Sermon preached at Evensong on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2026

The film of The Odyssey is all about journeys and encounters with new people. Some of them turn out to be gods. So people need to practice hospitality at all times lest everything fall apart.

In this summer season, travel and hospitality is on many of our minds including those of you who are pilgrims here today. Modern day travel is a little less exciting than in the ancient Greek fantasy of The Odyssey. We are unlikely to meet a cyclops and some sirens on our way!

But travel remains full of the adventure and challenge of discovering new places, navigating transport and foreign languages. With phones in hand, we can quickly translate our needs, find a place to stay or a decent restaurant for some food. Unlike even 20 years ago when young adults might end up hitchhiking or couch-surfing when travel plans fell apart, we are not dependent in the same way on strangers to give us a lift or take us in for the night, unless you are competing on the TV show Race across the World, of course.

In the ancient world, hospitality towards the stranger was a cultural practice and encoded in religious tradition, as it still is in many parts of the world. In ancient Rome and Greece, hospitality was based on a popular story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes travel in disguise throughout the region of Phrygia to test mortals’ willingness to help. Yet every household turns them away, except for one, where a poor, elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon, kindly take in these gods in disguise. The area is soon flooded, and their inhospitable neighbours are washed away, but the gods protect Baucis and Philemon and make them attendants in the Temple. When the two humans finally die, as a thank you they are transformed into two sacred trees: an oak and a linden tree.

Everyone in the Greek and Roman worlds would have known this story, including the people of Lystra, whom we hear about in our second lesson from the Book of Acts – and Luke, the author of both the Gospel and Acts, who was a sophisticated storyteller writing for a Greek-speaking audience.

Luke begins this odd little story with an incident in which the early church missionaries Paul and Barnabas arrive in Lystra and miraculously heal a man who had been unable to walk since birth. The people of Lystra are so bowled over, they assume these men must be the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes in disguise, for how else could they effect such a wonder? And if they are gods, then the people of Lystra must be careful not to offend them but show them hospitality, so they and their priests bring oxen and garlands for a communal sacrifice! T

They understand the logic of hospitality as laid out in the Baucis and Philemon story in which hospitality is a test. Mortals must pass it to earn the gods’ reward, and anyone who fails can be destroyed. That’s the moral architecture of ancient hospitality-religion: you perform welcome correctly, and the god pays you back. Reciprocity and reception.

Even though many of might be happy to be mistaken for gods and treated like VIPs, not so for Barnabas and Paul. As good Jews and followers of Jesus Christ, they refuse to allow the crowd to commit idolatry by calling them gods. They don’t speak the local language, so it takes a little while for them to grasp what is going on. Once they do, they rush out, tearing their clothes to show their dismay at this unexpected and almost comical turn of events, and explain that they are indeed just mortals. Like everyone else. In doing so, they create space to share the good news about the one, true God.

When the crowd is willing to listen and Paul can get a sentence in edgewise, he preaches. It is his first sermon in Acts for a Gentile population. This means he can’t quote Scriptural texts at this crowd, because they have never heard of the Jewish Bible and the New Testament is only just being written.

Instead, he starts with our everyday experience of life, explaining how “God did not leave himself without a witness, in doing good - giving you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.” He doesn’t start with a rebuke or condescension by saying “you are wrong to worship idols” as the headline, but instead he points them to the one who has been taking care of them and their ancestors all their lives, even if they didn’t know his name.

God has scattered signs of his care and compassion, which all people can sense in the everyday world around us. This is not an argument simply about the beauty of creation and how ‘the heavens are telling the glory of God’. But much more simply a reminder that God cares for us and provides for us through the everyday also: the fields and the forests, the work of farmers and fishermen. We are dependent on them, yet we can easily take for granted the food on our plates and roofs over our heads. Paul reminds us that none of this is possible without God the Creator.

The fact is that the crowd at Lystra is still playing by the rules of the Greek gods, offering garlands and oxen in the hope of a reward. But Paul isn’t asking them to pass any kind of test. He’s making it clear that they have already received the ‘reward’ from God as a gift. God has already shown the people hospitality by practicing kindness and generosity instead of expecting them to deserve it first. He does not expect them to serve him, but instead he serves them.

The people of Lystra have tried to make the holy, living God fit into their familiar template of gods like Zeus and Hermes, but the real god is nothing like those capricious gods who like to test humans or play favourites. The real God, as Paul will preach elsewhere, is the one who gives not just through creation but who gives his own son to redeem us. And the Son gives of his own body and blood to save and nourish his people. The true god does not expect people to sacrifice to him, but sacrifices himself for them. ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’, Jesus once declares (Matthew 9:13 & 12:7), quoting from Scripture (Hosea 6:6).

We all know Paul can write very long, rich, and rhetorically complex sermons also but here in in this briefest of sermons, the essence of the good news for us also is to point us to our common benefactor. He nudges us towards a relationship with the living, generous, merciful God, through creation first of all.

How does this sit with us? Especially given how alienated many of us are from nature and its seasons and rhythms, how entrenched we are in an industrial & technological world, how much can we step back to praise God for his creation and for his provision or do we just thank Tesco’s for the latest food delivery? We all lose touch of the web of which we are part and which God has woven, we forget that sense that the world is charged with ‘God’s grandeur’, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it. It is easy to feel weighed down and worn out by adult problems instead.

And yet sometimes grace appears unbidden. A childhood friend of mine from France developed a brain tumour a few years ago in her 40s. She is a mother of two teenagers. It was not malignant, but it was pressing on her brain stem and needed to be operated on, which was also dangerous. She had always been an atheist, but for some reason during this period of anxiety and fear before and after the operation, she suddenly felt a sense of being carried somehow. A sense of a compassionate presence sustaining her in a very hard season in her life. She asked a friend: why do I feel this way? What is this? And her friend responded: God. God, really? It began a process then ended with her and her children being baptized and confirmed in the Cathedral in Bordeaux. Now she bubbles over with excitement about God and faith now, but it all started with a friend willing to listen and a sense of being carried and sustained. She came to know she was already God’s beloved, before she knew whose table she was sitting at or whose hand was feeding her.

I’d like to end with a poem about nature and grace by the Christian farmer, poet and essayist Wendell Berry that continues to speak to our own day. Berry always saw signs of God’s goodness and provision, of God’s beauty and of hope, in Creation:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.