“Fragile Art of Hospitality”
A Sermon preached by the Rev. Cecilia Kingman Miller
For Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Congregation
November 11, 2007
Readings
“The Guest House” by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
“All The Hemispheres” by Hafiz
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
Hafiz
(from The Subject Tonight is Love - versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)
Sermon
A story from a long, long time ago:
An elderly man and his wife live far on the edge of the desert sands. It is a harsh climate, and the threat of wild animals or robbers is a daily reality. They tend their flocks and make their simple life together. They have no children to keep them company in their old age, but they are content.
Their tent is large, and the husband likes to keep the sides of it rolled up. He likes to keep watch for any travelers that may come. “Who would come see us?” his wife often asks, and she rolls down the sides of the tent to keep out the dust. But the old man insists that he must watch for guests, and he rolls the tents back up. He keeps his vigil, watching for guests.
One day, the old man is recuperating, and is in some pain. He lies on a rug, resting in the heat of the day. He is praying, quietly, when all of a sudden three men appear, headed right toward him.
“Wife!” he cries, “Wife! Guests!” And then he calls to the travelers, “Stay and abide awhile.” He invites the strangers into the tent, and asks if they would like a cool drink and some food. He gives them cushioned pillows to rest upon, he washes their feet, and then—though he is in pain—he scurries about to kill a lamb and cook some meat, while his wife, astonished by both the guests and his energy, quickly makes bread. “Use the best flour,” the old man whispers to his wife as he scurries by.
Together they prepare the meal, and serve the strangers. And then God speaks to the old man, and tells him that he and his wife will have a child. The old man realizes that he has been entertaining angels, without knowing it.
By now you may have recognized the characters in this story. The old man is Abraham, the woman his wife, Sarah, and the child she will bear is Isaac. Jews, Christians and Muslims all consider Abraham to be the earliest forbear of their religions. All three traditions point to this story as an example of the religious aspect of hospitality. Abraham welcomes the stranger, and in so doing receives a blessing far beyond imagining.
To us moderns, the word hospitality means having friends and family over—much as we will do in the next few months. For us, hospitality is a way of deepening connections and relationships. Or we may think of the hospitality industry—the hotels and restaurants that provide professional services for compensation. Or we might think of that practice of hosting people to improve our social or professional standing: for example, having the boss over for dinner.
Yet, for people in other times, hospitality was linked to travelers and strangers in need. In harsh climates and societies, the social compact makes clear that those with homes and food are duty-bound to extend care to strangers and to those who are vulnerable.
We can still see this ethic today—in the extraordinary welcome offered to guests in the Middle East, and in the cold north, as well. In the area I grew up in, in Montana, no one locked their doors. The harsh climate could mean death to anyone who arrived in a storm and could not find shelter.
According to one scholar, travelers “were particularly vulnerable in the ancient Middle East: The plight of aliens was desperate. They lacked membership in the community, be it tribe, city-state, or nation. As an alienated person, the traveler often needed immediate food and lodging.”
Additionally, “sojourners were often landless in an agrarian society where land was usually distributed by inheritance and where access to land was essential to life. Without special attention, resident aliens would be marginal to most Israelite institutions—to extended families, as well as to legal, economic, political, and religious institutions.
Their status was precarious and their well-being depended on the willingness of the community to welcome them into its life. Often powerless and vulnerable to injustice and exploitation, sojourners were frequently grouped with the poor, the widows, and the fatherless in the biblical text.”
Embracing these aliens helped incorporate them into society provided for their essential needs, and also protected the vulnerable from exploitation. Hospitality overturned the injustices of a hierarchical society.
In the Greek translation of the scriptures, the word often used for hospitality is philoxenia, from the Greek for one who loves strangers. And the early Christians took the religious practice of hospitality one step further yet, by insisting that hosts welcome the poorest to their tables as equals.
Jesus demonstrated this in eating with tax collectors and prostitutes, and by refusing to have separate tables for different classes. He instructed his followers to do the same, and indeed, in the early Christian church the practice of this radical hospitality was required for leaders in the church. Paul told the early churches that there was to be no more distinction between slave and free, male and female, Greek nor Jew—but that all were welcome at the table.
Over and over the early church leaders emphasized that all should sit at the same table. This was a radical disruption of typical class structures, and contributed to the persecution of the Christians. How dare this sect assert the equality of all?!
According to one scholar, “Writings from the first five centuries demonstrate the importance of hospitality in defining the church as a universal community, in denying the significance of status boundaries and distinctions of the larger society, in recognizing the value of every person, and in providing practical care of the poor, stranger and sick.”
This, indeed, was considered the chief work of the church. To create a universal community, to defy the social structures of domination and hierarchy that are held together by status boundaries, to recognize the value of every person, and to embody that value by caring for all in need. The early Christians understood that the purpose of the church was the transformation of society.
Like all human institutions, though, eventually the Christian church abandoned this mission and began to protect its own interests. This, and other social changes, influenced the understanding of religious hospitality.
Today, most of us do not know what it means to be a stranger at the gate. Most of us—although not all—most of us have sufficient resources that we can pay for food and lodging when we travel, and if we have a crisis, we can use our credit cards to secure a dry bed and a decent meal. And very few of us still welcome the homeless, the poor and the sick into our homes.
