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“There
is Still Room" Consultation
on Church Union |
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Fall before last, at the beginning of school, a new family
arrived in the town that I live in, a single mother with three children.
When you live in a rural town of 200 people, you don’t miss it
when someone new arrives. The
family was quickly stereotyped by their appearance and the house they
moved into as welfare-dependant: there appeared to be no active parenting
going on, the kids were running all over town.
One of the children was in my daughter’s class.
She and her sister began coming over to our house after school on a
regular basis to play. Sometimes her brother would hang around.
From what I heard and overheard, things were obviously not very
good at home. I asked enough
questions to be reasonably sure they were not being physically abused, but
I left it at that. Most of the rest
of my engagement with them revolved around trying to keep everyone playing
outside—outside—so I could
have some peace in my house. They
never seemed ready to leave when it was time to go, but I was relieved when dinnertime came and I could call an end to the
day and send them and the chaos they brought through my door home.
Then life could return to its usual calm in my private sanctuary of
home as my family gathered around the table.
After a few weeks of almost daily visits from these children, a
neighbor of mine in town called. She
was another one of those stereotyped welfare single-mothers, and she
needed some assistance. It seems
that those children hadn’t gone home from my house after all—they had
come to her—at dinnertime—because they were hungry—because their
depressed mother wasn’t functioning. My
neighbor was now out of groceries and out of money from feeding them.
It seems that the dinner table in her house was not exclusive
despite her lack of resources. It
wasn’t private. Having been
hungry herself, she opened the door when I was relieved to shut
mine—when I was relieved to keep them at arms length because I knew what
would happen if they came any closer. I
would start to care, the needs would be huge (or so I thought), I would
have to risk a relationship with their mother based on something other
than stereotypes that say that her problems are all her own fault. When my
neighbor called I had to face my own appalling failure.
Here I was, the pastor, regularly preaching hospitality and open
doors on Sunday morning, neglecting to minister to Christ in my own home,
stubbornly refusing to act with the compassion I know God has placed
within me.
“When you
have a banquet,” Jesus says, “invite the poor…” (Luke 14:13) “There is
still room”…“compel the people to come in so that the house will be
filled…” (Luke 14:22-23) “Extend
hospitality to strangers,” Paul says, extend it—don’t wait for them
to ask or beg…[i]
(Romans 12:13) I
debated about whether to start with or even tell this story of personal
failure. After all this is the
culmination of 40 years of dialogue and relationship building leading to
the joyous inaugural events of tomorrow. In
fact after reading through 40 years worth of COCU sermons and documents
and alerts and papers and papers and papers, I started to wonder what is
left to preach: perhaps I should just stand up here and say, “Go
Forth.” But you asked a Methodist
preacher, so you’ll get a sermon: let this be an ecumenical lesson to
you! I start with this story because it is about the kind of failure that happens all of the time: in our lives, in our churches, between our churches, between our churches and the community around us, and as we have so recently and deeply felt, between our country and our world. Failures on all these levels are interrelated. They are at once personal and corporate, spiritual and political. My abiding hope for Churches Uniting in Christ is that when we extend true hospitality to each other…in baptism…in the Eucharist…in ministry…in common mission against racism…that we will confess our sins and failures and remember together who and whose we are. For indeed we must. In Deuteronomy, we hear the refrain of hospitality that echoes throughout the Hebrew scriptures—a hospitality commanded by God through God’s prophets always for the same reason: remember what God has done for you; remember that you were slaves…captives; remember your experience and deliverance, and then love the strangers in your midst. Treat them with care, and not only care, but also justice. The passage from Deuteronomy is part of Moses’ long speech to the people before they enter the Promised Land. He is telling them that if they want to be strong and possess the land and flourish then they best keep God’s law and remember who and whose they are. And central to the identity of God’s people is this marginality.