Jesus-Driven Hospitality

The sermon text for today is Luke chapter 5, verses 27 through 32.

Luke 5:27–32

You can find this passage in the Blue Pew Bible on page 1568.

Listen as I read God's word.

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth.

Follow me, Jesus said to him.

And Levi got up, left everything, and followed him.

Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them.

But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, who belonged to their sect, complained to his disciples, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?

Jesus answered them, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

And uh the idea behind that is we wanted to hear from you what are the questions that you have about God or faith or the Bible?

What are the questions that you know people in your sphere of influence have, so that we can uh be the kind of church that uh doesn't shy away from talking about difficult things, but really uh wants to dig in and explore those things.

Um so we asked you to submit questions, and there was uh so many good, helpful, thoughtful questions.

You know, some of them you could tell were just like, hey, I'm pondering, I'm curious about this, and some of those questions you can tell were just deeply personal uh from people's own life experiences.

And uh so we're gonna spend eight weeks this fall uh exploring those questions together.

Uh but as we come to these verses today, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer.

God, we are grateful that you invite us into your presence.

We're grateful that you have invited us to gather on a regular basis, to be here, to uh listen to your word, to commune and enjoy relationships with one another, and uh to be strengthened and nourished in our faith.

And so we ask you, God, today, as we open your word, that you would do what you always do, and that you would help us.

God, we recognize the limitations of our own personal capacities, the limitations of our own perspective, and so we ask for the guidance and the wisdom that only comes from your spirit to help us as we open these verses and as we look at what's here before us.

So, God, be with us this morning in a unique and special way.

We trust you to provide for each person what they need as they come into this place.

And so we look to you for all these things, and we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Each year, Dina and I go out for dinner to celebrate our anniversary, as many of you also do for things like anniversaries or birthdays or other big sort of milestones in your life.

And so we uh made an online reservation, and as I was making the reservation, it asked me the question, are you coming in for a special occasion of some kind?

And so I indicated, kind of against my best judgment, that we are coming in for our anniversary, because I have no idea what they're gonna do with this information, you know.

Uh, but I did think, you know, maybe we'll at least get a free dessert or something out of it, if nothing else, right?

Uh so I made the reservation, and when we showed up at the restaurant that evening, uh we were welcomed as we came in the front door by the hostess, who uh just very warmly and very excitedly uh welcomed us and wished us a happy anniversary, which to be honest with you, I was not expecting that this person would actually do it.

Uh so that was uh very kind.

When we got to the table that they had uh set aside for us, uh there was this hand decorated card that says happy anniversary, and there was uh the these little, uh just a few small little table decorations.

Uh nothing big to like draw attention to the fact that you're here for a special occasion.

Uh but with the with this hand decorated card and with those little decorations uh just added a very special touch to uh to that moment for us.

When our waiter came by, our waiter wished us a happy anniversary.

You're starting to see a pattern here.

And uh when we left the restaurant that evening, the hostess who was at the door again wished us a happy anniversary and said, 12 years, right?

Now I I have to stop and count on my fingers how many years it is that we have been married, and we must have at some point told her as we were, you know, she would have had no other way of knowing that.

Um but I was really surprised that there was someone who I'd never met before in my life who remembered how many years it was that we had been married.

I bet you can remember a time in your life where you experienced hospitality.

Maybe it was at a restaurant like that, or maybe it was uh a way that you were welcomed, uh you were prep someone prepared for you at a conference that you were attending.

Maybe it was something that your employer or your manager did for you on the first day of work at this new company, or something that your teacher or professor did for you on the first day of this new semester or this new school year.

Maybe it was you went to someone's home and they were just really hospitable and welcomed you in.

I bet that you can remember a time when you left with the distinct impression that this person or these people thought about me before I was even here.

I bet you can also remember a time when you experienced non-hospitality.

You know, where you showed up and it was like these people were completely unprepared for you to be here.

Like they invited you over and they were unprepared for you to be there.

You felt like an afterthought.

You felt like they didn't spend any time thinking about you or preparing or anticipating your needs.

And so you have, at some point in your life, experienced both hospitality and non-hospitality.

One of the things that I most love about our church, and there's a lot of things, by the way, one of the things I most love about our church is that we are a hospitable people.

Now, are there areas in which we can grow in the area of hospitality?

Like, without a question, there is.

