The calling to preach the word of God is a series of opportunities to get yourself into trouble. On the one hand, there is the recurring invitation from the Spirit of God to, as the late Representative John Lewis put it, “get into good trouble”; on the other, there are myriad chances to put your foot in your mouth and start chewing on your ankle. This is one reason why the wise preacher goes forth only with much prayer, in a spirit of dependence. Let’s pray.
As many of you know, we came to Indiana from Colorado, where I pastored a church in a small mountain resort community. The church was pretty thin on the ground in the county, but I had a few colleagues whom I really appreciated. One was Doug Stevenson, a New Zealander who had come to the US a few years before to pastor an independent congregation out in Kremmling, in the western part of the county. One day, somewhat pensively, Doug told our pastors’ group his daughter was coming to visit from New Zealand. He and his wife Ethel were eager to see her, but there was a complicating factor: she was bringing her girlfriend along. Unsure how to respond to the situation, he had reached out to a friend for guidance. His friend listened, then told Doug to put a double bed in his daughter’s room, set everything up as nicely as he could, and leave chocolates on the pillows. “Make your daughter welcome,” was the message, which meant making her girlfriend welcome too.
I learned at Regent to take hospitality seriously, both from the way the Regent community valued it and from my introduction to the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who taught me the great importance of hospitality in the world in which Jesus lived; but I still saw it primarily in practical terms, as one of the small graces in which and by which we’re called to live. That conversation with Doug widened my perspective, because his friend wasn’t talking about hospitality as a practical response to human need but as a theological response to the human condition.
Then in 2015, a controversy erupted at Hope College, where Sara and I went and Lydia is now. Under the leadership of then-president Dr. John Knapp, Hope extended eligibility for spousal benefits to same-sex partners of its employees. The backlash from the decision was fierce—including from Hope’s Board of Trustees, which is one reason Dr. Knapp left in 2017 for a school in western Pennsylvania—but I found myself defending it. We were only months removed from the trauma of losing our health insurance and the tortuous process of putting our family on government health care benefits. I was acutely aware of how much health insurance can mean to those who are economically vulnerable, and so I didn’t see Hope’s decision as a theological statement about same-sex marriage. Instead, I saw it, and felt it, as a theological statement about the importance of extending hospitality to its employees in every way possible.
Hospitality is a Christian virtue, which means one of the channels by which the grace and love of God flow through us into the world around us. Most of the time, we treat it as secondary—we decide who is welcome and who isn’t based on other considerations, and then we extend hospitality to those who are welcome. If we look at Jesus, though, I believe we see him doing something very different; and so I’m going to tell you a story. As Rich Mullins might say, it’s a story that you’ve probably heard, but for this morning, I want you to set that aside. I’m not going to tell you where to find it in the Bible, and I ask you not to look. Just listen.
Once upon a time, a popular young teacher named Jesus was passing through town on his way from who-knows-where to where-to-next? It wasn’t a city like Jerusalem or Jericho, just an ordinary town with the usual run of people; and one of the leading men in town, a man named Simon, happened to be a Pharisee. The Pharisees had already clashed with Jesus, so Simon invited him home for dinner—not to show him hospitality but to evaluate him, judge him, and perhaps give him some badly-needed remedial education about what God really wanted.
Now, there was a way these things were properly done. Entertaining a guest was a public affair, so it took place in the courtyard of the house with the gateway open. Couches were arranged in a U shape, perhaps with a long, low table running down the middle; those who were eating would lie on one side on the couches with their heads closest to the table and their feet sticking out, something like this: [PICTURE] The people of the village could come into the courtyard, if they had nowhere else to be, and stand or sit along the walls to listen—and with their local teacher of the law hosting a controversial young rabbi, interest in the village was high.
As the host, you would meet your guests at the door of your home and give each of them a kiss of greeting on the cheek. To fail to do so would be a sign of contempt. Then your guests would take off their sandals and sit on stools placed around the outside of the U to have their hands and feet washed by servants. In a world in which most roads were a compound of dirt and animal dung, you can understand the importance of this courtesy. You might also have your servants anoint the heads of your guests with oil. Only then would you and your guests recline on the couches to eat.
Simon, in a calculated series of insults, denied Jesus all these courtesies, testing the younger man to see how he would answer the provocation. Jesus would have been perfectly justified to take offense and leave. Instead, he went quietly and took his place around the table (to the displeasure of those next to him). Before Simon could feel any sense of satisfaction, however, a woman burst into tears and darted forward from the crowd around the walls—and not just any woman, but a prostitute. She had heard Jesus proclaim the love and forgiveness of God for sinners—even sinners like her! She had come into the house of the Pharisee—the most unsafe place for her in town—in hopes of showing Jesus her love and gratitude. To see him treated with such spite and contempt broke her heart.
