Fr. Tyler's Farewell Sermon - "Love Bade Me Welcome"

You can listen to Fr. Tyler’s farewell address here.

---

Former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, of blessed memory, used to teach a class at Virginia Theological Seminary called “Anglican Spirituality,” or something. We called it, “Story-time with Frank.” Ostensibly we were reading, praying, and reflecting our way through his small gem of a book, Praying Our Days, which had recently been released. Someone in class, wise to the Bishop’s propensity for shaggy dog stories and digression, asked a question (a propos of nothing) about how to preach when the preaching task is impossible. “Easy,” Bishop Griswold said, “When in doubt, read George Herbert!”

So this is impossible and this is Herbert’s “Love III” from his collection The Temple (1633).

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

“Love bade me welcome... You must sit down and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.” If I had to tease out one throughline in my ministry at St. Mark’s it would probably be that in Jesus’ radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality, we are invited into transformative encounter with the Dying and Rising,Living God: a God of love who comes to us and meets us in the night of our deepest need to kneel, to wash, to feed and gently love us into loving ourselves, others, creation, and God. God first loved us, as we’re reminded in 1 John: before we’ve moved a muscle, lifted a finger, or prettied up the picture. By the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “Accept that you are accepted,” as Tillich writes, and live, serve, love, give and forgive from the unshakeable ground of God’s love sacrificially for your neighbor.

Here in Utah, God’s unconditional grace is in short supply, as in Samuel’s time when “the word of the Lord was rare and visions not widespread.” There is a lot of “my soul drew back,” and not a lot of “drawing near” and “you must sit down.” Too often I run into people who think they have to work or earn their way into the love of God. That baptism is a badge of purity rather than a crucifying pledge of solidarity with the least of these. That the body and blood of Christ is a reward for good behavior, rather than medicine for sick sinners. Too often I meet people who approach the spiritual life like treading water–deseperately trying to keep their head above water, desperately trying be some version of “enough” and always falling short. Too often, I encounter people who don’t know that there’s more to life than treading water–who’ve never heard the Good News that we can effortlessly float in the love of God that holds us, sustains, heals, and makes us whole–no membership or doing required. Too often, I encounter someone who, simply because they love who they love, has been made to think that, like the speaker in the poem, they are somehow so broken, so lacking, so deficient as to be unworthy of God’s love. It’s pure heresy. “Love bade me welcome.”

God’s grace is one-way love. It’s a quid without a quo as Jason Michelli likes to quip. It's the Father hiking up his skirts to run out and meet and lavish himself upon his prodigal son who’s wrapped in his warm embrace before he can even get off a single word of his well-rehearsed apology. It’s the invitation to the wedding banquet that goes out on the highways and byways to the poor, the lame, the crippled, the blind. It’s an invitation to a love that the world cannot provide and that doesn’t come and go, wax or wane. A love that casts out fear. A love that’s stronger than death. A love that bridges even the greatest of chasms. A love in which Lazarus and the Rich Man break bread together and the dogs have plenty of good bones to gnaw on.

One-way love is an invitation to each and everyone one of us, hobbled by self-centeredness, blinded by pride, limping along in a fearful, scarce world of I, me, mine–to live a “life that is truly life.” For we are all the Rich Man in the parable–walled away from life in our stifling, well-fed, self-sufficiency, deaf and blind to our own need for healing, forgiveness and grace; deaf and blind to the calling face of Christ the Stranger right outside our freshly-painted gate. Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

Recognizing our need for God and knowing ourselves to be unconditionally loved– “You are my son, my daughter, my child,”--is where this all begins. Not in getting your act together and your ducks in a row (good luck), not in getting the right ideas between your ears, not in heroic feats of spiritual asceticism, or a resume of good works that would make Mother Theresa blush. It begins with knowing that Jesus actually likes us and that you actually like being liked by God. It begins in letting yourself be loved. It begins in what the Christian Tradition calls poverty of spirit–an open handed receptivity to something, to someone greater than ourselves. Sr. Ruth Burrows puts it this way in her book The Essence of Prayer:

“If the heart of Christianity is the God who gives nothing less than God’s own Self, it follows... that the fundamental stance a Christian must take is that of receiving Him.... [W]e must accept to be loved, allow God to love us, let God be the doer, the giver, let God be God to us. But how hard it is for us to do that consistently! We are always reversing the role, intent on serving God, as we say, on doing this for God, offering God something.... Over and over again, Jesus tries to get his disciples to drop that self-important attitude and to understand that, before God, they are only very small children who have no resources within themselves, but look to their parents for everything, simply everything. It is not their role to give, but to receive. Jesus knows that this calls for a radical change of outlook and, more than outlook, a radical change of heart. From always trying to prove ourselves to God (is it not really to ourselves?), we have to become poor in spirit just as Jesus was.

Burrows is right to point out how quick we are to do something for God, but how curiously allergic we are to letting God do something for us, to open-handedly receive. Notice that the same thing happens in Herbert’s poem. In those final lines no sooner does the speaker begin to realize just how Good the Good News is “And know you not who bore the blame?” than the speaker offers to do something, “My dear, then I will serve.” How does Love reply? “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:/So I did sit and eat.” We are only very small children with no resources in ourselves who rely, like Lazarus, on God for everything, simply everything. First sit down and eat. Then serve from that boundless abundance.

Welcomed into life of God, our task is to gently keep welcoming God, to faithfully make a little space for God to continue love’s redeeming work in us for our neighbor. How simple this Christian life—to let onself be loved into loving God and your neighbor as yourself. Do you understand? Even the love with which we love God is already God’s love for us! Nothing to do, to give, to offer even–simply to receive and in the receiving to be made more unrepeatably and uniquely like the Beautiful One we follow tripping and stumbling down the Way of Love.

As we grow in intimacy with Christ (through the ho-hum ordinariness of daily prayer and dwelling upon God’s word as revealed in Holy Scripture, weekly worship in common, and standing in solidarity with the last, the least, the lost, and left behind) the radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality of Jesus starts to take root in us. And slowly, slowly, slowly, the walls between us and the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the land start to come down. Living from welcome, and living as welcome something of heaven flowers on earth, and rather than stepping over every Lazarus we invite him in for tea–“Come closer, friend.”.

But it’s called radical welcome for a reason. Mainly because, in case you haven’t noticed, there are plenty of things in life we don’t want to welcome. Welcome as a spiritual strategy and church-growth tactic sure, but as a fundamental disposition towards our life, a way of seeing and being in the world are you nuts? As many of you know, the past year has been very difficult for me and my family. What happened happened so fast that our heads are still spinning to be honest. Likely as a combined result of 6+ covid infections contracted serving during the pandemic, my on-going treatment at Huntsman, and a surgery last fall, my body has basically stopped working. One doctor told me recently that it’s like my body’s got the pedal down on the accelerator and my foot stomped on the brake at the same time.

Everything that is supposedly automatic in the nervous system is eerily not automatic. It’s felt like I’ve been blown out to sea, or caught in a riptide and carried miles from shore when all the usual things I came to rely on (health, mobility, my vocation, my ability to earn a living and provide healthcare for my family, my devastating charm and dashing good looks) were gone. Poof. Just like that. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

So where’s your welcome now, Tyler? I knew there was no way I could welcome all this on my own. It was too much. So I let Christ in me welcome it all for me. He’s one who stretched out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace, after all. I see myself like one of those little children that Jesus calls unto himself. I feel myself seated in that wide merciful lap, the hand of blessing resting on my ragamuffin head. Safe in his fireman’s hold of love that will never let me go, I can let the scary stories be just that–scary stories I don’t have to live from, or project onto others. They burble up, but quickly dissipate if I don’t feed them. In him–from whom no secrets are hid–everything is held, caressed, anointed, blessed. The anger, the grief, the fear, the loss, the impatience, the frustration can be welcomed, accepted, allowed to move through me unhindered. In a wondrous exchange, God receives my grief, my sorrow, my fear–and gifts it back as feet-beautiful peace, dancing joy, waters rising up to eternal life where I thought there was only a dry well. Brackish water turned to sweet wine in Jesus’ presence. Or did you think the Wedding Feast at Cana was just about running out of booze?