[ii] It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that when Jesus comes into the world he is a marginal figure. There is no room for him in the inn, he flees as a refugee to Egypt, his message is not welcome in his own hometown, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, branded a criminal he is hung on a cross. Marginality is not only central to the identity of God’s people but also to the life of God’s own being. Having received amazing hospitality in refugee camps in Central America and Africa, I have experienced first hand the clear understanding people on the margins of existence often have—they remember who and whose they are. Such remembering is hard for those of us who are white and therefore privileged in this the wealthiest country in the world. Not all, but most of us are so far removed from any experience of marginality that we have little to remember. In fact, we do our utmost to work against it. We revel in being the mainstream. We hold ourselves up as the model to conform to. We subjectively tell our history to ourselves and to those we have oppressed as insulation against the truth. We are conquerors, not refugees or aliens or strangers. I wonder what would happen if every person who attends a predominantly, overwhelmingly white congregation were to go to church tomorrow morning and find their house of worship locked and boarded up with a message on the door from God: “ATTENTION: You must worship. However, until you remember who and whose you are, you will not worship here. Go worship in a church that is open. Thus saith the LORD.” What would happen if these worshippers suddenly had to seek hospitality rather than give it? Had to face the loss of their identity, had to risk rejection? Leave their comfort zone, hear the experience of history from someone else’s vantage point? Mary Sawyer, in her book on black ecumenism, writes: “Permeating the black ecumenical perspective is a persistent intimation that the white churches of Europe and the United States may be devoid of authentic Christianity and that the black church, as preserver of the faith, is likewise the source of ecumenical possibility. ‘Inclusiveness,’ from this perspective, is not a matter of blacks and other disinherited people clamoring to be admitted to the white church, but of whites being invited by blacks and others of the Two-Thirds World to return to the fold.”[iii] Let that ring in your ears a moment. In Churches Uniting in Christ, surely we need to be struggling harder to pay attention to who it is that is doing the inviting and how the invitations are extended. Those of us who are privileged need to understand in a deeper way that there is grace and strength and authenticity at the margins because that is where God is busy keeping hope alive in the midst of suffering.[iv] Among early Christians, the original fold, who were certainly marginal in their context, the practice of hospitality was inseparable from their identity in Christ. They understood what theologian Kosuke Koyama points out, that “Christ is the hospitality of God toward us.”[v] The hospitality of early Christians was shaped and radicalized by the teaching and example of Jesus who was both guest and host: Jesus who ate with sinners disregarding stereotypes and not caring what everyone else thought; Jesus who fed 5000 on a hillside because they were hungry; Jesus who sometimes invited himself (as in “Zacchaeus, I’m coming to your house today”; in Luke 19); Jesus who taught us that when we feed a stranger we are feeding him; Jesus who accepted the hospitality of a woman who washed his feet with tears; Jesus who washed the feet of his own disciples, who broke the bread with them and shared the cup and told them to REMEMBER. Remember. It was not always easy for early Christians to remember. They had plenty of struggles over table fellowship—what to eat and who to invite. But many believed Paul when he reminded them again and again that attending to the spiritual and physical needs of all is not optional for Christians—it is integral, when your identity is rooted in the hospitality of God. Those early Christians met in homes; they shared meals, worship, resources in common; they lived as sojourners anticipating the coming of Christ. They extended hospitality that transcended barriers of ethnicity and culture and resisted the social stratification of their time. All this sharing across barriers was, for them, proof of the truth of Christianity. Anything less and the church would be inauthentic.[vi] Isn’t this what we long for through Churches Uniting in Christ? To show forth the truth of Christianity in the welcome and shared life extended beyond the barriers we erect among ourselves? Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities and a foremost practitioner of hospitality in our time, reminds us that when Christian communities practice genuine hospitality, we show forth the hope “that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.” [vii] How do we know when our hospitality is genuine? That it is of God? Genuine hospitality is extended with humility. “Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought to think,” the apostle Paul exhorts us (Romans 12:3). Remember that it is God’s table and that we are all guests together. Offer hospitality with humility—so that it is not patronizing, or humiliating, so that it doesn’t re-marginalize those it is extended to, so that it doesn’t demand a demonstration of worthiness or conforming to a certain sameness.