She had no water and no towel, so she rushed forward, weeping her heart out, and knelt over Jesus’ feet to let her tears wash them clean. When her tears subsided, she unbound her hair—a shocking act, something no respectable woman would do in front of any man at all but her husband, let alone in public—and wiped his feet clean and dry. She smothered them with kisses—the only part of his body she could have felt worthy to kiss—and then offered perhaps the greatest sacrifice of all. She drew out the bottle of perfume that hung around her neck (which also served as breath freshener) and poured it out to anoint Jesus’ feet.
Simon, seeing this, was shocked and horrified—but he also felt a sort of exultant satisfaction to see this young charlatan exposed. After all, any real prophet would have known what kind of woman was touching him, and no true servant of God would just sit there and let her do it. And then Jesus looked at him and said firmly, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”
Simon replied sourly, “Spit it out, Teacher.”
Jesus responded, “Two men were in debt to a moneylender. One owed him $3,000; the other owed him $30,000. They were both broke. Rather than having them thrown into prison, their creditor decided to completely forgive both their debts. Which one will love him more?”
That wasn’t what Simon had expected, but there was only one possible answer. “I suppose,” he answered, “the one who was forgiven more.”
Jesus said, “You have judged rightly.” Then he turned to the woman and said, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house as your guest, Simon! You know what hospitality requires. Yet you didn’t even give me water to wash my own feet—but she has made up for your failure by washing them with her tears and drying them with her hair. You failed to give me a kiss of greeting; she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet. You failed to anoint my head with oil; she surpassed you again—she anointed my feet, and not with cheap oil, but with expensive perfume.
“Simon, she has exposed your many failures for everyone to see, and so you need to understand this. Her sins are many—you know this, the whole town knows this, and so do I—but God has forgiven all of them; she’s been forgiven much, so she loves much. But you, Simon—you think you’re a righteous man, and you’ve convinced everyone around you. Actually, your sins are many, just as hers are—you’ve put some of them on display here this afternoon—but you don’t see them. In your pride, your arrogance, your self-righteousness, and the hardness of your heart, you have rejected the love and grace of God. Therefore you have been forgiven little, and believe you need little forgiveness; therefore you love little. You have little love for God and less for other people.” Then he reached out and touched the woman on the shoulder; he said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven. Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
And with that—and a disbelieving question from others around the table—the story ends. How Simon responds, we’re never told; it’s left to us to imagine. I don’t imagine he responded well, though, because there’s a fundamental divide between the way he looks at people and the way Jesus looks at people. Simon sees people through a purity filter. The most important thing about other people is how pure they are; that is what determines how you relate to them. If they’re impure, they must be condemned and rejected, and they must understand that the only way they can be welcomed and accepted is to purify themselves. The only theological question that matters in looking at another person is whether they’re good enough.
In stark contrast, Jesus sees people through a hospitality filter—and not just, or even primarily, the woman. That’s why he accepts Simon’s invitation! Remember what Emily said a few weeks ago: hospitality doesn’t just mean hosting other people. Lauren Winner has said that Christian hospitality means “to invite our guests to enter into our lives as they are”; if that’s true of Christian hosting, then Christian guesting must begin with accepting the lives of our hosts as they are. Think about this story in that light. Jesus willingly goes to share fellowship around a table with Simon, who thinks himself better than everyone when he is clearly the greatest sinner identified in the story, because his heart is hard. The fact that Simon’s sins are “respectable” makes them no less significant (or less vile) than the woman’s sins, only harder to repent of; and yet Jesus offers him hospitality by guesting for a man who will not host him.
Now, I’ve known a lot of folks over the years—some of them colleagues whom I greatly appreciated—who would be nodding smugly at this point and saying to themselves, “Those conservatives who reject LGBTQ people are so unlike Jesus. I’m so glad we are affirming and we welcome everyone.” Maybe some here are thinking the same sort of thing. Truth is, though, no one’s in a position to throw stones. I remember a story Tom Sheffield, our presbytery pastor in Denver told about the liberal Episcopal church across the street from the liberal Presbyterian church he had pastored back in New Jersey. This Episcopal church was a congregation which declared itself an affirming church before that was even a thing and proudly proclaimed they welcomed everyone . . . and then one day a young evangelical couple with two small kids started coming, then settled down and made themselves at home. As Tom told it, that family sent the congregation’s leadership into an existential crisis: when they said they welcomed everyone, they didn’t mean people like . . . that.
