5 Practices: What's Radical About Hospitality?

What’s so radical about hospitality? Well, hospitality is the way that we meet God. It’s the way we are told as Christians to foster mutual love. It’s the way God receives us and saves us.

You can see all of this in the Bible. In the book of Genesis, Abraham welcomes three strangers to his tent and they turn out to be God. They also bless Abraham and tell him that he is going to have a child in his old age, something that Sarah, his wife, finds so amusing that she laughs out loud while eavesdropping from behind a tent flap. By giving and receiving hospitality, Abraham and Sarah met God.

In the gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, Jesus tells the story of a Great Judgment at the end of time when people will be separated like sheep and goats and judged according to the standard of how well they have met the needs of others. “Whenever you visit the prisoner, feed the hungry or welcome the stranger,” the king in the story says, “whatever you do for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do these things for me.” By showing hospitality, the story suggests, we find our own salvation.

In the book of Hebrews, the writer starts the list of things the people should do by telling them not to neglect hospitality because through it some have entertained angels unawares. They would come into contact with the holy in the person of the stranger. By not neglecting hospitality, they would discover God’s love.

So what does hospitality look like and how should we talk about it? For that we may have to go to a movie. Finding Nemo.

There’s a scene in the middle of this movie when a clownfish named Marlin is taken in by a group of migrating sea turtles. Marlin is travelling to Sydney, Australia to try and find his son, Nemo. [Hence the name – Finding Nemo.] Along the way he’s been befriended by a blue fish named Dory who has terrible short-term memory loss. They have been told to find the East Australian Current because it will take them to Sydney.

In this scene they have just come through a huge group of jellyfish that have stung them into a stupor. Marlin has gotten separated from Dory and he wakes up to find himself in this huge community of sea turtles.

It’s the sea turtles who exhibit the kind of radical hospitality that I want to explore. They take in these two wounded travelers and welcome them as if they had always been part of the community. They even give them nicknames. They have a place for outsiders and a special love for children. They allow for an environment of creativity and even risk within the context of a nurturing community. And, most importantly, they are in the current that Marlin and Dory have been looking for. They know the stream that leads them forward and they trust it to take them where they need to go. And they welcome others to take the journey with them.[i]

Most of us learn the value of hospitality, not when we’re the hosts, but when we’re the guests. About fifteen years ago I went on a mission trip to southern Mexico. We were going down to help a small Methodist congregation build a sanctuary.

It was a long day of travel. We flew to Mexico City and then we got on a bus that took us south to the city of Puebla. It was the first time I had been to the interior of Mexico and everything was new. First, to see the sprawling megalopolis of Mexico City and then to go over the mountains past a volcano that was smoking.

By the time we got to Puebla it was getting dark. But there was still more travelling ahead. We got off of the public bus and got on a smaller charter bus with the missions coordinator from the church for that region. We went on two more hours through the desert to a small little place called Ahuatapec. Dirt streets around a central plaza. About 5,000 people were supposed to live there, but since there was hardly any work in the village, most of the men left for the week and came back on the weekends. It seemed like a ghost town.

At the end of this long day we were taken into a small house that had one long room. The families of the church had taken all the dining furniture they had and put it in this room. There were tables down the center loaded with warm tortillas and black beans. They sat us down and set warm bowls of soup in front of us.

It was crowded in that room. The whole church had gathered there. It was awkward, too. Many of them stood along the walls to allow us to sit at the table. And not many of us spoke Spanish so we communicated mostly with facial gestures and hand signals. But it was clear that these people had changed their whole schedule for that week to be hosts to us. Later many of them gave up their beds so that we could sleep in the best rooms in the house. When we left the children gave us small stuffed toys to take back to our children.

We had come to give them our time and our resources and our labor. But the overwhelming feeling we had that whole week was that we were receiving radical hospitality. We were being welcomed and made to feel at home.

On another occasion I was in Mexico shortly after the attacks of 9/11. I was worshipping in a small Methodist church and the pastor asked his church members to sit next to a North American, as he called us. Then he asked them to form small groups around us and to pray for us and for our country, recognizing the pain our country was going through. I didn’t understand all that was being said, but I knew that it was the first time since that tragedy that I had been able to cry. Here was a people who welcomed me and knew what I needed more than even I did.

