Sermon, 6/29/2025

3 Pentecost

Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20; 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

Foxes have their holes and birds their roosts, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Luke 9:58

You have most assuredly heard the phrase “attention span.”  I joke often about the length of my homilies, whose length on any Sunday was to vary from a mere 2.5 to 4 hours, but find the meditation reduced due to “attention span.”  In my former academic life, professional presentations can last an hour, 30 minutes of formal presentation, followed by a Q and A that might last equally as long.  And often, things did not end there.  Later, over cocktails, we engaged—my audience and I—in further lively debate.  

I recall one academic paper which I delivered with great fervor.  It concerned the evolution of Middle High German verbs into their contemporary New High German configuration and what that could tell us (my audience) about contemporary German society.  In the Q and A period and even later over cocktails, I admitted, as I do today, that the presentation had on its surface only indirect bearings on resolving threats of nuclear wars or feeding the hungry or curing diseases.  However, I would even today maintain that my paper did have significance, for it attempted to give my listeners insight into the collective German psyche, that which prompted and determined directions for further intellectual investigation into other fields.

In my current professional life as a priest of the church, I ask myself often the question how I might evoke a similar enthusiasm about that which we hear, you and I, in our lectionary reading.  Lacking presently here at St. James, the renown Episcopal Coffee Hour following Eucharist, or an adult bible study class, I must implore you to hear what in our readings we might find applicable to our daily encounter with the world. What is it in our allegiance to the call to Christ that motivates us to open soup kitchens, speak out against injustice and inequality, to rejoice in the beauty of nature and the universe?

And so it is today that I do two things.  The first is to remind you that I am not the one who determines our lectionary.  An ecumenical commission, which includes Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Lutherans and other Christian bodies, makes that determination for a 3-year cycle, A, B, and C.   Secondly, these lectionary readings, the Old Testament, the Psalm, the Epistle and the Gospel, have no crystal ball to anticipate what may be the event or concern in the secular world on a specific Sunday.  And while I state that my homily today is not a political treatise, yet I direct your attention to St. Luke’s gospel and ask you to consider whether it has relevance in how we, as Christians, may respond to the world around us. 

My thesis is a statement made by Jesus:  Foxes have their holes and birds their roosts, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.  (Luke 9.58)  This statement has social and political implications.  If that be the case, utilizing insights gained from my previous background, so is a close analysis, a close reading of the text required. 

Here is what stands out to me:

•   Jesus was to journey to Jerusalem.
•  The advance team of Jesus was rejected by the Samaritans, because of the political and religious dispute between the Samaritans and the Judeans, a dispute regarding who has the right to claim God for themselves.
•   James and John, brothers, disciples, and serving as the advance team, wanted to cause an immediate retaliation, if not an annihilation of the Samaritans and their village.  That would be a declaration of war.
•   As they proceeded on their journey, an unnamed man wanted to join their cause.  Jesus questioned his dedication to the cause.   Did he have the stamina, the commitment to endure/withstand the verbal jabs and probable physical attacks that would come his way?
•   Jesus caused another possible follower to think about priorities in his life.  “Let the dead bury their dead” was not a literal command, but that would be impossible.  Rather, the question is a theoretical, provocative one: Are you willing to relinquish old, outdated thoughts and means, in order to move forward?

I am absolutely convinced that if we were to take dedicated and hard and objective looks at our current national and international crises and verbal assaults, as well as physical attacks on individuals and nations, we could claim that what Luke has recorded regarding the message which Jesus of Nazareth sought to layout as a means of bringing the Kingdom of God near and saying “this day this is fulfilled in your hearing,”—we could say, could we not, that Luke was describing our predicament of 2025.  The vocabulary and place names may be different, but that can be fixed easily enough to fix and fit our own generation.

For our urgent consideration is the following question: What corrective actions are required of us Christians to reduced and eventually to eliminate this breach in communication between those, who according to our biblical record were created all in the image of God?  What may seem to you as extremely odd, if not ill-chosen, is the use of the sentence from today’s gospel, as a way of centering our reflections.  Hear again from St. Luke’s Gospel: “Foxes have their holes and birds their roosts, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58)

Consider, if you will, today’s gospel lesson from Luke, in the context of our baptism.  Many preachers use today’s gospel, and appropriately so, to talk about Christian discipleship, its rigors, its high expectations, its uncertainty.  But does not baptism have as its primary function to bring about community, God kingdom on earth as in heaven?  And like the two-year old, I find myself asking, over and over again, the question “Why?”  Why does the Son of Man have no place to lay his head, when, if what he is offering, is ‘good news which shall be for all people?’   

The solution is, so it appears to me, how we, and not just we at St. James, but how all Christians engage in the ministry of hospitality. To build community is to go beyond soundbites.  Baptism provides us with an identification beyond mission statements, slogans and mottos.  To baptize and to be a baptized person speaks to an actional ministry.  It is a ministry to reset the dignity of every human being, whether Christian or not, and, as the rule of St. Benedict demands, to treat every person who enters our doors, our sphere of influence, as if she/he were Christ. 

So ingrained into social interactions, across nations and cultures, is the concept of hospitality, that the messenger, the ambassador from one nation to another, is welcomed with the same respect and the same security reserved for the head of state being represented.  In the Middle Ages, to maim or slay the messenger, i.e. not to accord to him the dignity of hospitality, was an affront to the one who sent him.  Wars have been fought, because the messenger, the ambassador was maltreated or slain.

This ministry of hospitality, then, should not be perceived as a gimmick, but as a genuine response to the question “why does the son of man have no place to lay his head?”  This ministry of hospitality is that the church is the representative, the bodily form of Christ.   Therefore, as the baptized, we live out, to the best of our ability, Christ’s instructions to welcome the stranger, the sojourner, and to maintain an atmosphere within the church that says to everyone who passes by, “You are welcome here.”

In millennia past, welcoming the stranger meant giving a traveler a haven for the night, providing sustenance to satisfy the day’s hunger, and much needed rest.  It was a matter of survival to welcome those who were travelers.  It was not as today, when we may pull into Ramada Inn or Hampton Inn or Motel 6, or drive up to any of the myriad restaurants along our interstate highways.    

Admittedly, we live in a world vastly different from a world of prior millennia, even so distinguishable from the world of only 50 years past, but that basic human need for refuge and acceptance is still present.  And in our baptism, we are introduced to and state our allegiance to the precepts of Christ, that anyone who seeks to fulfill God’s will of inclusivity has found a place where he or she may lay his/her head.  When Jesus speaks to us about welcoming others, i.e. responding to the “why,” to the lack of accommodations for him, a place to lay his head, I see in our functional day-to-day encounters our task as fulfilling basic emotional and spiritual needs that are often just as urgent as the physical needs of the ancient sojourner.   

So here we are, on this third Sunday after Pentecost, wrestling with how we might live out our desire and our intention to offer a place of refuge to the stranger, which may be not a place to lay his/her head for the night, but a sympathetic and empathetic small smile on the street corner.  And certainly, so ought that be so to any and all who walk across the threshold into St. James. 

The Latin, non nobis solum, not for us alone, is the proclamation which should apply to and for those who come in the name of Christ into our sanctuary.  For their sake, for our sake as a parish family, for Christ’s sake, let us welcome one and all with such a ministry of hospitality.  When we so do, so will we have given by example an answer to the question to the question in Luke’s gospel: “Why does the son of man, God’s Messiah, not have a place to lay his head?”  For Jesus said, “whoever welcomes you, welcomes me.” (Matt.10:40-42)   Amen