"When Christ Comes to Dinner"
The real meaning of hospitality.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 9, 2002
Texts: Luke 10:38-42; Galatians 1:15-24
I had never seen a table like it before, and I have never seen a table like it since. My mother, my father and I had been invited to dinner at one of the most splendid homes in the whole of the island of Bermuda. I had been given very strict instructions before the dinner began: I was to be seen and not heard; I was not to speak unless I was spoken to. Needless to say, even at the age of 13, that was not easy for me.
I went to the dinner and it was resplendent with the most magnificent china, shimmering crystal, magnificent silverware. From the window along the side of the house, one could see the whole harbour of Hamilton. With the cruise ships coming by at night it was a thing to behold.
I remember being escorted to my seat, only to realize that there were four knives and four forks in front of me. The tension rose within me as to which one I should use and why. I remember looking down the table, for there were 20 or so guests, and every one of them, without exception, looked particularly nervous. This was exacerbated when the hostess came and gave us each a sheet of paper with instructions for the evening, including what was going to happen at precisely what time. We had been told that there was a guest of honour in our midst and there was a lot of muttering and fussing under people's breath as to who that was.
In fact, just a few years ago I remembered this dinner and asked my mother who she thought the guest was, because he seemed reminiscent of a little man with a squeaky voice who ran for the presidency of the United States of America some years later - but that's another story. The fact of the matter is, everyone was tense. As the dinner went on and we tried to meet the exact time-line, our plates were whipped away and new ones placed in front of us until finally we were instructed that we could go and sit outside for 10 minutes by the pool.
The great justice of all this was that there was algae in the pool. The pool absolutely reeked and no-one could stand being near it. The whole evening's magic seemed to dissipate from that moment on.
But after we had sat by the pool for exactly nine minutes and 59 seconds, we were informed that the games would be held in another room and so on, and so on. And so the evening went on until every one of us returned home completely and absolutely exhausted. In our opinion, the night had been a disaster.
But the more I think back on that night, the more I am reminded of today's passage from Luke's Gospel; for it seems to me that in both cases the hostess and the host were going out of their way to impress their guests, were trying to show and to reveal their own ability, but they had forgotten a principle of all good dinners: You've got to think of your guests first.
The passage that we have from the Gospel of Luke is well known - the story of Martha and Mary. In its simplicity it makes a very powerful statement. It makes a statement first of all about the nature of hospitality, about how we should treat people and how we should show and reveal our respect for others.
But deeper than that and central, particularly to this morning considering we have just baptized children, is the message of how we relate to God and how God relates to us. In both, the messages are synthesized: hospitality on the one hand and our relationship with God on the other. To understand both of these we must, I think, respect two profound lessons.
The first of the lessons is that any host must keep in mind the needs of his or her guests. This was not done in the case of Martha, although the story goes that Martha was a gracious and generous person. Clearly Jesus must have loved her, because he mentions her name twice in one place - Martha, Martha - as if implying a respect and a love. Martha was practising a hospitality and a generosity that had brought Jesus and probably other guests into her house. In many ways, she might have been trying to introduce Jesus as the guest of honour to the other guests who were there. We do not know. We can only speculate, but the simplicity of the event shows the generosity of Martha at the beginning of this story. This is very important.
A couple of weeks ago a former professor of mine received an honorary doctorate from Emmanuel College. His name is Hans Martin Rumscheidt. In his presentation on that day he talked about the need for hospitality, a hospitality that is born from the Jewish roots of our faith, i.e. part of the Covenant of God.
He gave as an example that in Greek we use the term in the liturgy Kyrie Eleison, meaning Lord Have Mercy. But he had been talking very recently to a friend of his who is Slavic, and the Slavs use the term Hospodi pomiluy. Hospodi is a name for God and the term literally means "one who gives hospitality:" that God is the guest who is gracious.
And so Martha is carrying out this work of the Hospodi, God's work, here. We mustn't condemn her for that. But the guest, ah, the guest - this is where the story falls down. The guest, you see, was someone who was turning to this house as his hospice.
A hospice is something that goes right back to the time of the Crusades. When the Crusaders would go from country to country they would find Christians to put them up and give them a bed when they were weary. But after the battles of the Crusades, many of the Crusaders came back injured and stayed at the homes where they had gone before for hospitality, even though they were injured and dying. Hence we get the word hospice today, a place for those who are critically ill and dying.
In the story, Jesus is at a hospice. He is on his way to die. He is on the way to the Cross. These are the last months and weeks of Jesus' life. Jesus, therefore, is dining with Martha and Mary and Jesus has a need. Jesus needs to be listened to and cared for. Martha had forgotten what her guest really needed. She had overlooked the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, in her very midst, was a man who was on his way to die.
I'll never forget visiting a man a few years ago who was in a hospice and was terminally ill. His family doted on him. I have never seen the like. They did a rota. They came in on the hour, every hour of the day and night. They sat next to his bed. They got him meals. They gave him liquids. They read to him from the newspaper. They were on the go all the time, caring for him as he was dying.
I went in to see him very near the end of his life, for it was felt that it was time for the minister to make a final visit. He said to me one thing that I have never forgotten. He said: "Andrew, would you please just tell my family to come here and just be still, for I have something to say to them." I went back and conveyed that to his children and his spouse.