The Mexicans have a saying, “Mi casa, su casa.” “My house is your house.” We say it a little differently. “Make yourself at home,” we say to our guests. But there’s always something a little awkward about that. Most of us don’t literally act the way we do at home when we’re guests at someone else’s house. We feel a little funny about raiding the fridge in the middle of the night.

There’s a little bit of tension in the host-guest relationship, isn’t there? It’s why there is that old saying about fish and welcome guests – after three days both start to be unwelcome. The tension is right in the word “hospitality.” It comes from a root word hospes which means guest and from which we get words like “hospital” and “hospice” – both places that offer a place of comfort and care. But that word is built on two older words – one of which means stranger – hostis – but that’s also the word we get “hostile” from – which means that there’s some suspicion built into the notion of a stranger. We’re never sure about strangers. They may be enemies. And the second part of the word “hospitality” has its roots in potes a word for power. Historian Gary Gutting looks at this and says that “there is an etymological sense in which welcoming a guest means having power over, (or, perhaps, giving power to) an enemy.”[ii]

This is what is radical about Christian hospitality. The Bible pushes us to move past our resistance to truly welcoming the stranger. In Deuteronomy God tells the people of Israel to make room for the stranger because “you were strangers in the land of Egypt” [Deuteronomy 10:19].

Jesus tells the story of a man who goes to almost foolish lengths in order to create space for a wayward son. It’s usually called the story of the Prodigal Son and in this story the son asks his father for the half of his inheritance that will be his and the father gives it to him! Foolish! Who would grant such a foolish request to a son who is likely to blow it all?

That’s just what happens. The son goes off to a far country – squanders the inheritance on loose living and ends up in poverty. He screws up his courage to go back and beg for a position – any position in his father’s service and we look forward to the groveling because that would only be just.

But the father is waiting for the son to return. He sees him from far off and runs to meet him. And before the son can get out his whole sorry apology – before the groveling can begin – the father is welcoming him back. Returning the signs of his status in the family to him. Killing the fatted calf for heaven’s sake! It’s no wonder that the older brother is upset. The father is as profligate as a drunken sailor. He will welcome anybody back.

God will welcome anybody back. And God shows us this in the most powerful way possible by coming to be our guest. When the world had forgotten itself…when people despised the love that God offered them…when Israel strayed from its calling…when brokenness and sin and malice were rampant on the earth…when the world was dark and God could have turned God’s back on the people and rejected them…God instead decided to be their guest.

First, God found hospitality in the womb of a young Jewish mother named Mary, who made room for God at the risk of her life. Sitting by a well, Jesus received water from a Samaritan woman whom he had no business talking to. Reclining at a table, he received the perfume and tears of a woman who gave what she had. At the tables of the Pharisees and tax collectors he was the guest. In the homes of Peter and Lazarus, he was the guest. On a Roman cross, Jesus received the hospitality the world had to give to a divine stranger. And in that moment when Jesus died, he became the host – making room in the heart of God for people who needed the forgiveness, the love, and the reconciliation that only God could give.

In his book Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Bishop Robert Schnase tells the story of a man he met while working in a clergy-training program in a hospital. The man had come in with his wife who had had a heart attack while they were eating in a restaurant. Schnase was with the man when the doctor came to tell him that his wife had died.

Schnase offered to call the man’s pastor, but the man didn’t attend a church. Schnase asked if there were family members he could call, but there were no family members living close by. There were also no co-workers since the man was retired and had moved away from the place he had worked. There were also no close neighbors because the man and his wife did not even know the name of their neighbors. Schnase did what he could to help the man through the day, but in the end the man left alone.

“Life is not meant to be that way,” Schnase says in his book. “God intends for people to live their lives interlaced by the grace of God with others, to know the gift and task of community from birth to death, to have the interpretive structures of faith to sustain them through times of joy and periods of desperate agony, to have the perspective of eternity, and to ‘take hold of the life that really is life’” to quote 1 Timothy 6:19. And yet, Schnase says, 40 to 60 percent of the people around us have no church relationship to speak of.[iii]

A church that offers radical hospitality recognizes that it is there for the 40 to 60 percent. It will go into the world and set up camp in the places where the world makes space. It will get to know the community it is a part of and it will care about the people who are feeling disconnected and lost and beat up and wounded. The people who don’t know if God cares about them anymore and who don’t know if they care about God.

