Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.Those are the ending verses of Chapter 10 in the Gospel According to Matthew, in which Jesus has been instructing his disciples, exhorting them to take up a new phase of discipleship and encouraging them in preparation for their mission of evangelism. Jesus is sending them out to proclaim the good news that “the rule of heaven’s empire is close at hand.”
You may have heard it said that Matthew is the Jewish Gospel. It’s called that because the author of this version of the Jesus story goes out of his way to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples, and the Jewishness of the ethnic setting in which their story takes place.
There they are, this troop of Jewish disciples who have followed Jesus, a latter-day Jewish prophet, out into the boonies somewhere beyond the Galilee, maybe sitting around a campfire like a band of hobos, getting their missionary orders from the holy man who has been leading them on an enigmatic journey out of their home territory and into an unknown future.
There are twelve of them, according to the scripture: first, Simon, also known as Rock, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the toll collector, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas of Iscariot, the one who, in the end, turned him in. They are all about to become Apostles.
An apostle is a an emissary having a special commission who represents a principal, another person having an important message to convey, in this case Jesus, the central message of whose ministry, in Matthew’s Greek, is best translated, “Heaven’s imperial rule is closing in.” We have more often heard this as, “the kingdom of God is at hand.”
Clearly, it was a declaration with political implications. Jesus proclaimed the ascendancy of the supreme power of God’s love, or Heaven’s rule, over against the brutal and oppressive military rule of the occupying Roman Empire, which claimed the divine sanction of the Roman gods.
And now Jesus was personally commissioning his twelve disciples, and sending them out with authority to proclaim the supremacy of God’s rule of love over the Empire’s rule of violent death and desecration.
We know what that means, to this day. As the ancient Jewish precepts Jesus taught are set elsewhere in Matthew,
You are to love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and you are to love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depends everything in the Law and the Prophets.And as is typical in Matthew, Jesus sent these newly commissioned Apostles of the good news of God on a distinctively Jewish mission. He instructed them, “Don’t travel foreign roads and don’t enter a Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
The setting of this missionary narrative was in the territory north of Jerusalem, and south of Syria, in a region where seven hundred years earlier, the schismatic kingdom of the fabled ten lost tribes of Israel had been reduced to ruin by the conquest of the Assyrian empire. The Samaritans were descendants of the ancient northern Israel sect, with its alternative scriptures, and its separate temple cult, founded under the dissident King Jeroboam in 922 BCE. The Samaritans’ relations with the Jews of Jesus’ time were strained, to say the least.
So the commission Jesus bestowed on the first Apostles was to carry the joyful message of God’s reign not to the immigrant Greek-speaking Gentiles, whose ethnicities were alien to the descendants of the tribes of Israel, and not to the refractory Samaritans, but to their own ethnically Jewish people. They were to go forth, not to evangelize exotic peoples in faraway places, but to minister to the suffering peoples of the surrounding villages and precincts. Their neighbors’ need for liberation and healing was as close at hand as the salvation message Jesus gave them. Jesus sent the twelve out to proclaim the good news of God, to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.”
And, according to Matthew, not only was any thought of material extravagance ruled out, but the missionaries would need no money at all. They would be mendicants; they would depend upon the hospitality of the people they would meet to sustain them. They were to trust entirely in God’s care, and to show that God was working not through the rich and powerful, but through the poor and powerless.
And Jesus promised them that those who have ears to hear, and hearts and souls to be healed, would welcome them as prophets, as righteous messengers of God. In the words of the Scholars’ Translation of today’s verses,
The one who accepts you accepts me, and the one who accepts me accepts the one who sent me. And whoever gives so much as a cup of cool water to one of these little ones, because the little one is a follower of mine, I swear to you, such a person certainly won’t go unrewarded.The salvation Jesus promised came about through simply accepting the acceptance that God offers freely, the good news of which was brought by Jesus’ disciples, and realized in Jesus himself, who according to another text elsewhere in the New Testament called himself God’s Apostle. And the humblest gesture of hospitality and welcome to one of the Apostles, these “little ones,” as Jesus spoke of them, would be more pleasing to God than great benefactions by the wealthy.
Whether from the point of view of the Apostles who are accepted, or the accepting ones who receive from them their healing, saving message, the “cup of cool water,” the grace of God, is in the welcoming of the stranger, in hospitality given graciously by loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
This is really the center of the Christian message, isn’t it?
