Christianity 101
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church
Matthew 10: 40 - 42, Rev. Marianne Niesen, June 29, 2008
The story is told of two little boys, ages 8 and 10, who were excessively mischievous. They were always getting into trouble and their parents knew all about it. If any mischief occurred in their town, the two boys were probably involved. The boys' mother heard that a preacher in town had been successful in disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her boys. The preacher agreed, but he asked to see them individually. So the mother sent the 8 year old first, in the morning, with the older boy to see the preacher in the afternoon. The preacher, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the younger boy down and asked him sternly, "Do you know where God is, son?" The boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response, sitting there wide-eyed with his mouth hanging open. So the preacher repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God?" Again, the boy made no attempt to answer. The preacher raised his voice even more and shook his finger in the boy's face and bellowed, "Where is God?" The boy screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into his closet, slamming the door behind him. When his older brother found him in the closet, he asked, "What happened?" The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, "We are in BIG trouble this time! GOD is missing, and they think we did it!
Of course, I’m not sure that helped the boys’ behavior at all - but it sure makes for a good story. It also struck a chord with me as I pondered my sermon for today. Sometimes I think the heart of Christianity itself is missing. Don’t get me wrong. I know Christians have done good things in the world . . . for instance the incredible relief work we as United Methodists are doing in Myanmar and China, the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, the work for peace you just saw in the DVD. But it certainly hasn’t all been good. Like you, I am disheartened when I consider some of the harm Christians have done through the years - supporting slavery, for instance, or condoning those who maim and kill physicians over the practice of abortion or those whose hateful rhetoric targets gays and lesbians and condones violence in the cause of "righteousness." Jesus would be puzzled by all that and would wonder how we got things so mixed up. There are reasons, of course and at another time, I might go into some of them. But not today. The point is, I think that in some ways the heart of Christianity has gone missing and - unlike the boys in the story - we have done it . . . through endless rules and efforts to nail things down and to be sure the bad guys get punished . . . bad guys, of course, being those who aren’t like us, don’t think like us and don’t act like us. In fact, the heart of Christianity gets obscured any time we act like a police force for God.
Today’s scripture text gives me an opportunity to help us get it clear again, to remind us that, at its heart, following Jesus is really quite simple - not easy but simple. I call it Christianity 101 and it is contained in today’s brief scripture text from Matthew’s gospel: Matthew 10: 40-42.
Did you hear the repetition? Over and over . . . welcome. If you welcome a disciple, you welcome Jesus; if you welcome Jesus you welcome God. If you welcome a righteous person, you get a reward . . . if you welcome a prophet - same thing. I’ll bet this section went on a while . . . with Jesus proclaiming that if you welcome the sick, the suffering, the children, the widows, you welcome me. But even if it didn’t, the point is quite strong - in just 2 verses, the word welcome abounds.
Point number one . . . to be a Christian is, first of all, to be about the business of radical hospitality. God ached for human beings to know they were eternally loved. The coming of Jesus was not about judgment, it was about love. It was about hope. It was about life - living it, sharing it, proclaiming it. When we see Jesus, we see God’s love in human form. So the job of a Christian is not to lay out the limits of God’s love (don’t cross that line . . .don’t cross that line . . . watch out there!) No! It is to witness to the limitlessness of God’s love. Jesus did just that - touching, healing, living with, and loving - indiscriminately, lavishly.
One of my favorite legends is the story of the wolf of Gubbio and St. Francis of Assisi. As the story goes, there was a wolf who was terrorizing the people of the little Italian village of Gubbio. Every time someone left the city gates the were in fear of being devoured by the wolf and the wolf often obliged! Francis heard of the problem and decided to go and speak with his brother the wolf. When the wolf caught sight of Francis, he charged out of the woods, growling, teeth bared, ready to attack. But, it is said, Francis made the sign of the cross over the wolf at which time the wolf stopped. Brother Wolf, said Francis, I beg you, in the name of Christ, do not attack the people any longer. Francis, it is said, explained to the wolf that God did not like for him to be attacking and killing people. But Francis also knew that the reason for the wolf’s ferocity was that there was little food in the forest and he was hungry. Most of all, as the legend goes, what Francis wanted was to make peace between the wolf and the people of Gubbio so he asked the wolf to accompany him back to the village. There, with the wolf at his side, Francis preached a sermon on God’s love and mercy - God’s embracing love and radical hospitality. And the wolf agreed to stop terrorizing the people and the people agreed to feed the wolf and to treat him as their companion and brother. And so it was that for two years the wolf lived among the people of Gubbio in peace and when he died the people wept - because the wolf reminded them "of the holiness of Francis and God’s gentle presence with them."
