Welcome

5th Sunday After Pentecost, Year A
June 28, 2026
Matthew 10:40-42

In today’s very short Gospel passage, we hear the word “welcome” no less than six times. I have to admit from my musical theater days that every time I see the word “Welcome” I immediately start singing “Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome.” And then proceed immediately to The Episcopal Church welcomes you! 

Well, Episcopal Church, we are meant to hear this word this morning. When Jesus repeats something again and again, pay attention to the message! These three verses close out Chapter 10 in Matthew, the final words of his Missionary Discourse to his disciples. Two Sundays ago Jesus began this teaching by explaining to his disciples that he was going to send them out to proclaim the Good News. They were to tend to the sick, restore life, cleanse, heal, and cast out evil! And they were to do it without taking any provisions or even a change of clothes, relying completely on the hospitality of others. Not knowing if they were going to be greeted or welcomed with the hoped for hospitality. 

Fast forward to the end of the discourse today–and hospitality is still the theme. Not some condescending or paternalistic shallow action but the focus on a deep and abiding compassionate welcome as a form of service to Christ. Our Christian faith invokes welcome that encourages us to trust, to be open, to share, to forgo manipulating others, and to live a way of life that takes us beyond personal gain. 

This isn’t a call just to clergy. If you claim the title Christian, you have thrown your hat in the rink with all of us disciples. We come to this place to worship and be fed by Christ himself. We pray, we restore ourselves and our relationships with one another, and then he says, let’s go! We are going to depend upon the hospitality of each other and other disciples, too, as servants of Christ. 

Great! Where are we going? Where the people are! Go where they work, go where they eat, where they play, and where they rest. As Bp. Doyle pointed out to us yesterday at the Deacon Ordination, there is no separation of God’s creation between a sacred world and a secular world. It is all God’s creation. We are not meant to escape from the world into the church and shut the doors and separate ourselves. God is out there in God’s creation walking about and we are expected to show up and go along with our God.

Our relationships with each other are nurtured by the Holy Spirit to trust one another, if we will allow it, and to take our message of God’s love to the places where we know people are hungry, where they are thirsty and give them that cup of cold water after they’ve spent a full day in the Texas heat building our houses and working on our roads. We are to go sit beside someone and feed them jello when they cannot feed themselves. We are to sit and pray with those who are alone and have no one to pray for them. And when we notice one has gone missing? We go check on them. We do not have the energy reserves or the time to waste to be at odds with one another, we are to work on and nurture our relationships as disciples. We do not carry the light of Christ in our hearts to keep it to ourselves, we need to live it. 

Our will to achieve caring relationships is within our grasp. Yet all too often, if left to our own devices, we fall short of creating and nurturing the genuine relationships which will transform us into the people God not only calls us to be, but has already created us to be. Pride, ego, self-doubt, and the like keep us from connecting with each other except in self–interested ways. Therefore we need God’s embrace and presence in our lives to live into this compassionate welcome with one another and extend genuine hospitality outside these walls. In these four short verses, Jesus helps us steer away from distorting others and ourselves through false narratives and into welcoming each other. Because in doing so, we welcome Christ himself.

Compassionate welcome means approaching each other through God, it is truly a well-coming. This is how we recognize that genuine human relationships emerge from putting the grace-filled hospitality of God’s love at the center of our lives and at the center of all our relationships. God’s hospitality teaches us that close, loving, enduring relationships are to be valued along with distant, occasional, and abrasive ones—as difficult as the latter ones may be. [Granted, we will often do all we can to get away from some folks so we don’t have to look at them, because when we really look, then we see, and something in us knows we are looking at the Christ in them, too.] This lively, and sometimes maddening, dynamic is the welcome Jesus speaks of in today’s passage. Further, if we live into this welcome with each other, we will find the rich rewards of discipleship found in God.¹

I also really want to look closely at this instruction from Jesus to his disciples that they are the receivers of hospitality as much as the givers. This is handed down to all of us in a lineage of discipleship, that we carry Christ in and with us. We bring the light of Christ, the love of Christ, the hope of Christ, and the compassion of Christ to others. We carry this in our very being. Sure, we can shut it off, we can try and hide that light, we can even deny it and the compassion we are to have for others. There are myriad excuses for denying this in ourselves and denying it in others. 

But what an amazing thing it is to think about who we are as disciples. When we are welcomed into spaces and places we enter as Christ’s emissaries, carriers of the divine. What a privilege it is that Jesus the Christ democratizes this divine power and presence in ministry with us. We are invited in a shared purpose with Jesus and God’s power is not at work only in Jesus but in and through us, as well. Whether we give or hope to receive hospitality, we always come as Christ bearers. Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, he says–isn’t that absolutely amazing to think about? How humbling to know that flawed as we are, Jesus finds us worthy to bear him in us. When I think of the light of Christ in us, I imagine us glowing with it–and yet we are so unaware of the light we hold.  

In a world that is too frequently shaped by a sense of unwelcome, of a denial of hope and fear for one’s safety, where the shadows seem to loom large, we do well to remember our purpose as Christians is to bear the Good News in these times and places. Genuine hospitality is reciprocal. We are not always to be the host, but sometimes the one being received, giving and receiving  compassionate welcome.

The disciples lived in a world where their message of the Good News was not often welcomed. They were taking the Gospel of Jesus out into the public square that challenged the systems that oppressed the poor, that challenged religious and political power, that called into account those that earned their wealth at the expense of others. Matthew, who gave us this Gospel today, was one of those who heard the Good News, and it changed him.

You see when Jesus talks about prophets here, he is talking about the truth tellers. Truth Tellers call all of us to examine our conscience and our habits, to not justify our actions but repent of them when they fall short of Jesus’ covenant with his people. Being able to receive the truth, we allow a transformation with God and that is a great reward itself. 

And the thing is, all we have to do is pay attention! Who will welcome and receive you today? The grocery store clerk at the checkout counter? Who will you welcome today? A Door Dash delivery person that could use a kind word? A nurse that is on the last hour of a 12 hour shift? Your light may shine in small ways or be a beacon at times, but it is a light for your feet to carry you on a path that Jesus has asked you to walk. And sometimes walking doesn’t mean physical ability or stamina, but being present to one in need via telephone, sitting in an airport, sending a card. We are all able to be present. If you cross a path with another, and sometimes the same person over and over, you are welcoming Christ in your midst.

We disciples are “the little ones” that Jesus is referring to. To the world we are not the powerful, the well resourced, or the ones in control. At least in the ways this world understands those things. When Jesus says, you take me with you, bear me in your hearts and minds and souls everywhere you go, then we learn over time that we do have a power that operates very differently, a love and compassion that cannot be taken from us. We have resources within us that we share that offer a warm welcome, a place for the stranger to belong and be cared for because a time will come when you may be that stranger. 

We both offer and are in need of a healing of the heart and soul that comes through another, and yes, we even offer a cup of cold water in this Texas heat which seems to be, according to Jesus, the least we can do. Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!

1.  Emilie Townes. Feasting on the Word Year A, Proper 8. ↩︎