated, silenced, or extinguished. The light that is coming into the world shines in the darkness, after all, and the darkness has not and will not overcome it.”

Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Light Shines in the Darkness -- John 1:1-14

There's a temptation, I think, when you're the intern and you're asked to preach on Christmas morning, to try and preach the best ever Christmas sermon. To try and craft some perfect words that will somehow be all things to all people. A sermon that people who have been attending this church for decades, months, weeks, or just this morning alone, will feel encapsulates the spirit of Christmas.

And in doing so I began to wonder just how we have come to be here at this time on this day for this purpose. We have gathered here for centuries to tell each other an old, old story. To tell each other of a young woman who travelled many miles and gave birth to a baby boy, simultaneously just like and unlike every other child who has ever been born. To tell each other of the shepherds and the wise men and the innkeepers and the animals. To tell each other of the little town of Bethlehem and the coming Emmanuel on that silent, holy night.

We come together on this holy morning to sing with gusto my mother's favorite hymn -- joy to the world! The lord is come! Our God has come to be with us again this morning. Our God has shown such love for us that God would participate so fully in our human experience as to walk among us on this, our broken earth. To come into our world in the humblest of ways—in a lowly manger—and to leave it in the humblest of ways—hanging on a cross.

We celebrate this morning not just the old story of the birth of a baby. Because it is not just the birth of Jesus of Nazareth that we as the people of Christ have gathered for centuries to proclaim. It is the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus the Christ that brings us to this table. It is the other old stories of Jesus and his friends that we will tell all year, year after year, that we have begun to tell anew in this Christmas season.

For our God came among us those many years ago, and our God walks among us now. Christ comes to us each time we eat and drink with our friends in memory of him. Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we celebrate the birth and the death of this God-with-us.

There’s another temptation at Christmastime, I think, to sort of gloss over the parts of the story that aren’t rosy and joyful. Like the part where Joseph’s family was so morally outraged that, rather than take him and his very pregnant fiancée Mary into their homes in Bethlehem, they allowed them to be relegated to a barn.

And we look at all these adorable nativity scenes with glowing candlelight and soft hay and quietly mooing cows…as though any one has ever been in a barn that smelled good or was comfy to sleep on the floor of or had quiet animals in it. It’s more likely that this experience was smelly and dirty and noisy. Most of God’s glorious creation is smelly and dirty and noisy, frankly.

And upon Jesus’ smelly, dirty, noisy entrance into this world, we also tend to forget just why it is that God has come to dwell with us. The Christ child is not born into a utopian society just so that God can revel in the human experience of perfection. We know that it is in fact quite the opposite.

Jesus is born into a world of injustice and political oppression and fear and violence and hunger. And he is born into a region with a ruler who orders the death of all of the children his age—for fear that this “newborn king” could usurp the throne.

Our gospel text for this morning even reminds us that Jesus came into a world in which his own people did not accept him. The rosy-cheeked child we envision in the glowing manger this morning will, a few decades later, be crucified for his crimes against the empire.

But we don’t like to talk about that. Because Christmas for our culture has become sentimental and glitzy and more about Santa Claus and wrapping paper than it is about the beginning of the most important story ever told.

Some of our most beloved Christmas songs hearken to the reality of the birth of Jesus. “O Come O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile,” we sing. “From depths of hell thy people save and give us victory over the grave.” Jesus came into a world that needed saving. He didn’t just come to us to change the whole way our world worked because God felt like it, or because whatever we were doing needed a little revision. The Christ child was born into a world that was desperate for change. And God walks among us today in a world that is still desperate for change.

The Gospel according to John tells us that a light shines in this darkness, and that darkness shall not overcome it. From the very beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God, it’s written. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld its glory. This tiny, smelly, noisy, dirty, baby boy is the Word made flesh.

On that holy night, that baby boy began to change the world. The story goes that a star shined brightly above his birthplace, so that all could know their newborn king had come. Just hours after his birth, people began to come from miles around to simply be in his presence.  And he grew up to teach us to love our God and love one another. He grew up to teach us to pray for our enemies and to care for those who are in need. He grew up to speak truth to power and challenge the oppressor. He grew up to revolutionize a society and reform a people. He grew up to bring light to those who sit in darkness. And we celebrate all of this anew this morning.

And there are many songs we know and love that speak to this. “A thrill of hope,” we sing, “the weary world rejoices for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” This morning is that new and glorious one. Each morning, from now on, is new and glorious.

And so as we go on our way rejoicing this morning, despite what advertisers would tell us, the Christmas season has not come to an end this day. This morning we have, like the shepherds, been told a very important story. And, like the shepherds, we will go out and tell to others what has been told to us about this child -- and we will all be amazed.

We will all be amazed at the power of God to bring good news to a weary world. We will be amazed at the power of God to show up in the unlikeliest of places and the unlikeliest of people. We will be amazed by the power of God to live and breathe among us all those centuries ago and even to this day. We will be amazed by the power of God to draw us together, again and again, to this old book, these ancient rituals, this simple bread and cup -- to be always making us new.

Merry Christmas! Amen.