Broadway Christian Church - Columbia , Missouri
Morning Worship - July 18, 2004

Prayer of the Day

Welcoming God, you gather us here and nurture us with the presence of your Spirit.  As Christ’s body, his church, we are called to be welcoming and open- hearted with others, most particularly strangers.  May we be so infused with the passion and compassion of Jesus that our hospitality toward others is both generous and genuine.  Amen.

Scripture 
Luke 10:38-42

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him.  She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he had to say.  But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.  She came to the Lord and asked, “Lord don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work all by myself?  Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing matters.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Message
The Virtue of Being at Risk
Rick Frost

As you may or may not know, Jan and I have been doing a little traveling.  You know how it is when you travel.  You get to experience what it is like to be a guest, what it’s like to be a visitor, what it’s like to be a stranger.  You get to experience many levels of hospitality, or the lack thereof, depending on where you are.  We so enjoyed Alice and Brody’s hospitality in Steamboat.  They graciously opened their home to us there.  Alice and Jan took yoga lessons every day so they might “achieve a greater state of peacefulness.”  That is a condition not easily attained when sharing the same space with Brody and I.  I understand that.  We, who would much rather be knocking a little white ball around various public courses or serving filet mignon on a hook to rainbows in the Yappa River.  Peace is a wonderful thing, and it comes in various kinds of shades and ways to various people. 

Several days later Jan and I were guests of Mother Nature and the United States Forest Service as we pitched our tent in the Taylor Park Basin surrounded by the beautiful Collegiate Peaks.  Some of you have been there.  Our daughter, Molly, once called them “the purple mountain majesties.”  I think that is probably correct.  The day for us was spent reading, and writing, taking photographs, gathering fire wood, doing some exploring, doing those kinds of things you like to do when you’re out-of-doors.  The night was spent at 9,000-plus feet, with the nearest city light 50 miles away, under a canopy of stars, so clear you could see constellations, and even galaxies, and an occasional satellite drifting across the sky.  You’ve been there.  We tried to make ourselves stay up to at least 10 p.m. so we could see the Creator’s light show, but finding ourselves forced into down sleeping bags due to the radical drop in temperature, below freezing in July.  This was last week in July.  It was below 70 degrees at our house last night.  I was pleased about that.

Hospitality.  That is what I would like for us to talk about today.  Hospitality:  the welcoming, the receiving of guests, of visitors, of strangers, of travelers.  It is a wonderful thing.  It’s a gracious thing, particularly when you run into it.  You’ve experienced it.  However, what most people do not realize is that it is an important part – indeed, it is considered a sacred duty – of almost all religions.  Did you know that?  Hospitality:  a sacred duty of religious people.  Did you know that?

Indeed, they tell me the Hindus believe God actually resides in strangers.  God actually resides in visitors and travelers.  Interesting.  In a recent addition of the “National Geographic Traveler” magazine, editor Keith Bellows talks about his recent visit to India.  From the Delhi airport, he caught a cab to his hotel. 

“How long are you staying,” asked the cabbie. 

“Five days,” reported Keith. 

“Where are you going next in Delhi?”

“Across town.”

“How long will it be?”

“Four or five hours from now.”

“I will wait for you, and I will take you.”

“And he did,” reported Bellows.  “All the rest of my five days, he waited over and over and over again, sleeping in his car outside my hotel at night, waiting outside hotels, restaurants, and shops while I did some sightseeing and took care business during the day.  When it was time for me to leave Delhi again, he drove me to the airport.  Only then did he mention money.  We settled.  He gave me his card.  He wished me Godspeed and thanked me for visiting his country.”

Hospitality.  An amazing thing.  A wonderful thing.  And an important virtue in almost all cultures and religions. 

“Practice hospitality,” Paul urged his churches in the New Testament.  “Show hospitality to the visitor, to the stranger in your gates,” says Deuteronomy 10.  Why?  Because you were once a stranger, yourself.  You were once a visitor, and God took you in.  Now, it is time for you to do the same. 

In the New Testament we learn that Jesus, himself, was dependent upon the hospitality of others.  His daily care, the food he ate, his lodging, as he went about three years of his business, and mission, and ministry on this earth.  In today’s text, Luke tells us Jesus came to a village where a woman named Martha and her sister Mary opened their home to him.  That was an absolutely almost unheard of thing.  A single woman, without a man in the house, opening her home to a stranger, to a rabbi.  Absolutely unheard of in its day.  A radical act.  A religious act.  A spiritual act.  She took him in.

Martha, busy in the kitchen, preparing a meal.  We like people who do that for us.  Do we not?  Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him teach, hanging on his every word.  We like people who do that with us, too.  Don’t we? 

