Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” In the Gospel today Jesus is getting at an idea he is going to flesh out further later in the Gospel. It is the idea that in other people we can find Christ. In this section it is all about welcoming Christ in the stranger, and that in the act of hospitality you are welcoming Christ. Later on, in Matthew 25, he expands that even more: I was hungry and you gave me food; thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was naked and you clothed me; I was in prison and you visited me; I was injured and you bound me up; I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
Sin
Sin. We don’t like to talk about it very much. And I get that. I don’t like to talk about it very much. It makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes feelings of guilt and shame might start rising within us as we think about what it is we have done wrong. We might get defensive. It just seems easier to avoid even thinking about our sin than dealing with it. Additionally, we have a history of misnaming sin, of calling things sin that aren’t, and not calling things sin that are. And sometimes in that misnaming we have weaponized sin language to use it against people, abusively, hurtfully. Dare I say, sinfully. So it is easier not to talk about it.
Extraordinary Ordinary Time
We are now in the 2nd half of the church year, which is commonly called Ordinary Time. The 1st half of the year is shaped by Jesus’s life. It is marked by a series of fasts and feasts that commemorate the moments in Jesus’s life, from his birth to his death and resurrection and ascension. The 2nd half of the year is different. It is not shaped by Jesus’s life, it is not marked by fasts or feasts. Now there are feasts that happen along the way, but they are different. In the 1st half of the year the feasts are the point. We move from feast to feast to feast to fast to feast. The whole time is marked by those things. But in Ordinary Time the feasts happen on the side. They are incidental. They don’t really affect what we are doing in this time.
