Monday, January 16, 2006
You're Welcome
Last week, I posted about The Call To Hospitality. In that post we looked at hospitality as differenitated from the mega-church mentality, and what it might mean to be hospitable in the Godblogosphere. So I was intrigued yesterday when Mark Roberts posted his sermon - The Welcome of Jesus.
In some ways Mark sounds remarkably like me
Have you ever experienced that. You're in a crowd and suddenly someone speaks up loud enough for most or all to hear and the situation moves from crowd to group, maybe even to acquaintances and friends. In a place long ago and far away I wrote about intimacy as a part of the Chrisian experience.
In my post last week, I differentiated between "welcome" and "hospitality," and Mark is using the word "welcome" in his sermon, but it is clear he means that word in the sense that I mean "hospitality," so I don't want to get into a word quibble.
Intimacy is the key. When people come to church, when they encounter us, they should feel a bond of intimacy. Whenever I think about these thing, I cannot help but reflect on John 4 - Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well. The thing that strikes me most about that encounter is that Jesus is almost instantly very intimate with that woman. They are bonded at the first words.
That, I think, is the thing we as Christians are called to do that we are so bad at doing. Intimacy, and farily immediate intimacy. Hospitality, welcome - these are how intimacy begins and early expressions of it, but we cannot stop there, we must learn genuine intimacy, for that is where we become more like Him.
Related Tags: Christianity, church, intimacy, hospitality, welcome, gospel, Jesus
In some ways Mark sounds remarkably like me
In truth, it's not people I don't like, but whole lots of them jammed together. So you'll rarely find me, for example, down at the Irvine Spectrum on the day a hit movie is released. Too many people, standing in line, packed into the theatre. Ugh!I agree, I hate crowds -- with a passion, much of what I do is built around avoiding them. But Mark reflects on scripture this way
When I read the story in Luke 9 of Jesus in Bethsaida, I feel for Him. Jesus had just sent His disciples off on a mission trip. When they returned, He took them to a small city called Bethsaida. It was about seven miles away from Jesus's home base at Capernaum. The text of Luke suggests that Jesus wanted some alone time with the Twelve, no doubt so they could rest and debrief their recent mission trip.Mark goes on to talk about Jesus' compassion for the crowd, but Jesus did more than have compassion and "manage" the crowd. Jesus turned the crowd intimate.
But things didn't work out as Jesus had planned. As Luke writes, "When the crowds found out about it, they followed him" (9:11). Jesus's hopes for some quiet time with His disciples were dashed by the presence of the crowds who just wouldn't leave Him alone.
How did Jesus respond to them? As Luke tells the story, Jesus "welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured" (9:11).
Have you ever experienced that. You're in a crowd and suddenly someone speaks up loud enough for most or all to hear and the situation moves from crowd to group, maybe even to acquaintances and friends. In a place long ago and far away I wrote about intimacy as a part of the Chrisian experience.
Relational intimacy is the same. The more intimate we become with someone socially, the more we risk their discovery that we are not quite all that we are cracked up to be. The reason that intimacy is in short supply today is not because technology is in the way; it is because people are no longer willing to risk the exposure that intimacy requires.Intimacy lies at the heart of what the church should be all about, and we have gotten very bad at it.
Why is that? Everybody is imperfect; we all have foibles and problems, why should it be so hard to let others see them? I think it is because when we expose those imperfections to others we expose them to ourselves. The image that is REALLY at risk in intimacy is not the image the other has of us, but the image we have of ourselves. The risk is not that they will reject us, but that we will reject ourselves, or more aptly, we will be forced to confront the issue and try to fix it.
In my post last week, I differentiated between "welcome" and "hospitality," and Mark is using the word "welcome" in his sermon, but it is clear he means that word in the sense that I mean "hospitality," so I don't want to get into a word quibble.
Intimacy is the key. When people come to church, when they encounter us, they should feel a bond of intimacy. Whenever I think about these thing, I cannot help but reflect on John 4 - Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well. The thing that strikes me most about that encounter is that Jesus is almost instantly very intimate with that woman. They are bonded at the first words.
That, I think, is the thing we as Christians are called to do that we are so bad at doing. Intimacy, and farily immediate intimacy. Hospitality, welcome - these are how intimacy begins and early expressions of it, but we cannot stop there, we must learn genuine intimacy, for that is where we become more like Him.
Related Tags: Christianity, church, intimacy, hospitality, welcome, gospel, Jesus
