Sermon - Everyday Encounters

Preached on September 1, 2013 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Scripture: Hebrews 13:1-2

Let mutual love continue. ²Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

Sermon

Is it possible to be in the presence of God and not know it?

You'd think that you would know, right? You'd think that to be directly in God's presence would be an overpowering, majestic, unmistakable experience. You'd think that it would be impossible to encounter God directly and have there be a chance of missing it, or misinterpreting it, or confusing it with something very ordinary.

But that's not necessarily the case. And the mistaken idea that encounters with God are always mind-blowing has, sadly, left too many people thinking that only other people have experienced God, or even that no one has experienced God because God doesn't exist.

But what if you could meet God and possibly not know that you had?

An anonymous writer of the very early church sent a letter to a group of Jews who had become followers of Christ. We call it the book of Hebrews, and at the end of this letter, after writing about how to understand Christ in relation to the history of the Hebrew people, the writer starts to review the kind of practices that shape a life of following Jesus. Here is the reminder to remember and visit with those who are in prison or being tortured, as happened a lot to followers of Jesus. And there are these words: “let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

It's actually a reference to what often happened Abraham and Sarah, the founders of the Hebrew people. They were at home in their tent when Abraham saw three men approach on foot. Now, living in the Middle East has never been easy, and travelers depended on others for hospitality. Abraham and Sarah had depended on others along the way, so they welcome these strangers, give them drinks to rehydrate, make up some food, give them a place to rest. And then, as any Hebrew child knew, the strangers told them that Sarah would become pregnant even though she and Abraham were by now quite old. And that’s what happened. It turned out that the three men were messengers of God, or angels, or God's way of meeting with people (those all mean about the same thing in the Bible, by the way. Angels were a way of God appearing to people, so the presence of an angel is the presence of God). Abraham and Sarah encountered God when they showed hospitality to those strangers, and they had no idea until they learned something that put their own lives in a new perspective. They had entertained angels without knowing it.

The Biblical scholar James Kugel writes that there are many of these instances in the scripture in which people are temporarily unaware that the stranger they have met is God (from Kugel’s The God of Old, 2003, chapter one). When they realize the truth, what they are surprised by is the message that God gives (“Sarah's going to be pregnant?”) or they are surprised that they didn't realize it sooner, as when Jacob says “surely God was in this place and I, I did not know.” But what they are not surprised by is the fact that they would encounter God in a way so ordinary, so everyday, that they might not even have noticed. They are not surprised that a God encounter could seem like an everyday encounter because they expected to encounter God in everyday life. They are not surprised, Kugel writes, because there was once a time when people did not think that there was such a strong border between the regular world and the world of divinity. Today we think of the natural world and the supernatural world as very separate (if there is one). For them, there was one world which was both natural and divine at every moment. In such a world, a person can encounter God and later say “it was just an ordinary, everyday thing that was happened, except for what I now know.”

You can encounter God in a way that seems perfectly ordinary, everyday, except that you will learn, as Sarah and Abraham did, something that puts your life in a new perspective.

So do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, wrote this wise person long ago. It's not the only way to encounter God but it is one way that we should not overlook.

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist who wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace, was captivated by God and wrote a good deal about his hope to live simply and generously in the way of Christ. He wrote a short story, a little fable, really, about a shoemaker named Martin who worked out of his home on the square of a Russian village. One night, Shoemaker Martin had a dream that Jesus would come to visit him the next day, much as Jesus had used to visit Zacchaeus to share a meal. He woke thinking what an honor that would be, and although he told himself not to put too much stock in a dream, still he couldn't help but keep an eye out the window as he went about his day.

While Martin started the fire to brew his morning tea, he saw Stefen, the town beggar, out in the early morning chill. Martin went to the front door and called for Stefen to come inside and warm himself by the fire. They shared a cup of tea and conversation before Stefen went on his way.

In the middle of the morning, while Martin was at his work, he saw on the square a young mother who cradled her infant child in a small shawl against the cold wind. Martin ran to the door and called them in to get warm by the fire. Martin said “I have an overcoat plenty big enough to wrap around you and the child. He brought it out and gave it to her as they said goodbye and “God bless you.”

