3rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B

Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B June 10, 2018 Our gospel reading for today starts off in a strange way. “The crowd came together again, so that Jesus and his disciples could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” What on earth is going on here? Why are people saying that Jesus is “out of his mind”? What has already been happening in only 3 short chapters of Mark’s gospel to make Jesus’s family and those of the religious establishment freak out? One of the blog writers I follow, a Lutheran pastor named David Lose, writes about this passage: “Why is Jesus getting so much flack?...All he’s done so far is announce the coming kingdom of God, call some disciples, cast out a demon or two, and heal a bunch of sick people.” [Lose continues,] “Of course, one of those disciples was a tax collector, he cast out the demon and did much of his healing work on the Sabbath, and he wasn’t put off in the least when approached by a leper. Which means that his vision of the coming kingdom of God was rooted in a profound inclusivity that would let neither religious law nor social custom prevent him from reaching those in need with the abundant life he came to offer.”i So what David Lose is saying is that in our gospel passage for today, we see Jesus’s family and the religious establishment of his time thinking that Jesus is either crazy or demon-possessed because of his radical hospitality and his practice of meeting people exactly where they are and not adding or even paying attention to existing rules for them to follow to be healed or to be with him. And it makes them all really mad, and we get that, don’t we? Because we humans love to have ways to determine if someone is “in” or if someone is “out;” or as David Lose puts it: “we create rules not so much for how they help our neighbor but for how they help us to define ourselves and how handy they are as a standard against which [we can] judge our neighbor. When we see someone who doesn’t conform, we call them rebels, or radicals, or unnatural, or immoral. Which is pretty much what’s happening to Jesus.”ii Thinking about Jesus’s radical hospitality has gotten me thinking about our own hospitality as a church. Now one of the gifts of our church is, in fact, gracious hospitality. I have seen it over and over again. We throw some amazing parties, including our Vacation Bible School that is coming up this week. And I also know that we can continue to grow in this, just like all churches can continue to grow in the ways that they follow Jesus and in how they welcome visitors and in the way that they meet people where they truly are as opposed to expecting them to conform to a pre-determined code of behaviors. The vestry and I began talking about some of this a few months ago at our annual vestry retreat, when I introduced them to the ministry of Invite Welcome Connect. Invite Welcome Connect is a ministry that came out of the diocese of Texas and was developed by a lay person named Mary Parmer. Mary and Invite Welcome Connect have since moved to a new home at Sewanee, and our own Canon Frank Logue is very active in this work with Mary. (In fact, Frank is one of the keynote speakers in the upcoming Invite Welcome Connect Summit happening this week.) If you are interested in all of this, I encourage you to check out their website at invitewelcomeconnect.com. You have already seen some of the fruits of Invite Welcome Connect at work in this congregation: in the Moo Cards for seasonal worship services, in our new website, and in our new full text bulletin. And today, I’d like to invite you into the conversation here. And of course, with that invitation comes….homework! I have copies of the Welcome Checklist created by Mary through Invite Welcome Connect that we are going to pass out now.iii Your homework for this week and over the next couple of weeks is to observe this church through the eyes of a newcomer and to fill out this check-list and then turn it back in to us. I’d like to have the completed check-lists back by the end of June if possible. Doing this may take a bit of research on your part, but I believe that this is one way our church can begin to intentionally expand our ministry of hospitality beyond what we are already doing. You can drop these off at the office, mail them, or scan and email them to me, or leave them in the basket in the narthex. You can put your name on it or you can leave it off. (If you find that this work really excites and energizes you, then please, let me know. There is an advanced component I can share with you to help us go even further in our assessment and exploration of the ways that we welcome.) In closing, I want to leave us with a challenge by David Lose, something for us to think about as a church. “So maybe the question isn’t, “Why is Jesus getting so much flack?” But instead should be, “Why aren’t we getting more?” Why, that is, aren’t we pushing the boundaries of what’s socially and religiously acceptable in order to reach more folks with the always surprising, often upsetting, unimaginably gracious, and ridiculously inclusive love of Jesus? And if that is the kind of love we want to offer, we might go on to ask whether we [are] communicating that message in word and deed loudly and clearly, both inside our doors and outside to the community as well.”iv i. Lose, David. Blog post: Pentecost 2B: Offering a Wide Welcome published June 1, 2015 at http://www.davidlose.net/2015/06/pentecost-2-b-offering-a-wide-welcome/ ii.Ibid iii.This can be found at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55e0acc3e4b0fc91a8f511f7/t/59fcbfa08e7b0ffcd27877b3/1509736352816/WELCOME+Check+List.pdf iv.Lose, David. Blog post: Pentecost 2B: Offering a Wide Welcome published June 1, 2015 at http://www.davidlose.net/2015/06/pentecost-2-b-offering-a-wide-welcome/