But we are a hospitable people, and we actually care about our church being a welcoming and hospitable place.

Like we actually have systems and we have processes in place that are designed to help us so that people who are coming here for the hundredth time, or people who are coming here as a first-time guest, being will feel hospitable church.

Like we have thought about them before they arrived.

We care about being a hospitable church.

Here's why I want to explore the subject of hospitality with you this morning.

We are in a season of ministry right now where we are heading into this fall.

And this season is a season where I believe that hospitality is more important than ever.

Elmwood's ministry has been bearing fruit in a lot of different ways.

Many of you have experienced that personally.

But one of the ways that we've seen uh fruitfulness in our ministry and we've seen God at work is uh that we see on a regular basis, we see new people coming to Elmwood and getting connected.

In the last year, as of last Sunday, uh we've had 92 first-time guests who have come to Elmud who have either found us online or were invited by someone in their sphere of influence.

Uh, but that's an insane number for a church our size.

There's been like I remember after COVID happened and everything was shut down and then everything opened back up again and everything was you know back to normal.

Like there was a few years where we had months at a time where we would not see a single new person come or get connected to our church.

And this year we've had 92 people who have come for the first time, and of those 92 people, 17 of them have expressed to us a desire to stick around and to put down roots and omelette.

Now, of course, we're in the middle of the summer right now, like on the tail end, so this is like peak everyone's out of town season.

So you may not feel those 17 people in the same way you would if everyone was here, but there's 17 people who are a part of our church today that were not a part of our church today eight months ago.

With the momentum that we see uh coming into this fall, with new people coming to check out and explore what Elmwood is all about, uh I believe it's more important than ever that we lean into one of these things that we do really well, and that is hospitality.

So, what I want to do with you this morning is I want to look at this passage that you heard read.

And in this passage we see an example of hospitality.

I want to look at these verses and just draw one main sort of lesson or one main point from them, and then think about uh how we can apply this in our lives and here on Sundays as a church community.

So, first, the main sort of point, the main big idea that I want to suggest for you this morning that we see in these verses is this Jesus came to rescue those who are far from God.

Jesus came to rescue and to save those people who are far from God.

Now, if we were to take time to read the book of Luke from the very beginning, those first four chapters, five and a half chapters leading up to this, we would pretty quickly get a sense, as Luke tells us the story of Jesus' life and ministry, we would get a pretty clear sense of the kind of people that Jesus was drawn towards.

The kinds of people that Jesus loved and spent time with.

And what we see is that Jesus was not cloistered away with the religious elites.

He was not cuddling up to wealthy or influential people, sequestering himself away from the normal people or the people who have problems.

No, we see that Jesus was with all the wrong kinds of people.

We see that Jesus was with the kinds of people that their society, and our society, by the way, tends to overlook.

And that is, those are the people who are the social and the moral and the religious and the cultural outcasts.

Those are the people that Jesus came to spend his time with.

So just look at the people that he's interacting with in these verses here.

He's interacting with tax collectors.

Tax collectors were viewed as being even slimier and more corrupt than politicians are viewed today.

It's a pretty high bar, isn't it?

You know?

But tax collectors were despised and hated by the Jewish people because tax collectors were Jewish people who collected taxes from the Jewish people on behalf of the occupying Roman government.

And they were very wealthy because the Roman government gave them permission to overcharge whatever they wanted and keep the rest over and above what was due to the Roman Empire.

And so they made their living and they made a whole lot of money off of extortion, taking money from their very own people.

And as a result of that, the tax collectors were hated by the Jewish community because they had defected and because they were working on behalf of the occupying Romans, the enemies.

Jesus is hanging out with tax collectors.

He's hanging out with sinners, who are the people who are, you know, have the reputation for immoral behavior.

These are the people who have a reputation for like not following God's instruction that he had given his people in the Torah and in the Hebrew Bible.

These were people that did not, they were not, you weren't religious or they weren't uh Jewish by any sense of the word.

And these are the kinds of people that Jesus is hanging out with.

And the religious leaders, of course, they're not very happy with this.

The religious leaders are very upset and do not approve of Jesus, who's a good Jewish rabbi with a clean history.

They don't approve of him hanging out with all kinds of people like this.

And you can hear the contempt in their voice as they go to Jesus' disciples and they ask, they ask them, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?

You can just hear how condescending and how much they're looking down on.

