“Fruit of Hospitality”
Scripture Reading: John 20:19-31
Sermon Transcript for April 23, 2006
By Pastor Bob Coleman
So Jesus offered what? What was it that Jesus offered His disciples? Peace—peace be with you! A simple gift, it feels like, but apparently a very difficult one for us to accept as people, His disciples also. You see at the heart of hospitality is peace. Can you think about it? How hospitable can you be to another person if you are in turmoil yourself? Usually when you are tied up in knots or some issue of distress has been in your life, you don’t receive other people into your presence that well. You can see it on the countenance, on the look of the eyes and on the face of people. They are disturbed. Something is going on inside and they tend not to be very smiling or helpful or happy. Now we can all put on a happy face for a short term, but I mean the longer you get to know a person, you’ll know what’s happening within them. Maybe not the specifics, but you’ll know whether they are at peace or they are in turmoil.
Peace is the gift that Jesus gives. And He gives it based upon hospitality because He receives everyone as they are. The false hospitality is, “I’ll receive you but not you”. False hospitality is, “You look like you could be a friend”, “I don’t care how you look like”, or “I don’t like what you’ve done and I’m not going to let you be a part of my life.” The Bendourin hospitality that Dan referred to is one that I also was amazed with and found out, by the way, that Bendourin tribesman living still in tents today are Christians, some of them. And their families have been Christian for a thousand years in the Greek Orthodox Church. What a revelation because I had assumed that those people who lived in tents and assumed that those people who lived in robes and wear those headdresses were, well, I didn’t know who they were. They were strangers to me.
The part of hospitality is getting to know people well enough to know what their needs are. That’s why we use the apples this week to fill our basket which you’ll anticipate what we will have for the next several weeks is what is going to be the next fruit that we are going to put in the baskets to fill out the six Sundays between Easter and Pentecost. But today we chose the apple. And it sort of came together to us as a group decision. The apple seemed to be a friendly fruit, seemed to be something…Well, I know what happened in my life where I knew a person who had been a retired person who ran an orchard. And every time you went to this persons’ house you got an apple. I mean it was his gift. He learned how to raise them well; they were sweet. Even in off season he could keep them in a chilled condition so that they were fresh and crisp. And it was his gift of hospitality.
But even greater than the gift of the apple, which was a surface gift just like the bread that we hand out to our friends and our guests who are here today for the first time. But the bread is only the surface piece; the apple is only the beginning. The “peace be with you” is only the first step of Jesus’ hospitality. It’s when you get to know a person well; you listen to where they are and who they are. You get to be quiet in their presence so they tell you their story. Then you can help to provide what the person really needs. Not an apple, not a loaf of bread as nice as that is, but it’s when we begin to listen well enough in a hospitable way to what is your deepest need.
And what was the basis of the peace that Jesus leaves with us and gives to us? Remember what was next? What is it you need to do that if you do it will be complete and if you don’t do it, it won’t happen? Forgive! “As you forgive, people will be forgiven. If you don’t forgive, people will not be forgiven.” Think of the power of that! That in the name of Jesus Christ you forgive someone, they are forgiven. It does not have to be redone. It doesn’t have to be reconfigured. But think of the other side of that power, if I don’t forgive you, you are not forgiven. And there are two sides of that forgiveness because I may need to forgive you first to be able to come to peace in my own heart. And you may need forgiveness from me so that you can be at peace in your own heart. So you see, hospitality without peace is a false faith. And peace without forgiveness really has no strength to it. In this very passage, following the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, one of the first messages He leaves with His disciples, “I give you peace. I give you peace through forgiveness.” And so the apple becomes a symbol for us of that first layer and first understanding of the power of forgiveness.
Now the anointing of the oil that we gave to you is another way to remind, to make you feel a sense of at peace and at home. Now the good news is that you have it here in your presence now and you can “take it with you” this week. You can take it by way of the “prayer tent”. You can take it by way of still a little bit of oil on your hands or on your forehead. You can take it on the external but the most important gift is that the peace must be resting in your heart. Now later in the scripture of this passage, Jesus is telling us by way of Thomas, the doubter (as we call him), the twin, the one who said, “I’m not going to believe that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead until I can see and actually touch His wounds. I have to have it proven to me.”
