"Welcome?"

(Gen 22:1-14; Mtt 10:40-42) JG White ~ 10:30 am, Sun, June 28, 2026, FBC Amherst (& TSSUC)

It was about eight years ago on a Sunday at Digby Baptist Church, in Nova Scotia. A congregation much like ours, with maybe five children and a whole lot of retired people. One Sunday, a local teenager, Grace, visited the pews with her grandmother Bonnie who is a wonderful and very involved member. Bonnie directs the Men’s Choir, for instance. As always at those Sunday services, there was that moment for everyone to greet one another: wave, shake hands, hug, wander around. 

Grace was an intelligent and well-rounded girl. Everyone in the Church knew Bonnie, and they knew Grace was her granddaughter. After the greeting time in the service, she said to her grandmother, “All these people hugged me; I don’t even know who they are!” Bonnie immediately realized how odd this actually was: how odd and artificial they could be any Sunday of the year, in those pews. 

Perhaps the Digby Baptist people were forcefully friendly. Might get us thinking: what is a real welcome? A good welcome? A genuine welcome? 

We have welcoming words from Jesus today, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This little paragraph is really about the Christians sent out on mission, and how they can respond to the welcome they are given. Check out the rest of Mathew chapter ten. It gives us pause to ponder our own practice of welcoming. And how we can be ready for any visitor to our lives to be a representative of God, have a word from God, and help us see the right way. 

Along with this Bible text we can fill out the ministry of welcoming by reading Hebrews 13:2, which has been well known. Be sure to welcome strangers into your home. By doing this, some people have welcomed angels as guests, without even knowing it.

Perhaps you have noticed in the Bible, from time to time, how a person, or an angelic being, appears in a story, and gets equated with Almighty God. Like in last week’s Genesis story of the three fellows who visited Abraham and Sarah. The chapter starts by telling us that YHWH (God) appeared to Abraham in a certain place, as he sat by his tent on hot desert day. Abraham looked up and saw three men. 

Read the story again, G 18; the three visitors were God visiting. As we walk with Christ, in our lives, we keep learning how anyone we meet could open the opportunity for a holy meeting. We hear that ancient Middle Eastern hospitality was a very special thing, in the Bible. Can welcoming be a special thing among us, in our own way?

Our Acadia Divinity College has a book series called East Coast Theology, and one of the volumes is ‘East Coast Hospitality: Myth or Reality?’ Yes, yes, we think we Maritimers are famous for welcoming tourists and visitors. They all rave about us. But try moving in next door – well, that can be a different story! In Anna Robbin’s chapter, the Dean of Theology claims, 

In more recent years, we have perhaps [also] failed to notice our retreat into our homes and away from community. Our tables are very often filled with our family and closes friends—people who look and think like “us”. We imagine the eschatological [future] future as the banquet table in heaven, where our family gathers and Mother calls us in for supper. That nostalgic vision perhaps prevents us from viewing the eschatological [future] banquet table with Jesus’ eyes. The Lord’s table is filled with those gathered from the highways and byways, who do not look or talk like we do. This is our home and our family. (ed. Melody Maxwell, 2025, pp. 49-50)

I had an older friend in ministry (GWP) who had such a heart for people, certainly the downtrodden and those who had been hurt or just neglected by local churches. He was a rural pastor. He had a vision for starting a Church for what he called ‘the walking wounded.’ And he knew so many. He lived in his home county, and knew lots of people who had dropped out of churches for every reason imaginable. Plenty of pretty good reasons. There must be a place for them. Often, for my pastor friend, that placed was Tim Hortons, or a street corner. Wherever he met them, and listened. 

In scripture today we could also review Jesus’ extended parable in Matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats. The sheep had treated ordinary needy people well, and this counted as treating the Shepherd King well; it was being good to Jesus. 

Then the ones who pleased the Lord will ask, “When did we give you something to eat or drink? When did we welcome you as a stranger or give you clothes to wear or visit you while you were sick or in jail?”

The king will answer, “Whenever you did it for any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did it for me.”

A bit over a week ago I visited a Baptist Church in Saint John I’d never seen before. They have a ministry to a wide variety of people in their neighbourhood, which is partly a rough neighbour-hood, I believe. I am sure they welcome and include folk that other congregations are not reaching - and I could see there is also a big Catholic Church in the neighbourhood, a United, and another Baptist Church, among others. For instance, the Minister spoke of the youth who are involved, including youth who are gay or trans, and are finding the path of faith, and being baptized. This is almost illegal for many Baptists to do, but here was an exception. There is a ministry, a real welcome to those who are not welcomed by all. 

