Welcome back to the sanctuary everyone!  I don’t know if you have noticed, but it’s looking exceptionally sparkly after last week’s interfaith washing and dusting and cushion repair extravaganza!  We had more than 60 people last week from Emmanuel Church and Boston Jewish Spirit and the Presbyterian Korean congregation, Spring of Boston, working together to make this place shine with welcome.  And as luck would have it, we have a Gospel lesson about welcoming this morning.     

It doesn’t start out about welcoming though – it starts out with Jesus and his disciples going through the Galilee, heading back home to the fishing village of Capernaum.  The disciples have been gone for a while, travelling all over Jewish and Gentile territory – from Tyre to the north, to the cities of the Decapolis in the east, changing locations forty-some times in a few short chapters.  Most recently, in the story, the disciples tried and failed to heal a boy and a short-tempered, perhaps travel-weary Jesus has done it himself.  It’s no wonder that when he predicts his passion for the second time and they don’t understand what he’s talking about, that they were afraid to ask him what he meant.

The disciples seem to be fairly cranky too.  They’ve been arguing, the story tells us, and they’re afraid to tell Jesus what they’ve been arguing about.  I wonder about what they’re afraid of – afraid that he’ll bark at them maybe.  Afraid to admit that they don’t fully grasp what’s going on, that they don’t get what he’s talking about, that they’ll seem stupid.  They did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask.  He asked them what they had been arguing about on the way, and they fell silent.  I don’t know about you, but I can certainly remember times when I’ve been afraid to say that I don’t understand what someone is trying to teach me, or that I’ve stood looking down at my feet when I’ve been caught having an argument on the way to somewhere and I don’t want to say about what.     

“On the way,” by the way, is a significant motif in the Gospel of Mark.  It was, for early followers of Jesus, a metaphor that meant being on a spiritual journey.   The earliest Christians were called “people of the way” – meaning people who understood themselves to be on a spiritual journey.  Reading scripture as metaphor is not a post-modern invention – it’s an ancient practice that still breathes life and multi-layered meanings into narrative.  Robert Frost once warned that “unless you are at home in the metaphor… you are not safe anywhere.”    

So they had been arguing, along the way, arguing on their spiritual journey, about who was the greatest.  Now I’ve always imagined that it was an argument where each one was asserting superiority.  Maybe it was the way I was taught the lesson in Sunday School, or maybe it just comes from being one of four children.  I always imagined something like, Peter saying, “I’m the greatest because I’m solid as a rock, Jesus said so.” And John was saying, “No, I’m the greatest because he calls me the Son of Thunder,” and so on.  But it’s occurred to me lately that they might have been arguing that another was greater – a little like the old Smothers Brothers routine where Tommy tells his brother Dick, “Mom always liked you best.”  Or arguing something like, “you should take the lead on this because you’re better than I am.”  Or they might have been arguing that they as a group were better or worse than another group.  You know, arguing about how “our group is better than, or not as good as, that other group.”  In a way, it doesn’t matter whether the disciples were thinking they were individually or collectively better or worse than another.  It’s arrogant to believe that you are better than another.  It’s actually also arrogant to believe that you are not as good as another.  It is an affront to the One who made you so marvelously well. 

And Jesus sits down and says, “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  He turns the “better than” or “worse than” argument on its head.  Jesus teaches them that the measure of greatness is not expertise or intelligence or money or any other kind of power.  The measure of greatness in the realm of God is servanthood – service to others.  Greatness is not measured by being served – greatness is in serving.  This was a very subversive message to be teaching to people who didn’t have any political or religious or financial power, people like those unemployed fishermen.  This is a very subversive message to anyone on economic or political or spiritual margins now. 

And in case his words aren’t scandalous enough, the story goes that Jesus took a little child in his arms and said, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the Onewho sent me.” (1) Here Jesus is asserting an identifying  connection between God and himself and a little peasant child.  Jesus is identifying himself and the Holy One with one who is at the bottom of the pecking order for honor or significance, who is most powerless and inconsequential, weakest, most vulnerable, lowliest, most marginalized, socially invisible, a non-person.  Jesus is asserting that welcoming such a relative nobody is welcoming him, and welcoming him is welcoming the One who sent him.  Jesus and God and the child are One.  It’s like the passage in Matthew when Jesus taught about giving food to someone who was hungry, or drink to someone who was thirsty, or shelter to someone in need of a roof, or clothing to someone who needs cover, or visiting someone in prison or who is sick – that in any of those actions, one is serving Jesus himself. 

So welcome all you children of God  – welcome to Emmanuel Church.  Welcome to all the parts of you – even and especially the parts in the margins, the parts in the shadows, the parts that don’t speak the language, welcome.  Welcome whether you are Episcopalian or not.  Welcome whether you are Christian or not.  Welcome whether believe in God or not.  Believing is not a condition for beloving or belonging here.  As Frederick Buechner once said, “Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved” anyway.  We’re not here to prove anything.  We’re here to celebrate, among other things, a collection of sacred stories about God believing in people – God believing in us, no matter how unbelievable we are!
For many of you, it’s welcome back.  But for all of you, for every single one of you, what I really want to say is “welcome forward.”  Welcome to this next leg of your spiritual journey, wherever you are on it.  There’s a lot going on around here!  There’s a lot to look forward to.  I hope you will journey into the future for a while with Emmanuel Church as we move forward into this next leg of our parish’s spiritual journey.  Welcome forward.