Sermon — July 2, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
I’ve just finished watching—you might say “binge-watching”—the Netflix cooking competition show The Final Table, in which twenty-four chefs from around the world faced off in a series of culinary competitions. Murray said to me last week while I was cooking and watching, “Daddy, what are you doing? Oh, just watching another show about cooking things you’ll never actually cook?” And it’s true, in the same way that the first thing I do every week when The New Yorker comes is crack open Tables for Two, and read a review of a restaurant I’ll never go to with food nobody else in my family would ever eat. I just love this stuff.
But there’s something I’ve noticed in these cooking competition shows, as well. They’re not just a live broadcast of some chefs in a kitchen with a bit of color commentary. Like any good TV, they try to tell human stories. And so they do background interviews with each of the chefs about their childhoods, or their cooking careers, or their vision for the restaurant they’ve founded. And I’ve noticed, as I watch an episode of one of these shows every evening while I cook dinner, that nearly every chef has a mentor whose legacy they’re trying to live up to. For one, it’s the father and the grandfather who were both chefs and who founded and ran the family restaurant through good times and bad before handing it down to him. For another, it’s his single mom in a blue-collar town who transmogrified the cheapest ingredients, night after night, into a homey dish that showed her love. For another, it’s the renowned chef who took a young kid under his wing, showing her the ropes and supporting her when nobody else would.
Each one of these chefs, in other words, has been given the gift of love by someone who made them into the person they are today. And each one, at some point, no matter how many Michelin stars they have to their name, reveals that they are still trying to live up to the gift of that love.
I say all this by way of introduction to a Gospel passage that is short, sweet, and simple. If all you had were Jesus’ words to his disciples today, you might think that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. And in a sense, you’d be right!
The early Church was full of traveling apostles, of prophets and preachers who’d travel from place to place just like Canon O’Connell visited us last week. Jesus and the early Christians taught that there were spiritual rewards for welcoming these wanderers with kindness. Welcome a prophet in the name of a prophet; receive a prophet’s reward. Welcome a righteous person in the name of a righteous person; receive a righteous person’s reward. (Matthew 10:40-41) Jesus lived in a culture in which hospitality was a household obligation, not the name of an industry. A traveling bishop or prophet would stay in your home, not a hotel. It’s expensive to feed another person, and hard work to host them; and Jesus offers a reward to those who receive and welcome his most prominent disciples as they go about their work spreading the good news.
But then Jesus goes on: “whoever gives even a cup of cold water, even to one of these little ones, in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” (Matthew 10:42) There’s some debate among Biblical scholars about what exactly “little ones” means. (There’s some debate among Biblical scholars about what nearly everything means.) Maybe it’s literally children who are “these little ones.” Maybe it’s the socially-disadvantaged, or just “ordinary folks.” But whatever the case, scholars agree that it’s a “deliberate contrast” to the “prophets” and the “righteous,” the famous, great, and good. [1] It’s not hosting an elaborate stay for an archbishop that matters; even welcoming the “little ones” counts. And as Saint Jerome noted, it’s not a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee here; it doesn’t cost you anything in fuel to warm it up, or ingredients to mix together. It’s just a plain old cup of water, something anyone can give.[2] And yet this simple, unpretentious act is enough. Whoever does even only this in the name of a disciple will never lose their reward.
So congratulations to all those on the St. John’s Coffee Hour rota. Even if you have no idea how to turn on that baffling coffee machine, even if you just put out the lemonade and iced tea, even if you only served a pitcher of water: you have been saved! You have offered a cup of cold water to dozens of these “little ones” in the name of the disciple Saint John, and you will not lose your reward.
If what you’re interested in is eternal salvation, Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us one thing to do, and it’s such a small and concrete task—once in your life, give a cup of cold water to one of the “little ones”—and you will not lose your reward. And the tininess of this task way of expressing, in Jesus’ form of teaching, the same truth that Paul expresses in our epistle in his own way. Christianity, properly understood, is not a list of rules to follow, or difficult work to be done. It’s the story of what Paul calls “the free gift of God,” which is “eternal life.” (Romans 6:23).
God’s love is free. And it’s a gift. We do not have to do anything at all to earn it, in order to receive it.
But we are left wondering how to live up to it.
This is the tension within which Paul lives in his whole Letter to the Romans. And this is why Jesus does give so many moral teachings. “What then?” Paul asks, “Should we sin, because we are not under law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15) Should we take this incredible free gift of God, which offers us an eternal reward in exchange for a cup of cold water, and throw it in God’s face? Should we take God’s unconditional love and use it as an excuse to treat one another like garbage, because God will love us all the same? Should we take the freedom we’ve been given and freely choose to follow the way of sin, and violence, and death? “By no means!” the apostle pleads. God loves you unconditionally. That doesn’t mean you should act like a total jerk. Throughout his letters, Paul is constantly trying to juggle these two competing aims: how to convince the early churches, on the one hand, of the amazing beauty of God’s grace and mercy, God’s unconditional, self-sacrificing love; and how to stop them, on the other hand, from acting in ways that are completely off the rails. And we modern Christians find ourselves in the same situation as they were, thousands of years ago.
You have been given the gift of life, and love, and hope. You have been a given a legacy and a model for the person you could be; if not by some mentor in your own life, than by the one big Mentor in whose name we gather here. You have been given a gift, and it cannot be taken away, no matter what you do. But you’ve also been given a choice. What will you do with that gift? What will you do with that legacy? Will you, who have been trained and loved by generations of chefs, turn around and treat your sous chefs like they belong in the compost? Will you, who have been handed the love of home cooking, sell mom’s apple pie recipe to McDonald’s and cash out? Will you, who have been loved beyond measure and forgiven beyond reason by God, hold resentments and grudges and judgments against the people in your life? It’s up to you. You have the freedom. You have the choice. You have been given the gift. You will receive your reward. You do not have to do anything to earn God’s love, anything at all.
But it’s the work of a lifetime to try to live up to it.
[1]Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary on Matthew 8–20, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. James E. Crouch, vol. 61B of Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 121.
[2] Jerome, Commentary on Matthew 1.10.42.