This sermon was preached on Sunday, July 22, 2018 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Mount Lebanon, PA. The readings for this sermon were: 2 Samuel 7:1-14a , Psalm 89:20-37 , Ephesians 2:11-22 , and Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 . My first night in my new apartment in Jordan, my roommate and I arrived late in the evening. As we were cramming all our luggage into the elevator, we encountered our elderly downstairs neighbor. Without hesitation, he invited these two strange American women into his apartment for dinner. We politely declined in the Jordanian way, three repeated “Thank you”s with increasing insistence. We didn’t want to inconvenience or impose. Granted, we had no food in our brand-new apartment most of the stores and restaurants were already closed at this point in the night, but we still declined and went upstairs with our stuff. After settling in, we spotted that a light was on in the store across the street and ran over, only to discover that the shop was actually one of