Fr. Bill Carroll – The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 22, 2024
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes one such child…welcomes me.”
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Jesus says something similar in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. Referring to those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, or sick, as well as those who are homeless, refugees, and in prison, Jesus says “As you did it to the least of these, who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Elsewhere, Jesus makes a similar point about missionaries: “Whoever receives the one I have sent receives me.” We might say that children and other vulnerable people are missionaries. They evangelize us without saying a word. By their presence among us, they invite us to welcome Jesus.
This is the biblical basis for our baptismal promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.” In the Bible, God’s “preferential option for the poor” is based on their need for help. In this world, to be poor is to face the risk of premature death. According to Psalm 68, in words echoed by many of the prophets, God is the “father of the fatherless, the defender of widows and orphans.” In the Book of Exodus, God chooses Israel, not because they are a great nation, but because they are oppressed and far from home. In the Torah, God specifically connects the abuse of widows and orphans with the sin of idolatry and the mistreatment of foreigners:
Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction.
You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry.
As Christians, we are commanded to seek and serve Christ in all persons. And we are to look for him especially in children and the poor.
But neither children nor poor people should be romanticized. Anyone who has ever worked with either knows that they can be just as difficult as the rest of us. And yet, they bear the sins of our society in a unique way. In particular, our greed and our violence fall disproportionately on their shoulders..
As the Catechism teaches, we are created to live in harmony: with God, each other, and the earth. As followers of Jesus, we are called to restore the community of creation, which we have broken through our violence and sin. And it’s for this reason that we promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
As I was preparing to preach today, I was reminded of our son’s first school in Athens, Ohio. Beacon School is run by that state’s Department of Developmental Disabilities. There are special needs classrooms in all the public schools there, but Beacon is one-hundred-percent for special education. It has the facilities and the trained staff needed to educate children with the most pressing physical, emotional, and developmental needs.
One of the things that always impressed me about Beacon is how each member of the staff (and not just the teachers and aides in Danny’s room), greeted him by name. They were always genuinely glad to see him.
It takes a lot of effort to instill this kind of active hospitality throughout an entire community. We could learn a lot from Beacon School as we strive to share God’s hospitality at this church. Hospitality is a revolutionary virtue. By it, we welcome strangers into our lives. We create safe spaces for other people to be themselves. We welcome them into new homes and new communities, without imposing our agendas on them.
Hospitality is a bit like God’s creation of the world. As one of my teachers, Kathryn Tanner, argues, God creates the world in its own distinctive realty. And God creates people in all our variety and differences. God lets us be. Without competing with us. Without forcing us. God allows us to be who we are.
Assimilation is the deadly enemy of biblical hospitality. So too is xenophobia, the fear of strangers and foreigners. Indeed, the Greek word for hospitality (in the Bible and elsewhere) is philoxenia, “friendship with strangers.” We can relate to strangers either by fear or by love. For Christians, strangers are just neighbors that we haven’t met yet.
We are changed when we meet new people. The differences they bring challenge us to stretch and grow. But not in the ways that coercive models of cultural assimilation would suggest. Rather, new friends help us to become more fully ourselves. We enrich one another. Without ceasing to be who we are, we are joined together as one.
Children are also strangers. When they arrive, they change everything. And welcoming them, like welcoming the Lord himself, changes us. Our families must adapt as we grow to make room for a child. Children bring blessings, but also grief. They bring joy, mixed with stress and heartache. That’s true of any relationship worth having.
But a child will not flourish unless they receive a loving welcome. That’s one of the reasons for the service in our Prayer Book entitled “A Thanksgiving for the Birth or Adoption of a Child.” This service frames the entry of a child into a family in terms of Christian love and hospitality.
How do we welcome children and other strangers? How do we create community with the little ones whom Jesus loves? Some of us are very good at doing exactly that. But (too often) those who are hungry, naked, thirsty, or sick (and those who are prisoners or strangers), find little welcome among us. They meet with doors slammed shut–if not clenched fists or a loaded gun. And many of these same people (the poorest and most vulnerable in fact) are children and their mothers.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus questions what it means to be powerful. He asks a question of every individual, every church, and every nation. Those who are great in his community, he says, are those who serve our neighbors. God’s Kingdom, he insists, is found in hospitality and love.
And so, he places a child in the midst of us, as a sign of those we must serve. And he tells us: “Whoever welcomes one such child…welcomes me.”
Amen.