By Rev. Jack Harnish, FUMC of Birmingham
Over Labor Day last year I read a lovely book called The Big House.
Lest you assume it has to do with my preference of college football stadiums, it’s actually about a family’s long-time summer home on Cape Cod.
The author describes it as an extraordinary four-story, shingle-covered house with gables and dormers, 19 rooms, seven fireplaces, and a warren of closets and crannies that four generations of children used for hide-and-seek. The house had been through five weddings, four divorces, three funerals, several nervous breakdowns, an untold number of conceptions and countless birthday parties and anniversaries.
Even though the family is now scattered coast to coast, they always came back.
After 42 of his own summers at the Big House, author George Howe Colt concludes: “I have always thought of it as home, if home is the one place that will be in your bones forever.”
And I thought, “That’s church. That’s God’s Big House, the place that will be in your bones forever. “
Now shifting my geographical metaphor from New England to my one-time home of Tennessee let me offer the invitation: “Y’all come on home now, ya hear?”
“Y’all” really is a wonderful plural form of the word “you”. It certainly beats the plural form I grew up with in rural Western Pennsylvania: “you’ns”. And it is more inclusive than the Midwestern “you guys” or even worse, the East Coast double plural “you’s guys,” but wherever you are from and however you say it, Jesus’ invitation to all is: “Ya’ll come.”
In Luke chapter 14-15, Luke tells the story of a Sabbath sunset dinner party. During the pre-dinner cocktail hour, much to the dismay of the hostess and the other guests, Jesus heals a sick man. Now first you have to ask, “who invited a man sick with dropsy (probably edema in the legs, due to congestive heart failure) to the party, anyway?” It was embarrassing.
And second, it’s the Sabbath and everyone knows you can’t touch sick people on the Sabbath. That would mess up the whole party!
But Luke, the physician, records that Jesus took note of this man. Jesus healed him right there — at the party, even on the Sabbath.
Then, perhaps to break the uncomfortable silence, he tells a few after-dinner stories. “Did you hear the one about the great banquet? Once upon a time, there was a father who had two sons, a woman who lost a coin and a shepherd who lost his sheep.”
The stories are all about who gets invited and who gets found, who comes home and who gets welcomed to the Big House. Frankly, the invitation list is a bit shocking.
Jesus says, “Don’t just invite the people you know, the people you like and are like, but expand the table. Stretch the invitation list to include the poor, the lame, the blind, the lonely, the lost, the outsider and the overlooked, because at God’s party in God’s Big House, the invitation is to all. “Y’all come.”
And the task of the church is to offer this invitation — to go into the world with the winsome word of Christ’s gracious invitation to come on home.
To go with the message of a God who welcomes all to his joy-filled banquet.
I remember when Bishop Judy Craig first came to Michigan back in the ’80s. She described the United Methodist Church as a great banquet feast. We have wonderful facilities, good food (always good food!), great music, and even pretty good after-dinner speakers. The only problem is, we have stopped inviting others to the banquet.
So a church that was born as an evangelistic movement becomes stagnant, withers and dies.
Our purpose is not to serve dinner to the folks who are already at the party, but to offer a place at the table for those we haven’t reached yet; to invite others into God’s big house and to say to those who have not yet found their place at the table, “Y’all come on home now, ya hear? Come on home to God’s great feast.”
Church-growth experts tell us there are certain times of year when people are more open to the invitation. Obviously the most significant is Christmas Eve when more un-churched people will look for a place to worship than any other day of the year.
Another might be Easter, but “Back-to-school” time is also one of the best.
Families are getting back into a routine, the kids are going back to school and parents are saying, “Maybe we should get back to church.”
The only thing lacking for most of our churches is the invitation, ways of opening the doors, letting others know that they really are welcome — ways of saying “Y’all come.”
It really is a “Big House”, you know. This church of Christ is meant to be a home that stays in your bones forever.
Now is the time to offer the invitation.
“Y’all come on home now, ya hear?”
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