Matthew 10:40-42

40 "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 41 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; 42 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."

WELCOMING CHRIST

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today our congregation is honoring a significant group of people that have been married or who were married to the same person for more than fifty years. We have 30 couples that have been married 50 or more years and 42 widows and widowers that were married 50 or more years. Two of our couples that attend worship weekly have been married 63 years!

We are honoring these exemplary elders to remind ourselves that the Christian community lives by a different story than the wider culture. We live by a story that we believe to be the Truth. That story says that at the heart of the universe there is a God of faithfulness and steadfast love. We live by a story that says that God enters into our human story and comes to save us from our selfish selves. We live by a story that says God so loves each of us that He gives away His own life that we might be His own dear people.

The faithfulness of our elders in their marriages is a living witness that it is possible, with God’s help, to mirror God’s steadfast love in the most intimate of human relationships – the marriage of one man and one woman!

Genesis 1:27 tells us that in the beginning God made humankind in His own image – male and female He created them. Then God blessed them and commanded them to multiply, fill the earth, and care for God’s good creation. In Genesis 2 we learn that the woman is, like God, a constant helper to the man. He leaves father and mother for the woman. The two become one flesh. There is complementariness to the way they are physically made – man for woman, and woman for man. They are made to become co-creators with God by producing offspring that will also care for God’s good creation.

Sin enters into the world by human choice. As Martin Luther says, they decide to fear, love, and trust something other than God – and their hearts are turned in upon themselves. They listen to the tempter’s empty promises. Because of sin, God’s harmonious creation is shattered and human relationships become something other than what God wills. As our marriage liturgy puts it, “because of sin, our age-old rebellion, the gladness of marriage can be overcast and the gift of the family can become a burden” (Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 203).

As others have said, there is only one hero in the Bible – God! When humans wander off into abusive and faithless relationships, God remains steadfast. When women become the property of their faithless fathers and husbands, God remains steadfast. When Israel’s kings enter into polygamous relationships as a witness to their own faithlessness, God remains steadfast. God is the faithful husband of His people, and they are as faithless as the temple prostitutes of Baalism (see Hosea).

Men and women are literally made for each other as even the physical make-up of their bodies declares. The desire that draws them to one another is a gift from a gracious God who gives them physical intimacy within a covenant relationship as a reflection of the passionate love God has for His people (see the Song of Songs). Because of sin, human desire becomes idolatrous – no longer a gift within the covenant relationship between man and woman but rather an end in itself. Because of sin, the human heart is turned in upon itself. It seeks to possess and take from the other without the sacrifice, commitment, or faithfulness that God willed from the beginning for the man and woman.

At the right time, in the fullness of time, God sent His only begotten Son, Jesus, into the world to woo and bring back faithless humanity to God – like a groom romancing his bride. God’s Son so loved God’s beloved people that He gave His life away on the cross to save faithless humanity from ourselves. Left to our own devices, we will endlessly seek our own will rather than God’s good and gracious will even though our disobedience leads to pain, separation, and death.

That is how sin-sick we broken humans are. Only a faithful steadfast God can save us from ourselves and remake us, through our baptism into Jesus’ death and resurrection, into the people God willed us to be from the beginning! Baptism is an on-going daily work of wooing and restoring us to what God originally created us to be. As Paul teaches in Romans 6, the old sinner is drowned. The new child of God is made alive to God now that she or he is dead to sin. (The Gospel is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for those that intend to continue on as they are and to delight in their faithlessness and disobedience!)

It is no small thing that Paul in Ephesians 5 urges husbands and wives to give themselves to each other as Christ gives Himself to the Church. It is again the recognition that the marriage relationship between one man and one woman most closely parallels God’s passionate, faithful love for humanity. Even at the end of the book, in Revelation 21, John envisions the New Jerusalem as a bride prepared and ready for her husband. At the last, God will be all-in-all – the former things of sin and disobedience will, at last, be destroyed! God will be united with His people forever.