Why are you hanging out with people like that?

And they weren't just upset because they were in the same room with people like that, or because they were in close physical proximity in the marketplace.

They were upset with them because of what it meant to eat a meal with someone.

In the first century world, uh in many ways very differently to how we approach food, meals that you shared with someone was a sign of solidarity with them.

It was a sign of friendship, it was a sign of intimacy.

And so by eating meals with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus is communicating to the watching world, these are my people.

These are the people I want to spend time with.

These are the people I'm associating with.

Not just casually, not just socially.

These are the people that Jesus came to rescue.

He shared table fellowship with all the wrong kinds of people.

And he even invited one of those people, a tax collector named Levi, who we know by a different name, uh Matthew is his Jewish name.

He wrote one of the books of the Bible.

He's a Jewish tax collector who Jesus invited to be a part of the inner circle of his apprentices.

He invited this person who was the social and the religious outcast to be on the inner circle of the people that he would spend time investing in and pouring into.

And the point is that these are the kinds of people that Jesus came to rescue.

He wasn't with the tax collectors and sinners by accident.

Listen to his response when they complain about him and why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?

He responds in verse 31 by saying, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

Now, notice the notice the parallel here between healthy and righteous and sick and sinners.

I think for us to understand the sense of what Jesus is getting at here, we have to insert air quotes around the word healthy and the word righteous.

Here's what I think Jesus is getting at in these verses.

I think what he's saying in his response is he's saying there's some people who think they are healthy.

And there's other people who know that they are sick.

No one who thinks that they're healthy feels any amount of urgency to go to the doctor.

Now, in a highly advanced, you know, in an environment where we have just insane amounts of advances in medical technology, we go to the doctor for preventative maintenance, you know, for checkups and things like this.

But no one who actually thinks that their body is healthy really feels any amount of urgency to go to the doctor.

It's well, it's whenever whenever I can fit that appointment into my schedule, I'll do it, but it's not an urgent thing.

Sick people, on the other hand, sick people are the ones who know that they need a doctor.

And so I think Jesus is is He's pointing out here, saying, I've come to rescue people who know that they need to be rescued.

And there are some people, like tax collectors and sinners and the people who are the outcasts, those people have a unique amount of receptivity to my message because they are the ones who know that their lives are not all put together.

Whereas those who think that they're healthy, those who think that they're righteous, whose lives are all put together, those are the ones who they don't need me.

Because they have no sense of urgency to be rescued.

And so Jesus is saying, these are the kinds of people that I have come to save.

Those who are far from God, those who are the tax collectors and the sinners.

Now, Levi did practice hospitality by inviting Jesus as well as his other people into his home.

But I think in order to really sort of catch a sense of the most important part of this passage, I think we have to see that there is a second and even more important act of hospitality that's taking place here.

Levi did welcome people into his home.

But what also we see here is the greater act of hospitality is Jesus welcoming sinners into the presence of God.

The Bible tells, talks about our condition as humans, our spiritual condition, talks about it in a number of different ways.

It says that we are estranged from God, that we are exiled from his presence.

Bible says that we are far from him.

And this is language that we can uh in some ways understand and identify with because uh there may be someone in your life who you are estranged from.

There may be someone in your life who's exiled you, who's cast you out and said, I want nothing to do with you anymore.

We're done, we're over.

There may be someone in your life who you want to be close with and yet you feel relationally far from them.

The Bible says that this is true of us spiritually, that we are far from God.

And the Bible says that the relational breach that exists is because we've lived in active hostility towards God.

Because we have lived in active rebellion against God and have done what is right in our own eyes, instead of following the good and wise and life-giving instruction that He's given to us in His Word.

And apart from God's intervention, we are lost, we are hopeless, and we are spiritually dead.

And so the only way that tax collectors and sinners can regain access to the presence of God is if God Himself welcomes them in.

And the good news that we see in this passage, and as we let this passage lead us forward, is that this is exactly what God has done through Jesus.

We see a glimpse of this here where, you know, it talks about Jesus.

He went and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting in his tax booth, and Jesus said to him, Follow me.

And Levi left everything and got up and followed Jesus.

So we see a glimpse of this as we see Jesus, who is God Himself, inviting this tax collector, this outcast named Levi, into his presence, into the inner circle of his disciples and apprentices.