Radical hospitality will also cause churches to make room for the stranger in the church. Not just in a passive way. Most churches will say, “I believe we are a warm and welcoming congregation.” But the longer we stay in a church and the more comfortable we feel in it, the harder it is for us to see it through the eyes of people who are new to it – especially those who may be from a different economic status or family situation or race or generation.

Churches that are radically hospitable actively seek to be welcoming – to be on the lookout for opportunities to make people feel at home from the first time that they walk through the door. They wear name tags so that, even though 90 percent of the people they encounter already know their name, the other 10 percent who don’t will have an opportunity to learn it. They seek out new faces – even though they may be people from the other service – and try to make sure they have a place to go. They point out where the nursery and the bathrooms are and where you can find coffee and fruit during fellowship time.

Radical hospitality means that everyone becomes involved in the hospitality mission of the church – not just the folks who are designated for this area on the Council of Ministries. Every Sunday School class and every small group thinks about ways it can reach out and welcome newcomers. Every person acts as if Franktown is her home or his home and every newcomer is Christ come to be our guest once more.

Recently some of our young adults were visiting in the Amish country in Pennsylvania and they went to worship with an Amish congregation. We might think of the Amish as a very closed group. But what our Franktown folks discovered was a level of hospitality that took them back.

They were not only welcomed in worship, but they were asked to go share lunch in an Amish household. And it was not just a lunch it was a feast. And they were not just there as guests, they were welcomed as family. It was obviously a powerful experience for them.

We are people who know how to be kind and warm. But what’s radical about Christian hospitality is that it pushes through the tensions we feel about strangers to find new ways to welcome them. It pushes through how limited we feel about how much time and money and resources we have to say, “You have enough of all of these things and you can make space for the stranger.”

The amazing thing about hospitality is that we have experienced it. It is how we got here. At some point, someone welcomed you into this place and helped you to see the wonders of God’s amazing love. It’s time to pay it forward.

Katherine Duck, who is a member of an Episcopal Church in Indiana says, “For a world gone mad with the need for power and control over every aspect of life, hospitality provides a graceful entrance into the garden of the sheer delight of knowing and caring for persons different from ourselves. Practicing Christian hospitality will allow us to live into a reality over which God’s Holy Spirit, not humankind, presides.”[iv] Hospitality is a fruitful practice that allows us to give up our sense that we have nothing to learn and nothing to gain from the person at the door. But when we open the door, we can experience a world made new. That’s radical. Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 13:1-2

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect hospitality, because through it some have entertained angels without knowing it.

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[i] I am indebted to Dori Baker for introducing me to this clip at the Fund For Theological Education Calling Congregations event, October 2008.

[ii] Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, [Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001], p. 309.

[iii] Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, [Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2007], p. 19.

[iv] Katherine Duck, “Review of Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl”, Spiritrestoration.org.

Beyond Belief

I’ve been thinking. And what I’ve been thinking is this: What Easter requires of us is beyond belief. It’s beyond belief. It’s not just a matter of belief.

We reach the end of the gospel of Mark and we are once again in strange territory. We have been reading through the entire book of Mark through these last seven weeks and some of you may remember that the book begins abruptly. Mark doesn’t give us stories of mangers and babies and wise men bringing gifts from afar. Mark starts with Jesus being baptized by his cousin John and striding off into the wilderness to face down Satan. You just immediately launch into the story.

Now we’re at the end of the story and it is just as abrupt. Listen to it with me and see if you hear what I heard. The Sabbath was over. The women who had waited through that long day after Jesus' death headed toward the tomb to anoint his body. They had bought some spices and they set off early in the morning, just as the sun was rising.

Who knows what they expected to see or why they wanted to go? Perhaps it was a final act of love, a desire to see Jesus once more, a hoping against all hope that it hadn't really happened. It seems they hadn't even thought about one of the basic necessities for their trip before they left, because as they approached the tomb they wondered among themselves, "Who is going to move the stone for us?"

So Mary, Mary, and Salome came to face the dead. But when they finally took their eyes from the ground and looked up at the place of the grave, they found that the stone had already been rolled away, even though it was very large.

