Sermon 06.01.2025: Breaking Bread: Tentmakers in Hospitality
This week's story from the Book of Acts speaks of the importance of hospitality when life is difficult and dangerous. Where does God call the church to be when people are facing exile, persecution, and danger?
Scripture
Acts 18:1-11
After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, and, because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them, and they worked together—by trade they were tentmakers. Every sabbath he would argue in the synagogue and would try to convince Jews and Greeks.
When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with proclaiming the word, testifying to the Jews that the Messiah was Jesus. When they opposed and reviled him, in protest he shook the dust from his clothes and said to them, ‘Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.’ Then he left the synagogue and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshipper of God; his house was next door to the synagogue. Crispus, the official of the synagogue, became a believer in the Lord, together with all his household; and many of the Corinthians who heard Paul became believers and were baptized. One night the Lord said to Paul in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no one will lay a hand on you to harm you, for there are many in this city who are my people.’ He stayed there for a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.
Sermon
This week is the final passage of our sermon series on hospitality. And this story from Acts may not be as familiar to you as some other Acts stories.
But Paul leaves Athens and heads to Corinth. Corinth had been destroyed by Rome in 144 BCE and then re-built in 44 BCE by Julius Caesar, inhabited by colonists from Rome, about 100 years before this story takes place. So it is a new city, relatively, built by an occupying force, first inhabited by the occupiers.
And it is on a strip of land that connects Greece to the Peloponnese peninsula. This strip of land also was the closest point between two bodies of water. So it is a crossroads city in every sense of the word. People from all over the mediterranean world flowed through Corinth.
And if you have read Paul’s letters to the churches in Corinth, you might recall that there was a lot of conflict, a lot of disagreement about how to be church, who to listen to, and how to get along with people who saw the world differently.
Good thing we’ve fixed all those problems, am I right?
Paul leaves Athens and heads the 50 miles or so to Corinth, where he meets Aquila and Priscilla. They were Turkish Jews who had been forced to leave Rome. They were refugees.
Claudius, it says, kicked the Jews out of Rome. But the historical record suggests that Claudius ordered the expulsion of Jews because they were following someone named Chrestus, which sounds like it could be the followers of Jesus who were causing the tension. Claudius may have been trying to expel Christians, but didn’t get the nuance of not all Jews following this Jesus guy. And many scholars think it wasn’t about religion as much as it was about expelling foreigners.
Like today, deporting all Venezuelans for being gang members, when in fact, not all Venezuelans are gang members.
Priscilla and Aquila will go on to be very important missionary leaders, taking the gospel to all sorts of places, and supporting Paul’s journeys too. But it is not clear at the start of the story if they were Jews or Christian Jews when Paul meets them. They are people who have been dislocated from their home because of an unstable caesar and his executive orders.
We are told Paul went to see them, not because they were the same faith, but because they had the same profession. Paul stayed with them, and worked with them, because they were both tentmakers.
Today in the church, a tentmaker is a pastor who makes their living outside of the congregational context. So I am not a tent maker, because you pay me a living wage and I don’t have to also do a second job. Thank you.
But many people minister as Paul did, doing something else to pay the bills.
I’d like us to consider the idea that we are all tentmakers, no matter if we identify as preachers and no matter who pays our salary. We are all called to be tentmakers.
Tents provide shelter to people who don’t have a home, or who are away from their homes, either because they like to camp or because Claudius has kicked them out of Rome as a political stunt. Tents provide hospitality and shelter from the sun, or from inclement weather.
Even when Paul wasn’t preaching, he was creating things for the world that provided shelter and welcome for people. You don’t have to be a preacher to be a tentmaker. Each of us is called to create shelter and welcome for other people.
We do that because there are people that need shelter. We also do it because there have been times when we were the people who received the shelter and welcome from other people’s tentmaking.
I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Priscilla and Aquila may not have had a dedicated guest wing in their home, since they had recently fled Rome after being displaced by Emperor Claudius.
I don’t know about you, but this is a helpful story for me. I think I sometimes think I will be able to be more hospitable when X, Y, or Z is in place. When I’m not so busy. When I have a bigger place. When the stars align and all is perfect in the world.
But hospitality is really what gets us through the times when all is not perfect in the world. It is how we care for each other when whatever Claudius is in the White House, and the world is disrupted.
Many of you know Lucy Bone, a high schooler from the congregation. She turned in a project for school recently, which I am sharing here with her permission, about Calvary. Quoting a TED Talk she’d listened to, she started with this: “Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.”
