Let mutual love continue.Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. [Epistle to the Hebrews 13.1-3]

There was a season in many Church traditions, where we offered the elements of communion with as much expedience as possible. Tiny, symmetrical cubes of post-crust white bread, accompanying thimbles of grape juice.  

Moreover, if the bread was prepared many hours before, it could disintegrate when too much enthusiasm was exhibited by those receiving.

What is communicated when we speak of God’s hospitality, then offer the elements in such an astringent way? The body and blood of Christ, for you…

The central act of our shared lives is the worship of an extravagant, generous God; when the sacraments are measured out so carefully, communion can almost become a dissociative exercise.

The hospitality of God is measured in the gift of Jesus Christ, by which any constraints of expedience or implied risk are rendered meaningless in comparison.

Where does this leave our hospitality, in worship and beyond?

When we baptise, there needs to be an abundance of water, particularly when drought is integral to our experience of life in Australia.

When we break bread and share wine, imagine there being sufficient so that anyone hungry for food and justice can come for a second and third helping, whether they are the host, or receiving for the first time.

The hospitality we offer to strangers will be influenced by the God we worship, to whom we are discipled. If baptism is measured with an eye dropper, and communion with a laser level, our welcome to strangers and guests will be similarly disabled.

We can mistake hospitality for the tolerance shown an unwelcome visitor. Hospitality is not “allowing someone to enter our perimeter”, but the welcome of a kettle boiling, and a chair made ready.

The author of Hebrews is probably making reference to some Old Testament stories, where holy visitors (angels?) make surprise appearances to Sarah and Abraham, and soon afterwards to Lot, who lived in Sodom. The angels received generous hospitality in both places, even to the extent of Lot protecting his guests from the assault of other men in the city. Sodom’s sinfulness is the failure of its hospitality, its violence towards those in need.

This is more than tolerance, more than welcome; it is generosity and safety. Lot acts as host, even at risk to himself – and his family.

We are called into “embedded” ministry, where we identify with those who are suffering, as though we are suffering ourselves.  This identity is the reason we offer hospitality, because we know what it means to be hungry, to value shelter, to need the care of others.

Remembering others is not reduced to the short, uncomfortable stanza during the Intercessory Prayers. It is reshaping our action and our worship around those who are tortured and imprisoned. It is breaking bread, acknowledging the generosity of God by whom our daily bread is given and, in the same moment, naming the brokenness of lives and bodies and communities and cities.

Remembering is also the prophetic assertion that this suffering is not the entire story told in Jesus Christ. Our identity with those who suffer, the reason we serve others, is our affirmation that justice and forgiveness – and resurrection – are the inherent consequence of being named and loved by God.

We wait for the sounds of God
and the sounds of the sacrament:
the breaking of the bread
and the gushing of the wine
the pain of sorrow and the pulse of hope
the echo of our name and the bread in our teeth
a cup on our lips and breathing at our side
as we wait for the sounds of God
the breaking of the bread
and the gushing of the wine.                        (Gary Trompf, “Your Will be Done”)

In the hope of the Spirit’s breath, we remember forward that God is not done. God is not yet done.

And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”          [Luke’s Gospel 13.11-14]

As I prepared to write this piece, I remembered something. I had an old friend who, after watching Dead Poets’ Society, sided with the principal.  

Just last week, we considered the division Jesus brings. Indeed, Jesus seemed pretty keen on the provocative and conflicted implications of his ministry.

When we explore those words of Jesus, we can imagine that the conflict might arise due to sermons challenging the authorities, or asking people to forgive each other, or even to love enemies.

However, when a person is healed? Really?

That a woman, unwell since Jesus was completing his final year of high school, has to wait until Monday? A woman is restored, and the first response – from the leader of the faith community – is complaint?

A person is set free, and the liberation is regarded as “work”, and not the shalom for which people hunger, and of which the prophets speak. As we frequently experience in the Jesus stories, the wonder of healing and restoration is less pronounced than the reaction of crowds and clergy.

We hear the crowds murmur, and the theologians criticise as tax collectors reimburse their victims, and people crippled with possession are set free. A woman anoints Jesus’ feet with tears and perfume; Jesus offers gifts in return, the blessing of forgiveness and peace. All his hosts have to offer are judgment and slander. A blind man cries out to Jesus, and the crowd seeks to jostle him into silence.

“O, captain! My captain!” Get back in your box.

We stand, conflicted and appalled at their behaviour. If we have sufficient empathy, we might imagine ourselves in the crowd, watching; if we have a smidgen more courage, we might see our face and hear our voice in the pharisees and leaders who condemn Jesus so easily, and those to whom he offers life.

A few moments earlier, Jesus talks about the burdens that are laid upon people’s backs by community leaders, and then nothing is done to lift them. People are trained to think that brokenness is acceptable, perhaps even that this is what God intends for those who struggle.  