They entered the tomb only to find that it was occupied by a young man in a long white robe. They took him for an angel and they were amazed at the sight. He noticed and he said to them, "Don't be so surprised. You came to this tomb looking for a dead man - Jesus who you followed from Galilee and who you saw crucified and put to death on Friday." The young man knew that they had not come expecting to find life. They came to the tomb because that's where the dead could be found and there was part of them that had died as well.

Then the young man gave them the words that explained the emptiness. "He has been raised, he is not here. You can look but you will not find him. Now, you go and spread the word. Tell the disciples and Peter to go to Galilee where you will see him again as he told you he would."

They were words too wonderful for them to hear. They came out of the tomb and fled, just like a group of pig herders had done when Jesus sent the demons of a possessed man into their pigs so that they ran headlong into the water and died. They went fleeing from this place in fear and trembling because something powerful had struck them. Confusion and terror gripped them as if they had no will of their own. And the first witnesses to the empty tomb said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.

That’s a strange ending. And it can’t be the ending. It can’t end this way. It didn’t end this way. If the women had really said nothing to anyone than none of us would be here. They must have told the tale. They must have finally overcome their fear to share what the young man at the tomb told them they must share.

We understand why the women ran away like this. We might have done the same. What has happened is beyond belief. Jesus was dead. Well and truly dead. They had seen him draw his last breath. They had seen him taken down – a lifeless form – removed from a criminal’s cross. They had felt the chill of the tomb. Or was that chill in their souls?

But to believe that he was alive? That he had gone on ahead to Galilee? They had seen Jesus do some amazing things before. When blind men called out to him from the roadside he had given them sight. When paralytics were lowered through ceilings he had lifted them to their feet. When a little girl lay dead with the mourners at the door, what did he do? He raised her up. But to rise himself and to go on as if death had no hold on him? It was beyond belief. And perhaps that’s just the point. Believing is only the beginning. What comes next is acting.

My mind has been drifting back to Thursday night. Do you remember the story of Jesus’ arrest? When all of his disciples began to flee there was one strange figure caught in the confusion. As Jesus is being taken away, a young man, a neoniskos in Greek, is following him and those who are trying to arrest Jesus also try to capture him, and they grab him by the linen cloth that he is wearing. He manages to wrench himself free and he runs away naked…the first Christian streaker.

Now when I started this whole series on Mark I gave you a theory on who that young man might be. Biblical scholars think this may have been Mark himself…the author of the gospel putting himself into the scene the way medieval artists would place themselves in biblical paintings. Or maybe he was Forrest Gump. But the truth is that no one really knows who he is. He’s just there as Jesus is arrested. And like everyone else, he runs away when the going gets tough.

But there’s another young man in the resurrection story – another neoniskos. He appears at the tomb. I’ve always thought of this young man in the tomb as an angel, too. And if an angel is simply someone who is a messenger for God, then that’s definitely what he was. But neoniskos is only used twice in the whole gospel of Mark—to describe the naked guy in the garden and this man in another garden. It still doesn’t tell us who the young man is. He’s just there as Jesus was raised.

So why does this matter? Because I’m beginning to think that the neoniskos is not just Mark...he’s also a stand-in for us.

It’s very hard for us to slow down enough to realize how powerful this story of Easter is. I know, I know. We’ve got troubles. We’ve got jobs that are shaky, bills to pay, health concerns, deadlines and relationships and friendships to deal with. Sometimes we’re just like the neoniskos, a young person on the fringes who happens to be there as the story of Jesus unfolds, wondering what it means for us. And sometimes we feel we don’t have anything more to offer than the young man when he runs off without his clothes.

But there are moments…like Easter morning…in silence, in awe, in the light of a sunrise peeking over the eastern horizon, when all things seem possible once again, and when I don’t seem outside the story of Jesus at all. At those moments I am the young man in the empty tomb with the best news of all. Death does not have the last word. Death can never have the last word. He is risen as he said and he goes before us into the world, so that we can walk behind in confidence. Christ is risen! That’s what the neoniskos finally says. Christ is risen! And because Christ lives, I live, too.

But Christ doesn’t just want us to believe that. Jesus wants us to live like Easter makes a difference. If the cross is the fulcrum point on which the course of our lives and the course of the universe turns, then can we really continue to act as if it is doesn’t make any difference to how we live in the world? Is Christ’s death meaningless? Was it all for nothing that God went to the cross to save you and me?

