New Look, New Start, New Paint, New Garden

No picture yet, but you MUST come to St. Paul's and see our renovations:
new red door -- not "fire engine" red but a true deep Henry Hobson Richardson-Frank Lloyd Wright red, a red that I think Ralph Adams Cram, the original architect of the building, would like.
Secondly, the interiors of both of our entrances have been painted -- clean, welcoming, cheerful -- Come on in!!
Thirdly, a garden! Well, there has always been a garden outside the chapel door, but today I planted some mums -- lovely fall mums, donated by a faithful donor. Come by, quite nice, indeed!

Here is last week's sermon -- it's about mission and hospitality. And a clean, welcoming entrance, nicely painted and fresh, is a good start. Come and see.

Proper 17 C 9/2/2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81 Hebrews 13:1-8,10-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14

These lessons today are about two things:

Mission is something you give away.

Mission is the work of God.

“Mission” is a buzzword in today’s corporate culture. Businesses follow mission plans and boards write mission statements.

But “mission” as we use it, as God uses it, is not about the bottom line. “Customer satisfaction” is not a mission, nor is “meeting our target goals” nor even “our mission is to get 500 more people in here every Sunday so we can pay our bills.”

No, those things are not part of God’s mission. They do not, as Jeremiah would say, spring from the fountain of living water. Such mission statements are more in the category of the cracked cisterns of our own making. In the words of the old Prayer Book, such things are among ‘the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

When it is not being used as a corporate slogan, “mission” is kind of a dusty word. In some contexts it has a very bad rap indeed. “Mission” is something that went with “empire,” and “missionaries” accompanied invading armies, and built institutions and came to care more about institutional survival than they did about the original impulse which sent them out into the world in the first place.

That original impulse is the mission of God, which, when we first hear it, sends us out into the world with urgency and fire. We are doing God’s work, which is to help bring God and the world closer together.

Which brings us to the point of today’s parable: hospitality.

The parables of Jesus are not wise sayings, or universal declarations. They are stories which always point us back to ourselves and to our relationship with God. When Jesus talks about hospitality, what is he then saying about us, about our relationship with God, about our participation in this mission work of God?

Mission work is hospitality, and it is hospitality given away – absolutely given away to people who can never hope to afford to be able to pay you back. In the economy of the ancient near east, you would receive a dinner invitation as a mark of status: the status of your host would be somehow improved by your accepting her invitation, and your status as a guest would be enhanced, and then you would invite your host back to have dinner at your house, and so it would go: gracious, kind, hospitable – but reciprocal. You ate; you owed. Such patterns served to keep social relationships intact.

But God’s hospitality serves to upset social relationships. You don’t invite the high-status people to dinner; you invite the low-status. Everybody gets a seat at God’s table, and you don’t get any brownie points for the best outfit or the fanciest college degree or the highest paying job. The first guests to be seated are the ones not on the social register – the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, to be exact – the ones who, as a matter of fact, are on God’s A-list for all the best parties. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews might say, you never know when you welcome in that stranger that you have entertained an angel unawares.

Now we certainly do not do this hospitality perfectly. All too often this kind of hospitality is more like charity, with the “have’s” playing the parts of the Ladies Bountiful with the “have-not’s.” No, in God’s mission, around God’s table, with God’s seating chart, everyone is equal. At God’s table, we all eat family style, and when God passes around that big bowl of green beans, yes, the ones who are hungriest get to eat first, but there will be plenty – more than enough – to go around.

Mission – doing God’s work – is not a zero sum game. It doesn’t get used up. There is no bottom line. Just when you think your old Aunt Tilly, so crippled up with arthritis, has just eaten the last slice of roast beef, why the next thing you know, someone else has come in, and Tilly has gotten up and served this newcomer a plate of God’s best prime ribs. At God’s table, everyone is a guest, and everyone a host. It’s a beggar’s banquet with every place fit for a king.

So let’s not get too puffed up here about what we are doing. We are not inventing any wheel with this “new mission” in Brockton. It’s not St. Paul’s Table downstairs; it’s God’s Table, just as this is God’s Table, where we gather each Sunday, each one of us a beggar, starving for the sustenance that only God can provide – each one of us a king, looking out for the weaker ones among us who need a better place in line. This is where we come when our cisterns are empty. This is where the fountains flow with living water. Come. It’s time to eat and drink.

Now, I did not put this poem by George Herbert in the sermon, but it fits. It's a love song to Jesus, from an ordinary person, who recognizes just what a gracious, abundant gift God gives us, each day, each week, even. Come and see.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.