"Welcome Sunday" | Brendan Barnicle | Sunday, September 7, 2025

Today is Welcome Sunday. It’s the beginning of our program year. Our choir is back. Godly Play is back. All manner of wonderful things are back here at Trinity.

And after our service, I’d encourage you to head over to Kempton Hall because there we have displays of all the ministries we do there. More importantly, you’ll have time to spend with our vestry members, who you will be able to identify by these lovely purple boas. In true Trinity fashion, purple will be the color, and they will be there for all of your responses, to hear all of your concerns.

Also, to add to today’s drama, I will be on the roof. No one told me when I took this call as the interim dean that high-wire acts were required. Now I know why it took so long to find one.

Now, it may strike you that it is a little bit surprising that today is Welcome Sunday if you just listen to those scripture passages. Ironically, that may be the least welcoming scripture in the entire lectionary. Consider for a minute what we just heard first from the book of Deuteronomy: Moses telling Israel that if you follow all God’s rules, ordinances, commands, proverbs, provinces, then you’ll be okay. But if you slip up on any of those, well, watch out. That doesn’t sound like a very welcoming God. Kind of sounds actually, to me, like kind of a petty God. A God who gets so worked up that if you miss one provision or proverb, then you’re out. Doesn’t sound like the God that Jesus was talking to us about.

So then consider our second reading: Paul writing to a slaveholder encouraging him to free his slave. It’s maybe a little more welcoming, but still, really. And to me, it just serves to remind me how often Christianity was complicit with slavery, how rare it was that someone did the bold act that Paul did—to ask that slaves be freed.

But above all, the least welcoming message we get is from Jesus today: Hate your family. Hate everybody. Hate your life. And for good measure, just sell everything too. Nothing says welcome like “hate your family.”

So what exactly is Jesus trying to do here? What he says is so inconsistent with everything that’s gone before. In the Gospel of Luke, the only place we have the word hate is here. Up to this point, Jesus’s ministry has been one of welcome and inclusion. And now we get this word about hate. So what exactly is he trying to do here?

Scholars have puzzled over this for years, and there are a couple different theories. The first is what I call shock and awe. Jesus is trying to get the disciples’ and my attention. You know, the disciples—what I love about them is they are just regular people. They’re not trained in theology or scripture or anything. So, every now and then, Jesus has to just shake them. And he sure did today. Nothing shakes you like a little bit of hate.

Then there are other theories on this. One is that this word hate is actually not properly translated, that a better translation is love less. So Jesus is saying, you just have to love your mother less than God. Again, not typically welcoming—love your parents less than God.

So I have my own theory on what’s going on here. Now, typically this scripture is viewed as Jesus telling the disciples what the cost of discipleship would be. I think what Jesus is doing here is preparing us for discipleship. And that’s why in those middle two verses there, you see Jesus talks about: you wouldn’t build a tower unless you knew what it was going to cost; you wouldn’t do a new roof unless you knew what it was going to cost; you wouldn’t start a war unless you knew you had enough troops.

So I think what Jesus is getting at is preparation, and that he recognizes that for us to be prepared to be his disciples, we need to learn to deal with hate. That we can’t just shove it to the side. That actually, Jesus knows that in our lives there might be a little bit of hate every now and then. There might be somebody that we don’t love in the way that we would hope to, or that God would have us hope to. There might actually be toxic people in our lives. And so Jesus is reminding us that when those times happen—when we find ourselves in the despair of hate—that we still are part of God’s beloved community. That we still belong to God even when it feels like we don’t belong to anybody else.

Now, I use the term beloved community, which I know we haven’t used all that often here at Trinity. It’s a term that I use instead of “kingdom of God.” It’s a term that was first introduced by a Stanford professor, Josiah Royce, at the beginning of the 20th century. It became popularized in the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King. And it was more recently introduced in our context by our former presiding bishop, Michael Curry. And in all three cases—Royce, King, and Curry—they were trying to give us an example of what the kingdom of heaven might look like: like a beloved community. A community in which we were all the beloved of God, a community in which we all belonged.

