11th Sunday after Trinity

Readings: Sirach 10. 12-18; Psalm 112; Hebrews 13. 1-8, 15-16; Luke 14. 1, 7-14 (view all)

Amy, Evie and I have just returned from a really lovely couple of weeks in Italy, including a wonderful couple of days in Florence. We stayed in an amazing, historic hotel right in the centre of the city with a wonderfully decorated room (it’s the first time I’ve ever taken a photo of a hotel bathroom ceiling!)

Something you always worry about when abroad is the hospitality that you will receive, especially when struggling with a language barrier. But the welcome and the hospitality we received in Florence was amazing, and made our visit to the city something really special.

‘All are welcome’ — words we sang a few moments ago in the modern hymn, ‘Let us build a house’, by Marty Haugen. But words which are very often much easier to say or sing than they are to live and practice.

So, as we reflect on this morning’s readings, how can we practice welcoming hospitality to others, especially those who are different from us? How can we truly  ‘welcome all’?

In our gospel reading, Jesus is invited to a dinner party at the house of a local dignitary — one of the leaders of the Pharisees. And it’s here, as they observe Jesus and Jesus observes them, that he challenges them about the quality of their hospitality and their welcome.

Where they have become obsessed with position and status, Jesus challenges them to practice hospitality which is characterised instead by humility and service. And where they have limited their welcome to those they have deemed ‘worthy’, Jesus challenges them to welcome ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind’ — those who couldn’t ever afford to repay the favour.

Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live, a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive.

At the heart of Jesus’ challenge is the observation that, for these guests, their relationships have become conditional on the reward they bring. Rather than an informal gathering of friends, you can imagine this as the kind of tense, competitive dinner where the great, the good, and those aspiring to be like them, are all vying for position and status.

Rather than truly loving relationships, instead this set of relationships around the table has been reduced to a set of transactions — with each person trying to improve their place, and the host trying to earn favour from their guests.

And in today’s transactional, consumerist culture, this caution is more relevant than ever. In our lives, it can be so easy for our hospitality, our community, our friendships, to be reduced to consumerist transactions — conditional on the potential return, whether this is an increase in status, in popularity or in opportunity. 

I certainly find this trap so easy to fall into in my own life.

I can find myself subtly managing which friends to invest in based on those I need or want to get something out of, rather than those who might need my care and support. I can find myself engineering my facebook profile, so that it shows only the best bits of my life, but none of the worst, and competing for my posts to get the most ‘likes’.

And in the life of the Church, we can easily fall into the same approach, saying to ourselves, ‘Well, we’re not likely to see them on a Sunday, so why bother?’

But God’s way, the way of Christ’s kingdom, is about unconditional love and welcome, about hospitality offered to those who could never pay it back. It’s about giving without ever expecting to receive in return, about emptying ourselves rather than increasing our status. 

This is the picture of God’s upside-down kingdom which we find in our reading from Hebrews as well as our first reading from the Wisdom of Sirach. This is a rare, but valuable, opportunity in the Sunday lectionary to get a glimpse of one of the books of the Apocrypha, outside of the normal historic canon of scripture.