Are we just going to keep it to ourselves or will we tell? It’s O.K. now, you know. The young man at the tomb has said to tell the news. No more secrets. Jesus has gone the distance. Now you know the whole story. It’s O.K. to tell the world that Christ is alive and it makes all the difference.

So the question is – will you claim the abundant life that is yours – the life that has been bought at such an incredible price? Will you keep walking behind Jesus into this new life or will you flee in confusion? Thanks be to God.

Mark 16:1-8 Now when the Sabbath was over, Mary the Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. Very early in the morning of the first day of the week they went to the tomb as the sun arose. And they said to one another, "Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?" But when they looked up they saw the stone had already been rolled away, even though it was very large.

They entered the tomb and saw a young man sitting on the right side clothed in a long white robe and they were amazed. But he said to them, "Don't be awe-struck; you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, the crucified one. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But you go, tell his disciples and Peter that he goes before you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he said to you."

So they came out and fled from the tomb because confusion and trembling took hold of them. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.

Following Jesus to a Fruitful Life: Acting Like a Child

The truth is that if you follow Jesus you might be considered a wimp. It could happen. Jesse Ventura seemed to think that. You remember Jesse. He was the pro wrestler who became governor of Minnesota. One time he created a stir by saying “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”[i] He backtracked a little from that, but he was only speaking his mind.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed something of the same thing. He was a philosopher living in the late 19^th century when he wrote a book titled The Genealogy of Morals. It’s an extended critique of religion and particularly Jewish and Christian beliefs.

Nietzsche believed that religion was an instrument that weak individuals used to keep the strong under control. “Jesus of Nazareth,” he said, “the gospel of love made flesh, the ‘redeemer,’ who brought blessing and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinners – what was he but temptation in its most sinister and irresistible form?”[ii] For Nietzsche, what Jesus tempted human beings to do was to do nothing, to be passive, to receive what the world flings at us and not to act, not to become fully human. What Nietzsche believed was that Jesus was teaching the weak secretly to hate the strong and to restrain them from acting.

The world is full of Nietzsche’s now. Adolf Hitler took Nietzsche’s philosophy and twisted it into a perverse ideology that brought unimaginable suffering to the world. In his mind, it was a legitimate act to try to rid the human race of its weaker members, its degenerate members, as he thought of them. In place of the world as it is he thought he was creating a super race, a master race.

Nietzsche’s children don’t all look as repellant as Hitler. Sometimes they are much more respectable. There’s a little of Nietzsche in all of us. We all have a little self-interest that chafes against the idea that we need to be restrained. “Why do I have to think about the poor? Why should I be concerned if they are in need? Shouldn’t they be looking out for themselves? What concern is it of mine if the migrant worker is being abused? Do I really need to care about the folks down at the nursing home? And folks in far-off lands? Orphans in Russia? Girls being bombed and threatened in Afghanistan simply because they are going to school? Women being raped as a matter of course in the Congo? When the Church talks about such things…when people care about such things…aren’t they just being naïve? I have so much to do. Why should I be distracted by them?”

As we talked about last week, the world doesn’t want to hear about weakness. It still doesn’t know what to do with a crucified savior. We say to ourselves, “If we’d been there we would have known better than the disciples. We would have seen who Jesus was and we would not have been a part of the mobs calling for his death.” But maybe we would have seen him as a naïve trouble-maker, too. Maybe we wouldn’t have been so concerned if the ruling authorities took him out.

The first time that he told them about his crucifixion they were on the way to Caeserea Philippi. Then, on their way back to Galilee, Jesus told them once again, "The Son of Man will be betrayed into human hands. They will kill him. And three days after being killed, he will rise again."

That's the essence of the Christian story about Jesus put as plainly as Jesus could put it. Jesus betrayed, killed and raised again after three days. We say it in our affirmations of faith and in the Great Thanksgiving before communion. When you ask what this Jesus Christ event is all about, this is it.

The disciples still don't understand. And they're also afraid to ask Jesus what he means. So they keep on walking.

We don't know exactly what happened on the rest of the trip, but we can take a pretty good guess, because when they got to the house in Capernaum where they are staying, Jesus asked them, "What were you arguing about on the road?" and Mark tells us that they didn't answer because they had been arguing about who was the greatest. We might say that they were acting like children because they got into a silly argument they didn't want the teacher to know about.

