All Are Welcome—A Sermon on Love, in Sadness

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.

It was, um, sparsely attended, but we did our first Tea-ology Tuesday on Facebook Live yesterday. We’ll be back every Tuesday for the foreseeable future, at 2pm, talking for a few minutes about the scripture for that week. A little teaser, if you will. And it’s a place for you to ask questions about the reading or about whatever other theological thing you’re wondering about, frankly. If you’ve been part of Bible Study or book group here at The Belfry, you know that we are a tangential people.

Of the scripture laid out in the lectionary for this Fourth Wednesday after the Epiphany, the most relevant one, in my professional opinion, was the letter from Paul to the church at Corinth. So I talked about that. You can go watch the video later if you really want to, but also we’re just going to talk about it now, and you’re already here. [Hey, reader. You can go watch that video on The Belfry’s Facebook page if you are so inclined. Also, next week’s Tea-ology Tuesday is live at 2pm, if you want to get in on the fun.]

This letter is one of the more famous pieces of the New Testament. If you’ve ever been to an even vaguely Christian wedding, you’ve probably heard these words. Love is patient, love is kind. It is beautiful.

We usually, though, do not read this entire passage in its context when we read it at weddings. The beginning is my favorite part. It’s so over the top! It is written, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor 13:1). Basically, we can say all sorts of things, but if we don’t back it up with love, we’re just making noise.

It continues: “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13:2). The Apostle Paul had a flair for the dramatic. “If I give away my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor 13:3). We can do all the things we think are right, but for all the wrong reasons.

And furthermore, we may claim that we are doing something out of love, but we may be wrong about that. We talk about love a lot in church and in our wider culture. But do we really know what we’re talking about? Is the cheap chocolate of Valentine’s Day really the same thing as the love we share as Christians? Not even close.

For Christians, Paul insists, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor 13:4-8a).

It is easy to understand why people want this read at their wedding. It’s beautiful. And certainly a worthy goal for two people in a relationship.

February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month. I’m not sure any of you are still teens, but it bears repeating. “Nearly 1.5 million high school students experience physical abuse from a dating partner in a single year. Girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence.” Members of the LGBTQ community experience intimate partner violence at rates equal to or higher than their heterosexual peers. People in these relationships are being lied to by their partners when their partners say they love them. Love is never violent. Love never controls or dominates without consent.

You are a beloved child of God, and no one who actually loves you will actively cause you physical, emotional, or spiritual harm. You are a beloved child of God, and you therefore must not cause physical, emotional, or spiritual harm to someone you love.

If someone you know is in a relationship that you see as controlling, or weird, or potentially dangerous in any way, there is a lot you can do to help. CARE, the Center for Advocacy, Resources, and Education on campus is an important place to start. I am also a place you can start. I want you to know that you can trust me, and your friends can trust me. In Christian community, this is part of what we mean when we say we love our neighbors. We support one another, pray for one another, and tell each other the truth.

Some members of the UC Davis community recently told the truth about some harmful “love” they were receiving. They were part of a ministry where leadership opportunities for LGBTQ folks were not the same as for other folks. They were expected to suppress their attractions and identities, and not openly love who they love. They were expected to receive the concerns of the staff with grace, and understand that they were loved, but loved differently. This is just noise.

It is important, in our work of welcome, to be inclusive of all people. It is also important, in moments like this, to be specific. Students and community members of every gender identity and expression and every sexual orientation are welcome here. If you consider yourself part of the LGBTQIA+ community, you are welcome here. If you are new to the discourse and do not know what those letters stand for, you are also welcome here. We are all in this together.

And when we say welcome, we do not mean welcome to sit on the sidelines. We mean welcome to receive communion, welcome to read scripture, welcome to play music, welcome to help cook dinner, welcome study the bible, welcome to come on retreats, welcome to nap on the couch, welcome to be free.

Last fall, Emily and Kenton drafted a statement, and the rest of the student leadership voted to adopt that statement, declaring The Belfry a Reconciling in Christ Community—a designation in the Lutheran church that means we do our best to welcome everyone into the family of God, especially our queer siblings. I am not going to read you the entire statement (though I can get you a copy of it if you would like), but I just want to highlight for you how it begins:

“The Belfry is comprised of a wide variety of people. We are diverse in passions, cultural background, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, ethnicity, body shape, artistic preferences, physical abilities, emotional maturity, educational goals and focuses, and we have different ideas on how best to change the world. In places where we lack diversity we strive for inclusion, openness, and welcome.  We actively welcome and affirm all people. No one is turned away from our community or our table.”

Each and every one of you is loved by God just as you are, in that chair right now. You were created to be that way, on purpose, with love. When God created the first creatures, God smiled—I presume—and called them good. And God did that over and over and over and over again, as each living being has come to walk, swim, fly, creep, and crawl on this earth. Including you. Beautiful, perfect, wonderful, complex, human you.

Welcome.

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.

Welcome!—A Sermon on Matthew, Ezekiel, and You

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.