In her own words, she continues: “When I was starting this project, I wanted to document a community, and I immediately thought of the community that I am a part of at my church. There, I was surrounded by people I had known my whole life, people I could ask almost anything of, and they would give it to me without a second thought. A people and community that loves me no matter how much I neglect showing up regularly on Sundays. I think that generally there is a growing lack of community in the world. It’s difficult to find the drive to talk to strangers in public spaces when you know that there’s a device at hand that can solve issues of boredom without possibility of judgement or rejection. When we seek community, we seek a place for us to grow, socialize, receive help, and build relationships.”
I think Lucy is correct. We all want a village, although maybe some of us sometime forget we need a village, but to do the work of being a villager, that is the challenge.
Priscilla and Aquila did the work of being a villager for Paul. Because they provided shelter for him, and let him work alongside them as tentmakers, he was able to ‘argue in the synagogue’ each week. Argue is a contentious word in English, but in the Greek, it really is about an open exchange of ideas. Paul would make his case for Christianity each week in the synagogue. And if you read his letters, you can see his rhetorical skills were strong.
I suspect though, that it was the community that Paul made that changed people’s hearts as much, or more than, his arguments. He stayed there for 18 months, which is a long time in Paul’s itinerant ministry.
I think there are Christians who have taken Paul’s arguing as the point of this story. We see them today, protesting against people, excluding people from faith, judging people for getting it wrong. That is a misreading of the Greek, for one thing. But more than that, it misses the call to be villagers for each other. If we’re excluding and judging people, and not welcoming them into our homes and lives, we are missing the call to provide hospitality, to make the village we live in one that supports and cares for people.
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We’ve all heard stories of ICE agents disappearing people from their asylum hearings around the country. And this week it happened in San Francisco, just across town from us. In addition to completely abandoning the rule of law, the sanctity of the courts and the judicial process, it also shows a complete disregard for any values we hold as Christians. This is not okay. We cannot be silent while this continues.
Also this week in San Diego, almost 3 dozen ICE agents showed up ready for battle, in full tactical gear, faces hidden by masks, to arrest restaurant workers, while people like you and I were peacefully eating dinner. The federal agents didn't expect a resounding rejection by the neighbors and patrons. The community spontaneously protested the ICE agents. ICE discharged three flash-bang grenades to disperse the crowd. The people instead pushed ICE agents out of their community forcing the vehicles to retreat.
These people were being villagers. And I’m sure some of them were a little afraid. But remember what God said to Paul: ‘Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no one will lay a hand on you to harm you, for there are many in this city who are my people.’
We will not have a village at all if the government can just take any of us off the street and send us to concentration camps in other countries. These diners showed us how to be villagers, to be tentmakers, how to stand with each other and offer shelter and safety in the face of absurd cruelty and inhospitality.
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Friday night, almost 1,000 people were in this sanctuary for a sold-out event to listen to the author Ocean Vuong talk about his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. Ocean came to this country as a refugee from Vietnam. His grandfather was an American GI who had married his grandmother during the Vietnam war. The grandfather had gone home to visit in the US and was there when Saigon fell and he was unable to return to Vietnam to his family. Ocean’s grandmother was worried that she and her 3, half-American daughters would be seen as collaborators. So she placed her daughters in separate orphanages, hoping that would be their best chance to not be targets of violence in a country that had received so much violence.
By the time the family was reunited many years later, Ocean’s mother had already given birth to him and was working in a salon. But a police officer recognized her as someone with mixed race, which meant she should not have been allowed to have a job. The family fled the country for their safety and eventually were granted asylum in the US, where he grew up, a child of this country who was not always welcomed by this country.
In his conversation Friday, he talked about dignity, and the importance of seeing the dignity of every person we encounter. He didn’t say this, but I suspect he learned the value of this because his own dignity has not always been recognized in either the country of his birth or in this country, where he grew up.
He reminded us that on the news, whether it’s Fox News on one side, or the Daily Show on the other side, we traffic in humiliation. We act as if our political opponents are rubes and idiots and only we have the handle on truth. He is a professor, as well as a poet and author, and he has had to teach his students to remove humiliation from their critiques of each other’s work. Because each of them is due to be treated with dignity.
He was talking about the work of being a villager in this village called life.
Hospitality is about seeing the dignity in others, about being tentmakers to offer shelter in a stormy world so their light can be seen by others.
Let us be tentmakers, one for another. Amen.
To hear a simple truth: you are a light others can see.
