Blessings Overflow
“When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”
The early 20th C American artist Geri Melchers here depicts the supper that concludes the Road to Emmaus story (Luke 24). Obviously, that post-resurrection appearance is not our text for this week, but the episode IS an important interpretive key to Luke’s gospel, and especially, any moment where we find “feasting” and the “breaking of bread.”
Christ here has entered into the humble kitchen of humble people, breaking with them their humble bread. He is serene and perfect, and a light alights upon his back, and the people who witness it are filled with that light, and astonished with supernatural amazement.
Jesus in this week’s Gospel teaches us that we find our greatest blessing of human connection, not when our parties gather our friends — as much as we know that that can bless us and nourish us and encourage us! — but when we invite and involve those who have no way of repaying us. The author to the letter of the Hebrews likewise instructs us that we should practice hospitality with abandon, knowing that we might thereby entertain angels.
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
—Hebrews 13:2
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
O Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow after us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Mnoeo, Christe (Remember, Jesus)
The text of the hymn Lord Jesus, Think on Me is an early 19th C translation of the Greek of a devotional poem of Synesius of Cyrene, Bishop of Ptolemais in Roman Egypt.
It is sung here in the choir of the Riverside Church, a fascinating interdenominational church funded by Rockefeller and pastored by the Northern Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick in the early 20th C as an attempt to model a form of American Christianity that was historic and ancient, yet explicitly and utterly opposed to fundamentalism. Through the influence of Rockefeller and other gilded-age elites, many colleges and universities across the country boast chapels of a similar style and vibe.
Unfortunately, the project of “Gothic revival” in a nonfundamentalist key did not leave much behind besides these kinds of monuments. The dynamics within American Christianity seem to be such that the faithful tend to either become fundamentalists, or become so broad in their understanding of the faith as to, for all intents and purposes, abandon it altogether. But if this is the tendency, it need not be an inevitability. We can pray with Synesius, H. E. Fosdick, our friends at Riverside Church, and many others to our right and to our left that our Lord Jesus Christ would remember us and have mercy on us, and deliver us from every snare and temptation that befalls our feeble mind and body. And in the midst of our waiting and watching, practice hospitality, receiving those whom the Lord sends to us, and sharing those good gifts he has entrusted to us.
