Readings for July 17, 2016
9th Sunday after Pentecost

• Genesis 18:1-10a and Psalm 15  
• Colossians 1:15-28  
• Luke 10:38-42

One Thing, by Pastor Fred
It can be a challenge to mingle with the guests when you’re the host of the party! 
 
At our first call in Michigan, Kim and I had an annual Christmas Open House at the Parsonage every December.  It was quite a production, not just Christmas cookies and coffee, or a cake ordered from Jewel, but everything was home made.  We had 4 different fondue’s, we had 3 different varieties of Tiropita’s that we made one phyllo dough sheet at a time, we had Kim’s mom’s favorite wine marinated chicken drumettes, and my home-made Eggnog.  Mind you, it was only once a year – and the first year, it almost did us in!  We desired to play the hosts, Kim and I, with the finest Hospitality we could provide. 
 
Only, we didn’t really get around to the visiting part of Hospitality, the sitting at the feet part, at least, not that first year.  Coming from the city, we didn’t realize that the Finnish people of Upper MI don’t believe in “fashionably late”, and at exactly 10 to the hour, the doorbell rang!  And we were still running around, setting things up, finding the last lo-ing cattle of our various cultural collections of nativity scenes, lighting the candles, not to mention, beating the egg whites frothy, of my fresh home-made eggnog.  And BTW, I can’t believe we served raw eggs and cream, back then!  Of course, it was absolutely delicious, but “thanks be to God”, no one was struck ill with food poisoning! 
 
As the guests ebbed and flowed throughout the evening, we struggled valiantly to keep up.  Kim and I were in and out of the kitchen, fussing and fidgeting, and yes, ‘distracted’ (like Martha) by many dishes we wanted to keep hot or cold – just right – before we presented them to our honored guests.  We made a few frantic attempts to come in and sit down with them, but ‘listen’ and relax, we couldn’t, as we were distracted by what had to come out of the oven next, afraid that smoke would rise, and the smell of burnt offerings would pour out of the kitchen, if we didn’t hurry back. 
 
Like Martha, we felt exasperated with “all the work.”  But we had no one to blame but ourselves!
 
Being worried and distracted we were not able to do the ‘one thing’, most necessary, be present for our guests.  The next year, knowing something had to be done, we invited two of our most talented confirmands to come and help with the food prep and serving.  That was a turning point.  That, and letting go of my delicious, but dangerous, egg nog!  And from that year on, we were much better able to practice Hospitality with our guests at the Christmas Open House. 
 
And we began to see our hospitality more like, Abraham and Sarah’s, welcoming well, serving lavishly, and attentive to our guests.  Abraham – though 99 years old – ran out to greet his guests, practically begged to serve them, treated them as more important, and offered them the usual Middle-East ‘daily special’ of water and pita bread, and then, going above and beyond, enlists his whole large family to put on a lavish feast, still finding time to play not only Host, but guest, standing by, under the shade of the Oak trees with them.  And Sarah & Abraham do all this for complete strangers, even before they realized their divine angelic status – messengers of God.  
 
It takes a bit of both Mary and Martha – Mary who sat listening to the Word of God at Jesus’ feet like a good disciple, and Martha preparing and serving the meal – to be truly hospitable and to stand with the Guests.  That’s what we learned.
 
We learned that a Hospitality team is two sides of the same coin.  That all of us, really, have a bit of both in us.  We are sometimes the harried worker, the distracted director, the pushed to the limit parent or child.  But we are also the attentive listener, the satiated concert or theatre goer, the curled up in the couch book worm, the Yoga meditator. 
 
Jesus is not rating, or judging these opposite characteristics, “loving God with everything you have,” like Mary, and “loving your neighbor as yourself,” like Martha and the story of the ‘Merciful, Good, Samaritan’ from last week.  The two stories go together, after all, one after the other in chapter 10 of Luke’s gospel.  We do, and we are, both, in our life of faith. 
 
Jesus certainly wasn’t putting down “service,” literally the “diaconate,” those who served at table.  For, we know how Jesus praised Peter’s mother-in-law after he healed her, as she went from being served, to serving him a meal.  We know Jesus celebrated with the wedding party at Cana – where he went from being served to serving the gallons and gallons of new wine from those water jugs.  We know that Jesus ate and celebrated with the tax collectors and every repentant sinner, because, as the ‘bridegroom’, he was only with them a short while longer, both offering hospitality and receiving it.  Jesus was honored to dine with “strangers” and those hungering for his message of the kingdom.  He both served others, and was served. 
 
