A Holy Economy of Love
A Sermon by The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Track 1, June 25, 2023
Readings: Genesis 21:8-21 (Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert), Romans 6:1b-11 (Dead to sin, alive to God in Christ), Matthew 10:24-39 (Disciples to be like the Teacher)
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.
This past week I had the real joy of spending time with four remarkable young men from our parish, JS Wilson, Nicholas Lowe, Sam Arny, and Nick West – and two multitalented chaperone-extraordinaires, Parks Gilbert and Matt West, on a service trip to Appalachia in a tiny mountain town that was incidentally called Appalachia located the westernmost part of Virginia, but not West Virginia. We were in the mountains. Each day we rose early in the morning and shared a brief devotion with our fellow service trippers before setting off for a shady holler where we spent the day rebuilding a rotted out floor for an incredibly hospitable older couple who had lived nearly their entire lives beneath the coal mine above us where the husband had once worked.
When our work for the day was done, we came back to the high school where we were staying to shower off and share time of rest, fellowship, and reflection with other groups of volunteers who had also decided to offer a week of their summer vacation in service of a mountain community that is rich in culture and kinship, yet has been devastatingly impacted by decades of economic struggle caused by complicated global forces of declining industry. Like many similar communities in the region, Appalachia, Virginia was a coal mining town, and for decades this industry supported the lives and families of countless generations of Irish, Italian, Polish, and African American laborers who left – or were forced to leave – their ancestral homelands in search of economic opportunity and a chance at a better life.
Though it often came at a great cost to their bodies and lungs, the coal mines afforded this better life for many of them until seismic shifts in global manufacturing and energy production transformed the mines from a source of life and livelihood into a dry and desolate well.
It’s hard not to see the parallels between the struggles of Appalachia and the despair of Hagar and her infant son Ishmael, who we just heard were cast out from their once abundant home and into the desert with dwindling sources of water to drink from. As we drove through the hills of Appalachia we saw these dry wells in the form of derelict and decaying houses, shuttered mills, and blighted schoolhouses. Each of them cried out like Hagar and the psalmist, saying “Turn to me and have mercy upon me, give your strength to your servant; and save the child of your handmaid” (Ps. 86:16).
And like the story of Hagar and Ishmael’s dereliction, we also saw signs of the community’s tremendous faith and hope that God’s saving providence would not let the children of Appalachia be forgotten. Almost as plentiful as the collapsing buildings were its houses of worship. Baptist, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, AME Zion, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Apostolic and even one little Episcopal chapel. It was hard to imagine that in a county with a population of only 36,000 (Arlington has 230,000 for perspective), that there were even enough people to build all these churches. And yet there they were. Like Hagar, the people of Wise County, Virginia have not lost hope that God is watching after them and despite their poverty, they have chosen to offer their first fruits to keep the lights on in the temple and to glorify God’s Holy Name.
There’s this beautiful line you may know from the service of Morning Prayer that goes “Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten. Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.” (BCP, 98). It’s beautiful, but I think it’s wrong. I think it misidentifies who, exactly, is in need of hope. Places as poor and as full of hope as Wise County always remind me that the hope of the poor is far from being taken away, quite the contrary.
In fact you’ll notice that there is often an inverse relationship between how much material resources we have at a given moment and how much we need Jesus! The more we have, the less we think we need hope. The less we have, the more we recognize our need for hope. For example, I’ve still never prayed as fervently to God as the time I ran out of gas on the highway at nineteen. I’ve never had more religion in me than the time I spent my last dollar on a cheeseburger in college.
You see, the hope of the poor is alive and well, my friends, we witnessed it in Appalachia. But there is still the lingering question: from where is their help to come?
Well, if I’m honest, it’s not ultimately from us. We are not the savior. We on the service trip did not come to the people of Wise County as Jesus to them, Jesus was already there. And the people of Wise County do not rise each Sunday morning and pray to the people of Arlington to hear the voice of their supplications, rent a Honda Pilot, and come to rescue them. Rather, what happened is this. The disciples and servants in Wise County of our common Savior, Christ Jesus, called out to Him, and He in turn called out to us, to come to them, not as saviors, but as disciples and servants of the Savior.
You see, in today’s Gospel, Jesus said to the disciples: “a disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master” (Matt. 10:24). Us disciples in Arlington and those in Appalachia are both trying in our own ways to be more Christlike; to be more servant-like to one another by being like the One who came to serve.
But what does it mean for us as disciples to look more like the teacher? First we need to know what our teacher Jesus looked like in order to be more like him. We know he was a carpenter, or the son of one, who spent most of his life working with his hands. On this trip we followed this path of serving like the teacher in quite literal ways by rebuilding the decaying floor of a house. Jesus our teacher showed his disciples through miracles of feeding and everyday acts of building how we are to serve our neighbors by building up ground for them that is sturdy and true.
Our teacher Jesus also gave and received hospitality. In the Gospels Jesus was frequently inviting people not just to serve, but to be served by him. This business of allowing ourselves to be served by another, especially another whose material resources are more scarce than ours, can be difficult and uncomfortable. And yet it’s vitally important to affirming our common dignity to accept those acts of welcome and hospitality when they come.
Under the well-meaning impression that we had come to serve our host family, not the other way around, we tried repeatedly to politely decline their continuous offers of food, drinks, and even baseball caps, until they stopped asking us entirely and simply presented these gifts before us so that we had no other choice than to accept them. We realized at that point that the desire within them to serve us was the same that compelled us to serve them. To deny their gifts would be to deny a goodness that God had placed in their hearts. This hospitality that we received and they extended to us as fellow disciples of the teacher implicated us all in a holy economy of Christlike service to one another. An economy that is immune to globalization, stronger than the ebb and flow of fickle markets and industrial decline. It is an economy of God’s holy love that we are implicated in when we serve and allow ourselves to be served. Because we are not the savior, and thank God for that. But we are disciples among fellow disciples of that same savior.
Finally, our teacher Jesus shows us the way of discipleship in community primarily by doing acts of sacrificial servanthood in our lives. Christian ethics are not just an intellectual exercise in knowing what’s right that we magically receive when we are baptized. There’s an old Christian saying attributed to one of the Church Fathers that goes “disciples are made, not born.” Though we did not, and could not, resolve the systemic social and economic forces that necessitated our presence in Appalachia in the first place, I have no doubt that all of the youth and adults, who went on this trip came back as better disciples, both because of the work we had done and because of the Christlike witness of the people we encountered. Our work and practice at discipleship had made us more faithful disciples.
This work of learning together from the teacher is daily work that belongs to all of us. We bring our encounters as disciples of the teacher back to you so that our learning might be learning for us all. You don’t need to go sleep on the floor of a gymnasium for a week to perceive each day given to us as an opportunity to grow into more skillful, compassionate, and mature disciples of the one whose life shows us the way to life. The need is all around us, and so is the teacher, and so are the disciples. So the next time you see Sam, Nicholas, JS, or Nick, stop and ask them about their trip, because their work of faithful discipleship can help us all to be bearers of water to dry places, and disciples who are more like the teacher. Amen.