Jesus comes first to those who will believe without having it proven to them. And he gives them peace. But Jesus’ hospitality is greater than that. It goes to those who doubt and says, “Alright, if you need something to help you believe, here’s the physical but it is great for those who believe without seeing and without touching. But if you need to touch, if you need that concrete, my gift of peace comes to you also” In the forgiving of your doubt, and the freeing of you from the doubt that has constrained you and kept you from believing fully as Thomas did.
What a powerful message for us! You see, we’re purposefully between Easter and Pentecost, and I hope you will get the word out and invite people to come because there is real reason and purpose for these baskets. They are not just nice decoration. We believe that in the next six weeks, we are going to share with you steps of action in your life that will be an example outwardly and inwardly of the fruit of God’s peace and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because we are working towards a goal and that is Pentecost Sunday. Reverend Dan is working with the Confirmation class. We will be bringing them in on that Sunday, those who are confirmed. Some of them are going to be baptized on that day and we are working out that day to be a special experience. By the way, if you have not been baptized and you feel called to be baptized, and Christ calls us to be baptized, that will be an opportunity. Please contact Reverend Dan or myself. If you want to have your baptism remembered on that day, we are going to work out a way for that to take place. And it’s going to be by sprinkling or pouring or immersion. And you say, “Well, where are you going to do that immersion?” We have plans to do it right here on our own property so that will be something to look forward to.
But the backup of that is that baptism is an outward sign and an action on your part that you have felt the presence of God’s spirit in you and in me and that peace starting to take hold because hospitality as a fruit is based upon being at peace first in Christ. The greatest hospitable gift that we can give to strangers that come into our midst, guests, first-time people, is that we know Christ in our own hearts. We are accepting the gift of that peace in each of our hearts. That’s a powerful understanding when we look at these words which are simple and straight forward. And it comes to us in a time when we know this world needs just as much as ever before the opportunity to bring peace to it.
The Psalm 133 that you heard earlier is an outward expression because let me read to you again what the words are that lead to that. It says in the beginning of that Psalm, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity.” You see, the anointing of the oil is just an outward experience but the inner peace of unity and the spirit is at the heart of who we are. And the other gift that we can give in hospitality is that people will know that Jesus Christ was risen, not just for the purpose of making God look good, but that we are truly forgiven as a whole creation of God. And that means us individually.
In the letter of I John the writer says in The Message translation, “We saw it, we heard it, and now we are telling you so that you can experience it along with us--this experience of communion with the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.” That is our purpose as a church—is to experience that communion with Jesus Christ, of God, the Father, ourselves and then turn around and tell others about it and make it possible in our midst for that spirit to be felt. Later on the writer said in Verse 8, “If we claim that we are free of sin, we are only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins, we make a clean breast of that. He won’t let us down. He will be true to Himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us from all wrong doing.” When He served as a sacrifice for our sins, He solved the sin problem for good. Not only ours but the whole worlds.
One of the weakness of the Christian church is we really don’t believe the gospel enough. We keep thinking, “Yeah, its good words. It sounds like it ought to work. We would hope that peace would be available to the whole world, but we really don’t believe it or trust that is what God wants.” I heard Adam Hamilton, who is a pastor at a church in Kansas, say, “Our difficulty is simply that we don’t trust God to want more than what we want.” How about that? What’s your best hope in your world? God’s hope is even greater than that. And one of the difficulties of churches is not believing enough and opening themselves enough to trust that God is really behind and with and ahead of us in the direction that we are going. What a powerful way to say that your heart and your mind, my heart and my mind, if it is going to be unified as it says in the Psalm is to be unified in the purpose of God, the creator, fulfilled in Jesus, the Christ.