And of course, all this Hospitality is embodied in the Lord’s Supper Jesus instituted, on the night in which he was betrayed, when Jesus shared the Passover Meal with his Disciples in the Upper Room, and Commanded all of us, ever after, to prepare, to serve, and to eat.  Jesus is a Guest with us in this meal, and our Host.  We are to focus on this “one thing” that is the “better part”, and then “go and do likewise”.  It is good to develop both the ‘Mary and the Martha’ sides of our faith life.  To ‘love God with all that we have, with our heart, soul, mind and strength, and, to love your neighbor as yourself’. 
 
“We” are in the business of ‘Hospitality’.  As the writer of Hebrews says of the Abraham and Sarah story, in the Epistle: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for by this some have entertained angels unawares” (13:2).  How can we welcome those around us with the Good News of the kingdom of God?  How can we be hospitable to strangers and share what is essential about our faith?  How can we live the life of welcoming for the sake of our Host at the Lord’s Supper, and feed the world with this bread of life? 
 
When we entertain strangers in the name of Jesus, we may be entertaining God’s angels, or, welcoming those “thirsty to find their lives” here and now.  Either way, it is worth sharing the “one thing” that is truly necessary, and letting go of the many distractions holding us back.  Like two sides of the same coin, it can be a tricky balancing act between Mary and Martha in our lives; between knowing when to make the eggnog, or just pick it up at the store.  But we know that God’s hospitality for us is always done with lavish generosity.  And we can rest assured that our Host is always ready to serve us with the finest gift of all, God’s love and grace! 

Readings for July 10, 2016
The 8th Sunday after Pentecost 
Proper 10, Lectionary 15

• Deuteronomy 30:9-14 
• Colossians 1:1-14 
• Luke 10:25-37

Neighborliness, Reverend Fred Kinsey
I am worried that, not guns or the people who pull the trigger, but the use of violence as a more and more common and copied way to determine our differences, is where the devil has decided to enter our lives. 
 
This has been a very difficult week.  Families in Dallas, Minneapolis and Baton Rouge are in shock and tears at the loss of their loved ones.  Communities are angry and frustrated, wondering what to do? fed up with these all too familiar scenes, and are demanding that the senseless killings stop, already! 
 
As the President said yesterday, there is no justification for this.  But as uncompromisingly final the death of 7 innocent victims is, still the reasons behind them are complex, vexing, with no simple solutions. 
 
And so we grieve too, with the families and communities, we feel their loss, and join in their frustration, and theirweariness.  When will it end?  How much more must we endure?  And yet the violence continues.  Cell phone videos and social media have changed the debate, but the vexing hex of violence, goes back much farther, and I’d say, much deeper.  What seems like a long time ago now – you have to be over 40 to remember back to 1992, anyway – when a similarly frustrated Rodney King, pleaded for the violence of the L.A. riots to end: “can’t we all just get along? Can we get along?” he famously said on camera.  The violence had erupted precisely as a reaction to the court case of Rodney’s brutal beating by police, who were surprisingly exonerated, despite a videotape of the incident.  Though statistics tell us that gun deaths have gone down since that time, the root cause(s) remains mostly unaddressed.  Violence begets violence. 
 
Even the effects of all this violence are incalculable, largely I think, because they are so hidden from view.  Like the priest and Levite who passed by the man left for dead on the side of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, who would have been unseen, were it not for the cell-phone-like view of Luke’s eye-witness perspective in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the shootings this week are but the tip of the iceberg, leaving deeper wounds inside us, on our psyche and spirits. 
 
Soldiers who have seen combat are affected, as each new gun attack recalls the combat they experienced, inflicting new pain on old wounds, or unconsciously sublimating realities they thought were buried and gone, which takes its toll in ways they are unable to face, and all too often resurfaces uninvited in hurtful ways, usually on people they love.   
 
In a similar way, survivors of intimate partner violence are left feeling the vulnerability of their scars all over again.
 
The legacy of slavery and the institutional nature of racism that is still alive and well in its wake, is a violence that hurts African Americans, and, in the end, all of us. 