So, there are two things going on in my mind, this sermon. One, the welcome we Christians have for others in the whole community. Two, the welcome we have for people here in our fellowship, worshipping and serving together. 

Here I find it is just like it was for me in Digby, NS, in Windsor, NS, and in Parrsboro, NS, where I started, 30 years ago. There are new people appearing in the pews quite regularly. Some are simply visitors, tourists who were temporary. Others are new in town, settling in. How are they welcomed? I don’t mean greeted. I mean welcomed, in the fullest sense of hospitality, the big picture.

Some visited very little - they checked out other congregations and ended up somewhere else. Some visited five or ten Sundays, and then disappeared. Some remained, and were integrated into the congregations. 

We who are settled into First Baptist, and Trinity-St. Stephen’s, we are the spiritual neighbours who have visitors. We are the Church families that might welcome and adopt some of the guests we have from time to time. We have learned a great deal about the agenda of Jesus. How the Saviour meets people, esteems them, offers help, invites them to follow, or to go and do something, and so forth. 

We also have our idiosyncrasies, not all of which are endearing! Many of us white colonial folks, who are not ‘from away’ have our bad habits we don’t even know, or that we actually like. I mean, I’m not from Amherst, I’m from Wilmot Station, but I have been a Bluenoser all my life. There’s a code word for you! We’ve gotta watch our code words. We use this beautiful building, which has signs for the bathrooms, but after that very few hints about what is where in this structure. And we might ask a friend we know here about the stranger who is in the pews over there (maybe for the past 12 months!) but have barely met. 

We must confess we simply have the social problems that our established society has. I always give the example of the wonderful Nature Club in another town in Nova Scotia. I used to visit that Nature Club occasionally, if they had an interesting guest speaker. In the big lecture hall people were gathering and happily talking amongst themselves; they all seemed to know one other… except for me. At 7 o’clock, a fellow would step forward and welcome us and start to introduce the evening. What was his name? He never said it. But he would say things like, “If you need to pay your membership dues, go see Harold.” ‘Who on earth was Harold,’ I’d wonder to myself, and wonder where in the room he was. That sure didn’t include me. But it sure felt friendly to the smiling people who knew each other there (and knew Harold).

Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, takes us to a better place of welcoming, surely. And the scriptures illustrate: the wonderful welcome of God, and the failures of people from time to time in history. We, the Church, can still be a ‘house of hospitality.’

I use that term to lead into my final anecdote. When I arrived in Windsor, NS, in 2002, I found a ministry had started there just a year before my arrival. It was a weekly free lunch called, ‘House of Hospitality.’ Some volunteers made soup or pasta each week, got free bread and maybe doughnuts from a local grocery store, and opened up the big kitchen to the public. In 2002 there would be maybe ten people showing up. But little by little it grew. The regulars invited their friends. People who needed a bit more food in their week started showing up. People who needed to eat with other people instead of all alone every day started showing up. After a couple years there were 25 to 35 people having lunch together every Wednesday in that big Baptist kitchen, that House of Hospitality. It became a beautiful little community in itself. Some good connections were made. Grace happened - and I don’t mean the prayer before the meal, but that happened too. 

With Jesus, we too discover who our neighbour is. Who goes right by our door. Who to meet and greet. Even to invite in. And in them, we meet Christ Himself - maybe when we least expect to. We welcome a newcomer and welcome Jesus. We include a person who has a good message for us to hear and learn from - they are a prophet. We bring in with openness a person with some real good thing going on, and we are rewarded for being open to what they bring. We offer the simplest of things - a drink of water? - and there is great grace in that moment. 

We do this here, from this building, or 1 Ratchford St., and we do this from our own home in our particular neighbourhood. Or the coffee shop we frequent. Or our workplace. Or the nature club. Or a sports field. Wherever. What does a hymn suggest? The Church is wherever God’s people are praising. And as we will remember later this year, Christ is present, with just a handful, when gathered together in Jesus’ name. 

So first of all, and last of all, may we and all who join us know Jesus is here, in Spirit. Amen.