We see a glimpse of it here as Jesus is in this room filled with all the wrong kinds of people, and Jesus, who is God in the flesh, has surrounded himself with tax collectors and sinners.

We see a glimpse of it in these verses here.

But the greatest act of hospitality is if we let these verses lead us forward to the cross.

As we let these verses point us forward to what Jesus has done for us by going to the cross, which is not just the greater, but the greatest act of hospitality, it's a cosmic act of hospitality.

Because it's through the cross that we are forgiven.

The cross is the means by which we are forgiven.

The cross is the means by which we are washed clean from the shame and the guilt that we have because of our sin and our idolatry.

The cross is the means by which we are welcomed into the family and into the presence of God.

Friends, we are the tax collectors and sinners.

Now it may express itself very differently in our lives in the 21st century modern context, but spiritually speaking, we stand on level ground with all these people in this scene here who were tax collectors and sinners, and the ones whose lives were uh not.

Living in line with God's instruction, those are the people that we can identify with.

We are the tax collectors and sinners, and it's through a cosmic act of hospitality that God has, through Jesus, welcomed us back into his presence and made life in his presence available to us.

And when we see what God has done for us in Jesus, our hearts will then be turned outwards towards the tax collectors and the sinners of our day.

When we see the greater act of hospitality that is the cross, we will reflect the hospitable heart of our God in our relationships with one another, in all the places where we live, work, learn, and play.

And here on Sunday morning, as we seek to continue to grow in being a more and more hospitable place.

So what do we do with this?

What's the application for us?

What do we take home from this?

I want to suggest uh two ways to respond or to apply this.

Uh the first is this.

Cultivate a heart of hospitality.

Cultivate a heart of hospitality that overflows into a life of hospitality.

Now, if you were to experience hospitality in some way and then go home to try and dissect it, or to try and reverse engineer and say, okay, I that that was that felt really hospitable.

Like, what was it about that that made it hospitality?

You could come up with a number of different things.

You could reverse engineer it and say, okay, hospitality is, you know, the that person or those people, they made me feel welcomed.

They made me feel like I belong here.

That I'm not sort of watching someone else's family have Thanksgiving dinner, which is super awkward, by the way.

You know, like I was welcomed in.

I felt like I belonged here.

You might say, uh, this person or these people, they made me feel uh they embraced me.

Sometimes there's people who are huggers, you know that?

And there's some people who can get away with like physically embracing you.

And there's some people when they hug you, you're like, that feels so welcoming and so hospitable.

And there's other people when they hug you, and you're like, please don't hug me.

You know?

But whether it was a physical hug or not, you would say, This person or these people, they embraced me.

I didn't have to change who I was before I walked in the door.

I could come in as I was.

You might say things like, uh, this person or these people, uh, they were concerned about my needs.

They thought about my needs, they anticipated my needs, sometimes even foreseeing needs I didn't know I had, but they were ready for it when that need came up.

You might say, uh, these people were they were generous towards me, because uh practically, when we exercise hospitality, very often it costs us something.

And so you'd say, you know, these these people were generous and they gave of their resources to serve and to love me and to welcome me and to embrace me.

And of course, we could we could identify maybe other aspects of hospitality that are sort of uh behind the scenes of that, but I think you get the point.

And what I think is most important for us to remember is this when we define hospitality narrowly as having people into our homes.

If you think of hospitality as only that, what it means is that there are people in this room and who are a part of our church community who will practice hospitality maybe a few times a year.

Hospitality is not equivalent to hosting people in your home.

When we look at all the virtues and the character traits that make up an environment of hospitality, what we will recognize is that we can practice hospitality all the time.

Did you know that you can practice hospitality in someone else's home?

On someone else's turf, because at the end of the day, hospitality is not just about having people into your home.

Being hospitable is about the kind of person you are.

And you can be that hospitable person who embraces others and who welcomes others and who cares about the needs of others and who's generous and all those things.

You can do that all the time in all kinds of different places.

And so what we need to see is that hospitality is not just the actions, the outward actions of you know, hospitality, whether it's inviting someone to your home or whatever it is.

Hospitality begins in our hearts with the kind of people that we are.

And so we need to cultivate a heart of hospitality.

And we do that by centering our lives around the message of God's hospitality towards us in Jesus.

So, first, cultivate a heart of hospitality.

The second application that I'll uh submit to you this morning is this.

Remember the impact your hospitality can have.

