When I was growing up, the word church had just one definition for me—a building where people went on Sunday mornings to hear and talk about God, to pray and sing hymns and listen to sermons. My version of that church building was small, with stained glass windows, a balcony no one sat in, wooden pews and an aisle in the center, an organ, an upright piano, three Sunday school rooms, and a basement for potlucks. The pulpit was front and center with the choir seats behind it. I can still remember the voices of our preachers, and our choirs. Outside was a cemetery, not as old as Trinity’s churchyard, but with some graves dating to the 1800’s and some stones that had my last name on them. Surrounding the church were farmhouses and fields, and farther away, the gentle ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
We have certainly thought differently about church these past few years. Church as a building has changed. As we have closed doors and opened them and closed doors again and re-opened them again, church has become outdoors, has become wilderness, has become windows on computer screens.
It wasn’t until I found the Episcopal Church that I heard the word “parish” used to describe an individual church, and while that took a little getting used to, along with all the other Episcopal vocabulary, like chasuble and diocese and mitre, I loved the underlying history behind the word. Parish has its roots in the intertwining of civic and religious life in the Church of England—the idea that a parish and its congregation takes care of and is involved in the lives of its literal, geographic neighbors, including at that time and now, orphans and widows and the sick.
While I believe strongly in the separation of church and state, there’s something wonderful in understanding a parish as not just a church building and the people who worship in it, but the homes, schools, hospitals, and people who live around it. It reminds us again of that question “Who is my neighbor?” that Jesus answered with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is my neighbor? My neighbor is the person who lives next door; my neighbor may hold very different religious ideas from mine, or they may have voted for the other party; my neighbor is the person I look at and think we have nothing in common—I can’t relate to them; my neighbor is the stranger on the street.
And today’s reading from Hebrews tells us, welcome the stranger. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Those beautiful words, hearkening back to the Old Testament.
We’ve been reading from Hebrews all through August, and today is the last Sunday we’ll read from this book, if I’ve read the lectionary correctly, until Advent. Today’s passage, which is from the very last chapter of the book, almost the last verses, seems at first glance to cover a lot of ground, from strangers to prisoners to marriage to money, almost as if the writer is trying to squeeze in every last bit of moral teaching before putting this letter in the mail. Welcome the stranger; remember those who suffer; be faithful in marriage; don’t be greedy. The writer of Hebrews was trying to encourage his readers and his listeners, early Christians who were torn between cultural norms and the countercultural teachings of Christ, to hold fast to the faith. The writer of Hebrews even calls this “letter-slash-sermon” an exhortation, an epistle intended to encourage and inspire its readers and its listeners. And there is more to this passage than a list of dos and don’ts, and I think it can be found in a word that’s used twice in our particular translation, toward the beginning of the passage and toward the end:
Let mutual love continue.
…Let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God.
What is the writer of Hebrews telling us to do?
To love one another and to praise God and for both of those things to be continual. To take care of one another and to offer sacrifice, to worship, without ceasing—and also to realize there is no disconnect between loving one another and praising God, between loving those we know well and loving the strangers we don’t know at all. All of the words in between those two exhortations—to love one another and to praise God continuously—illustrate how we are to do that, what we are to practice in both parishes—in our church and in the world surrounding us.
First, we are to practice hospitality: to welcome the stranger, whether they are a newcomer on a Sunday morning or one of the guests we welcome to Noon Lunch or a person sitting on the sidewalk who asks for some change or for a prayer. It requires that we step out of our comfort zones, be ready to listen, to slow ourselves down for another human being when we’re otherwise going a mile a minute and trying to get to our next commitment on time.
We are to practice empathy: to remember the prisoner, to suffer with the suffering. Every Sunday we speak together the Prayers of the People. How can we carry those prayers back out with us into the world and do something with them? How do we remember the prisoner, the refugee, the persecuted and marginalized? How can we put remembrance into action?
We are to practice fidelity: practice patience with those with whom we are bound by ties of love and commitment, to not take for granted our relationships with our spouses and families.
And we are to practice contentment and gratitude: to recognize how easy it is for us to want more and more, to not be satisfied, to place too much importance on the things we possess or want to possess and often don’t need, as AJ talked about a few weeks ago. Materialism and greed destroy our relationship with God and with one another.
And in this last chapter of Hebrews, these practices of hospitality, empathy, fidelity, and gratitude are held together by those two exhortations—to love one another and to praise God continuously—which suggest to me that our practice of love and our practice of praise do not start or stop at the doors to the church.
Another way of thinking about it—our parish is not bounded by these walls. Just as we bring into the church our worries and our griefs, our need for prayer and our need for confession, the fears and griefs of the world outside, we bring back out into the world the prayer, praise, thankfulness, and determination that we experience and express inside the church. The hospitality that we practice with each other in this building we are to practice with strangers we meet when we step back out into the city. The thanksgiving and sense of holiness we find in this building we are to carry with us out into the world, for it keeps us connected with God and grounds our actions in love. The things we share in this building—prayer, fellowship, curiosity, the passing of the peace, the Eucharistic meal around the table—we are to share when we go into the world, not just in the words and ritual of worship but in the concreteness of action.
The boundaries of our parish, of our church, are not defined by these walls. They are defined by relationship, by the people we meet and work and live with every day, by the world we carry into the church and the praise we carry into the world. The boundaries of our parish are defined by love.
Let mutual love continue.
Let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God.
Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, August 28, 2022
Epistle: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