Why would they be arguing about this? Was it just a kind of denial? The disciples were scared and confused by Jesus' pronouncements of impending death. So maybe they decided that they would never be able to understand and turned instead to something they could understand - competition. And since there were twelve of them the easiest competition they could find was between themselves. Which one was the greatest? Later James and John would bring the dispute to Jesus, asking if they could sit at Jesus' side in his glory. But for now it was an argument they used to pass the time when they were not understanding things.

Jesus knew what was going on, even before James and John came to him. So Jesus realized that he had some teaching to do. He sat down, which was the normal position for a teacher to take in those days, and he called the twelve disciples to him and he told them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all."

Now I can see the disciples trying to figure this out. They were running down lists of excuses in their minds, trying to see how they could fit the rule to their situation. "Now, when Jesus says last, he must just mean the last of the believing folk. And when Jesus says all, he must just mean all the acceptable folk. I might be able to live with this saying if that's what he means."

But then Jesus did something that none of them expected. He called a child into the middle of their circle. A child! Please understand what a dramatic act this is. Children in Jesus' day were not treated in nearly the same way that they are today. Many children in our culture are smothered with things and attention and we rearrange our schedules to suit their needs.

It was very different in the ancient world. Children were forced to live in a world made for adults from their earliest days. Adults tolerated children until they grew up and could act like civilized people. They certainly weren't people that you sought out or asked to come into adult groups, especially if the group was discussing religion.

Children were servants in the household. They would have stayed with the women until they reached age and then only the boys would have been allowed into the realm of adult men. We think of children as innocents and we talk about the innocence and wide-eyed wonder of children. That was not how people in Jesus’ day saw children. They were non-people and treated that way.

We have been seeing children all over Mark’s gospel, though. Children are important to this story. Jairus’ has a dear daughter who is dying and he will do anything he can to bring her to health, including seeking out this travelling teacher and healer. A Syrophoenician woman has a daughter with an unclean spirit and even though she is a foreigner, she will do anything for this child, including seeking out this Jewish Jesus. As Jesus comes down from the mountain with Peter, James and John, they run into a man who cries out to Jesus on behalf of his son – “I believe; help my unbelief!” Even evil Herod in his courts has a young stepdaughter who delights him with her dancing. Children are all over this story.

So something is up here. Something is upside-down in this story. So maybe it’s not so surprising that Jesus took a child and brought her into the middle of the disciples. Then he embraces her. What a powerful image this is! In the midst of this great discussion on who is the greatest, this power play among the disciples, there is a hug! Jesus points the way forward by giving a hug to the one person in the household who is considered the very least. And he says, "Whoever receives one such child in my name, receives me, and whoever receives me does not receive me, but the one who sent me."

If they had really been paying attention this would have popped the bubble of every disciple in the room. They were in competition to decide who was the person of greatest worth, who was the person whose name would be remembered. Jesus, however, took a person who was considered a non-person, a nameless child and put that child at the center.

This is where Jesus gets us into trouble. He is saying that, “Yes, we do care about the weak and the poor and those who live on the margin, because it is a way into the heart of God. We meet God in the child. We learn from the wounded and the broken-hearted. We receive Jesus when we receive one such at this.

Children are at risk in this world. There was a disturbing report this week that said that the number of abortions and vasectomies may be on the rise because of economic conditions. One person close to the situation said, "Unfortunately we see women who are making decisions about terminating a pregnancy because of the severe economic crisis they're facing. They simply don't believe they can afford to bring another child into the world."[iii]

Children are one of those things that don’t make sense if you take Nietzsche’s philosophy to its logical end. Children will always be among those the world considers weak. They will always consume the thought and time and energy and worry of those who care for them. They will not make sense to those whose vision of life does not extend beyond themselves.

The Bible knows, however, that children are a blessing. They are a statement of confidence in the future and they signify that our lives have greater significance than what we, as individuals can do. They are always hope and promise, however they come. And Jesus puts a child at the center.

Jesus takes a child! It was his way of pointing to God's will which is not self-serving, but other-serving. The true measure of greatness is servanthood, and that means serving all, not just the believers, not just the acceptable folks, but all, including the last and the least.