You see, their need was to run around and be active. They needed to be busy, but the guest of honour, the dying person in this case, needed love and attention and a listening ear. That's the kind of hospitality that he required, just like Jesus in the room with Martha and Mary. You see, what Martha had done was forgotten her guest. She had not only forgotten her guest; she was actually getting mad with Mary: "Mary, Mary, come on. Don't you understand there are things to do? There are meals to prepare. We have guests. Don't you just sit there at the feet of this Jesus. Get up and get on with it and be active."
You can understand Martha's reaction if the only thing that mattered was preparing the meal. But Mary understood something much deeper. She knew the guest that she had there and there's a wonderful moment in Luke's Gospel where we are told that Mary sat at his feet.
This is a Semitic, a Jewish idiom for someone who learns and grows and understands that in the one at whose feet he or she is sitting there is authority. You see, Mary understood that there would not be many times when she would be sitting with this Jesus and, unlike Martha, she seized the day.
My friends, so often we have a wrong attitude when it comes to our appreciation and our understanding of God. We think that, like Martha, we have to be rushing in a thousand-and-one different directions. We think that we have somehow to be always pleasing him with what we do, rather than recognizing him as a guest in our lives and spending time with him and praying with him and learning from him. We must understand that when Jesus Christ is the guest in our lives, we must listen and be still.
But there is also a second lesson and that is the lesson that the host must not forget his limits.
I don't know about you, but when I go to a fine restaurant the thing that I want more than anything, besides good food, is good service. Really good service is the type you don't even know is there. At the right time your plate disappears and your next course arrives. You don't even recognize the fact that your glass has been filled up and you don't even remember receiving the bill at the end. That is the best of all, I think. That is truly great hospitality. It's timing, it's understanding the need to please the guest, that is the true sign of a really great host.
So often, my friends, we forget the limits of our time and we are like Martha. The first thing that we hear about Martha was that she was over-complicating things. She wanted to make sure that this was ready and that was in place and the other was set; but she had so complicated her life that she had missed the reason for the meal. In fact, for Jesus, the meal had actually become a distraction.
That is why Jesus says to her, and I have retranslated this over and over again to try and understand it, but I think the best translation of it is: "There is one thing you need only." There is one thing you need only.
In other words: "Martha, you are charging around doing all these things but there's really only one thing you need: What you need is me," he said. "You are worrying about many things, but there's only one thing that matters - me." The problem with Martha was she had forgotten the limits. She had gone beyond them and she was complicating her life.
I have a word for the parents and the grandparents and the sponsors of the children this morning and my word for you is this: There is one thing you need only. You might give your child every benefit; you might pour on them all of the gifts of the world; you might give them opportunities that you never had or conceived of; but if you don't give them the one thing that really matters then, in fact, you are not really giving them what matters at all. And the one thing that matters more than anything else is the gift of their faith in God. That is the one thing that is first and foremost.
You see, Martha had become distracted. She had become distracted by the incidentals and had forgotten the essentials.
There is a lovely story that I read not long ago of Paul Tsongas. Paul Tsongas, when he was a young senator, had been diagnosed with cancer. He had made the commitment once he had become a U.S. Senator that he would run for the presidency of the United States of America.
Well, on the night after he announced his candidacy he gathered his family together for dinner. He was interviewed about it afterwards and he said: "This is probably the last night that I will ever have with my family like this until the race for the presidency is over, and then I know not what." Then he spoke the famous phrase, and this is where it came from: "No-one ever asked on their death-bed whether or not they had spent too much time at the office."
You see, my friends, what Paul Tsongas realized was that there were essential things and there were things that were not essential. What was essential for Tsongas was the time with his family, and he didn't want to put other things in their way.
So, too, in our relationship with God: We do not want to become distracted because when we become distracted with the things of this world at the expense of our faith in Jesus Christ, we lose Him.
There is a story of a little boy who said his night-time prayers. Every night he would bow his head and he would say: "Dear God, I want You to look after Mummy and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Barry and Auntie Jean. Amen." One night, he was told that his mother wasn't well. The young boy had had some difficulties with all of this and he said: "Dear God, I want to pray for Mummy and Daddy, for Grandpa and Grandma, for Uncle Barry and Auntie Jean and I hope You keep well too, for without You we are all sunk. Amen."
Without the one thing, we are sunk. Without the essentials we are lost. That's the difference between Martha and Mary. Martha was carried away with all the things that she had to do, but they were the non-essentials. The true host was Mary, who sat at Jesus' feet, who listened to him, who learned from him and who grew.
Recently I was reading a very touching note by a very famous preacher called Hazon Werner. Hazon Werner tells the following story, which sums this all up beautifully.
"One day while making a pastoral call," he wrote, "a mother said to me 'Will you read this letter, it's from Bob.' I sat down and I read the letter. When I had got half-way through I knew why she wanted me to read it, for Bob was away in the military service. That is what he said when he came home and I quote:
'You know, I have a feeling, Mum, that I am coming home all right. I don't know why, but I feel that God is taking care of that; but what I want to say is that when I do get home, I hope that, when we have finished dinner at night and we are all there at the table, we will just stay there and look at one another and realize for just a little while, nothing else but the fact that we are there together. That's all I really want.'"
My friends, there is only one thing we really want, only one thing we really need: to sit down with one another and to care for the guest; to be a host and show the work of the Hospido; but more than that, to be at the feet of our Lord and to listen when Christ comes to dinner. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.