We welcome. Luke 14:12b-24. 04/07/24.
We Welcome
Luke 14:12b-24
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Blevins
April 7, 2024
“When you put on a luncheon or a banquet,” he said, “don’t invite your friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors. For they will invite you back, and that will be your only reward. Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you.” Hearing this, a man sitting at the table with Jesus exclaimed, “What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!” Jesus replied with this story: “A man prepared a great feast and sent out many invitations. When the banquet was ready, he sent his servant to tell the guests, ‘Come, the banquet is ready.’ But they all began making excuses. One said, ‘I have just bought a field and must inspect it. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I have just bought five pairs of oxen, and I want to try them out. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’ “The servant returned and told his master what they had said. His master was furious and said, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ After the servant had done this, he reported, ‘There is still room for more.’ So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full. For none of those I first invited will get even the smallest taste of my banquet.”
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I was staying in a hotel not too long ago. I was in a hurry, so check-in was a bit of a blur. I dropped my stuff off in the room and left in a dash. I had a key card, but it didn’t indicate what my room number was. So when I got back to the hotel later that night, I went up to the front desk and said, “Sorry, I forgot what room I’m in, can you help me out?” The receptionist replied, “No problem, ma’am. This is the lobby.”
Hospitality at its finest right there.
As we begin our 10-week series I’m calling “Chapel’s So Bright, Gotta Wear Shades,” we begin with hospitality. The action verb related to hospitality is “welcome.” The first of Chapel’s ten core commitments is “welcome.” “We welcome and include all who come our way.”
I can’t wait to dive into this core value, but first I need to give this sermon series some context. And this Sunday, often referred to as “Low Sunday” in my “business” (“Low Sunday” refers to the typical lower attendance on the Sunday after Easter), is the perfect Sunday to talk about “family” stuff since it’s mostly us “home folks” here today. You know how at home after all the guests leave, you roll up your sleeves and clean up and do the dishes? We’ve got some work to do today, family! (If you’re visiting with us today, this is the day when you transition from guest to family! So come on into the kitchen and roll up your sleeves with us!)
Earlier in the service you heard Adrienne Archer talk about our newly adopted “Missional Aspiration” and ten “Core Commitments.” This language, as she indicated, is the result of a grant we received and months of truly excellent work by the leadership team. Additionally, about 50 Chapel members participated in small group “listening sessions” with our consultant . . . some of the same folks also participated in a Saturday workshop in which we pulled everything from the listening sessions together. By the end of that Saturday workshop, we had the main concepts, then the leadership team fine-tuned the language. Finally, our church board approved a “missional aspiration” and the ten “core commitments” that you find printed in your bulletin. I’d like us to read the “missional aspiration” together:
Chapel by the Sea aspires to be a beacon of God’s love, inviting people into a vibrant life with Christ.
If you’re a member of the Chapel, I encourage you to memorize this statement. Don’t worry! We’re going to practice over the next few weeks. As an aside, I want to tell you that even though my participation in the crafting of this statement was mostly as an observer and encourager . . . I love this statement! I think it absolutely captures what I believe to be true about the Chapel. Let’s practice saying this statement one more time . . . this time with gusto!
Chapel by the Sea aspires to be a beacon of God’s love, inviting people into a vibrant life with Christ.
The next part of the statement fleshes out how we accomplish our “missional aspiration.” Let’s read it together too:
As an interdenominational Christian faith community, we share common commitments to:
Welcome, include, love, and respect all people
Engage people through thoughtful worship, inspiring music, and honest exploration of Scripture
Nurture authentic community and deep spirituality, growing in our faith together
Transform our world through active service and advocacy
Don’t worry. You don’t have to memorize this!
This part uses the word “interdenominational.” A common feature of interdenominational churches—churches that bring people from various denominations together under one roof—many (if not most) interdenominational churches are non-doctrinal. For example, I come from a Baptist background. In the Baptist church, folks have some strong ideas about baptism. Most Baptists don’t do infant baptism, rather they have a doctrine about “believer’s baptism,” specifically by immersion. How many of you come from a “believer’s baptism by immersion” background like me? How many of you received an infant baptism?
I was with some clergy a few years back, and when they learned that I served an interdenominational church, they were perplexed. They asked me, “So what do you do about baptism?” I said, we baptize according to the family’s tradition or preference. I could see the lightbulbs kind of going off in their minds! So here at the Chapel, we don’t have a doctrine around baptism. In fact, we don’t have a set of doctrines at all. It’s how we can be interdenominational. Some who come our way are like that group of pastors who pressed me about baptism. “How can you do church without doctrine?” I’m asked from time to time. Another way to ask this (and maybe you’ve been asked this yourself): “What do y’all BELIEVE at the Chapel?” So the next time you’re asked that question, do you want some help knowing how to answer? Here’s what you can say:
Chapel by the Sea aspires to be a beacon of God’s love, inviting people into a vibrant life with Christ.