But the real tragedy of the commonplace use of violence, and racism, is more than the ‘unseen’ violence affecting us every day, intolerable as that is, but the real tragedy is the violence we refuse to ‘look at,’ from the perspective of the dominant white culture in our country.  We need to look at it, acknowledge it, and confess its sin, so that we can begin to deal with it.  Not because we are bad people, but because the system of violence exists through all of us, until we do.  As Jesus knew, the social system is at a breaking point, when its leaders enable murder to go unattended. 
 
Though hidden, violence is never isolated, and it grows like a cancer.  The Evil One knows this.  So, how we respond to violence can make all the difference.  We pray that our faith, and our common baptismal bond, are strong enough, to help us take the next steps toward justice and peace.
 
Jesus said, “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.”  This too is violence.  Though only a parable, a story Jesus used to illustrate who our neighbor is, it is a true account about how, when we don’t know our neighbor, we will continue to hurt each other.  And it asks the question, who will help?  When will this violence end?  This could be any of us – like random victims of a deranged sniper.  We know what we want to happen.  Each of us know, we would want to be rescued, saved, cared for, no matter who we are. 
 
When Jesus’ audience hears the parable – who are mostly Galileans and rural folk – that a priest and a Levite see the person, but pass by on the other side, they know there is normally going to be yet a third character in the story who will come by.  And the third one was usually “an Israelite.”  That was the common trope: a Priest, a Levite, and an Israelite.  And the Israelite is a lay person, one of them.  It was the trope of anti-clericalism.  It would have been, not only the normal way such a story would go, but an easy softball for Jesus to lob to his listeners. 
 
“But,” said Jesus, “a Samaritan (not one of them!) while traveling came near [the man left for dead]; and when the Samaritan saw him, he was moved with pity.  He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him…”
 
The Good Samaritan, right!?  That’s who we’d want to rescue us.  Except, to the disciples, he was not good at all!  Samaritans were sinful 2nd cousins, never the heroes of the story – hated since the return from Exile 500 years earlier!  Jesus has not only challenged his followers, but changed their whole way of thinking and acting.  Jesus has changed who our neighbor is, and what neighborliness looks like!  Love your neighbor as yourself, yes, and now, love your enemy.  There is no one who we should not consider as a fellow human being, no one who is outside the bounds of our religion, our race, and our gender.  All, can be our neighbor, and when we are “merciful” to them, as Jesus says, that is fulfilling the law of love - a radical neighborliness.
 
The first hearers of this story did not understand the way they were inflicting violence on one another across these human-made boundaries of nation and ethnicity, gender and race.  A good example is the attitude of the disciples not long before Jesus told this parable, when they had been shunned from entering Samaritan territory.  Jesus said they should just shake the dust off and move on.  While the disciples asked excitedly if they should call down a firestorm from above to demolish them!  Nice neighbors, those disciples were, right?!
 
Violence is not the answer.  And we have heard that, thank goodness, from many a leader interviewed on the news in the past week.  Not to say that there isn’t plenty of justified anger to go around. 
 
But even the protests against police violence have been peaceful across the country, and the police responses professional, at least from my experience here in Chicago, which is an improvement over demonstrations a generation ago.  And ironically, the shooting of officers in Dallas was at a peaceful protest of the Philando Castile and Alton Sterling shootings.  The protesters were beginning to disperse, police and protesters were taking selfies together! 
 
I hope the President is right, that in the big picture, we have made progress on this front.  But I believe that the unseen violence, the deeper vein of our sin, is the racism that we are all too often, not yet confronting.  We must name it, and work to end it.  Prayers are indeed powerful, but to ignore the root of institutional racism, is to enable the power of the evil one in our world and communities.
 
Jesus does not shy away from the truth.  As the Son of God he comes as a truth teller, and in the Good Samaritan, Jesus holds a mirror up to us for us to see, that there is no one who is the other in our world that we can demonize or call inhuman.  Our neighbor is the one in need, just like us, on the roads we travel every day, near or far, whatever color or creed.  Violence begets violence, it grows like a cancer.  Jesus calls us to name it and to conquer it with love – like the Good Samaritan does.  Jesus gives us hope that every single act of faithfulness can make a difference. 
 
And so, as Jesus himself instructed, let us “go and do likewise.”