Today we honor the many Christians in our midst that have been married fifty or more years, holding them up as a sign of hope to us in an age when faithlessness seems increasingly to be the norm. Despite sin’s attempt to shatter the promises that were made as wedding vows were said, we have, in our midst, people that stand as living witnesses to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. With the help of God, they have kept their vows. With the help of God, they have laid down their lives for each other recognizing the very presence of Christ in their most intimate friend and neighbor.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Lord Jesus continues to speak of the coming of God’s kingdom – the glorious rule and reign of God. He uses the words “prophets, righteous ones, and little ones” to describe those that are ambassadors and envoys of God’s kingdom. He urges His hearers to welcome these envoys, these representatives as Christ Himself. In the tiniest act, even in the giving of a cup of water to one of Christ’s representatives, there is evidence that the kingdom of God has embraced the one who offers hospitality as if to the Lord Himself. God remembers each act of hospitality.

I cannot help but think of an old story told about Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She was asked how it was that she could continue to tend the sickest and most wretched of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa said that as she looked at each person for whom she was caring she tried to imagine that she was tending the Lord Jesus’ wounded body – His nail-scarred hands, feet, and side. And so it was that in each act of caring, the Kingdom of God embraced and even reached out through Mother Teresa as she welcomed Christ in her neighbor and as she embraced the neighbor as if that person were the Lord Himself! God remembers each act of hospitality.

The marriages and the family life of Christians can likewise be glimpses of the Kingdom of God in our midst: mothers giving their bodies to pregnancy, labor, and nursing; parents setting aside careers for a time in order to raise a child; parents taking time off from work to take a child to the doctor and nurse a little one back to health; fathers putting aside the childish ways of boyhood in order to spend time with wife and child. In the tiny acts of diaper changing and saying no to some selfish pleasure in order to say yes to a family, a father and mother, a husband and wife welcome each other and their children as if each were the Lord Himself. God remembers each act of hospitality.

In the June 2005 issue of Touchstone Magazine, Fredericka Mathewes-Green writes about her journey from hippie adolescence to life with her husband, a former Episcopal and now Eastern Orthodox priest. She writes poignantly about how her views on sex and marriage have grown and changed throughout the years – ample evidence of how the Kingdom of God has touched and molded this Christian woman’s life.

Mathewes-Green writes: “Everything you hear in ads and entertainment is telling you that your goal is to wake up next to someone gorgeous tomorrow morning. That’s the rationale of consumer sex. But I think what humans really want is to wake up next to someone kind, fifty years from tomorrow morning.”

“The decisions you make today, and tomorrow – and tomorrow night – will have everything to do with whether that happens for you or not. It happened for me. I have been married thirty-one years, and until the end of my life I’ll have beside me the man who fell in love with me when I was nineteen. If I get old and cranky, if I get breast cancer, if I get Alzheimer’s, he’ll stick with me, and I won’t be alone, and I’ll do the same for him. In this way we show the presence of God to each other, and grow into his likeness” (from “Bodies of Evidence: The Real Meaning of Sex Is Right in Front of Our Eyes”, p. 32).

I began by saying that Christians live by a different story. But some say that there is no such thing as one over-arching story. Like Pontius Pilate, some doubt there is such a thing as Truth. For some life is a cacophony of competing stories, for others life is perhaps only a series of random and meaningless encounters. And we Christians cannot stop people – even those we love – from embracing other stories or even no story at all. That is the way it has been from the first human choice against God and for the selfish self and its own wanton desires.

Today we rehearse our story, the story of a faithful God of steadfast love who refuses to abandon us sinners to ourselves but continues to woo us as a passionate Lover who will not let us go. Today God gives us not a cup of water as a sign of kingdom hospitality. Rather God gives us His own life in bread and wine longing to become one with us that we might be His own and live under Him in His kingdom.

That same God has given us human embodiments of His love and faithfulness in the couples and in the widows and widowers that have been married fifty or more years. They remind us that the story we live by is the Truth. It is possible to lay down our lives for each other in the same way that God’s Son Jesus has given His own life for the sake of the world. God can do the impossible with selfish people. God can mold us, especially within our marriages and family life, into the likeness of His servant Son.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©Samuel D. Zumwalt
St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
Wilmington , North Carolina USA
szumwalt@bellsouth.net