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Over Labor Day I read a lovely
end-of-summer book entitled The Big House. Now lest
you assume it has to do with my preferences in college
football stadiums (especially after yesterday!), it’s
actually about a family’s last summer in their long-time
summer home on Cape Cod. It was always referred to as “the
Big House,” and it really is. The author describes it as “an
extraordinary structure, a massive, four-story,
shingle-style house as contorted and fantastic as something
a child might build with wooden blocks. Somewhat whimsical
with peaked roof, bays, gables and dormers, porches and
breezeway. It has nineteen rooms, or if you count
bathrooms—26, including eleven bedrooms, seven fireplaces,
and a warren of closets, cupboards and crannies that four
generations of children have used for Hide-and-Seek or
Sardines.”
He says the house has watched over
numerous family events including five weddings, four
divorces, three funerals, several nervous breakdowns, an
untold number of conceptions, countless birthday parties,
anniversaries and love affairs. And even though the family
is now scattered coast to coast, they have always come back.
They all “…thought of the Big House as an unchanging place
in a changing world, a sanctuary we assumed we would always
be able to return to.”
After 42 of his own summers at the Big
House, he concludes: “…I have always thought of it as home,
if home is the one place that will be in your bones
forever.” (George Howe Colt, The Big House, page 12)
And I thought…that’s church…that’s
home…that’s God’s Big House, the one place that will be in
your bones forever.
Now shifting my geographical metaphor
from New England to Tennessee, let me offer the invitation:
“Y’all come on home now, ya hear?” That’s how they say it in
the South. It represents the warmth and welcome of Southern
hospitality, a sense of belonging and identity, the
invitation to come on home.
And I thought…that’s church…that’s
home…God’s Big House is the place of welcome and belonging,
in your bones forever.
Luke’s narrative takes place at a Sabbath
sunset dinner party. If it were this week, it would be a
great Rosh Hashanah New Year’s party. Jesus is in the home
of a ruler of the Pharisees. I am sure it was a lovely home
in the suburban hills of Jerusalem, with a pool, near the
golf course and country club. And during the cocktail party,
much to the dismay of the hostess and the other guests,
Jesus heals.
First of all, who invited a man sick with
dropsy (probably edema in the legs, due to congestive heart
failure) to the party, anyway? How did he get in? It was
embarrassing. And second, it’s the Sabbath, after all, and
maybe even one of the High Holy Days, the days of awe.
Everyone knows you can’t touch sick, unclean people on the
Sabbath or you become unclean. And that would mess up the
whole party! But Luke, the physician, records that Jesus
takes note of this man. Jesus sees him. Jesus touches him.
Jesus heals him…right there, at the New Year’s party; right
now, even on the Sabbath.
Then, perhaps to break the uncomfortable
silence which settled in, he tells a few after-dinner
stories: “Did you hear the one about the great banquet?”
“Let me tell you about a wedding feast.” “Once upon a time,
there was a father who had two sons…” Along with the search
for the lost coin and the rescue of the lost sheep. The
stories are all about who gets invited and who gets found,
and who comes home and who gets welcomed to the Big House.
1. It’s all about the invitation.
Jesus focuses on who gets invited, and
frankly, the invitation list is a bit shocking. He says:
“Don’t just invite the people you know, the people you like
and are like, the people of importance, but look beyond your
immediate circle of friends, expand the table, stretch the
invitation list to include the poor, the maimed, the lame,
the blind. How about inviting the lonely and the lost, the
outsider and the overlooked, the young and the old, the
least expected. How about inviting them? Because at God’s
party in God’s Big House, the invitation is to all. Y’all
come…”
Y’all….what a wonderful
plural form of the word “You.” Because you
realize “you” can be singular—just you and me. The plural
matters. Y’all sure beats the plural form I grew up with in
rural Western Pennsylvania, where it was “you’ns.” And it is
certainly more inclusive than the Midwestern “You guys,”
or even worse, the East Coast double plural: “You’s
guys.” But wherever you are from and however you say
it, Jesus’ invitation is to all: “Y’all come.” The
invitation to the banquet table in the Kingdom of God is to:
The humble and the proud
The rich and the poor
The lame and the strong
The whole and the broken
The joy-filled and the sorrow-laden
The insider and the outcast
And the task of the church is to offer the invitation.
In fact, Jesus says that if your first
round of invitations is met with nothing more than lame
excuses, go into the main streets and the side streets, the
highways and the byways. Go, invite everyone you can find.
Gather them in so the Lord’s house will be filled, so all
will know the joy of coming home.