Before we complete our sermon, let us ask ourselves how we contribute to the condition of those who are bent over so far, they can see barely more than a pace in front of their eyes. This is as true for our neighbour beside us, as those neighbours we witness in warzones and poverty.

When someone seeks our help, and we have no time today; when a person names their hunger and our response is to consult our calendar; when people ask for justice and are told that wounding is all they can expect.

A colleague of mine consistently reminds me of the powers and principalities which infect our age and season. The measure of our faith is not the culture in which we live; it is one who was executed and then raised to life.

The church so easily succumbs to the markers of “practical solutions” and the illusion of language which suits profit and loss.

For Jesus, the worth of this woman was not measured in her abilities, or lack of them. She was a child of Abraham, an inheritor of the promise of God; her value was her humanness.

Sabbath, the day of shalom, is a day for renewal and recreation, peace and life; is that not what Jeus offered her? Is that not what Jesus offers us?

Our calling is to help people to lift their heads and receive the blessing of freedom.

---

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”  [Luke’s Gospel 12.49-51]

“No one will be worse off under my housing/tax/employment/education/migration policy” is what we are accustomed to hearing, especially around election time. In a world overburdened with populist politics, you will rarely hear a candidate espousing the value of our sacrifice or personal cost; unless it’s borne by someone else.

There are great speeches from leaders of the past, which hold us to account for previous missteps, or which call us to the challenge of sacrifice for others, or for our future. Such rigorous, ethical discipline appears less likely in this current cycle of history; to misquote and deliberately reverse the intent of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address in 1961, “Ask not what you can do for your country, but ask what your country can do for you.”

It’s nice when people like us.

If we ever imagined Jesus to be polite in speech and mild in approach, this passage will certainly disabuse us.  Jesus has been building a formidable list of challenges, about true wealth and the destructive illusion of finding security in a property and financial portfolio. He has warned those who will listen about being prepared, and the consequences of not being ready.

And then he fails the test of being politically electable. He tells the unvarnished truth.

Choosing to follow Jesus will be costly, in terms of friends, and family, and decisions about how we live. Jesus really isn’t nice.

When we have been raised only with images of the comforting and safe Jesus, we are unsure how to respond to the Jesus who requires our obedience and talks of his presence bringing conflict. We can’t be surprised; the simple commands to love our neighbour, and the far more complex love for our enemies have confounded us since Jesus first uttered them.

Then, if we are sufficiently courageous, we ask about the outworking of these commands. Where do we, as disciples of Jesus, locate ourselves when we try to love our neighbour who deliberately harms others?

What about our understanding of the appalling conflict in Gaza at this precise moment? Christians have found themselves on all sides of this disaster, so perhaps the following question is how do we, as Jesus’ disciples, handle our own conflicts which arise from crises like these?

When we are raised to be nice and polite, we are ill-equipped to engage with the reality of the world which we are called by Jesus to love – and to serve.

How do our communities of faith address and resolve conflict? Sometimes we maintain a stoic (read polite), resentful silence, or relocate to another congregation, or we simply acquiesce. We need to be able to have conflict with the same dignity and care which Jesus offers to us; our discipleship matters.

We need also to discern whether our opinion is like the property of the rich fool in Jesus’ recent parable: self-satisfying and self-justifying.

Last week I asked when discipleship became so inexpensive. What words of Jesus led us to think that there was no sacrifice asked of us in order to live the way to which he calls us?

There are communities of faith which avoid engaging in the world around them for fear of what it might cost. In doing so they misquote and deliberately reverse the discipleship to which we are called.

The signs are all around us, as they have always been. Our task is to bear witness in this time, confident that the one who has been crucified and raised has, by that very act, addressed the crises of this – and every – time.  

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;cease to do evil,
learn to do good;seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.                   [Isaiah 1.16-17]

A close friend and I were talking recently – and at length – about all manner of things, as friends are wont to do. At one point, our conversation embraced our discipleship, and the shape it takes and has taken.

My friend reflected upon a discipleship of decades, a journey for which I have great respect. In recent times, he realised that his path in the past had been somewhat misdirected, attending with such vigour to some aspects of faith in Christ that he failed to apprehend the essential element – the outworking of his faith.

We explored how this had arisen, speaking of a particular formation in faith, the various communities to which he had belonged, and the teaching which both accompanies us and, is shaped by, the wealthy, educated world.

It is deeply perplexing.

The Old Testament prophets all speak with resonance of God’s passion for their world in which they live. Hosea, with whom we wrestled in these last two weeks, has deep concerns with the faithlessness of God’s people; his life and his words echo that concern and offer hope of God’s reconciliation.

Isaiah’s polemics about worship punctuate much of what he offers us. The cause of his ire is not worship itself, but the lives led by those who worship; they will speak of a faithful God, who comforts the lost and oppressed; they will pray for the forgiveness and justice residing in God’s heart and hand; they will sing of God, present to us when parent and partner and community have been torn from us.

