March 15, 2026 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA
Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;,* he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.,*
Luke 14:7-24 (The Message) [Jesus] went on to tell a story to the guests around the table. Noticing how each had tried to elbow into the place of honor, he said, “When someone invites you to dinner, don’t take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he’ll come and call out in front of everybody, ‘You’re in the wrong place. The place of honor belongs to this man.’ Red-faced, you’ll have to make your way to the very last table, the only place left.
“When you’re invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. Then when the host comes he may very well say, ‘Friend, come up to the front.’ That will give the dinner guests something to talk about! What I’m saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face. But if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.”
Then he turned to the host. “The next time you put on a dinner, don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor. Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be—and experience—a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned—oh, how it will be returned!—at the resurrection of God’s people.” That triggered a response from one of the guests: “How fortunate the one who gets to eat dinner in God’s kingdom!” Jesus followed up. “Yes. For there was once a man who threw a great dinner party and invited many. When it was time for dinner, he sent out his servant to the invited guests, saying, ‘Come on in; the food’s on the table.’“Then they all began to beg off, one after another making excuses. The first said, ‘I bought a piece of property and need to look it over. Send my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I just bought five teams of oxen, and I really need to check them out. Send my regrets.’ And yet another said, ‘I just got married and need to get home to my wife.’
“The servant went back and told the master what had happened. He was outraged and told the servant, ‘Quickly, get out into the city streets and alleys. Collect all who look like they need a square meal, all the misfits and homeless and wretched you can lay your hands on, and bring them here.’ “The servant reported back, ‘Master, I did what you commanded—and there’s still room.’ The master said, ‘Then go to the country roads. Whoever you find, drag them in. I want my house full! Let me tell you, not one of those originally invited is going to get so much as a bite at my dinner party.’”
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
It seemed as though everywhere I went this week, I heard another story about the power of welcome… and so I’m sharing a couple of those stories with you.
The first comes from a woman who is a chaplain in the US Army. She’s telling the story of a hospital visit she recently made:
A few months ago, I went to see a retired Army chaplain who had been admitted to our hospital because of a bad fall. His nurses told me that he was in and out of consciousness and it might not be worth a visit, because he wouldn’t even know I was there. Since he was a regular attendee of the small Presbyterian church where I was a substitute preacher, I decided to stop by anyway.
His eyes were closed as I stood over his bed. But as soon as I said his name, he looked directly into my eyes.
“I am so glad you are here,” he said. “We need to get ready for the service. I know everyone has a different opinion about what’s right, but the most important thing is that everyone knows how much he or she is welcome — by us and by God. After that, everything else will fall into place.”
And then he closed his eyes. I stood there dumbfounded. It felt like he had passed the torch to me, one old soldier at the end of his race to a younger one at the beginning of hers.
Just like he said: all are welcome. We can thank a very generous God for that.
At what sounds like the end of his life, in his last words, the old chaplain makes sure the young one knows that, in God’s world, all are welcome. We are all welcome.
Another story came from a notice that famed Bible teacher, Beth Moore, is ending her practice of large event teach-ins. You’ve probably never heard of her, but in the Southern Baptist world, she was a major influence… until she publicly objected to the way Southern Baptist leaders were supporting Donald Trump. The SBC threw her under the bus. They stopped publishing her books, refused to sponsor her events, turned their backs on her. She ended up leaving the denomination, and began publishing her books and sponsoring her events on her own. Now 70, she’s stepping back from one part of that ministry. That’s all background… here’s the part of the story that stopped me for a minute:
What happened to Moore was devastating. Moore left the SBC in 2021 and cut ties with Lifeway,[the SBC publishing house] with her ministry taking over her events. She would later retell the story of her own experience of abuse as a child and how the [welcome of the] church and [of] Jesus had saved her in her 2023 memoir, “All My Knotted-Up Life,” and how she found a new church home after leaving the SBC. “Never underestimate the power of a welcome,” she [said] in a 2023 interview.
Welcome saved her again. It was welcome that helped her rebuild her life, her ministry, and her faith. Welcome.
Everyone is welcome… and welcome changes lives, here and in every other place that practices it.
Now, look again at the reading from the Gospel of Luke: the whole reading, from verse 7 to 24 is really about who belongs, about living your belonging, being a welcoming person. This is one of the places in the New Testament where Jesus makes God’s everlasting welcome abundantly clear.
The point of the story comes home as we hear once again that story of the big dinner party, the wedding banquet. The host is deeply annoyed that the “good people”, the ones who make the party, well, they’re too busy to come, or – more likely, since all the excuses are flimsy – they just don’t think it’s important enough. The host offers welcome, and the “in folks” blow the host off.
It doesn’t end there, though. The host turns the whole thing around. Instead of begging the in folks, he reaches out to the folks who never get invited to the big events – hungry folks, the friendless, the homeless, the folks no one notices. No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.
But notice that the folks who turned the host down, the ones who were fake, who really hurt him with their rejection? Those folks have lost their place. Everyone’s welcome, unless you hurt someone. God’s welcome is never an excuse for bad behavior.
The Gospel lesson reminds us that our welcome doesn’t rise from our personal power, our good looks, our age, race or height. God loves us as we are, no matter who we are, whether or not we follow God. Loved and welcomed, we are given the power to reach out to others, to extend that welcome to them, to let them know there is a place where they are welcome.
In a world where it’s becoming clearer and clearer that there are people in power who do not think that everyone is welcome, it’s important to remember that they are wrong. Some people want to rid the United States of people of color. Right now, those folks are trying to deport 350,000 Haitians back to the Haiti they left after political and natural disasters. The Christian belief in welcome means that we have a responsibility to those who we welcomed here in a time of need. It is immoral for us to simply say, without remediation of the problems that caused them to leave, that their time’s up and pitch them out the door. We believe that everyone is welcome, and that means everyone deserves compassionate care.
That’s not so common as we might think. Usually rejection, unwelcome is kinda behind closed doors. But lately, it’s become much more open.
Out in Kansas, they’ve made a law that effectively says that trans people can’t legally drive cars – by saying that their drivers licenses were immediately cancelled if their gender on the license was their birth assignment rather than their lived gender. And then, just to make their unwelcome really clear, it became illegal for transpeople to use the bathroom of their lived gender…. Which means, for instance, that someone who is a transwoman, living as a woman, dressing like a woman, maybe wearing makeup, is required by this law to use the men’s room… and transmen, guys with beards, wearing suits, are required to use the ladies room. You can imagine the ways in which having a guy with a beard using the ladies room might be as disturbing as a woman with a dress in the men’s room.
The bill was passed, over the veto of the governor of Kansas, and took effect immediately. It’s a law which contradicts everything we know and believe about people. For we believe that transpeople are people, that God loves and welcomes everyone, and that laws like the ones in Kansas are not just inhumane, but evil.
So, let me go back to the beginning. God welcomes everyone. You don’t have to be the “right color” to be welcome. You don’t have to wear suits and ties, or dresses and heels. You don’t have to stick with the gender you were assigned at birth. You don’t have to go to Yale, or even finish eighth grade. God welcomes us all.
The bread we celebrate is a visible sign of that welcome. When we share that bread at Communion, we are sharing with everyone, because all are welcome. There is no one standing here in the aisle saying, you, but not you.
Everyone is welcome in God’s church.
Amen.
© 2026, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 