Welcome! Welcome back! Welcome home! It’s so good to be here with y’all in our little chapel, making a joyful noise once again this year. We’ve just begun to share stories of summer and moving and new classes and already-changed schedules and new roommates and all of the thrills of a new quarter at UC Davis. I’m so excited about all the new-ness, but I’m also excited about the familiarity. I’m so happy to see new faces, and so happy to see returning faces. We have so much great stuff on the calendar for this year, and so much great stuff that will happen that we could never even plan for.

When I sat down at Peet’s coffee to start this sermon—like I do pretty much every time—I opened the lectionary in wonder, thinking, “What will the feast of St. Matthew say to us? What will we consider about welcome and new-ness and excitement?!” And I opened Ezekiel chapter 2 to God convincing a reluctant prophet to tell his people they’re in trouble. Oh, perfect! Nothing like a little lamentation and mourning and woe to kick off a school year!

The reason we’re reading this story today, though, isn’t because of the calamity that Ezekiel was supposed to prophesy. This is the Old Testament reading assigned to the Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, whom we celebrate today. Yep, that’s Matthew of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew gets his name from the word mathetes, which is Greek for “disciple.” His is the story of a disciple, just like any other. We don’t think he wrote this Gospel, but we think he contributed to it, and it includes his story, which we read today. We’ll get back to Ezekiel later.

You may have noticed that Matthew is a tax collector. We hear about tax collectors fairly often in Matthew’s gospel for this reason. Not because Jesus wants us to evade our taxes, but because Jesus wants us to take a long hard look at our empire. Because they were representatives of the empire, most folks were not about to cozy up to their neighborhood tax collector and invite them over for dinner.

But Jesus sees him in the tax booth and says “Follow me.” Not in a grand way, not in a “become my disciple” way—at least, not yet—but just, “hey, come here. Sit down for dinner with us, see what we’re about.” Matthew “sat at dinner in the house,” and “many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him” (v 10).

Looking around the table, Matthew absorbs the scene. There are people there who are like him. There are other tax collectors—he won’t even be the only one!—and there are people not usually invited to dine with important people. Jesus has mixed together people who are normally separated from one another, and maybe from everyone else. We know, now, in 2016, that this wasn’t how things were done in those days. Jesus got in a little bit of trouble here and there for welcoming the unwelcome.

Since today was the first day of classes, in the middle of a packed week here at UC Davis, you have probably heard the word “welcome” like 5 bagillion times. If you’re a first-year student, probably like 50 bagillion. I mean, I even made you sing about it.

Have you felt welcome? Have you entered into spaces where you felt comfortable? Where you felt like yourself? Where you felt like maybe a new-ish version of yourself? You, UC Davis edition. I sure hope so. And I especially hope one of those places was here, in our little yellow house.

College is full of incredible opportunities. You’ll learn all sorts of things and meet all sorts of people. You’ll go to class, most of the time; you’ll stay up super late with your roommate talking about the most random stuff; you’ll eat your body weight in pizza; you’ll check out some clubs and organizations; you’ll change your major, probably; you’ll move from place to place on your bicycle—which seems kind of unwieldy right now—and soon be amazed at how easy it is to find your way home.

In the middle of all of that, God will be with you. Here at the Belfry, we’ll be singing and praying and laughing and eating and learning and and questioning and maybe even answering. Maybe the Belfry is the place for you. Maybe not. Maybe you’ve checked your watch six times since I started speaking and you’re wondering if church is even close to what you want to do with your college life. That’s okay. You are welcome here.

You’re welcome here tonight, and you’re welcome here next week; you’re welcome here if you haven’t come back but it’s the end of the quarter and you decide to give it another shot. You’re welcome here when you read about another traumatic act of violence in the world and you need to process it with people of faith. And you’re welcome here when you suddenly realize during spring quarter that it’s Easter and you really want to shout HALLELUJAH with some folks. And you’re welcome here next fall when you try coming back, again. You are welcome here.

Let’s circle back to Ezekiel for a second. The section of the story we read may have felt long, but it was actually just one snippet—there’s more of pretty much the same on either side of the chunk we read. God saying, “Ezekiel, listen to me,” over and over again. Ezekiel doesn’t really have very many lines in this whole thing, but, from context clues, I don’t think God would have repeated Godself quite so hard if Ezekiel had listened the first time.

Luckily for us, God doesn’t mind saying the same thing to us over and over again. Luckily for us, the stories we read in the Bible—like this one, with Matthew—remind us, over and over, that we’re welcome. Luckily for us, we gather at the table together, as a community of reluctant prophets and tax-collectors-turned-disciples and everybody in between.

If that’s not the story you know—if the story you’ve been told is that you don’t deserve to be here, or that you aren’t good enough—well, let me be so privileged to be the first to proclaim that you are. You, whoever you are, are a beloved child of God. Nothing you did and nothing you will do changes the love God has for you. You’re in. We’re in. Everybody’s in. Since we’re in, we’re free. Free to live and love and try and fail and learn and grow and laugh and cry and sin and doubt and wonder and celebrate and leave and return and rest easy in the grace of God.

It’s the first day of school, you’ve got enough on your plate. Rest easy, dear ones. You are welcome here.