A Welcome Church [Advent 2A - Romans 15:4-13]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Romans 15:4-13
A Welcome Church
The
wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the
calf and the lion and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. It is a pastel vision fit for a nursey
wall. It is also unrealistic in a way that
hurts, that stirs up a kind of desperate unfulfilled longing most often
reserved for prayers we dare not say out loud.
It is the kind of vision that makes one homesick for a place we’ve never
known.
Isaiah always finds a
way to set our best dreams to poetry. His
poetic visions are so fiercely beautiful that I named my son after him. Because I want my son, my Isaiah, to dream
these impossible dreams and hope for a future that is entirely unreasonable. I want him to be the little child whose feet
are firmly planted in the coming kingdom of God.
I love poetry – for
all the ways in which is stirs the soul and ignites the imagination. I love the way poetry speaks directly to the
heart and demands it move.
But I also recognize
the limitations of speaking in dreams and relying on interpretation. It is easy to read Isaiah’s poem – this zoo
without enclosures – and think that the prophet is talking about tranquil animals. But Isaiah’s people weren’t worried about
wolves. They feared humans. The Babylonian armies were toppling their
walls. The peace for which they longed
wasn’t for their livestock; it was for their children, their children under siege,
their children who were no longer safe in school or at the market. And so they dreamed of a future in which the
predators would no longer see them as prey but as friends, as one flock, in
harmony, at peace.
I love poetry. But also I appreciate the Apostle Paul. Because in his urgency, he pushes this
beautiful poetry into prose. His vision
is admittedly less artful, but no less effective. He wants a Church that looks like Isaiah’s
poem – a Church that is shockingly together, a holy harmony, a community in
which dividing lines are erased and hostilities are drowned in love.
Isaiah dreamed of a
future, a distant future found in the fullness of time; Paul was not so
patient. He wasn’t interested in waiting. His vision would not be placed on hold. Paul was challenging the Church – not to simply
imagine but to bring imagination to life. Don’t just wish for a Church that like
looks like Heaven; be a Church that looks like Heaven. Put out the welcome mat and open up the
doors.
Folks who quote
Scripture, who reel off Bible verses, are usually either grasping at straws or
they mean business. Paul means business. He cites passages like a someone standing before
their dissertation committee. Every
verse is a battering ram to the door of the Church – a Church that always and
forever, since the very beginning, has been tempted to lock the doors.
Here in his letter to
the Romans, as he does in many of his letters, Paul makes an impassioned plea
to open the doors of the Church to the Gentiles. In its earliest days the Church was almost
entirely Jewish. And that makes sense
because Jesus and his twelve were Jewish. But Paul, also Jewish, came to believe that
the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, was actually really Good News for
everyone. Paul is arguing for a Church
without outsiders, without exceptions. Paul
is arguing for a Church big, wide, and generous enough to welcome everyone;
100% of the people. And to get everyone, all of the people, into the Church, the
doors better open incredibly wide.
Paul’s is a vision
right out Isaiah. He knows his Bible. It is the prophet Isaiah who says, “Thus says
the Lord, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” It is the prophet Isaiah who says, “Nations
will stream to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning. Your gates will always be open; by day or
night they will never be shut.” The final
verse that Paul quotes in our passage from Romans is from Isaiah – though his
translation differs from ours. It is the
prophet Isaiah who says of the Jewish Messiah: “in him the Gentiles [too] shall
hope.”
Now the Christian Church
has obviously come around on Gentiles. We
have quite a few Gentiles in the on holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; there
are even Gentiles here this morning. And
that should mean that Paul’s dreams have come true: everyone is welcome. But clearly that has not been, and in many
places is still, not the case.
The Church, over the
centuries, has used any number of criteria to exclude folks from the community
of faith. Paul argued for a Church
without exclusions but churches have excluded folks because of language,
ethnicity, hair color, dominant hand, gender, socio-economic status,
occupation, family of origin, sexual orientation, sacramental theology. You name it and someone has been asked to
leave a church – or in more extreme cases burnt at the stake – for it.
As the Episcopal
Church becomes more inclusive, expansive, and welcoming, it is easy to forget
that that has not always been the case – not even in our more recent history. Our own Bishop reminds us of our checkered
past – and of the strides we have made. Many
of you have had the opportunity to meet Bishop Kym; she has visited with us a
number of times – mostly recently during the vigil we held on the Monday after
the Club Q shooting. If you know Bishop
Kym you can see the sparkle of her spirit.
And so it is hard to imagine a Church that would not recognize her gifts
or honor the call God has placed on her life.
But just a couple of generations ago our Bishop would not have been
welcome in most of her churches because of her skin color. A few decades ago our Bishop would not have
been welcome to stand at the altar in an Episcopal Church because of her
gender.
2000 years ago Paul
meant to knock down the doors. He
advocated for Isaiah’s open gates. But
despite his efforts, the Church has insisted on playing the gatekeeper throughout
history – an often shameful history.
And it never should
have happened. Because two-thousand
years ago, the most prolific writer of Christian scripture commanded the Church
to, “Welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed you.” And the welcome that Christ extends to us is
not a tepid tolerance or a conditional acceptance; Christ embraces us with all
the love we can bear. We, those of us named
Christian, are called to love those whom Jesus loves and, as the song so
innocently reminds us, Jesus loves all the little, and also big, children of
the world. The gates of his heart are
always open; by day or night they will never be shut.
Our
Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry “tells the story of a young woman who became
an Episcopalian in the 1940s.
One
Sunday, she invited the man she had been dating to join her at morning
services. Both of them were African American, but the church they
attended that day was all white, and right in the heart of segregated America.
The young man waited in the pews while the congregation went forward to receive
communion, anxious because he noticed that everyone in the congregation was
drinking from the same chalice. He had never seen black people and white people
drink from the same water fountain, much less the same cup.
His
eyes stayed on his girlfriend as, after receiving the bread, she waited for the
cup. Finally, the priest lowered it to her lips and said, as he had to the
others, ‘The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve
thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’
The man decided that any church where black and
white [people] drank from the same cup had discovered something powerful,
something he wanted to be a part of.
The
couple was Bishop Curry’s parents.”[1]
Sometimes the Church gets is right. And when we do, we see that love changes
lives – especially the lives of those who have been locked out, shut out, or thrown
out of the Church, especially those who expect to be locked out, shut out, or
thrown out of the Church.
We are called to create the future of the Church – a Church
known by its love, a Church loved because of its stunningly radical welcome. We can dream it. But that’s not enough – certainly not enough
for Paul. We also need to be it.
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