All Saints: "Hospitality and Discipleship: Can we Do Both?"

All Saints: "Hospitality and Discipleship: Can we Do Both?"
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; 
Psalm 149;
 Ephesians 1:11-23;
 Luke 6:20-31
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons

I am someone who genuinely wants everyone to like me, and there is a part of me that wants to please everyone. (That might come as a surprise to some of you!) Part of me
that wants everyone to speak well of me. Sometimes I think that being liked by everyone would be a blessing, that it would be a blessing to be popular. A lot of Christians think this way, I think. Like it would be a blessing for everyone to just like us.

We are often motivated by hospitality, and welcome, and inclusion, as though the more welcoming we are, the more people will like us; and the more people like us, the more we might become an inclusive community. So the church is motivated by righteous desires, when we want people to like us.

And we should be hospitable. There is something very Christian about it, to welcome people, to be friendly.

It made me wonder, as I prepared this sermon – maybe we should begin to shed all of our unfriendly burdens. There’s so many ways that we could be even more blessed because people would like us so much more, if only we gave up things like (oh I don't know) anything distinct about being a Christian, like our belief in the divinity of Christ, or the bodily resurrection, or that pesky doctrine of the Trinity, say – all those difficult doctrines that can make Christianity so unpalatable to others. Then, people would like us, right?

I even wondered if we should give up on being good disciples, give up on living godly lives, give up on repenting for our sins, or even trying to follow Jesus. Isn’t it all just a barrier to others? Wouldn’t we rather be more like the world around us, wouldn’t we rather have everyone like us? And for people to like us, isn’t that to be blessed?

Perhaps – is it better to be sub-Christian and liked by all, than to be robustly Christian?

***

There is some logic to that, right? Minimizing our differences could make us more hospitable and friendly. It’s sure easier to get along if it’s difficult to tell the difference between Christians and the non-religious, between Christians and those of other religions. Wouldn’t minimizing our differences please others and make them feel welcome?

I wish it could be that easy. But I’ve got bad news for you. As a person who has tried and struggled with keeping everyone happy, I’ve discovered a few things. And if you've ever tried to please everyone around you, this will probably sound familiar: It's never possible to please everyone. Some people will never be pleased anyway. And in the end,
the attempt to please everyone often turns you into a person without principle.

When a person, or a community, has principles, it means saying no when some would have you say yes, and saying yes when people would have you say no. Believing in something that others don’t believe means being a person, or a community, of distinct character. It means being, believing, and acting in a way that people may not always like because there is something larger at stake than being liked by all.

***

Today we read Jesus's sermon on the plain, a summary of discipleship that does not seem to be all that concerned with pleasing anybody at all – even Jesus’s disciples, I imagine. You're not blessed when everyone likes you – not according to Jesus, in this particular sermon if his – instead, you're blessed "when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you" for his sake. "Woe to you,” says Jesus, “when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Jesus is not so concerned with everyone liking you; in fact, Jesus calls anyone who is universally loved a false prophet –because to be universally liked is to be without much principle, to be like by all is to always tell people what they want to hear. This will inevitably make you a liar to some people, some of the time.

Jesus doesn’t stop there: Jesus then lists some very hard, difficult, perhaps entirely impossible demands of discipleship:

Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Turn the other cheek. If someone steals your coat, give them your shirt too. Give to the beggars, and never, ever, ask for any of it back.

Tried that lately?

**

It looks like this kind of discipleship means not being hospitable or accommodating at all. that kind of demand is not going to be all that compelling to all strangers.

So it makes me wonder: which is it? Should we, in the interest of good Christian hospitality, conform ourselves to the ways of the world? Or should we become radical disciples, unconcerned with hospitality, or inclusion, or welcome at all? Should we find something in between, where we are kind of welcoming because we are kind of Christian disciples? Or kind of Christian disciples in order to be a little more welcoming?

I don’t have an easy answer to this, except to say that it seems to me that these two things, hospitality and discipleship, are in considerable tension, all the time. It seems hard to be both, despite the fact that God calls us to be both hospitable and disciplined.

***
When Paul calls us “to set our hope on Christ,” “the hope to which God has called” us, what he is asking us to be is a community of welcome, and a place of reconciliation: just as the world was reconciled to God in Christ in the resurrection, just as Jesus goes from death to life, so we are united as the body of Christ, and called to a new way of discipleship. We are called, in the body of Christ, to reconcile those who are near with those who are far.

The tension is there, between discipleship and welcome, but as it turns out we don’t understand one without the other. For Paul, reconciliation is a spiritual discipline, and the spiritual discipline of reconciliation is only understood within the context of the doctrine of the resurrection, that utterly unique Christian teaching about what the world is really to be like. Just as the world is reconciled to God in the resurrection, where the life of the world is welcomed into the life of God, so we too work for reconciliation amongst each other, and between the body of Christ and the world.

We could throw the Christian teaching about the Trinity in there too: by way of a solid understanding of the life of God as fundamentally a life of mutuality among three persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit, by that we grasp what Christian discipleship is, the work of deepening our own relationships and modeling them on the divine life by way of our welcoming of others, being reconciled with each other. By this we become something more than we were before: reconciled to God and one another.

Do you see it?

Being disciples, being a people sanctified by the work of God in Christ, moves us to do the work of reconciliation. True hospitality comes out of being more of a Christian disciple, true hospitality comes out of being more of a Christian believer, not less of one.

Christian discipleship and Christian believing is strangely both in tension with hospitality, let’s not deny that – but more fundamentally, Christian discipleship and believing is the reason for our hospitality, and the way we learn how to do it!

And by this call to be disciples , we will probably not always be popular; but we will be blessed, having the true freedom from saying anything or doing anything to please others. We will be blessed by the freedom to walk with God, the freedom to become Christian disciples, and the freedom to become who God is calling us to be: open, welcoming, and reconciled to the world around us, and by this, reconciled to God.