In the Book of Acts where the people are gathered together following the post resurrection and post Pentecost experience, they were discovering the opportunities of what it meant to be a unity in a small community. They were finding the needs. Remember what I said earlier, the basis of hospitality is knowing a person well enough to understand what their needs are and then meeting their needs. Not to make us feel better but truly meeting their needs. In the Book of Acts, Chapter 4, Verse 32 and following selected versus it says, “All of the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was his own but they shared everything they had.” You see, there were no needy persons among them for from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales, put it at the Apostles feet and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
What a powerful message that is for us today that the basis of hospitality is listening well enough to the needs of people that indeed we can come to the point where we are not hording what we have, protecting it for our own sake, but saying to the Lord and to God, “This is what you have given me, how do you want me to direct what you have given me so that it will meet your purposes and fulfill your plan and it will bring peace and unity and hospitality as your plan and your purpose for this creation calls for. What a powerful way! It doesn’t mean you go into poverty. It just means that everybody has enough. Everybody has enough, not just in the physical realm but everybody has enough in spirit. Because if it is only in the physical realm, then we are just clothing the body and we are feeding the body. And that’s good, that’s what Christ calls us to do. But we also must take in the spirit of Christ hospitality, the fruit of forgiveness, so that people might be made whole from the inside out, that their spirits may be reconnected and brought together in a reconciled and pure way, for that’s the ultimate purpose and goal of God’s plan and the churches who will follow in God’s way and the brothers and sisters who will follow in God’s way. It’s to help people come to wholeness so that when the rough things of life, when the death of an infant or the death of a sister or of a longtime friend, or a serious illness like cancer, or surgery, when whatever the experience is that does happen in our life, there will be a spiritual peace that will carry us through.
What a powerful message for us to understand that when Jesus first met His disciples, according to the Gospel of John, He gave them peace through forgiveness. Spiritual, personal, meaningful gift of hospitality! Peace in one’s own heart and peace in the heart of the one who is receiving it.
To conclude our message for today--another time of prayer. Yes, we prayed earlier and we prayed before the lesson. Now we want to pray on the response of the lesson. What is it that is in your heart today that is not in peace? What is it that is kind of gnawing at you? Because you see, before we can be hospitable to other people remember what I said. You have to be at peace in your own heart. People will read through you eventually. You can put on a face for a short term, but if you are going to carry the burden for a long time and be open to other people, you need to know that to give peace you must have peace. To give forgiveness you must be forgiven. So what is it that’s clogging you up in the arteries of your spiritual heart? What is it that’s causing you pain and difficulty? Maybe it is for someone else—a broken relationship. Maybe it’s a family or friendship, maybe it’s a heartache that you have that you’ve carried all too long. I want you to take a moment of prayer where you offer that to the Lord and seek the presence of that peace for Christ offers it to us this morning as clearly as He offered it to the disciples 2000 years ago as recorded in Scripture. As you forgive, you will be forgiven. As you forgive others, they will be forgiven. As you give peace, find peace in your heart. But if you don’t have that forgiveness, how can you give it away? And what a powerful message to say that we have the power of forgiveness in our hearts and available to us but we also have the power to withhold.
So let’s take a time of prayer where we will in silence present and I’ll close with a verbal prayer. “We are glad that we can share on the surface the bread, warm word of welcome, the surface things of hospitality, but Lord this morning you have told us through Your word that true hospitality must carry with it the spirit of peace and forgiveness joyfully and fully given. Lord may we walk the path of hospitality this morning by accepting the peace that only You can provide, receiving the forgiveness that only You can forgive. And as it dwells in our hearts, we simply offer the good news of that peace and forgiveness to others. Let us take time to seek that for ourselves. Let us take time to listen to others and give that gift to them. For if we don’t do anything else in the course of our life, let us be at peace with You, with one another, and give the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ. For it is through Your Son, Jesus Christ, that we know wholeness, completeness, salvation, forgiveness, Your kingdom. We thank You for the glory of Your message this morning, Your word, Your spirit. As we offer in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.”
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