To live the radical hospitality of God is fundamentally to work toward living together in peace. Sometimes our neighbors are scary. Sometimes they are just different. Sometimes they say and do things that we don’t understand. Sometimes they act in ways we think wrong. Sometimes they are wrong. And sometimes we are. But the heart of Christianity is to begin at the place where we call ourselves brothers and sisters, despite the differences. When we practice this radical kind of hospitality, an amazing thing happens. We reach out proclaiming the love of God, knowing that only love can change the wolf into a friend - and in the process, we often find that we are the ones changed. Love is an equal opportunity transformation agent!
Point number one . . . the heart of the Christian life is about sharing the welcome of God not bearing the judgment of God. If Christians worked on that . . .imagine what might happen!
Point number two . . . and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones . . . will not lose their reward. To be a Christian is about love in action. One cannot call oneself a Christian and not be involved in acts of service. It doesn’t have to be big . . . it can be as simple as ‘giving a cup of cold water.’ To be a Christian is to do what we can to alleviate suffering in the world. Of course, others do as much. Christians have no corner on ‘good-doing.’ The difference for a Christian is that we do good as a natural response to knowing how much we are loved. We become Christ in the world. We bless because we’ve been blessed.
I recently read a commencement address that Tom Hanks gave in 2005 at Vassar College. His daughter was graduating so he agreed to be the speaker. He focused his remarks around a surprising finding made by some researchers studying computer-generated simulations of gridlock. The study was trying to ‘determine how many cars should be taken off the road to turn a completely jammed and stilled highway into a free-flowing one.’ The results were startling. Only 4% of cars needed to be removed . . . four cars out of each one hundred. Hanks went on to call this phenomenon the power of four. He asked his listeners to imagine other changes that just four could make.
"Take a hundred musicians in a depressed port city in Northern England, choose John, Paul, George and Ringo and you have ‘Hey Jude.’ Take a hundred computer geeks in Redmond, Washington. Send 96 of them home and the remainder is called Microsoft. Take the power of four," Hanks challenged, "and apply it to any and every area of your concern."
He ended his remarks with a four-letter-word plea . . . help! We need help. Your help. You must help. Please help. . . Help . .. And you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country, and our planet. . . . help publicly. Help privately. Help in your actions by recycling and conserving and protecting, but help also in your attitude. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. . . Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help law bring justice, until justice is commonplace. Help and you will abolish apathy - the void so quickly filled by ignorance and evil. . . so do it. Make peace where it is precious. Help plant trees. Help embrace diversity and celebrate differences. Help stop gridlock.
But, we don’t need to be graduating to grasp the power of that message. At the heart of Christianity is not a requirement to do all the good that needs doing. It is to start. To do something. We have the power right here to stop the gridlock of hate and apathy; we have the power to make sure the hungry in our community have food; we have the power to make our world better. And even the smallest thing - like a cup of cold water, a smile, a refusal to laugh at a racist joke, helping someone cross the street - matters. If we Christians did just that, the world would change. Imagine!
Did you know that the time in history that saw some of the greatest growth in Christianity was during a plague that beset much of the then known world. Rodney Stark in his book The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, suggests that one of the reasons Christianity grew at a time when whole villages were being wiped out was because Christians took seriously this directive to ‘give a cup of cold water’ to those in need. Stark suggests that the philosophy the Christians practiced, of selflessness and caring for the sick, created in the Christian community a stronghold of mutual aid, which resulted in a superior survival rate to that of the Greco-Roman pagans. As another writer describes:
"During the outbreaks (of the plague), pagan citizens, priests, and even medical practitioners left the cities in panic, abandoning the sick to die. Dead bodies were thrown to the roadsides or left to decay in the homes of victims. Christians, on the other hand, remained in the population centers, at huge risk to themselves, to care for the sick and bury the dead. Their different response was born out of their different world view.
Christians believed in a personal God, a divine command for brotherly love, and an afterlife. The (dominant) culture knew nothing of these. Their gods were impersonal deities who made no moral demands on human behaviors and offered no salvation from mortality. Since charity was not a divine requirement, it was something that, in the throes of an epidemic, only an extremely brave or foolish person would exercise.
The different world view of Christians also led to a different outcome. By attending to the sick with the basic necessities of food and drink, Christians helped many victims survive who would have otherwise perished. Although the ministry of love and compassion resulted in the deaths of many attending Christians, the rates of survival in their communities were substantially higher than in the pagan communities.
The growth of Christianity at this time was truly remarkable: "between AD 150 (15 years before the first plague) and AD 300 (50 years after the second), Stark estimates that the number of Christians grew over 150-fold - from around 40,000 to over six million!
A cup of cold water, a ministry of love and compassion, makes all the difference. Christianity 101, point number 2 . . . for the love of God . . . don’t just stand there do something!
And there you have it. Christianity 101. Christianity is most fundamentally about the hospitality of God, received and offered and about doing whatever we can to alleviate suffering in the world. More has been added over the years - some of it important, I know. But today on this hot, beautiful Sunday, as we enjoy the jazz - I submit to you that if we get these two things down, the rest of it will be a piece of cake . . . or a nice cold ice cream cone. Or, even better, a cup of cold water generously offered to all with love.
