“Churchcraft I: Radical Hospitality”

"Churchcraft I: Radical Hospitality"

9/6/09

Texts: 1 John 4:16b-21; Acts 8:26-38

1 John 4:16b-21

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Acts 8:26-38

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, "Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, "Go to that chariot and stay near it."
Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. "Do you understand what you are reading?" Philip asked.
"How can I," he said, "unless someone explains it to me?" So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
The eunuch was reading this passage of Scripture:
"He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before the shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth."
The eunuch asked Philip, "Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptized?" And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him.

I wonder if you have ever had the experience of realizing that God was calling you to undertake a particular task, or perhaps to go a particular place? Maybe the leading was quite clear. Or maybe you became aware of it over time, like a grain of sand in your mind, slowly becoming a pearl. If you have had that experience, then you know it can be unnerving and uplifting, a confirmation that ours is a God who knows us in a very particular way, enough to know our name and address, so to speak. And if you are one who has tried to respond to God’s leadings from time to time, I am willing to bet that at some point, you may have arrived somewhere, all dressed up and ready to serve - and wondered, “what am I doing here? Lord, if you are listening, some kind of sign would be nice. Exactly what am supposed to accomplish out here?”

Luke doesn’t say it in his Book of Acts, but I wonder if the story we heard today had such a moment in it for a man named Philip. Not the Apostle by that name, but the Philip we first met in Acts 6 - a new convert to the faith who was probably a Greek-speaking Jew. This Philip heard a call from the Lord to get himself down along the highway that leads from Jerusalem south to Gaza. Even today this is a bleak and arid route, a wilderness road, as Luke puts it. God seems to have been pretty specific in Philip’s leading: he’s supposed to arrive there at high noon, when not even the lizards are venturing out from under their shady rocks. Maybe Philip wondered why he should go to such a bleak place at the worst possible time of day; if he did, Luke doesn’t tell us. We are simply told that Philip heard and Philip went.

It wasn’t long before Philip heard a commotion. From over the hill came the ancient equivalent of a high-speed motorcade: a royal chariot, drawn by armored horses. In it are several resplendent archers, escorting a well-dressed dignitary. Dark-skinned with startling white eyes and teeth, these are emissaries from the very edge of the known world. Philip would have had reason to be impressed with these Ethiopians, for in his day the dark skin and features of Africans were considered beautiful and exotic. (Strange as it sounds to modern ears, prejudices against darker people actually would not emerge until some 1,400 years later, and in any case would have made no sense to the Greeks and Romans.) At such a sight in the remote wilderness, Philip may have instinctively stepped aside in awe and deference.

You know, even apart from the presence of armed guards, there are some pretty good reasons why Philip might have kept to himself and let that Ethiopian pass by. Despite his obvious status and wealth, the Ethiopian was just as obviously a foreigner, one forbidden to enter the inner courts of the Jewish Temple. What’s more, he is not what to a Jew like Philip would have seemed like a real man: he is a eunuch, a person whose physical abnormality (according to the law of Deuteronomy Ch. 23) excluded him from ever becoming a Jew. The Ethiopian is racially, culturally, physically different, and very easily left alone. In a moment, the chariot will be gone, and Philip will be left with the vague question, “that, Lord? Was that why you brought me out here?”

Of course, Luke says that Philip does not step back. He hears a voice within whisper to him, “Philip, you step up to that chariot and run along beside it.” Again, Philip hears, and Philip goes. I expect when he did so, he noticed the archers’ eyes locking onto him, a lone nutcase in the wilderness coming at them, their hands at their quivers, ready for trouble. But close is where Philip has to be, in order to hear the Ethiopian reading aloud from Isaiah and wondering at the poetic mystery in the prophet’s words. A light goes on in Philip’s mind. “Do you know what you are reading?” he asks. “How can I,” the Ethiopian responds, “unless someone guides me?”

The rest, as they say, is history! And yet it so easily could have been otherwise: Philip watching the dust settle, wisely avoiding the risk of coming in close. How easy for Philip to resist that inner whisper to go and run alongside that chariot. We know this caution: plenty of times we have pushed back against some quiet leading, some whisper to reach out to another for the sake of the Good News of Jesus Christ. We do it all the time. Imagine some Ethiopian appearing today in our packed parking lot. Oh, he would not be riding in a chariot, of course. He would pull up in a Dodge minivan. Perhaps he would not be a he, but a young woman, entering our worship space for the first time. In each hand, she holds that of her hastily-dressed little ones. A neighbor has told her the music at St. Mark’s is terrific; she has also heard from a friend at work, who has a son who once came here for Thursday night tutoring.

