On a day when North Carolina woke up to an earthquake, in a week when Beirut suffered a terrifying explosion, in a month that marks 15 years since the most devastating hurricane to ever hit the Gulf Coast with winds and waves that broke the levees, we might hear this scripture text in far too literal a way. I want to acknowledge the parallels but ask that we not draw lines into our modern day experiences. Instead, let’s prepare ourselves now for a storytelling and story-listening mode to get at the heart of the text before us; a story of calling, of Divine voice, and of sending out again.

Hear now our second reading: I Kings 19.9-15a

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I increasingly find it quite tricky to hold a sacred text and listen for a fresh word for us today when that sacred text more ably belongs in the hands of my rabbi friends. I am aware of how much I have to learn about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, about the tradition that sparked my own, about the intersection of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity each reading themselves into these ancient stories.

But story, I get. And while I am keenly aware of my inability to place Jacob’s dream in a context of rabbinical tradition without a fair amount of study, I am quite confident in our collective ability to hear in this story something of our own. Frederick Buechner is known for his sermons and his writing, but specifically for his remarkable memoirs. His vulnerability and honesty capture the longings of his readers, and he knows there is a power to telling a story. Quite famously, he writes, “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”

I hope that will be our lens for approaching this text before us today; what lies in this story of Jacob laying down to rest and dreaming of a ladder to heaven that we recognize as our own?

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As co-opted as Jesus has been in this country, as much as he has been commercialized and made into a brand, as much as I resist the Hobby Lobby “hang it on your wall” Jesus motif…the Jesus of the gospels is still so utterly compelling to me. Why begin with a caveat like that? I suppose I feel it’s somewhat dangerous these days, in our culture in this moment, to align yourself with Jesus and not specify which one.

So the Jesus I am drawn to liked to hang out on the beach. He didn’t have personal wealth, and we never read about him owning his own home, but he somehow managed to be hosted by all kinds of folks, especially the ones whose front doors opened up right onto the sea.

As Matthew 13 opens, we read that Jesus goes out from the house to sit beside the sea “that same day.” There’s certainly enough to play with in this passage without wondering what else happened on that same day, but we need to know. We need to know what had gone on within this man leading up to some rest in that house and a fleeting moment of solitude beside the sea.

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We only have a couple of verses to work with this morning in our gospel reading. On the surface, there isn’t much to chew on or at least much of anything new. Jesus has *just* finished telling his disciples to take up their crosses and follow him. He has spoken the ominous, challenging word that whoever follows him will find their truest life. And then he speaks these words of welcome. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me.”

So maybe this is a word about hospitality? That seems an unsatisfying and tremendously inadequate conclusion. This is about more than the welcome. This is about more than offering a drink to one who thirsts. This is very much about the mountain behind the mountain or the You beyond you.

Professor Elisabeth Johnson adds this observation to our study, “In the ancient world identity was tied to family and community. It was understood that in showing hospitality, one welcomed not just an individual, but implicitly, the community who sent the person and all that they represent. Therefore, welcoming a disciple of Jesus would mean receiving the very presence of Jesus himself and of the one who sent him, God the Father.”

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What a complicated text lays before us! Why does Jesus have to make it so complicated? Why can’t Jesus just tell us to follow our bliss and be present to the moment? Why does he have to throw in all of this talk of swords and violence and conflict? Why does he have to go and say all of it is inevitable if we are really following him?

It’s almost as if following the Way of Jesus is not clean and easy. It’s almost as if he’s warning us that the anger and punitive aggression he leaves in his wake is going to be provoked by anyone who matches him step for step. It’s almost as if the way we’ve done Church in the West for a very long time really isn’t in step with the Way of Jesus at all.

You know that Mahatma Gandhi has been called “the modern world’s greatest prophet of nonviolence” as he led “a thirty-year struggle to free India, nonviolently, from British domination. But did you know that, though he was Hindu, “the only picture he had in his room at the Sabarmatbi Ashram…showed Jesus with an inscription below that read ‘He is our peace.’ Gandhi called Jesus the great ‘Asian prophet,’ a reminder to the West that our central figure of religious belief was not a Westerner at all. As Gandhi used to say, if Christians had actually done what Jesus taught us to do—namely, love our enemy—the world would long ago have been transformed.” It was the Hindu peacemaker Gandhi who lamented the disfigurement of Christianity “when it went to the West” because “It became the religion of kings” and no longer a radical practice of following Jesus.

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