Tom didn’t tell us how that story ended; like a lot of Jesus’ parables, he dumped it into our laps, unresolved, to wrestle with. But it illustrates a critical reality: instinctively, human beings divide those around us into those who are welcome and those who aren’t. There are those whose sins are acceptable (i.e., like ours) and those whose sins aren’t (i.e., not like ours); there are those who are “our kind of people” (for reasons of social class, educational level, or what have you) and those who aren’t. To welcome people, you have to be able to affirm them, you have to approve of them—not perfectly, we’re not that unreasonable, but in all the important ways. That’s a purity filter, and in this regard, the only difference between left and right is how it’s tuned. This is naturally how we operate. It’s not how Jesus operated. He didn’t welcome just the prostitute or just the Pharisee, he extended his welcome to both—at the exact same time.
Understand me clearly here, I’m not telling you what behaviors or people you should affirm. I’m not even getting into that. I’m saying that shouldn’t matter to whom we’re willing to welcome. Does that mean their sins don’t matter? No; but do yours? Do ours? Jesus reached out in hospitality to Simon by accepting his invitation, but that didn’t stop him from rebuking the Pharisee in the sternest terms—and for a guest to rebuke his host was as glaring a violation of the social norms as for a host to deny his guest all the expected courtesies. Why did he do that? Because while Simon would no doubt have acknowledged that he, too, was a sinner, he didn’t think he was a sinner in any way that mattered. He saw himself as a theoretical sinner, as a sinner in the abstract, as opposed to that woman weeping on the floor who was a real sinner. That is the mindset Jesus seeks to shatter like a sledgehammer through a plate-glass window.
We can only afford to have a purity filter when we’ve never faced our own sin honestly enough to realize that it’s not just “those people out there” who are impure: it’s us. We are the unacceptable, we are the unwelcome, and yet we have been welcomed by Jesus as we are now and accepted by God as we are in Jesus. I really don’t care a lick whether your instinctive mental picture of a sinner waves a rainbow flag or wears a MAGA hat, what matters is whether each of us can say with Paul, “It is a true saying and worthy of full acceptance that Jesus Christ came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” We’re called to be a body in which “there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free”—gay and straight? Black, white, Hispanic, East Asian, South Asian, Slav, Turk, Arab, Jew? Not that these categories cease to exist, but that we cease defining people by them, because “Christ is all, and in all.” To get there, we have to accept that it’s not just “those people,” whoever our “those” may be, who have much that is earthly in them which must be put to death: so do we, and just as much.
Given all this, what would it take to be a church that welcomes the unwelcome? What would it take to show the world the hospitality of Christ? I can’t say for sure, but I think it might take a church that has long valued, and practiced, sitting in the mess with one another. I think it might take a congregation founded on the acknowledgement that every one of us has vile darkness within us, and every one of us has thought and said and done things that shame us so deeply, we can’t even look at them, and that we can bring all of it into the light together because we’re all in the same boat. I think it might take a group of people who have been exhorted to move from condemnation to curiosity, to respond to our own sin and that of others not by denouncing it and exiling it, but—as Bess said a few weeks ago—by welcoming it, not as something good to applaud, but as something real which we need to understand so we can heal and grow. And I think it would probably take a church with leaders—let’s make up a name and call one of them, oh, “Dick Rooker”—capable of incarnating this by standing in the assembly of the saints and matter-of-factly laying bare their own sin, not to beat themselves up about it but to tell the story of the work God is doing in their hearts.
Looking at it, that’s a pretty tall order; but does it maybe sound like anyone you know? Yeah, me too. If there’s any congregation I’ve ever heard of that has been prepared for the ministry of welcoming the unwelcome, it’s this one; and perhaps, as Mordecai told Esther, it’s for such a time as this that we have been put here—not because we think we’re better than anyone else, but because of how clearly we’ve learned to see that we aren’t.
In that spirit this morning, let us—all of us, even me—accept the hospitality of Christ as he invites us to his table. Brothers and sisters, we are the crippled, the broken, the poor, the disreputable and the outcast invited from the highways and byways to share his feast.
Jacopo Palma the Younger, Penitent Woman Anointing the Feet of Christ at the Table of Simon the Pharisee, 1548-1628. Pen and brown ink over black chalk.