The church is called to be that kind of
redemptive, inviting, welcoming community where all can find
a welcome and a home. We are that band of servant messengers
who offer the invitation in the name of Christ. The church’s
life together should be marked by such joy, such delight,
such celebration, that a stranger might think they dropped
in on a wedding feast.
The Gospel records that when Andrew met
Jesus, the first thing he did was to go to his brother,
Simon Peter, and say, “Come and see.” When the woman at the
well met Jesus and tasted the living water, she ran
through the village saying, “Come and see.” And the
urgent task of the church is to go to the world saying,
“Come, taste, see the goodness of our God.”
I remember that when Bishop Judy Craig
first came to Michigan back in the ’80s, she described the
United Methodist Church as a great banquet feast where the
table is spread. We have wonderful facilities, good food
(always good food!), great entertainment with good music,
and even pretty good after-dinner speakers. We have high
moments of celebration and festivity. The only problem is,
we have stopped inviting others to the banquet. We have
forgotten how to extend the invitation. So a church which
was born as an evangelistic movement becomes stagnant,
withers and dies.
By contrast, a recent study of the growth
of the mega churches across the country comes to this
stunningly obvious conclusion:
The bottom line for the numerical success
of mega churches is that they attract and retain more
persons over time than do other churches. This might be due
to marketing savvy or seeker sensitive profiles of a target
demographic, but it also might mean that these churches are
able to excite their members to tell others about their
church, to invite their friends at a greater rater than
other churches.
(“Mega
Churches Today,” 2005, by Scott Thumma,
Hartford Institute for Religion Research)
And by way of example, if you have a
friend who attends Kensington, my guess is you have already
heard about and been invited to their new worship services
at Groves High School.
That’s the point of the postcards you
have in your hands. In fact, it’s the whole purpose of our
MidDay Worship service. Our purpose is not to
serve the folks who are already at the party, but to reach
those we haven’t reached yet, to invite others into God’s
home and God’s family, and to say to those who have not yet
found their place at the table: “Y’all come on home now, ya
hear? Come on home to God’s great party. Come on home to
God’s Big House. Come home, come home, ye who are weary,
come home.”
It’s
all about the invitation and the welcome; who gets invited
and who comes home.
2. But the ultimate invitation is
not just to a party, not just to the church. The invitation
is to come home to God.
The invitation is to find yourself anew
at home in the arms of a loving God who waits, Jesus says,
like a prodigal father for the return of his prodigal son.
That’s the final story in this trilogy of after-dinner
tales. We know it as the “Parable of the Prodigal Son.”
The word prodigal literally
means “a wasteful expenditure, recklessly
spendthrift”…and so he was, and so he did. The son
squandered his inheritance, Jesus says, on riotous, loose
living. He really lived it up. And wow, did he have a good
time!
But the word prodigal also
means “luxuriant, profuse, giving abundantly.” You see,
there is a second prodigal in the story. It’s the prodigal
Father whose reckless love and spendthrift grace is beyond
all comprehension. This is the story of a prodigal God who
offers the abundant, luxuriant welcome to his returning
child. So these stories end with the greatest party of all
when the prodigal father cries out in joy:
…go bring the robe, put rings on his
fingers and bells on his toes, kill the fatted calf and make
merry, for this son of mine was dead and is alive, he was
lost and is found; this son of mine has come home!
This morning, I don’t really know where your journey has
taken you.
I don’t know what pigpen of prodigal
affluence has consumed your life, what turning point has
brought you here this morning. Or maybe you are more like
the elder brother in the story, the one who has been around
the family home all this time, but has missed out on the
prodigal grace, the abundant love his Father has for him.
Whatever road you’ve traveled and wherever you have been,
the invitation this morning is simple: “Y’all come on
home now, ya hear?”
It really is a “Big House,” you know—a
home that will stay in your bones forever. Come home to the
banquet table set for you. Come home to the fellowship, the
laughter, the joy of the family. Come home to the loving
arms of a prodigal Heavenly Father who has been longing,
looking, waiting just for you and is ready to welcome you
with luxuriant, abundant, amazing grace.
Come home, come home,
ye who are weary come home.
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
calling, oh sinner, come home.
Y’all
come on home now, ya hear?
Notes:
The study on the growth of the mega
churches is entitled “Mega Churches Today 2005: Summary of
Research Findings” by Scott Thumma, Dave Travis and Warren
Bird. It was produced by The Hartford Institute for Religion
Research at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, CT and Leadership
Network, Dallas Texas. To read more of the study go to
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ org/faith_megachurches.html or
www.leadnet.org. |