And I think so much of what Jesus is doing today is preparing us to do that work so that we might all belong. So I think the reason he says you can’t be my disciple unless you’ve had this experience of hate is that he knows that until we’ve been in that dark night of despair, we can never appreciate the depth of God’s love for us. That until we’ve been and dealt with the negative emotions in our lives, we can’t truly love one another in the way we are called to.

That part of our growth as Christians is developing what psychologists would call emotional maturity—being able to look at the times when we feel hate and negative emotions, and not sweep them under the rug, but look at them, learn from them, grow from them, transform them so that we transform us, so that we turn into the disciples who welcome all. So that all people may know that they belong in God’s beloved community. That no amount of hate and fear and anger can keep God away.

Ours is not the petty God that we hear about in Deuteronomy. Ours is a God that’s bigger than our hate, bigger than our fear. A God in which we all belong.

Jesus is preparing us for that work, which is not easy work—dealing with our negative emotions—but he knows that all of it, all of our emotions, come from God. They all go back to God. They are all the work of discipleship, for all the work that we do together.

This past week, I was rereading a book by the Irish poet John O’Donohue. Any of you familiar with John O’Donohue? I see there are more than a handful here. I was rereading his book Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on the Yearning to Belong. And his thesis is that we all have this need to belong. Wherever we are in our journey, we have this universal need to belong.

Jesus understood this. It’s what Jesus is preparing us for today in this difficult, seemingly unwelcoming gospel passage. He’s preparing us for the work that allows us to welcome one another so that we all know that we belong. In the same way that Jesus welcomed the Syrophoenician woman and Zacchaeus from the tree, the way he welcomed the woman at the well, the way he welcomed the Roman centurion with a sick child—all people that he might have at one point had negative feelings for—he welcomes them, lets them know they belong, gave us the example of what it looks like to belong.

I was reminded of this in a poignant way this past summer. As many of you know, for the last six years I was the director at St. Francis of Assisi in Wilsonville. And at the end of last year, one of our members came to me and shared that he was very, very ill. And he was a man who had never been married, never been partnered, had no children. His parents were deceased. His one sibling had passed. He had no nieces and nephews. He had no family at all. He lived a largely monastic, quiet, solitary life.

He was active at St. Francis. He was a LEM. He was in the book group. Came to dinner church and the movies. He had people that he knew there. But as he approached this illness, he was rightly afraid of who would care for him. He shared with one of our parishioners that he didn’t feel like he had any friends. And in that moment, that congregation swarmed around him. They held him up. They took him to the doctors. They signed him up for Social Security. They got him on Medicare. They got his prescriptions. They helped him move house twice. They moved 8,500 pounds of books. I tell you, nothing says love like moving 8,500 pounds of books.

They made room for him in their hearts and in their lives. They showed him what it means to belong. They showed him what it means to welcome. Reminded me that all of our ministry starts with welcome. It’s in welcoming one another that we build relationship. It’s in relationship that we build trust. And it’s with trust that we can change the world. It’s when we enter into welcome, in relationship, that we build trust. And with trust we can be the beloved community. With trust we can be the people who make sure that all know that they belong.

This summer, I’ve had the good fortune to meet with many of you one-on-one. It has been a true, true pleasure. And frequently, you have asked me, “What are we as Trinity? What are we as Episcopalians? What are we as Christians called to do at this moment when hate and fear run so rampant in our midst? How are we to respond? How are we to resist?”

And many of you are resisting in bold and creative ways. And I would suggest the way that we do it that’s unique to us is through welcome and belonging. When we create a sense of belonging, we provide a strong defense against the powers and principalities of this world that would scare us and separate us and frighten us.

When we belong, we are a strong bulwark against the powers that would dominate, the powers that would oppress. Our power comes because we belong. Our scripture compels us to belong. Our tradition reinforces it. And that today, when you come here to Trinity, wherever you are in your faith journey—you belong.

Know that today, as we do the work of welcome, we do the work of belonging. A belonging that can change the world. A belonging that can create nothing less than the beloved community.

Know today that here at Trinity, today and always, you belong.

Amen.