But there is more than good manners and good etiquette at stake here.  The hook in hospitality, particularly in an uncertain and in a sometimes-crazy world, is opening the door.  It is taking the risk.  It is being vulnerable to people we don’t know.  It’s the risk we take with strangers.  The main problem with strangers is they tend to be so strange.  They really are.  They are so different.  They are so other.  They are so much of an unknown quantity.  We really don’t know if they are going to take advantage of our vulnerability or not.  So we rightly teach our children not to speak to strangers, but soon we find that you and I, like most people, tend to connect with, spend time with, entertain people who are just like, very similar to us. 

Now the troubling thing with that is that hospitality is, according to tradition and Scripture, one of the major ways in which we make room in our lives for God, grow in our faith, and enlarge our notion of family.  We sort of have very narrow views of family.  Hospitality causes us to face that, to expand our notion of family.  Maybe, maybe, just maybe that’s why Jesus, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, says for those who really “got” what he was about – that those who practiced the virtue of being at risk – are folks who “get it.”  For he said, “I was hungry, and you are the one who gave me something to eat.  I was thirsty, and you gave something to drink.  I was the stranger.  You never laid eyes on me before, and you risked.  You took me in.”  Interesting.  Interesting.

Look around you today.  Do you see anybody you don’t know?  I hope so.  If you do see somebody you don’t know today, good.  I want you to meet them.  I want you to speak to them.  I want to ask you to welcome them.  I want you to not allow them to leave this premise without having an opportunity to be welcomed.  You are good at that.  Almost all of you are.  Please, keep it up.  You are known in this community as a people who tend to welcome. 

Now, that’s not the hard part.  Let me tell you about the hard part.  This is the tricky part.  I know there are some of you here today, who have come to worship this morning…  You are kind.  You are generous.  You work hard.  You take responsibility for yourself.  You tend to love your family and your friends.  Every once in a while you gather with the rest of us, and you knock on heaven’s door (isn’t that the way Bob Dylan talked about it?).  Some of us do that when we come to worship.  Every once in a while we have a need, we have a problem, we come up against something we can’t handle, and we throw up a petition to heaven, and we ask, “Is anybody home?  Lord, are you there?  Here’s what I need.  Here’s what I’m concerned about.  Here’s what I’m asking.” 

And that is fine.  That’s good.  In fact, Scripture teaches us to ask every single day for the things we need for life and the things we need for salvation.  But here is what I want you to hear.  The Bible usually tells that story just the other way around.  Did you know that?  Friend, the door that needs opening is not Jesus’ door.  The door that needs opening is your heart, and my heart.  That’s the door that needs to be opened.  That’s what we do when we worship. 

I know there are reasons.  I know some of them are very deep reasons that some of us have locked our hearts shut.  We have them tighter than a drum.  Again we work hard.  We are generous.  We love our families.  We do all kinds of wonderful things, but our hearts are locked down.  Do you want to know a secret?  On Sunday, when we worship here, we are not knocking on God’s door.  The amazing, the surprising, mind-blowing thing is that when we worship together, God knocks on our door.  Do you know what I mean? 

That’s the spiritual issue of the day.  Are you willing to open up that door?  Are you willing to open the door to your heart, the door to your mind, the door to your soul to receive the love of Christ?  I think it is the scariest thing going.  It makes a lot of us nervous.  It makes a lot of us uncomfortable.  It even frightens some of us.  We don’t even know how to talk about it.  We don’t know how to tell somebody how to do that.  All of those things we fear related to opening the door of our hearts to other people, to meaningful relationships, even to Christ.  But that is the issue.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  You know, the Bible remembers Jesus saying in the book of Revelation, chapter 3, “Listen,” said Jesus, “I am standing at the door knocking.  If you hear my voice and open that door, I will come in, and I will eat with you, and you with me.”

The question today:  Have you personally opened your heart to the Spirit of the Living Christ?  What was that like?  When did you do it?  How does that feel?  Maybe you’ve never done it.  Why haven’t you?  What has kept you from doing that?  Just name it to yourself today.  Personally open your heart and be hospitable to the Spirit of the Living Christ. 

I think saying “hi” to strangers and welcoming them, and honoring them, and even sometimes entertaining guests and visitors are good things.  Like I said, most of you do that so well.  I want to encourage you to continue to be very intentional about welcoming every visitor you see in this place.  Don’t let them go out that door without welcoming them.  But that is not the real challenge.  The real challenge, folks, the real test, the real growth, the real step in faith is the opening of our hearts to the person and the Spirit of the Living Christ.  That is the secret to Christian living.  It is the virtue of being at risk.  And it is risky.  But it will transform your life.  It will change it.  It won’t just change it for today.  The Bible says it will change it forever.

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Host of heaven, open our minds to receive others into our lives.  Open our hearts to fully embrace you.  Let us make the moment to be fully present in your holy presence.  Amen.