Pentecost 5A (Matthew 10:40-42)

​Today's gospel lesson seems like Jesus's teaching on hospitality. But is it really about hospitality? We take for granted that hospitality is always a good thing. Yet the French philosopher Jacques Derrida claims that even hospitality carries an aspect of hostility. To welcome a total stranger comes with an expectation — that the stranger will accept and comply with the norms of the community offering the welcome. And so Derrida coins a term, "hostipitality," to capture the paradoxical nature of the host-guest relationship. Which leaves us with a question: if this passage really is about hospitality, how is Christian hospitality any different from hostipitality? 

There's a movement across these three verses. It begins with Jesus identifying himself with the one who sent him, namely God: whoever accepts him accepts the one who sent him. There's an identity between the two. Then it moves to reward: whoever welcomes a prophet receives a prophet's reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person receives a righteous person's reward. But the last turn is different in kind. The one who is welcomed is suddenly, radically expanded to "one of these little ones." And who are these little ones? 

Let's unpack these three turns. A prophet carries prestige; there's an authority to a prophet, so welcoming one has its obvious merit. What about the righteous person? They carry moral standing, and welcoming them means honoring a life we'd want to respect and follow. But then — what reward could possibly come from welcoming these little ones, who are Jesus's own disciples? They carry nothing. No title, no claim, no status that would make welcoming them seem worthwhile. The word "little" here isn't about age; it's about social insignificance and vulnerability. Picture the one you'd walk right past — the person wiping down the tables after coffee hour while the rest of us are still talking, the newcomer sitting alone in the back pew, the name you never quite learned because there was never any reason to learn it. Welcoming them earns you nothing. And that, Jesus says, is the very one for whom you cannot lose your reward — because that is where he is. 

And this welcoming of the little ones takes us all the way back to the very first saying: "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me." It begins with what it means to welcome Jesus. To welcome Jesus is to welcome what he holds most important in life. It's not just accepting his gospel with our heads, but embodying it, living it out. So then — what is the core message of his gospel?! You already know this; I've said it the past two Sundays. But I'll say it again, in case you missed them. It's that the kingdom of God is present, here, within our hearts, within everyone's hearts — and that there's an urgent need to repent, to change the way we see ourselves, others, and the world entirely. "Kingdom of God" is an ancient expression, and the heart of it is that word, kingdom — a reign, a rule. It names whatever actually governs us: the unspoken rules that shape and form us into who we are. So the real question is — what reigns in you? What rules your heart? Jesus is asking us to let God take that throne. 

So if we welcome Jesus, we welcome his message. We live it, believe it, practice it. We practice the presence of God in ourselves first. And then we welcome those who may not yet know that the presence of God is already within them — already there, before I say a single word about it. This presence strips away our fat, egoistic eyes. It opens up in us a sense of sonder. Sonder is another neologism, like hostipitality. It names that moment when… suddenly we notice that other people's lives are as vivid and as important as our own — that each of them is the main character of their own life, just as much as I am the main character of mine. 

But sonder is just a flash, a glimpse. The real discipline is what Iris Murdoch calls "unselfing."* To get there, we sit in quietude and present ourselves to the presence of God within. All the images we've been masking ourselves with, all the labels we've fabricated — they get stripped away. 

And here, I think, is the answer to the question we began with. Remember Derrida: even hospitality hides a hostility, because in the end the host says, my house, my rules — you are welcome, stranger, so long as you become like me. But that "my" depends on a self that owns the house. Unselfing dismantles exactly that self. When the ego that would set the terms is stripped away, there is no "mine" left to guard, no norm to impose as the price of welcome. We no longer receive the little one into our world on our conditions. We look at them through these unselfed eyes, and we see the presence of God already there — already there before we arrived to offer anything at all. And that is a hospitality with no hostility left in it, because there is no self left to be threatened. 

And the strange thing about this welcome is that it spreads. When you have been received like that — not for your title or your usefulness, but simply because God was already in you — you become room for the next person. The one wiping down the tables, welcomed that way, sets a place for someone else. The newcomer in the back pew, welcomed that way, turns and makes space for whoever comes in behind them. That is how the kingdom comes — not by conquest, not by my house and my rules, but as one emptied self becoming room for another, and another, until the table is full.

*The link between sonder and unself is originally from Jonny Thomson's mini philosphy https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1305124261590514.