The Language of Welcome

Welcome

There are many different ways to say welcome and even more ways to express it. If you were in New Zealand, the Maori might lean forward and rub their noses against yours. I once knew a man who always greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. I would try to dodge, but eventually I learned, that was his welcome. If you were in Oman, you might be greeted with a freshly brewed cup of spiced coffee. Here in the South, we have all sorts of greetings and welcoming gifts. At each Chat and Chew, the Bishop was gifted with a different gift basket full of pottery, gift cards, and Takis chips.

In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus has summoned the twelve apostles and then sent them forth, charging them to proclaim the good news and to do all sorts of amazing things like cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, etc. He gives these men parting instructions. They are to go forth and not accept any payment, merely relying on the kindness and the welcome of others, but it won’t be easy. They won’t always encounter hospitality, and when they don’t, they are to flee to another town and start again. Go forth without any assurance of where you will stay or how you will be fed. No reservation. No booking ahead. Seems kind of uncertain.

Sensing any reservations, Jesus tells them not to be afraid and to keep at it. For “whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” Jesus is going back and forth with this sense of welcome, saying it 6 times within 3 verses.

Whoever welcomes. The welcome here specifically refers to receiving someone as a guest, to accepting them. It is a word used in the New Testament to describe deep hospitality.

What does it look like to really welcome?

Think about the last time you traveled somewhere and you felt welcomed? Maybe you went on a cruise and you had towels in the shape of fun animals. Perhaps you went to Disney and got to wear a fun button and every cast member greeted you. In the pandemic, my family and I started staying in AirBNB’s for the first time and really loved it because of our interactions with the various hosts. Once we stayed in Chattanooga and the host went grocery shopping and stocked the fridge with breakfast goodies ahead of time. Mints on the pillow. Freshly turned down sheets. A tray of tea and coffee items. A book of helpful travel tips and wonderful spots to visit. All of these are steps taken that say “you are welcome.” It is a preparation and readiness to fully receive another.

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” Jesus says. Whoever welcomes the messenger welcomes the One who sent them. Jesus is saying that when we welcome one another, we are also welcoming Christ. In Matthew 25:40, Jesus says “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are my family, you did it for me.” In Hebrews 13:2 it says not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for we may indeed be entertaining angels. In Jewish culture, hospitality carried an important role and Abraham was thought to be the father of hospitality from when he entertained the three angels on the road in Genesis 18. Thus, hospitality to strangers had a deeply ingrained history with the Jewish people.

While we might sometimes envision welcome on a large scale, I love where Jesus says in this passage “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones will not lose their reward.” A cup of cold water can look a lot of ways. When I was in college at Mississippi State, I attended a small church outside of town called Longview. I went with a friend one Sunday because she assured me there would be lunch after and I was a hungry college kid. What I didn’t know was that this beautiful lady and her husband prepared lunch in their home every Sunday for all the college kids. I’m not talking pizza or ramen. Over homemade sourdough bread, pot roast, and pie, this couple anointed us with welcome, and it always felt like a cup of cold water to my soul.

Edward Smither says in his book Mission as Hospitality “In North America, we want to go against the grain of a high-pace, task-driven society and reclaim our homes for hospitable encounters. We want to welcome visitors to our tables for meals and to eat good food that we have taken time to prepare. We also want to be good guests who joyfully enter into homes and welcome spaces of others.” He says that “hospitality has more to do with attitude than it does space....the ministry of hospitality begins when I deliberately stop what I am doing and say with a smile ‘please come in.’”

I remember a story from a few years ago in 2016 when a grandmother named Wanda Dench sent a text message to her grandson asking if he would make it for Thanksgiving. Apparently she had the wrong number and ended up sending the message to a stranger, a high school senior named Jamal Hinton. Their messages continued back and forth and Jamal ended up accepting her joining her for Thanksgiving dinner anyways. What was an accidental message between two strangers sparked a deep friendship with the two coming together for Thanksgiving every year since. Strangers learned that they knew how to speak the language of welcome. Welcome happens when we grab a cold glass of water, when we pull up a seat at the table, and when we say please come in.

A little over a week ago, Jim and I moved into the parsonage. The movers arrived earlier than we expected and we needed help in cleaning and unloading. All of a sudden that Thursday, around 15 of you came over to our house and mopped floors, scrubbed the kitchen, wiped down the bathrooms, helped assemble furniture, and filled our fridge to the brim with all sorts of goodies. As if that wasn’t enough, in deciding to go explore the Delta one afternoon, Jim’s truck broke down on the side of the road 20 miles outside of town. There we were stranded and two members of the community drove to pick me and the girls up. They dropped us off, turned around, and went back to get Jim. Others have helped Jim this past week with various needs at the parsonage as well as taking him to get a rental car so he could make it to my ordination service.

Initially, it made me a bit uncomfortable to have everyone coming inside to clean up. I didn’t want you to see it that way, but that isn’t the language of welcome. The welcome of God gets into the mess of one another’s lives and chooses to make that God’s home. God takes our mess and makes it his dwelling place. You spoke the language of welcome to us over and over asking “how can I help?” In other words, “how can I best receive you?” “How can I show you that there is space for you here?” I had been pondering this passage for weeks. After just a few hours around you I realized God didn’t want me to just speak about welcome. God wanted me to experience it through you. Like a cold cup of water for the soul.

Today we celebrate one of the most powerful ways in which God welcomes us, here at the table. Here is where we remember how Christ took ordinary bread and ordinary wine, blessed it, and made it a means of receiving God’s grace. Christ took what was ordinary and spoke words that we would speak to one another for years to come, as a language of remembrance, but also a language of welcome.

For it is at this table, God’s table, that we declare all are invited- all are welcomed- all are accepted- all are received. It is in this space over this holy meal that we are welcomed by God, that we join together and welcome one another, and that we rise to go forth and speak the welcome of God to all the world.

For whoever welcomes you welcomes me says the Lord. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who receives us now and always. Amen.