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“Building a House of Welcome”: Sermon by Rev. Pamela 11/8/2026

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Sermon on November 8, 2026
“Building a House of Welcome”
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan

https://churchofstmartin.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/2026_11_08_Pentecost24sermon.mp3

Measure twice, cut once. I will always associate this advice with my great uncle John. For decades he held down a 9-5 office job, but his real talent was as a builder and handyman. Born just after the turn of the last century, he had been an honest-to-goodness cowboy in his youth; when he decided to settle down, he rode his horse up to a plot on an empty hillside above the still-developing town of Richmond and built a house there with his own two hands.

Uncle John did not mess around when it came to building things. Nobody worked harder or had more respect for his tools. He was a great example of taking work seriously but not taking himself seriously. He was no-nonsense, competent, capable, and cheerful. When his beloved wife died in her 80s, he took over the cooking and the gardening, taught himself to bake pies with beautiful latticework crusts, and went to Mass every weekday at 7am. His was the essence of a good, simple life, lived with integrity and grace. He was still living in that house he had built for his family, stubbornly independent to the very end, when he died at a hale and hearty 101 years old.

Measure twice, cut once. I’ve always assumed it’s a saying about carpentry, but in a broader sense it’s an attitude that can be applied to almost any human endeavor. If you take the time up front to do a job well, you won’t have to clean up a lot of silly mistakes down the road.

Jesus, the son of a carpenter, could have used this adage when talking about the kingdom of heaven. The foolish bridesmaids could just as easily have been foolish tradesmen, who brought enough of what they thought they would need, but no extra. No “just in case” supplies or provisions. And it came back to bite them.

It’s odd, because we’ve heard so many times that God’s kingdom is a place of abundance, where there is always enough and more than enough. Today’s parable seems to push in a different direction. It hints at the importance of limits, limits to time and to resources. I find myself wanting to try to twist it to mean something else. Maybe Jesus was just having an off day. Not every sermon can be a winner, after all!

And yet. Humanity’s struggle with limits is woven throughout the Biblical narrative, starting way back in Genesis and that one tree that we weren’t supposed to mess around with. We don’t like limits, but they are real. If we want to have a real relationship with a real God, not a fantasy of our own making, perhaps we need to acknowledge that limits seem to be built into the fabric of creation. The passage of time. Physical constraints and imperfections. Vulnerability to illness and injury. Decay. And yes, death. There is no escaping these, no pretending they don’t exist. Or at least not for long.

Remember, the problem in the story wasn’t some existential lack of oil. The problem was that some people hadn’t brought enough. They aren’t really punished, so much as asked to bear the consequences of their own actions. They aren’t denied oil forever. They aren’t cast into the outer darkness. They just don’t gain entrance to the party. And, this is important: the other bridesmaids are not being selfish when they refuse to share their oil. They are being responsible. It was their responsibility to bring the oil, to bring the light. If they’d shared their oil with the other bridesmaids, the party would have been cut short, would have ended when the oil ran out halfway through, because there was no other source of light. The light, and therefore the party, depended on everyone doing their part.

Acknowledging the reality of limits isn’t the same as falling into a scarcity mindset. It’s realistic, not pessimistic. It leads us to prepare, not to panic. In fact, it can lead us to an even deeper sense of wonder and awe at all that God does provide for us, at how much diversity and abundance there is within the existence of limits.

We live within an economy and a culture that wants us to ignore the limitations that God has placed on our world, to live in a fantasy of endless growth and total optimization. As farmer philosopher Wendell Berry wrote, this has led to a situation where “our economy’s most voluminous product is waste.” If we live the way our culture encourages us to live, he goes on, we will mostly “take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return.” The worst thing about this behavior is that it not only wounds and demeans creation, depleting and destroying anything seen as a resource, it wounds and demeans our souls. We lose touch with mystery, with holiness, with the wondrous beauty of the ordinary. We never learn how to be satisfied, how to make do, how to know when enough is enough.

The year’s stewardship campaign was inspired by the hymn “All are Welcome” by Marty Haugen. Building a house of welcome is a joyful, fulfilling calling, one that we are answering here at St. Martin’s. What I have learned so far from my years here is that being inclusive and genuinely welcoming is different than just being nice, accepting, or friendly. It is a fundamental reorientation, a rejection of our human tendency to want to make clear distinctions about who is in and who is out, who belongs and who doesn’t.

Building a house of welcome is challenging, because it will always push us up against our limits. What do we have space for? Time for? Money for? Who is being left out or left behind? What, and who, are we prioritizing? These questions are a little like the church equivalent of “measure twice, cut once.” They are the questions that a wise builder, or wise bridesmaid, or wise steward of church resources, will always be asking.

Building a house of welcome, in other words, is work, but it is deeply satisfying work. When we are pushed up against our limits, we can actually go deeper: deeper in our faith, deeper in our questions, deeper in our discernment. We are brought face to face with understanding what is most valuable about church, what makes it different than all the other welcoming places that exist in our community. Among other attributes, church is a place where people are welcomed for no other reason than that they are made in the image and likeness of God.

The whole goal here is to bring people closer to God, one another, and all creation. We believe that lives are transformed by following in the way of Christ. And it all starts by recognizing that everything we have comes from God. That is the foundation. What we build on that foundation is built by being together, by singing, praying, eating, laughing, and working together. The skills required are simple ones. Humility. Forgiveness. Gratitude. Generosity.

Those are skills we can all acquire. As Pope Leo has said recently, “Building a world in which everyone can flourish requires shared responsibility and courage. No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing.” Shared responsibility. And also shared joy, shared wisdom, shared healing. I see those gifts, those skills, within these walls all the time. We have everything we need, together, to continue this work. Long after this stewardship season is behind us, I know we will still be singing: “Built of tears and cries and laughter, prayers of faith and songs of grace, let this house proclaim from roof to rafter, all are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.”

[i] Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (New York: Scribner, 2024)

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