Renewing Our Community: Sermon 1 – Hospitality

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is a great anniversary for our community, 7 years from the opening day of our church. None of this could have been done without you, without your dedication to our Community of faith and without the intercessions of our patron saint the Holy and Glorious Prophet John the Baptist. It feels therefore very fitting to share with you today some very exciting news about the next step for our community.  

By now many of you have received the information about our project we named “Renewing Our Community”. From the very beginning I want to tell you that this is not about a building renovation. No, this is about you! I see this beautiful community growing every day and it warms my heart to see it.

Our community is in the Church and it is the Church in the same time. It is so because the Church this is the place where any community of faith begins, with the un-originate community of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Here, through the Sacraments, we are all crafted on the body of Christ and we become the Church.

The Church, as the sum of all our people gathered around Christ, extends beyond these walls. We are not Christians just inside here, but we are Christians everywhere we go. We are Christians most in our relationships with others: our friends, our families, our places of work. We take the Church with us everywhere.

We exercise these relationships first within our community. This cannot be done just by gathering here in the church once a week for two hours and then scatter to our own business in between. This is just the beginning; here we listen, we learn but, then, we step outside and we start applying what we have learned inside.  A community grows stronger only by working together, learning together, helping others together.

This is where our vision begins: a vision of a strong community able to offer hospitality to all its members and beyond, that can educate its children and adults, that can offer help to other in need around us. We have done some of it, but we need to do more. With the beautiful growth in our community, I think we are ready to take the next step.

In the following weeks I will talk about the things I would like to see happening more in our community, about goals we should set for ourselves to grow closer to the life in Christ we are called to live, to renew our community from within so we can reach further.  

I’m going to start today by talking about hospitality, a basic Christian duty with roots that extend all the way back into the Old Testament.

In our Narthex we have depicted the beautiful icon of the Hospitality of Abraham. In the biblical story, three visitors appear to Abraham and his wife Sarah and they treat them with great reverence, hosting them and preparing a meal for them. (Genesis 18:1–8) Turns out that the visitors were actually three angels and, in the interpretation of the Holy Fathers, they represent a type of the Holy Trinity, beautifully expressed by St. Andrey Rublev in his original icon, which now stands as the canonical way of representing the Holy Trinity in Orthodox iconography. 

Have Abraham and Sarah not extended their hospitality, this beautiful revelation would not have happened. They chose to see in these three strangers something more, something deeper than their traveling clothes. The following story form the life of the monks of Egypt is illustrative in this regard.

“An elder was asked by his spiritual son: Abba, how do I see God? The elder said: behold your brother! “

In every human person there is the image of God and, when we offer hospitality, we offer it to God Himself. “If you have done it to one of these little brothers of mine, you have done it to me.” (Matthew 25:40). God reveals himself to each if us, as He did to Abraham and Sarah, if we choose to see Him in all those around us.

In the New Testament Christ chooses again to show Himself to His Disciples in the breaking of the bread. He invited them to dinner, washed their feet as a gracious host and offered them not only food, bread and wine, but nothing short of Himself, His Body and His Blood. This became for us the mystery of the Divine Liturgy, the most intimate way to enter in direct Communion with God.

This hospitality is deeply engrained in the Orthodox faith and culture. Looking at the Christian communities in the areas where the Gospels originated and were initially spread, we see a strong culture of hospitality, where offering food is a way of showing love. We gather as families around the dinner table, and, in the comfort of food and company, we have Christ in our midst.

This is the type of hospitality we would like to expand in our own community. We travel here on Sundays for the divine services from all the corners of the DFW metroplex and we gather in our hall after Liturgy to spend some time together, to break bread, to talk about what just happened in Church, to comment on the homily imparted to us by the priest, to get to know each other better, to forge friendships, to ultimately become one body. Spending time with each other socially is crucial for our community. Otherwise we are just a bunch of strangers that happen to go to the same temple; we are in the same building but we are not one.

If we extend more of this hospitality to our members, to our visitors, to any one that steps foot in our parish, the mystery of the Holy Supper will extend beyond the walls of the Church and reveal the presence of Christ in every one of us. Then we will be one in the One that brings us all together.

This is the reason why we chose to use as our project icon the icon of the Holy Supper, to help us visualize our goal beyond the walls we need to the community we want to forge. May our Lord Jesus Christ keep us all together around the table of His heavenly banquet! Amen.