It is often said that the church is the only institution that exists for the people who are not yet a part of it. We come here each week, not just to join together in love, but to prepare for service out there beyond the walls. At least that's what we're called to be. And still the foreigner, the child, the refugee, the unemployed person, the abused person, the hungry person, the teenager waits for us to come.

To be about this mission is to be misunderstood by the world. The Nietzsches will never understand. But we just might find Jesus, who was betrayed and killed and who, after three days, was raised again - for you and me and us all. We just might find Jesus, who shows us a child and shows us the Way. Thanks be to God.

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[i] http://thinkexist.com/quotation/organized_religion_is_a_sham_and_a_crutch_for/210461.html.

[ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. By Francis Golffing, [Anchor Books: New York, 1956], pp. 168-9.

[iii] Paula Gianino, CEO of Planned Parenthood in the St. Louis region, quoted in “Meltdown Impact extends to abortion, birth control,” AP, 24 Mar 2009, http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MELTDOWN_FAMILY_PLANNING?SITE=VANOV&SECTION=BUSINESS&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.

Following Jesus to a Fruitful Life: Who Do You Say That I Am?

The truth is that Jesus is not who we think he is. I’ve told the story before about the friend of a friend who was an Episcopal priest taking his first appointment in a small parish in southwest Virginia. He decided, when he arrived at the church, that the arrangement of the chancel area in the front of the sanctuary was all wrong. So for his first Sunday he moved all of the furnishings to where he thought they ought to be.

I’m pretty sure this is one of those things that warn everybody against doing when they go to seminary. You don’t make major changes to the worship space on your first Sunday because somebody is likely to get upset. Sure enough, as people were shaking his hand at the door, one dear saint of the church came up to him and said, “If Jesus Christ knew what you had done to the front of this church, he’d be rolling over in his grave.”

Jesus is not who we think he is and the reason for that is that we keep on making Jesus over to look like us. A Harris poll came out recently and it said that the person who most Americans mentioned when asked to name a hero is…Barack Obama. Right after him is Jesus. God is 11^th in the poll, which is a little confusing since Christians would say that gives God two spots.[i] What’s amazing is that after all this time Jesus consistently ranks at the top of surveys like this.

If you dig a little deeper, however, you discover that who Jesus is looks very different to different people. Some people look to Jesus and see a great teacher. Some people look to him and see a miracle worker. Some see him as a great historical figure who started a very influential movement that has had a lasting impact on the world. Some people see him as a prophet – even some other religions like Islam, though the story they tell about Jesus is very different from the gospel accounts.

Some see him as the son of God. The Christ. The Messiah. The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The one who was fully human and fully divine.

Sometimes we sing about Jesus and talk about him as the one who is high and lifted up, exalted at the right of God. And sometimes we sing about Jesus as being right beside us. “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.” You might think, after that song, that Andy is Jesus’ other name! But the great mistake we make is in thinking that the way we are thinking about Jesus is the only way to be thinking about Jesus. The truth is that Jesus is not who we think he is.

It’s not unusual to fall into this trap. Jesus’ disciples did it, too. Along with all of the other people who followed Jesus. In the segment of Mark’s gospel that we read today you see how there are many, many people around Jesus all the time now. Jesus cannot seem to get away from the crowds, even though he’s travelling all over the place.

The Pharisees come up from Jerusalem to take him to task. 4,000 people come out into the wilderness and he feeds them. People bring him a blind man and he heals him. Everybody is looking for Jesus, but the people who understand who he really is are few and far between. The woman who touched the hem of his garment and was healed. The synagogue ruler who came to appeal on behalf of his sick daughter. The Syrophoenician woman who comes to Jesus even though she is a foreigner – an outsider to the promise – and who seems to have to argue with Jesus in order for him to give her what she wants for her daughter. These people seem to get it. They seem to know who he is. Along with the unclean spirits, of course.

But the disciples? They’re clueless. Even after seeing Jesus feed 5,000 people miraculously they can’t get a grip on how he’s going to feed just 4,000. When Jesus starts to warn them about the leaven of the religious leaders and of old King Herod he is using yeast as a metaphor for how the corruption of these figures can grow and expand. But the disciples think that he is chastising them for not having enough bread for their journey. They just can’t get their minds around what is going on.

