Loading...Sermon January 17, 2016
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen, Newport, PA
Second Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C
…the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." John 2:9-10
Please be seated.
My mother was born in a little town called Fulton. Fulton is about 25 miles northwest of Syracuse close to Lake Ontario. It seems an odd place for immigrants from southern Italy to settle, because it’s so cold there and they get lake effect snow. They can easily get 50 inches in one snowfall and if there’s a blizzard, they can get 7-8 feet of snow!
I guess it was the jobs at the Nestle factory and the canning factory that drew the immigrants. There was also some good land for farming, even in the short growing season that far north.
The town is about 300 miles from here and in the years before Rt. 81 was completed, it was quite a long drive. My grandmother took the Greyhound bus from Syracuse a couple of times a year and she and my grandfather usually came to Pennsylvania to be with us at Christmas. But we only visited Fulton in the summer.
I have such fond memories of those visits. My grandmother’s sister Mary lived right next door. My grandmother’s Aunt, also Mary, lived just around the corner. Her husband had a little neighborhood store with a candy counter and was always allowing us to pick out some candy. Two other sisters often dropped by and Francis often took us to her big rambling home where she and her husband had raised eleven children. The Aunts often made us cookies and gave us quarters. My Aunt Mary used to take me to visit her parents and to play bingo. We were surrounded with so much love.
In the summer when I was 13, I asked to stay with my grandparents another week. Everyone agreed I’d be okay taking the Greyhound bus back to Harrisburg. Honestly, during that week, I was a little bored and I was terribly homesick. I don’t remember much else of the week except a visit by my grandparents’ friends. They were a couple in their 70s, older than my grandparents. They’d been in the United States for many years, but unlike my grandfather, they had never learned to speak English.
I was used to my grandparents speaking Italian in front of me, mostly if they were arguing, but they usually spoke English. My grandmother was born in the United States after all. I only knew a few Italian slang words. The visit by these friends was a little difficult for me, because I didn’t understand any of the conversation.
Before these friends arrived, my grandmother had me set up TV trays. These were metal with a design on them, similar to the ones we had at home. Then my grandmother filled some colorful metal bowls (I still have those bowls) with chips and nuts and had me put those on the TV trays. Once the couple arrived for their visit, they were immediately offered drinks.
Thus I learned about hospitality. If people came to visit, you always had something to offer them to eat and to drink. It was how you made people feel comfortable in your home.
In fact, when my daughter and I showed up unexpectedly to visit family in Sicily, they nearly emptied the cupboards to feed us and apologized profusely that they did not have a proper meal to offer us.
I must confess while I witnessed this hospitality and welcome, I’m not as gracious as they were. I get so focused on the task at hand, that I often forget to offer food and drink.
Yet, hospitality was highly valued in my family, and so I identify with this story of the wedding at Cana. The fact that you would be hosting guests and run out of drink would be horrifying. And to have only water for the purification rites – for washing your body, not necessarily great water for drinking, would leave you with no beverages to offer in a culture where drinking wine was safer than drinking water. It’d be like running out of water.
When I explored more about the importance of hospitality, I read that in the Mediterranean world hospitality was considered a sacred duty and often more stringently kept than written laws. Nomadic peoples often had to rely upon others for food or lodging, so they, in turn were hospitable to strangers.
There was an understanding that in doing so, you could be taking care of God and we see that in the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18. Remember how three strangers passed by and Abraham implored them to stop awhile and rest. He offered water to clean their feet. He asked Sarah to bake 3 cakes of bread for them. He had the most tender calf killed to feed them. Remember, the people passing by were strangers! They were not known to Abraham.
Jesus would have grown up and learned the rules of hospitality. He would have learned to treat all guests with respect and honor. He would have learned that if a guest brought animals, you as the host provided for those animals. You provided water for the guest’s feet. You provided rest. You provided a generous feast. You protected your guest without question for three days and thirty-six hours, roughly 4 ½ days. If you traveled, you could go into the center of a city and as long as you were polite, you would be invited into a home to stay under these same rules. You could count on it. (The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 1962, Vol. E-J, p. 654)
And that’s how Jesus was able to conduct his ministry. The rules of his culture regarding hospitality meant Jesus could go from town to town and find rest and food and care from strangers. When Jesus sent out the seventy as recorded in Luke, Chapter 10, He told them they didn’t need to take anything with them, because he knew, according to the codes of hospitality, they would be cared for by strangers.
Christians could travel from town to town and know they’d be cared for, but they also appreciated the opportunity to worship with and get to know other Christians. In this way, everyone’s understanding of the Gospel was enlarged and strengthened.
I don’t know about you, but this kind of hospitality feels pretty difficult to me. Yes, I am a friendly person, but to the extent of opening up my home to a stranger for nearly five days and preparing a great feast for a total stranger?! I can pass that off as “the times have changed,” or that was back then. Now we have hotels and restaurants. And we have agencies and organizations that can help. We have a Priest’s discretionary fund here at the church. I know I need to ponder this a little more.
Yet, the one place I believe we are called and challenged to be hospitable is in our church. I know this can be dangerous as we all heard about what happened when the people of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were hospitable to a newcomer during their Bible Study.
Nonetheless, we are called to be hospitable. We are called to welcome the stranger in our midst. Our coffee hour is certainly a wonderful feast, so we’re great at that. Being hospitable also means showing people around, sitting with them during the service and introducing them to others at coffee hour. And being hospitable also means that if they choose to join us, we must be willing to change. Because make no mistake about it, every new person who comes into our midst means we change who we are. Sometimes the change might be easy for us. Sometimes it’s a little harder.
Yet, Jesus’ wanted to bring all on earth to him and we are his representatives here and now. It’s our mission. If we’re all created in God’s image and if we each have different gifts from God, then each of us and any people who come to be part of our community, allow us to more fully know God…allow us to see more and more of God.
Amen