[viii] Genuine hospitality is also extended with respect. Christ is in every person that we welcome. Jesus was criticized by the self-righteous for sharing table fellowship with sinners because to break bread with another person is to recognize their essential humanity. We have plenty of experience with this: as I recall it was not easy years ago to desegregate the lunch counters here in Memphis for the same reason. Genuine hospitality is extended with respect. Genuine hospitality is extended with a willingness to receive. Jesus says to invite those who cannot repay. Yet, when you offer hospitality you usually find that guests have as much to give to you as you have to give to them—and that we need what they have to share. We need to receive hospitality in return. As Paul reminded the Romans, “We are one body in Christ, individually we are members of one another.” There is no getting around the fact that we need one another to be whole. In November, the World Council of Churches sent a team of persons from member churches around the world to make a pastoral visit to the United States in the wake of September 11. Many of them came from deeply conflicted places themselves: Lebanon, South Africa, Palestine, Pakistan. They came to be with us in our grief, but also to bring us the gift of their experience. They were our guests, but what they had to share was crucial for us to open ourselves up to and receive—wisdom and outside perspective of the United States. Bishop Mvume Dandala of the Methodist Church of South Africa, the leader of the delegation, recalled recent events in a way that has stayed with me these months afterward. South Africa, several weeks before September 11, was the host country for the UN Conference Against Racism. South Africans viewed this as a great honor, to host the world…this country that had struggled so long to overcome Apartheid and has so much to teach the rest of us about racism. The time of the Conference came and shortly after it began, the delegation from the United States, the most powerful country in the world, packed its bags and went home over disagreements. We refused their hospitality. Many people in the United States might have been oblivious to this action, but the people of South Africa were aware—and angry. Yet when September 11 happened, many South Africans stopped what they were doing to organize prayer vigils for us, to light candles in front of our Embassy and consulates, to stop people from the United States on the streets and express their concern. Their anger did not prevent them from connecting with us in common grief. Genuine hospitality requires a willingness to receive and also a willingness to relinquish: to give up what gets in our way; to stay at the table, even when the agenda might not please us. For those who have been marginalized, this may mean giving up or overcoming certain well-founded fears of assimilation or of loss. It may also mean relinquishing precious energy when you may be weary already from what the world has laid on you. For those who are privileged, we mush relinquish the notion that privilege doesn’t matter, relinquish fears of retribution, of loss. Give up some familiarity and comfort—relinquish wealth and resources. For who is it that is invited to God’s banquet? The poor, the marginalized. Those who remember who and whose they are. Genuine hospitality can be hard and costly. It is the kind of practice that only makes sense in the economy of God. We no doubt have many excuses, we might be stubborn, but we cannot afford to turn away from the invitation. When we practice hospitality as God has shown us, we make space for repentance of sin and failures, we make space for Jesus’ forgiveness to flow, for reconciliation and transformation to take place. In genuine hospitality the love of God flows between persons and we come as close as we can to understanding one another and to reflecting for the world the body of Christ. Howard Thurman, that great mystical prophet, in writing about love and reconciliation truly shared among persons, said: “Very glibly we are apt to use such words as ‘sympathy,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘sitting where they sit,’ but in experience it is genuinely to be rocked to one’s foundations….The willingness to be to another human being what is needed at the time the need is most urgent and acutely felt—this is to participate in a precise act of redemption.”[ix] In forty years of dialogue and relationship building in the Consultation on Church Union, we have already shared a great deal of hospitality with one another, even moments of redemption by the grace of God. As Churches Uniting in Christ, may we “GO FORTH,” to remember who and whose we are—to ever more faithfully extend hospitality so that the world may truly know we are all invited to God’s table. There is still room. Thanks be to God. [i]
Christine D. Pohl, Making Room:
Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids,
Mi.: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 70, quoting St. John Chrysostom’s
comment on Romans 12:13, “run to them,” he says, “and be given
to finding them.” I am
deeply indebted to this excellent book of Dr. Pohl’s throughout this
sermon. [ii]
Pohl, Chapter 6, 104-124. [iii]
Mary R. Sawyer, Black Ecumenism:
Implementing the Demands of Justice (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity
Press International, 1994), 3. [iv]
Pohl, 122. [v]
Kosuke Koyama, “When You Give a Feast, Invite the Poor,” The Christian Century, August 16-23, 1998, 747. [vi] Pohl, 42-43. [vii]
Jean Vanier, An Ark for the Poor
(New York: Crossroad, 1995), 10. [viii]
Pohl, Chapter 6, 104-124. [ix]
Howard Thurman, A Strange
Freedom: The Best of
Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, edited by
Walter Earl Flunker and Catherine Tumber (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1998), 183. |
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