There are some who do still live this radical form of hospitality—in the Catholic Worker and Mennonite communities, and others, where they welcome the poor to live, eat and work alongside the rest of the community. These people understand that charity cannot offer dignity and wholeness unless it is paired with true, deep welcome and acceptance.
These communities understand that to provide material aid without offering fellowship and true relationship is to further distance ourselves from those in need. Genuine hospitality requires that we invite others into relationship. That we witness their lives, and in turn allow them to witness our own. That we meet in mutuality, and that those of us who offer material aid must be willing to be changed in the relationship.
Indeed, we know not what gifts we might receive. What might happen if our churches began again to practice a radical hospitality?
John Buehrens, former President of our denomination, tells a story about the church he formerly served in Dallas:
During the Great Depression, the church closed its doors for a time. When it reopened, in a rented hall downtown, it put a sign outside: “All are welcome.” One Sunday, the fellow who’d been hired to clean the hall asked the minister, “Do that mean me?”
Assured that it did, the minister then had to face the fact that no church in the city at that time was racially inclusive. He had the Board pass a resolution that this one now was. Only to find that the chair of the hospitality committee, a woman from the Deep South, who had married a Unitarian from the north without much changing her regional racial prejudices, she was not only opposed but given to muttering about it. Other members came to the minister saying that she had to be removed from her sensitive position.
“No,” he replied, “we must simply tell her to be welcoming to everyone; then we must try to love her all the more, till that changes her heart.”
It must have worked, because today the Dallas Church is a vibrant, thriving church offering known for its social justice work in and beyond its walls.
Practicing radical hospitality takes us into new territory. Inviting strangers among us means that we might come into contact with people who are different from us, and that this difference might be transformative for us.
Quaker author Parker Palmer writes: “I have argued that the church, picturing itself as a close and warm family, tends to suppress conflict, depriving its members of a vital lesson in public life [how to navigate conflicts in healthy ways]. That same familial image undermines the public life in another way – by excluding the stranger from its midst. If the church is to serve as a school of the spirit, and as a bridge between the private and the public realms, it must find ways of extending hospitality to the stranger.
Parker continues: “I do not mean coffee hours designed to recruit new members for the church, for these are aimed at making the stranger “one of us.” The essence of hospitality – and of the public life – is that we let our differences, our mutual strangeness, be as they are, while still acknowledging the unity that lies beneath them.”
Now, I want to say something particular about how this church welcomes strangers in your midst. You do a remarkable job of greeting people, helping them find their way and inviting them to take part in the community. When people come here for the first time, they feel a warm welcome.
But I want to challenge us all a bit to take a fresh look at the way that those who join us might experience things after they join. First, I want to caution us against seeing new members as folks who can work on committees and contribute their labor and be the new worker bees, because darn it, the rest of us are tired!
This is what one wag called the “vampire model” of church membership, where new members are seen as fresh blood. Those who have chosen to make this their church home are of course prepared to give of themselves to this community. But remember, in the act of hospitality we shall be transformed…
When someone comes to us for the first time, they didn’t get up on a Sunday morning and say, golly, I think I want to go serve on a committee somewhere. They got up a lot of days and felt that something was missing from their lives. Maybe they got up in the night, in pain and loneliness. Maybe they had a loss—a divorce, a death, a job. Maybe they have been looking for something for years, and didn’t even know what it was.
But one day they finally decide to come here, and they turn down the road and park—hopefully they found a space-- and they come in these doors, and I do hope that here they find what they are seeking. Kindness. Love. Peace. A new vision of life. A sense of hope.
As these new folks come in, they bring their own hopes and dreams, and longings. They enter the church community and become part of our future. New members are not here to staff our dreams. They are here to join us, and contribute their own hopes and visions, so that together we may be transformed anew.
Is this hard for those of us who’ve been here a long time? You bet. It’s funny, pretty much all of us want the church to be just as it was when we joined. We fall in love with the church, and we like it as it is. In a world where so much changes, all the time, even families, why can’t this place remain familiar? Why does my church have to change?
This can be a painful experience, no doubt. And yet, we know from the natural world that all things must change or they will atrophy and die. We know that stagnancy is not health. We know that for this church to thrive into another fifty years, we must welcome new people and new dreams. We must listen to their ideas and hopes. When they do something in the church, we must restrain our urge to say, “That’s not how we do it here.”
Instead, we must allow these new people to bless us with their gifts. And we must be willing to be transformed, to be, as one of our hymns sings, to be changed by what we’ve started.
For, my friends, the fundamental reality is that the world needs us to be so transformed. The world needs churches living the deepest ethic of hospitality. Our time is no less fragmented and dangerous as the Roman domination. The poor, the sick, the downtrodden—they are cast off to the edges of society, and in need of humane care. The work of reconciliation among people—among races and religions and classes—is acutely needed. There are many who seek meaning in an age of rampant materialism. The practice of kindness and mercy is desperately needed in these days.
Remember the work of the church:
To create a universal community,
to defy the social structures of domination and hierarchy,
to recognize the value of every person,
and to embody that value by caring for all in need.
Is that not still our purpose? Is this not our true calling? Let us take up this work in gladness. For together we shall build the beloved community, the reign of love on earth.
May it be so for us, each and every day, my friends.
AMEN
