June 28, 2008
Welcome
On the road in beautiful downtown Mayville, NY, at the public library’s WiFi:
Pent 7/8A (Mt 10.40-42)
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Mt 10.40).
So far as Jesus is concerned, the last thing card-carrying Christians need is a card to carry. If, indeed, there are any credentials required at all, love and justice will do jes’ fine. And according to Matthew’s take on the Good News, Welcoming.
Welcoming one another is not only what makes us disciples, it’s what makes being a disciple about. It’s what makes us who we are. No amount of grandstanding, breast-beating, ecclesiastic gerrymandering, confessions, or decades of evangelism can take its place. Wellcome and welcome all and thass all.
So what does it mean for us to love one another in this welcoming way? And how on earth will anybody, presuming they should much care one way or the other, ever know whether we do or don’t? How can you tell a disciple from a devil without a program?
Our founders were mighty smart to separate out the religious and the secular institutions in our nation, to make them — and to insist that they remain — unbeholden to one another. Church is not state and vice versa. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to the both of us.
And they were smart, as well, not to talk a lot about love. What they were after for a welcome change was a just and open and fair society and a government that could pull it all off and keep it that way. Even a welcoming church was welcome to help out, but all the same, was also welcome to stay out.
We churchers would look a long way before we’d ever find a political system more conducive to or nourishing of our own self-understanding. We’d also look a long way before we could embrace such an experiment with the full empowerment of our stewardship, both to enable and coax it along whenever it wavered and to indict and admonish it with something like the Isaiah two-step whenever it erred and strayed.
But the best way and, indeed, the only way to embrace this herculean ministry, of course, is to be such a society ourselves, then to do it, to model it, to make it so attractive folks simply have to have a piece of the action for themselves. It is to take this ministry far more seriously than we take ourselves. It is to realize that loving and welcoming one another in any kind of institutional or even communal way is to practice justice and fairness and civility and respect in our own common allegiance and worship.
So all the while this grand experiment in justice our founders imagined and birthed has come upon what may be the worst of times in its two centuries, where’s the church? Championing justice? Loving one another? Modeling fairness and acceptance and inclusiveness? Calling the hands of our nation’s leaders back to the premises of our founders, but tending to our own, as well? Welcoming?
Where are these disciples when we need them the most? How can one tell a disciple from a devil?
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos