I Can Still Hear Them Cheering

July 2, 2023 + Lectionary 13a + Matthew 10:40-42 + Pr. Craig Mueller

I can still hear them cheering.

I marched in the pride parade a week ago. Along with twenty other Holy Trinity folk. And many others from welcoming churches in Chicago. There were thousands and thousands of onlookers along the four-mile route from Montrose to Diversey.

You wouldn’t think a bunch of church people holding signs would get cheers. Holy Trinity Lutheran. St. John’s Episcopal. Lakeview Presbyterian. And many, many more. But the loud cheering never stopped. You’d think we were celebrities receiving a royal welcome.

I couldn’t stop thinking how ironic it was. Many of the folks cheering had been rejected by their churches. Most were done with organized religion. Many have decided never to set foot in a church again. For them it symbolizes hate, rejection, judgment. After all, recent court rulings and statehouse laws regarding reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights are strongly backed by Christian conservatives.

So why were they cheering? Why were some folks nodding? Holding a holding a hand to their heart? Whispering “thank you, thank you.”

Maybe those cheers were in proportion to the hurt they have otherwise known. And all of us church folk represented a message they were longing to hear. That God loves them. That they are accepted for who they are. Truly. As one church sign said, “God is proud of you.”

Some say that we can no longer expect people to flock into our churches like they did in the 1950s. Rather, we need to take the gospel to the world. Perhaps Holy Trinity has no stronger witness in our neighborhood each year than simply marching in the pride parade with a message that many in our community find so surprising and unexpected, that year after year they cheer and cheer and cheer.

It reminds me of Jesus’ message to the disciples after he sends them on their mission. The word welcome appears five times in two verses. A church like this loves it! But remember, it’s first about others welcoming, or as another translation puts it, receiving our message.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message provides a helpful paraphrase: “We are intimately linked in this harvest work. Anyone who accepts what you do, accepts me, the One who sent you. Anyone who accepts what I do accepts my Father, who sent me. Accepting a messenger of God is as good as being God’s messenger. Accepting someone’s help is as good as giving someone help. This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.”

It's about hospitality: both giving and receiving. Hospitality, a core Christian value. Think of yourself as a hospitality ambassador, living your baptismal mission in the world.

For Saint Benedict, welcoming the stranger into the monastery is welcoming Christ himself. Or as Benedictine writer Joan Chittister adds, “Come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today.”

Hospitality may be as small as everyday acts of kindness and generosity. And hospitality can be as large as welcoming immigrants, something worth reflecting on with the nearness of Independence Day. Many of our forebears saw the Statue of Liberty as they entered our country, longing to know welcome and dreaming of a new life. In the poem by Emma Lazarus, the statue of liberty is lifted up as the “Mother of Exiles,” offering a world-wide welcome. And crying out:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Of course, we know how controversial immigration reform is in our country. How divided we are in how to respond to the crisis at the border and whether we should welcome migrants or not.

Yet as Martin Marty reminds us, before we deal with policy and politics, we need to boldly name the needs and rights of immigrants and the gifts they bring to the republic. For Jews and Christians, the scriptures could not be clearer. We welcome strangers created in the image of God. We practice hospitality. Our country has been a beacon of hope and welcome, but in recent years children have been ripped from families, put in cages, vilified, traumatized, blamed and then sent back to the poverty, danger and trauma they were fleeing.

Jesus speaks of the cup of cold water given to one of the little ones. And later will say, when you did it to the one of the least of these, you did it unto me.

We often talk about immigrants and migrants as the “other” as the “them” as if they were faceless, voiceless beings. My thinking has been influenced by a book called They Are Us: Lutherans and Immigration by Stephen Bouman, who served as interim pastor at Saint Luke the past for years. The people we “otherize,
our children of God, our very siblings.

The political and practical realities may be challenging, but let the Church be clear with its message. As an affirmation by the Lutheran World Federation stated in 2013: “A core value of my faith is to welcome the stranger, the refugee, the internally displaced, the other. I shall treat them as I would like to be treated. I will challenge others, even leaders in my faith community, to do the same.”

Martin Luther said that when hospitality is given to the persecuted and oppressed, God himself is in our home, is being fed at our house, is lying down and resting.1

I can still hear them cheering along the streets of the parade last Sunday.

And I can hear God cheering when strangers are welcomed. When migrants are clothed and fed as they are in Chicago and other sanctuary cities. I can hear God cheering when sinners are forgiven. When stony hearts are opened. When a cup of cold water is shared with someone thirsting. When every child is accepted and loved. Simply for who they are.

May we be such a welcoming community. At times weeping. At times cheering. But always embracing. Always embracing the stranger. The new person. The one who disrupts our lives. And changes our hearts. Amen.

1Material on immigration from “They Are Us: Lutherans and Immigration,” Stephen Bouman and Ralston Deffenbaugh; forward by Martin Marty.