I’m speaking here of where we find ourselves when all that can be changed has been changed, and what hasn’t been changed can’t be changed and must finally now be accepted, surrendered to in faith, and trust, and acceptance that my life, just as it is, right here, and right now is the appointed place and time for encounter with the Living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It’s what Lazarus–poor, needy, dependent entirely on God, reliant on help from outside with no resources of his own–models for us as the fundamental Christian disposition. Funny that a powerless beggar licked by dogs is held up by Jesus as an icon of discipleship and intimacy with God! Shocking! Repulsive! But from where does our offense come? Only in the stubborn apple-grabbing insistence on being the Doer, the Actor, the Giver. Only in our prideful assertion of power and control. Only in our refusal to let God be God–giver, gift, and giving all-in-one. How strange that it is Lazarus who shows us the way out of hellish self-enclosure–a dying to self-sufficiency and willing embrace of powerlessness that opens the door to keeping company with the Risen Christ as living, relational presence, regardless of circumstances.

I'm new to this whole disability thing, but I’ve noticed I have to be constantly alert to the ways my preconceptions, prejudices, requirements and demands of how things “should” be trap me in an isolated, lonely, graceless universe with myself and my efforts at the center. I’ve noticed I can switch from poor surrendered Lazarus to the self-sufficient Rich Man at the drop of a hat! When I can remember that my disability is not an obstacle to God, but my very path to God–God’s chosen means of grace working in and through my weakness to draw me into ever deeper union and communion with Him, things are navigable. “Why should this be happening to me?” yields on a good day to, “Why shouldn’t this be happening to me? Let’s see what new strangeness my body will get up to today!” It’s perhaps best summed in my favorite prayer of all time in the Book of Common Prayer (461):

This is another day, O Lord. I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be. If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit of Jesus. Amen.

One of the most remarkable things about a community that makes space for Divine Welcome at its center is not only how it is healed, formed, shaped, and built up, but also how the Divine Welcome of Enemy-love spreads out from the altar and at the Deacon’s dismissal is unleashed upon a world of sumptuous feasting, a world of fine linens and purple robes, a world of gates, and great chasms between the rich and God’s poor. You are Christ’s welcome at coffee hour and in Godly Play. You are Christ’s welcome to residents at The Point. You Christ’s welcome when you open the doors to our unsheltered neighbors through 2nd & 2nd. You are Christ’s welcome at Hildegarde’s Food Pantry over three thousand times a month and in countless other ways, thanks be to God. I think we might be on our way to living into St. Benedict’s call that, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” I don’t know about you, but I’m with

Kierkegaard when he says, “I’m not a Christian, but I hope to be one one day.”

And, forgiven sinners of St. Mark’s, just as I had my where-the-rubber-meets-the-road moment on my sick bed, “Can I be welcome here?” you now have a stiff test in front of you. We live in a time of wars and rumors of wars when fear is strong among the people. These are strange and dangerous times where the temptation to point the finger of accusation, cast out, and scapegoat has perhaps never been so strong. Beware the pointing finger of accusation that casts out, scatters and divides while it feasts sumptuously behind locked gates. Beware the prowling call to crucify murmuring in our midst. Be instead, in the spirit’s power, our Lord Jesus’ warm mother hen welcome who gathers her brood under her sheltering wing. Thank you for the opportunity to serve. I will miss you more than you could ever know. I will continue to hold you in my heart with the Risen Christ. God bless you and adieu.