Matthew 5:13-14
You Are Welcome a poem by Schuyler Brown
Good morning salt-seasoning of the world, light bearers of the presence of God! Thank you for doing your part to make God’s love visible in this moment in time in this corner of the universe! Salt takes what is bland and ordinary and makes it zing. Light shines so that everyone can see what’s beautiful and true. Jesus was salt and light to the people of his time and he’s commissioned us to carry on that work. Then he’s promised to come with us to help us see how that can happen.
Mostly, Jesus lived to tell the world that everyone is precious to God; everyone is loved and valuable. He did that by treating everyone as if they belonged with him, inviting them to join in the amazing things God is doing in the world. We’re spending this season considering how to describe what God is up to, and today’s words describe Jesus to a T – welcoming and inclusivity. When some of the power-folk of his time wanted to criticize Jesus, they said, “He even eats with sinners and tax collectors.” To which Jesus might have replied, “Thanks for the compliment.” Inviting everyone in was what Jesus was about!
To understand how radical that was, we need to recall that the religious leaders of first century Judaism were about exclusion. They prided themselves in being God’s people – different from everyone else. Then they focused on the rules, which were incredibly hard to follow, leaving behind those who were poor or hard-working or not born Jewish. They described how this was supposed to work in what were called the Purity Codes, and told people that if they weren’t pure, God didn’t want anything to do with them. Then they encountered Jesus who broke the rules to make room for everyone and had the audacity to tell them that’s the way God wanted it because God is love.
In Jesus’ time, good religious people didn’t eat with sinners, especially tax collectors who worked for Rome. They ate with people who knew how to wash properly and so were clean. They ate with the right kind of people. They couldn’t believe the nerve of this Jesus who told them people mattered more than rules and God loved them all. So if we’re going to introduce people to the love of God as Jesus showed us, we’re going to have to break those rules too.
I’m beginning to think that every week of this series, we’re going to find ourselves saying it all comes down to how you see people, and God sees all people as important. There aren’t good people and bad people, in people and out people, friends and enemies. There are just children of God. We’re all one family. We’re all in this together.
When we say, “Welcome!” we aren’t saying, come on in and we’ll tolerate you. We’re saying, “You’re family. We belong together.” We don’t do that because we want to be nice, but because it’s true. Every single person is a part of who we are, and everyone brings something essential to community. In God’s world, there aren’t divisions between rich and poor, gay and straight, men and women, old and young, white and brown. Each one is unique and each one is important. We have a way to go to internalize that reality, but we’ve made a beginning. We’re learning how to see the man on the corner with a sign begging as a brother and the woman on the corner with a sign protesting as a sister. We’re learning how to open our hearts and our minds to internalize a Jesus-sized world view.
Do you remember when we decided to spend a lot of money fixing our roof and our windows and painting this place? We said it was an investment because we wanted to fill this building up. It was a down-payment on welcome. Look at what happened! Three churches on Sunday and meditators on Monday and Moslem prayers on Friday. Singers and piano players and Boy Scouts. Quilters and gardeners and readers. Who knows who’s going to come tomorrow. Welcome and inclusion is about making space and then letting people learn from us and help us grow, too.
I remember almost 50 years ago when I started in ministry, it was new for women to be welcomed. (Some places that hasn’t happened yet.) Back then when the women got together, they’d complain that they’d been invited to the table but hnot heard. The men still ran the meetings, and no one listened to a woman’s ideas until a man repeated them. I suspect that happened in more than just ministry once-upon-a-time. Not so much now; or at least it’s better. Welcome and inclusion are about not just letting folks come to the table, but letting them talk and dream, letting them influence the menu and the after-dinner dancing. It’s about letting people matter not just because it’s the nice thing to do but because we’re all better for it. We become better people when we make the effort to really see and hear our neighbors and to let them count.
Because that’s what Jesus did and it’s what he continues to do when we let him show us the way.