Now she stands in our Narthex; someone said hello to her at the door, another gave her a bulletin. She nervously scans the heads of those seated in the sanctuary; she knows no one. Not many seats seem open; she wonders if she will inadvertently sit in somebody else’s place and offend them. When at last the music starts, it is admittedly a bit of a relief to her. For now she can be anonymous, this single mother raising two on her own since her husband left a few months ago.

The last. thing she is to God, of course, is anonymous. For our Lord knows her quiet anxiety, her pain, her continual fear of financial disaster, and above all, her sense of loneliness. The last thing this woman on the edge of faith, on the edge of health, on the edge of loss needs is anonymity. She settles down in the back pew, her kids beginning to color their children’s bulletins. The service begins.

You tell me: will she remain anonymous? Will she? Or will she actually meet another person, who comes up alongside, as Philip once did? Certainly she’ll see here a friendly church, lots of smiles as others are greeting familiar faces. Everybody, of course, wants to be part of a friendly church. No one seeking a church is looking for an unfriendly one! Most churches are friendly - once you are in.

But then there are some churches - a smaller number, I am afraid - in which there is this Spirit that called Philip to come up alongside the stranger. Perhaps you have heard it said before: this Spirit calls us to be more than a friendly church; this Spirit enables us to become an hospitable church. Hospitality implies something intentional, not “natural” in the sense of doing what comes easily. Hospitality is what I call “Churchcraft,” part of our basic job description. Over the next four Sundays, we’ll be examining a different aspect of Churchcraft - but today, we begin with hospitality, because it involves a recognition that our church exists not to promote our own well-being and satisfaction, but rather to bear witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ to others.

That we don’t intentionally exclude anyone culturally, racially or socially different (like the Ethiopian eunuch) is certainly a good thing, but the question really is: do we act, all of us, to make sure that our circle of Christian fellowship is always open to the stranger? Hospitality, radical, Spirit-led hospitality, means constant awareness of the one who is not yet part of our family, continued attentiveness to the experience of first-time and repeat visitors to our church.

This isn’t easy. What IS easy is going to church with our own needs in mind. Then we can sit back and presume it’s somebody else’s job to take the initiative to ask the name that goes with an unfamiliar face. We could reassure ourselves that we’re bad with names and faces, leave it to the more naturally outgoing folks, like Pency, Jim, Mona. But then we remember Philip, out on that wilderness road. He heard the whisper, and he went to the stranger. This is not the work of a committee; it is an attitude of gratitude, the genuine delight we take in seeing someone who may become a new brother or sister in Christ. We need to hold to the memory of what it was like when we, too, were strangers in this church, what Sunday morning looks like to someone who wonders: Where do I park? Which door do I enter? What do I do with my kids? We must learn to examine every aspect of our life together, every activity with fresh eyes, hospitable eyes, as if we were the stranger who came lately.

But what if you’re a visitor today, hearing this more-practical-than-usual sermon that sounds a bit like in-house communication? Is there some Good News in all of this for you? The Good News is that this whisper in the desert has been breathed into St. Mark’s United Methodist Church! We really do love one another here because God first loved us. We break bread together at table open to all God’s children. Every week, we reach out to others in Christ’s name. Now, we’re not as good at it as we will be, and (truth be told) some of us are nowhere near as involved as we need to be. But we are on the way, and on behalf of this congregation I say to you: you, too, can find a place here, exactly because you have found a place in the heart of God. God knows you by name, values you, among everyone, and if for this reason alone, you are welcome here.

As for those of us in our accustomed places, let us never forget that what we enjoy, everyone in the Roanoke Valley needs. More important to the visitor than the music or the sermon is the fact that they actually met someone here. So remember Philip, who heard, and went up alongside. Lay aside fear, do what is NOT natural, and step right up to the chariot. Who knows: perhaps your gesture will be the one thing to bring that person back. And the rest, as they say, is the future.

Amen.