To love God with all one’s being is to love God’s whole Creation, which includes us and all our neighbors, all of us made in God’s image. God’s love sustains us all impartially, and is reflected in our love for one another. As the brilliant Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano wrote, “I am another you; you are another me.”
Let me tell you another story, not a Gospel narrative but a very personal story, a memoir I wrote in the 1990’s for a national journal for liberal religious educators. It was published in a collection of contributions from parents and their children under the title, “Images of God.”
I have two daughters, Anna and Maggie, who are now twenty-five and twenty-three years old. For me, the experiencing of their births, and my parenting relationship with them in early childhood opened me wide-awake to the life-changing reality of direct, transformative religious experience. For me, the alpha and omega of religious experience is human-hearted love.
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, the firstborn and the more pensive of my two preschool-aged daughters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with me on the front porch. “God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”
Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said. “I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Soon after I wrote that reflection some twenty years ago, I began seeking to understand and cultivate, and to communicate the meaning of that deeply spiritual experience of infinite, unconditional love, one like other spiritual experiences I’ve had, often, since then.
Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as God.
And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, within us and among us, for we are all of God, children as it were of God and manifestations of God’s eternal, infinite love.
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote an early Christian bishop, St. Irenaeus. Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love. Love is the response of human persons in joyful acceptance of their deep connectedness with one another in the ground of ultimate reality, of being itself, of God’s real presence.
For Christians, together the body of Christ, awareness of God’s love in which we are all connected is what I call Christ-consciousness, because Christ, whom we embody, is the fully human incarnation of God, God with us, God among us, God within us.
Now Jesus Christ’s ministry of salvation is ours, as St. Teresa of Avila wrote in the sixteenth century:
Christ has no body on earth now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion for the world is to look out; yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.And I affirm that, to the extent we can say anything positively true of our relation with God, we can say, with the author of 1 John 4,
Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him [or her]. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and [God’s] love is made complete in us. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.Love is what made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way of life that surpasses death.
Now let’s take the step from our Gospel narrative, and from our God-talk, to our own ordinary daily lives, living out the way of life of Jesus’ followers in Christian discipleship. We were born in this world nineteen and a half centuries on, but our relation to Christ is not much different, really, from that of the generation of disciples for whom the Gospel According to Matthew was written, fifty years or so after Jesus and his first disciples walked upon the dusty pathways of Galilee.
Our Gospel narrative is of course an imaginary one, pieced together in piety by a faithful author looking backward to an earlier time, making meaning for his people of a collection of oral accounts and written sayings attributed to Jesus. That is its beauty and its power.
Here and now, we can make new meaning for our own lives in our hearing of the sacred story. We can imagine ourselves in the roles of Jesus’ disciples, sent forth on missions of apostleship to our neighbors. And perhaps more significantly, we can imagine ourselves as the village neighbors receiving them, accepting them, welcoming them as Christ in the stranger’s guise, and offering the cup of cool water.
In the United Church of Christ, we speak of radical hospitality and extravagant welcome, as descriptions of how we mean to embody the good news of God in our lives as Christ’s disciples for our time.
One way we do this in my congregation is by hosting twenty homeless guests overnight each Sunday. Our church volunteers serve supper and share evening table fellowship with our guests, and we provide them with breakfast foods before they leave Monday morning. Five other congregations in Santa Cruz join us in this, welcoming these guests in church fellowship halls every night of the week. I was the principal organizer of this community mission project, which has been in operation for two years now.
I’ve been consulting with your pastor Mark Fountain, and with clergy and lay leaders of several other churches in the Aptos-Soquel area, to help organize a new faith-based shelter project of the same kind here.
I hope that some of you will be inspired to works of extravagant welcome and radical hospitality in your church for other wayfaring strangers, people who have next to nothing in the way of material resources, and who lack any housing at all.
I hope you’ll be encouraged and inspired by what is plainly possible to join in the organizing process with your neighboring congregations. It would be my joy and my honor to guide you, and to share with you the benefit of my experience. I’m sure there will be a time soon for us to work together to bring a new mission project into being here where you live and worship.
Now as you go forth in discipleship, be mindful that you don’t need to go very far. There are lost souls just beyond your doorstep, and multitudes of displaced, dispossessed, and suffering children of God right here in your own neighborhood. There, but for fortune, go you and I. Let us be good news to them. Let us offer them the cup of cool water.
God’s blessings be with you. Go in love, go in peace, and remember – you are not alone.