So when Jesus asks them who people are saying that he is, we don’t have high hopes that this crew is going to be able to figure it out. But it’s an important moment in this story. This hapless crew may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they will be the nucleus of the new church. These will be the ones that have to tell the story. They will be among the first to testify.

“Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks.

“John the Baptist,” they say. John who has just been beheaded by Herod but who had a large following and who called the people to repentance just like Jesus has been doing. “Elijah,” they say. Elijah, the prophet, who was known for his miraculous signs and for the fact that he was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind. Legend said that he would return in advance of the day of the Lord. “One of the prophets,” they say.

“But you…who do you say that I am?”

The question hangs in the air. Who dares to say it? Who dares to say what they all hope but struggle to believe. Finally it’s Peter who answers Jesus. “You are the Christ. You are not the warm-up act. You are not the one who prepares the way. You are the way. You are the main event.”

Jesus tells Peter to be quiet. Don’t let the cat out of the bag. And then he proceeds to tell them, for the first time, where this rapid journey full of ‘immediately’s is headed. “The son of humanity must suffer many things.” He’s speaking in the third person but he’s talking about himself. “The son of humanity must be rejected by the chief priests and the elders and the scribes. He must be killed. And after three days to rise again.”

The end of the road is suffering? The end of the road is rejection? The end of the road is death? Even with the rising again, this is not what the disciples or the crowds had come to expect.

This is Jesus! The one who stares down demons and binds the strong man. The one who is so powerful that even the hem of his garment is infused with supernatural power. The one who can feed multitudes and walk on water. Suffering? Rejection? Death?

We still can’t handle Jesus’ death. It just doesn’t compute. I think it must be because we are too busy thinking about what Jesus can do for us…about how Jesus can bless us as we are without there being any change or any pain or any transformation. The idea that the journey might involve some struggle or even that some parts of us may have to be put to death so that a new self can arise…that idea is disturbing.

Which brings me to Jean-Claude Van Damme. Do you remember Jean-Claude? He made a series of very gory, very forgettable action movies. I’ve never watched one all the way through. They’re just not worth anybody’s time. But I do remember finding one on TV one day – Cyborg was the name of it – and it includes a scene that shows just how hard the idea of Jesus’ death is for us.

In the film, Van Damme’s character is literally crucified to the mast of a ship. But Van Damme is no wimp. He’s not going to let the nails holding him to the mast in the middle of a raging storm be the end of him. He proceeds to wrench the nails out of the mast by his own brute strength – something that is not humanly possible.

That movie seems to suggest that a real hero wouldn’t have gone to the cross and died. A real hero wouldn’t have submitted to the worst that the world could do to him. A real hero wouldn’t have tried to change the rules about how the world works – he would have just been better at the using the rules as they are and would have claimed victory on the world’s terms.

Jesus is not that kind of hero. Jesus did not come to play by the rules as they exist. You know what rules I’m talking about. The rules about how might makes right. About how you can do anything you want as long as you’re rich enough or strong enough or beautiful enough or well-connected enough. The rules about how more is always more and always better than less.

If that’s the kind of hero Jesus was going to be, he would have marched on Jerusalem at the head of a mob or an army. He would have overthrown Herod and Caesar and any other ruler who dared to get in his way. He would have ended up on a throne and he would not have ended up on a cross. Maybe that’s the scenario the disciples expected but Jesus is going on a different journey.

You see, Jesus is not who you think he is. He’s not going to affirm your expectations – he’s going to change them forever. He is going to meet you where you are and accept you as you are but he’s not going to leave you that way. He’s not going to let the stories you tell yourself and the tapes that play in your head be the thing that defines you. He’s going to challenge you to get over yourself and discover what he knows you can be. And he’s going to do the same to the world.

Did you really think that when Jesus came out of the wilderness and declared that the kingdom of God was at hand that you wouldn’t be affected? Did you really think that when he was calling people to walk who couldn’t walk and to hear who couldn’t hear and to see who couldn’t see that it was only about them? Did you really think that this journey was not for you?

Jesus has made the turn toward Jerusalem. It’s all about the cross now. And he’s inviting you to come. But whether you respond to the call or not – know this – Jesus is changing the world. Because he’s not what you think. He’s more. Thanks be to God.

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[i] http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/02/20/Obama_tops_Jesus_in_heroes_poll/UPI-69841235147253/.