These examples that I'll give are uh admittedly about a Sunday morning environment.

But these same exact things are true in all the other areas of our lives as well, okay?

I want you just to a moment, for a moment, think about the kinds of people who walk through our doors every Sunday.

Like just imagine and envision the people and their life experiences.

There's the longtime member of Elmwood who's walked through these doors over and over and over and over again, maybe for decades.

There's the longtime follower of Jesus who has sensed, maybe with much heartache and turmoil inwardly, that the church they've been a part of for maybe a long time that they love, that it's time to move on and find a new home for whatever reasons those might be.

There's the parent who feels totally in over their heads.

There's the young professional who's figured out that money maybe isn't the answer.

There's the retired person who's finally got to a season where they can stop working like in the marketplace and doing stuff to, you know, get paid for it, and they have this sort of realization, maybe a debilitating realization that like this is what it is.

This is what I've spent my whole life looking forward to is going to doctor visits and feeling tired all the time and not being able to do all the stuff that I envisioned myself doing when I was working, looking forward to retirement.

This is what it is.

There's a student who is searching for some kind of stability in the midst of a world, a digital world that is constantly changing all the time.

There's the person who feels isolated and lonely and who's longing for community, who's longing just for a place where they can be seen, known, and loved, and they can feel like they belong here.

There's the person who walks through the doors on Sunday morning who has just made the worst decision of their life.

And they have no idea where to turn.

And they think, maybe God could forgive me.

Or they come in thinking, if I come to church and pay my penance, maybe God will forgive me.

Maybe I can earn back his favor or his trust.

But there's the person who's made the worst decision of their life and they can never take it back and they don't know where else to turn.

There's the person who's just received a diagnosis they didn't expect, a person who's just lost someone in their life that they love.

There's the person who has walked away from God or the church maybe years ago and is sensing, okay, maybe now is the right time to come back.

Just feel a draw and a sense of pull to come back to church again.

There's the person who's been wounded by the church, who's been deeply hurt by the church, and finally, after a long season away, finally gets up the courage to walk through the doors of a church again.

Those are the kinds of people that are going to walk through the doors of our church on any given Sunday.

And the point is that we have no idea.

We have not a clue what people experience as they come in here on Sunday morning.

Unless they tell us.

And some of you know what each other are experiencing because you're already in relationship, but especially as we think about people who come in here for the first time, we have no idea what it is that those people are experiencing.

And friends, through us, they get to experience a taste of the hospitality of God.

Through us, they get to have just a little small taste of the embrace and the welcome and the generosity of God.

And so never underestimate the impact that your hospitality can have.

Friends, it's possible that your smile, that your kindness towards a person who comes here for the first time, that your curious questions seeking to know this person and who they are and where they come from, it's possible that those things might be the reason this person chooses not to give up on the church.

It's possible that you going out of your way to say hi to someone that you don't know and to welcome them, that may be the reason why they stay at Elmwood and ultimately why they come to know Jesus.

Never underestimate the impact that your hospitality can have.

And again, this starts with us in our hearts.

It starts with us cultivating a heart of hospitality, and it expresses itself in a variety of different ways here on Sundays and throughout the week, for sure.

But never underestimate the impact your hospitality can have in someone's life.

As we come to the communion table today, we are reminded that cultivating a heart of hospitality means looking back to the cross and also looking forward to new creation.

When we come to the communion table, we look back to the cross and see that greatest act of hospitality where God welcomed us into relationship with Him.

He welcomed us into His presence.

And we uh were so grateful and we're so filled with joy as we remember and think about that.

But also we look forward to new creation.

In the end of the book of Revelation, John is seeing this, uh he's one of Jesus' disciples.

He sees this vision of new creation.

And the way he describes what awaits us is he describes a banquet.

He describes a meal that God himself has put on for us.

And in this vision that he has of this uh this great banquet, this wedding feast, God is the loving and generous host who has welcomed his people to feast with him.

He is the one who has welcomed his people to celebrate and to experience the fullness of life in his presence.

And so when we partake of the communion table, we not only look back in remembrance and with gratitude for what God has done for us in the person of Jesus, we also look forward with anticipation and we look forward with longing to the time when we get to experience the hospitality of God in its fullest.

I'm gonna leave a few moments for silence and confession, and then we are going to come and celebrate Christ at the communion table.