Finally, as the afternoon light was fading, Martin saw a woman chase after a young boy. She grabbed him hard and there was much yelling. Martin ran out the door to find out what was wrong. It seems the boy had stolen an apple from the woman's basket. Martin spoke to them kindly and helped to resolve the wrong. As these two left, the woman had offered forgiveness to the boy, as well as the apple, and he had offered to carry her basket.

Martin was dismayed at the day's end that Jesus had not visited him. But then he felt a presence in the room, he turned and saw a vision of each of the day's visitors appear before him, and he heard the voice of Jesus say “this was me, and this was me, and this was me as well. Thank you for welcoming me into your home.” That night, when he turned to his evening reading, he read again in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus said “as much as you did for the least of these, you did for me.” Martin remembered that when we are generous to strangers, we are, in way that is spiritually very true, being generous to God, and our generosity to strangers opens our own hearts to receive generosity ourselves.

Let love be mutual. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that many have entertained angels without knowing it.

The more we show hospitality to strangers, the better we are able to receive those gifts for ourselves. Experience tells me that the more practice we have welcoming of others, understanding their particular fears and regrets, and forgiving of their flaws and failings, the easier it becomes to accept God’s welcoming of us, God’s understanding of our fears and regrets, and God’s forgiveness. The more we practice hospitality, the more we are able to receive.

Strangers become God’s messengers.

Sometimes it’s our religion that makes us strangers to each other. Eboo Patel is a young man who has worked for years to alleviate violence across religious lines by getting young people of different religions to go out and serve together. He sees a danger in people of any religion who teach that the unfaithful are the enemies, and wants to show a better way by getting religious strangers together: Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, Hindu and Sikh. Amazing things happen when these strangers decide to work together. One day, the Christian and Jewish kids were captivated when the Muslim kids all took a break from work at an appointed tim in the afternoon to pray together. They thought it was pretty cool to have a religion that tied spiritual practice to the natural rhythms of the day: morning, noon, sunset, bedtime. They went back and asked their own religious leaders, and do you know what they discovered? They learned that their own faith traditions also had prayers for different times of the day, developed by Jews and Christians thousands of years ago and still practiced today. They discovered a sacred practice for their lives by working alongside these Muslim strangers who were becoming friends. (From Patel's Acts of Faith, 2007).

Did those kids encounter God that day? They certainly learned to see their lives in a more holy perspective. They were certainly invited into a deeper life of spiritual connection.

Three years ago, a small group from this church was invited to a private concert by an amateur rock band in rural Tennessee. We met these guys while one a mission week at Henderson Settlement, near the Kentucky Tennessee border, where we have sent people over the past decade to repair homes in a beautiful but economically depressed area of Appalachia. We were siding the grandparent’s home next door, and their son said that he would have his bandmates over to give us a show one afternoon if we were interested. Could we possibly not be interested?

The afternoon arrived and we walked into the shade of their rambling added on band rehearsal room, tired and dirty and glad for the variety of old chairs and couches scattered around the edge of the room. And they started to play, and they were having fun, and pretty soon a couple of got up to dance, and then we all got up and we were all dancing, and their friends were dancing and we forgot how tired we were and had a great time. Was the band good? Not so good, no. But was the music and that makeshift room for dancing a great gift to us? And did the joy of that afternoon remind us that joy is a gift that does not depend on the condition of our house or the size of our bank account or our prospects for the future? Yes. And actually that music was pretty good.

Did we encounter God that day? Did Shoemaker Martin? Did Abraham and Sarah? It could be. See, that's the thing, the only way to tell an encounter with God apart from an ordinary day is in how we look at it. There's no proof. It's faith. We certainly saw our lives in a more thankful, joyful perspective.

What if God is active in our lives not in big showy ways but in ways that are so ordinary and everyday that we might not know it? What if we have been looking for the dramatic spiritual epiphany, when we should have been looking for hospitality between strangers, for ways to give a welcome and loving attention to others, and in the giving be blessed by what God is always giving to all of us, even if we haven’t noticed.