And yet, when the singing and praying and preaching are done, there is silence and not justice. The orphaned child remains hungry.

How did discipleship become so inexpensive? When did liturgy become so anodyne?

It is clear that my friend’s paradox is not his alone. The contention about faith, as opposed to good works, bears no viable offspring. It is an argument of deliberate obfuscation, to avoid Isaiah’s – and God’s, it seems – profound despair.

The measure of the failing which the prophet addresses is that worship has no meaning if the hungry remain famished, the poor remain impoverished, and those who are oppressed cannot stand from the burdens which they bear.

This is not just bread in our hands and an open door, but voices which speak and sing for those who are able only to whisper for fear of consequence.

The contention which my friend and I resolved is that it is not only powers and principalities in the world around us which have formed us in this manner, but the complicity of the Church which keeps us compliant in our turn.

As a consequence, many aspects of worship remain beholden to praise songs which ask nothing of us, self-interested prayers, and sermons which are invested in transaction, disregarding mercy and hope.

Our Basis of Union asserts that “The Church is able to live and endure through the changes of history only because its Lord comes, addresses, and deals with people in and through the news of his completed work” – Christ is present and attends to people’s lives and struggles. This is where we are called, not in the abstract.

In the Uniting Church, we offer a missional refrain, speaking of worship, witness and service. As I continue to disciple myself to Christ, I see how these three are inherently inseparable. Each informs, and is informed by, the others. When one is diminished, our worship becomes performative, our service simply becomes social action, and our witness articulates only wishful thinking and not a hope, anchored in the risen, crucified One.

I admire my friend’s integrity, to reorient himself to the calling of Christ. In his faithfulness, I am reminded that is how each of is called to live, to be yoked to the one who will continue to correct that which is erroneous in our lives, to the glory of God.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.                       [Hosea 11.3-4]

The prophet offers us an image of God which we can all understand.

The picture of a parent, or grandparent, ushering the child they love from infancy into childhood. When I read Hosea’s words, I see a child with both arms at full stretch above their head, held by their mum who walks slightly behind them, to give their child the hope of independence.

The child is chortling with delight.

We all know this story, at least in part, perhaps in entirety. Which is precisely why Hosea, prophesying with the breath of God, offers it to an errant Israel and, thus, to us.

As always, with the raising of children, with families, there are good and bad days, better and worse seasons. None of this is surprising.

We have had someone hold our hands and lift us along; we have fallen down and been raised back up. We have carried and encouraged, stumbled and fallen. We have laughed and wept.

Our breath catches when God cries out after their recalcitrant, “How can I give you up?”

The novel, the poem, the movie, the homily, in which we can see our face and hear our heartbeat; these are the ones which capture us. However, we are neither Raskolnikov, nor Scout Finch, despite us feeling the depths of their struggle, or their hope’s exaltation. We are not them.

This is the rabbit hole into which we can be led, when prophet and preacher offer us a metaphor of God’s love, or anger, or blessing. We want to say that God is just like us.

Instead, we worship a spendthrift lover who tosses coins of gold across the midnight skies, as Thomas Troeger sings of God.

We attend to the beauty of the language when the prophets speak of God as a nursing mother, and a carer guarding each step, and a rock withstanding the seasons and storms, and the storm itself, and the still sound of gentle nothing. God is none of those things, and all of them.

We hold these images to help us understand, to help us embrace our faith, and to discover a way to, perhaps, grasp our God’s hand, even for a moment.

If we mistakenly imagine that God is just like us, then gradually we reshape God to dovetail with our emotions, our predilections; God is in the image of me. The wonder of imagining something of God’s nature, of God’s relationships with the creation, slides sidewards into self-involvement and we become the creators.

We become sufficient unto our task, we believe. As the farmer in Jesus’ parable remarks, “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” [Luke 12.13-21]

This is an echo of what Parker Palmer refers to as “functional atheism”, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything lies with us. It also means that if anything decent is going to happen, it is up to us to ensure its happening. It is in our hands.

The God who cries out for the woman and the man in the garden is not like us; the God who forgives, whose anger is like the wind, who steps out our life with each of us and calls us each by name, is not like us. This One who sacrifices their only child in an astonishing act of life and love and death-defiance, is not in our image.

In our lives, and because of God, in our love and our mercy and our sacrifice, we reflect something of this God.

It is only in Jesus that our hands and hearts might, with awe, grasp this One who loves us. It is on the cross when we may touch the profound wonder of God’s embrace, and when we might believe that something of that image resides in us and offers us life.

The cross is the heart of God’s creating, not metaphor, but meaning. When we choose the meaning, we find that which God hopes and intends for us – mercy, justice and life. This God, in whose arms we have been held, who will never give us up, and who will never cease to call our name.