You see, some churches orient their life together around a set of beliefs. In an interdenominational church, about the only way you can “do” church together is not through a shared set of beliefs, but through shared practice. There are two five-dollar words to describe this: orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Orthodoxy means “right belief.” Orthopraxy means “right practice.” At Chapel, we orient our life together around a shared orthopraxy.
If we were to adopt a set of doctrines, the Baptists among us would tell us that the right doctrine about baptism is a “believer’s baptism” by immersion. They’d want all of you who had an infant baptism to get re-baptized via the doctrine of “dunking!”
Here’s the thing about doctrine: doctrine divides. Doctrine is the reason there are over 45,000 denominations within Christianity. Doctrine, by default, means that some are “right” while others are “wrong.”
An interdenominational church like the Chapel seeks to unify. So instead of doctrine, which places people into camps of right and wrong, we orient our life together around shared practice.
For many of us who grew up in churches organized around a set of beliefs, this can be a difficult transition. But once you can shift gears to coming together around shared practice, you might just find it’s so liberating! And it’s entirely biblical.
Jesus’ “great commandment” isn’t about belief, it’s about practice. Remember the “great commandment?” “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The great commandment isn’t about orthodoxy, it’s about orthopraxy.
In the book of Acts, we read about how the very first Christians oriented their life together around practice. Acts 2:44-47a: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of the people.”
Individually, each believed. Collectively, they practiced. The same is true for us here at the Chapel.
Over the next ten weeks, we’re going to get into ten practices, ten core habits, what we’re calling “Core Commitments” that Chapel members, through the grant project recently completed, discerned as the way we choose to orient our church life together. In their simplest form, they are ten verbs. These are the colorful words printed in your bulletin. Will you read them with me?
Welcome. Gather. Pray. Give. Serve. Forgive. Sing. Grow. Respect. Love.
I’ll use my remaining time to talk about the first of our ten “Core Commitments.”
We welcome and include all who come our way.
In the Saturday workshop back in January, our consultant took the words he heard in the, six small group listening sessions and put those words in a word cloud. If you’re not familiar with word clouds, you take a set of words, and you enter them into an app along with a number—in our case the number represented how many times our consultant heard a particular word. There were some beautiful words in our “word cloud”: Friendly, Inclusive, Loving, Generous, Warm, Caring, Musical, Accepting, Active, Uplifting. But the number one word, which became the biggest, boldest word in our word cloud was this: “Welcoming.”
So it makes sense that the number one commitment on our list of “Core Commitments” is welcome:
We welcome and include all who come our way.
I LOVE that this got the top spot in our list of core commitments! At the Chapel, we welcome and include all who come our way. Even people who were baptized as infants!
Because of our location on Clearwater Beach, a major tourist destination, it makes sense practically that hospitality would be a core value. But our welcome and inclusion is more than pragmatism. It’s a natural outgrowth of faith in Christ.
In the story from Luke, we read earlier, we find Jesus having dinner in the home of a leader of the Pharisees, someone who was obviously well-respected in the community. Jesus discusses humility after witnessing some guests at the dinner jockeying for the places of importance at the table. Jesus turned to the host and challenged him not to invite his friends or family or rich neighbors to future banquets. Instead, Jesus tells him: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” Another guest at the table chimes in: “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” Jesus turns to the guest and tells the story we now call the “Parable of the Great Banquet.” In this story Jesus tells, the banquet host has invited his wealthy friends to dinner, but one by one, each of his wealthy friends gives an excuse and begs off. So the host instructs his servant to:
Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.
After this was accomplished, and there was still room at the table, the host gave the servant further instructions:
Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full.
When we think about welcoming and including all who come our way, if we are to follow the teaching of Jesus, we would do well to think about who’s hanging out “behind the hedges” as a first priority.
You see, there’s hospitality that welcomes tourists to Clearwater Beach. There’s the kind of hospitality that includes people who look like us. There’s a hospitality that reaches out to the people at the club and those with impressive investment portfolios. Yes, that’s absolutely hospitality.
If Jesus’ parable is as much for us as it was for the guest at the Pharisee’s table, then we must also consider how we welcome and include those “behind the hedges.” The people who aren’t included. Those left out of dinner invitations. Jesus mentioned “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” for starters. Who might we add to the list?
If welcoming and including is the priority we say it is, there won’t be anyone who feels left out or cut off from the banquet table here at the Chapel! It’s not easy—this is more than your run-of-the-mill hospitality. This is RADICAL hospitality. And yet, this is the way of Jesus.
There’s a beautiful quote that makes its way around social media from time to time: “When you have more than you need, build a bigger table, not a higher fence.”
In our commitment to “welcome and include all who come our way,” let us always be about the work of building a bigger table!
I could say so much more about this first core commitment of “Welcome”—this practice of hospitality. And we’re just getting started, folks! We’ve got nine more to go! Welcome and inclusion is merely the first of ten ways we aspire to be a beacon of God’s love. And as a beacon, we shine the love of God to the world all around. That’s why I love this church! That’s why I love this people! Because you’re constantly shining God’s love like a beacon. That’s why I think:
Chapel’s so bright, gotta wear shades.