Dixie Cup

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda/Ingleside Retirement Community Chapel
06.29.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 10:40-42

As you get older, your memory of childhood starts to fragment into a string of impressions. Every moment of every day of your life isn’t stashed away. The odds are good that you have very little idea what you had for lunch on the third Tuesday after your seventh birthday. Instead, we keep those things that make up part of our story, imprinted into us as a part of who we are and why we are. People and places and moments that are somehow important stick with us longer, go into us deeper, and speak more to the moments that are to follow.

For some reason, I remember dixie cups, the bitty little ones that you can buy in stacks by the hundreds. These were nothing like the giant half-gallon buckets that they give you these days at McDonalds or Seven Eleven. This was a teeny bit of paper, scarcely larger than a little plastic communion cup, decorated with flowers or paisleys or Sesame street characters. It was just enough for you to get a refreshing mouthful of water.

In the bathroom of my grandparents houses, there were dispensers located strategically by the sink. They were always stocked up with an orderly column of those cups. As a guest in those houses, those cups stood like a regiment of hospitality, a little reminder that someone was thinking about you and the fact that you might wake in the night and be thirsty. Hello, said that regiment of containers, in the silent way of things set out with care. Are you thirsty? Why don’t you have a little drink?

We don’t forget those little moments of grace.

Matthew’s Gospel today talks about welcome, about receiving, and about being grateful. It’s an interesting thing to hear from Matthew, because Matthew is a Gospel that comes to us from a crucible of conflict. Many scholars of the Bible believe that Matthew is a later Gospel, one that comes from a period after the fall of Jerusalem. Even more important, Matthew seems to come to us from a time of tremendous conflict within the church. If, as most scholars think, this gospel reached it’s final written form towards the end of the first century, then Christians were facing a tremendous battle. They were struggling with the reality of this question: Can you be Christian and still be a Jew?

During the time of Christ, and in the earliest days of the church, Christianity was a Jewish movement. But at the time Matthew’s Gospel was written down, Judaism had just experienced a massive blow. After the Zealots had risen up in revolution to throw off Roman rule, Rome had come down hard. Six legions of crack troops were brought against the Jerusalem, and after a long and desperate siege, the city fell in the year 70. Not only were the fortifications destroyed, but the temple itself..rebuilt after the Babylonian destruction...was razed to the ground.

The Judaism of priests and sacrifice was no more. But the temple, ruled by what the Gospels called Saduccees, was no longer the only place you could be a Jew. Synagogues had risen up, places where people could gather and discuss Torah and live out a life in response to it. It was in those synagogues that Christianity engaged with Judaism, and it was in those synagogues that the early Christians were finding themselves increasingly not welcome. Their message was not received there.

The section I read this morning comes right after one of the most challenging sections of Christ’s teaching as recorded in this Gospel, in which Jesus...the prince of peace...says that he has come not to bring peace but a sword, setting families and friends against one another. The Gospel of Matthew was written for a people who were facing just such a struggle. A Christians, they were being cast out. They were engaged in deep struggles because of their newfound faith, and as they left, they found themselves often separated from loved ones who remained.

And so the question must have been asked, again and again...what is the fate of those “on the other side?” What happens to those who have shown grace to us, who have loved us, who have cared for us...but who do not profess this faith?

It’s a question that was asked back then, and it’s a question that is still asked.

This last week, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life came out with one of their vast temperature takings of the landscape of American faith. This recent survey of over 25,000 religious folk isn't just methodologically sound. It also gets at some of the underlying theological assumptions among the different religious traditions in the U.S. Among those questions was that very question. What happens to those who do not profess your faith?

What the researchers found was that 83% of the members of the pluralist former mainline churches...that’s folks like us Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians...feel that a person of another faith can be in right relationship with God and inherit eternal life. We're up there with the Buddhists (86%) and the Jews (82%) on that front.

More startling was the finding that fifty-nine percent of self-described evangelicals felt exactly the same way. That’s a significant majority. People...particularly people who have a strong sense of the grace and love of Christ...who “know him personally,” as it were...have a great deal of difficulty damning the graceful. Or the gentle. Or the hospitable.

Here in this little passage in Matthew, there are signs that the gospel writer was drawing out sayings of Jesus to say...well, perhaps Jesus doesn’t. Perhaps there is space in His grace to remember those who welcome him, or show kindness to him. It is Matthew, after all, who gives us the only detailed story of the last judgment in all of the teachings of Jesus. In that story, which comes to us in Matthew 25:31-46, it isn’t our church membership or our own conviction of our own salvation that counts. When the Son of Man divides up the sheep and the goats, the standard he’ll use is this: it’s how we received those in need. How we comforted those in time of need. It could be something as simple as offering up a tiny little cup of cool water to one who thirsts.

We don’t forget those moments of grace.

We have to trust that God doesn’t, either.