The Radical Hospitality of God

“Hospitality” is kind of a buzz word these days.  So much so that there is an entire hospitality industry consisting of restaurants, hotels, and other service industry businesses.  Churches talk a lot about being welcoming and hospitable, and if you do a quick search on the internet, thousands of sites and resources are available for people seeking to understand what the Bible says about hospitality and how to do hospitality better.  Currently I serve half time as the Synod Minister for Hospitality & Mission and supplement that by working for a local event company.  Which means a good portion of my day is spent immersed in this world of “doing hospitality”, and so I tend to see everything through a lens of hospitality.  So yes, it does matter how the tables are placed and what food is served and if everyone knows where the restrooms are.  It helps create the experience and makes sure everyone feels welcome.  That is what hospitality is about- creating a space of welcome that facilitates the experience you are hoping for your guest to have. 

But I think in that definition, we are limiting ourselves.  Because we are not called to practice hospitality, we are called to what I like to refer to as “radical hospitality”.  The kind of hospitality that does not simply welcome guests when they come in the door, but rather throws open the door, runs out into the street and yells “get in here, we’ve been waiting for you!”.  The kind of hospitality that was extended to us through a God who took on flesh in order to live among us, so that more would experience God’s  love and grace and acceptance. 

In our first lesson today, three men- 3 strangers- appear before Abraham and he offers to bring them a little water and a little bread.  After they have accepted that offer, he quickly begins further, more elaborate preparations-what began as a little bread and a little water became cakes from choice flour, milk, and a calf.  A great reminder that when God tells us to extend hospitality and feed the stranger- God really meant it! In this culture however, it was custom to hold back initially, so that the guest did not feel obligated to accept.  Once they accepted, THEN you could offer more.  So while this is a great example of hospitality, it isn’t radical hospitality.

No, radical hospitality is more than that, it is bigger than that.  Because we have a God that is bigger than that. Radical hospitality is what is poured out upon us in the waters of baptism.  Through nothing we have done or said, God says you are mine, beloved child.  When we baptize infants, God’s love and promise surrounds them and doesn’t hold back.  It doesn’t wait to see if they accept it- they really have no choice in the matter- which is maybe part of the point.  In baptism we hear the invitation that we are marked with cross of Christ forever- FOREVER!  And if any of you have ever experienced a guest who has overstayed their welcome, you know just how radically hospitable a “forever” invitation really is.

We see this transformation through baptism in our encounter with the Ethiopian Eunuch.  This encounter between the Eunuch and Phillip may not seem that radical, but take a closer look.  This Eunuch was an Ethiopian- a foreigner.  That alone made him an outsider in 1^st century Jerusalem.  Plus he was a Eunuch, someone set a part as different.  And yet- “what is to prevent me from being baptized?”  - the answer:  Nothing!  Suddenly this outsider is extended the radical hospitality of God through the waters of baptism and now look what a slippery slope Phillip is headed down.  If even this outsider can be baptized, where are the limits?  Who else can now be included, as the old boundaries are broken?  Now this message of grace and love of Jesus is available to all.  This simple encounter with an Ethiopian Eunuch changed the story.  That is radical hospitality.

But how can we be sure that this is what Jesus really was saying his teachings?  Because in our Gospel lesson today, Jesus approaches a group of fisherman and simply says “Come”.  He picks the least educated, most unqualified of the bunch, and simply says Come.  He doesn’t ask them to do anything else.  He invites them to walk with him, talk with him, eat with him, share life with him.  Radical Hospitality- inviting others into intimate relationship, community, a place to belong.

And the beautiful thing is that Jesus continues approach us and simply say come- come to the table, come share this bread and this wine.  Come to the table, where all are welcome, there is always enough, and there is always room for one more. 

When we understand and experience the radical hospitality of God through the water and the wine, it changes how we respond to God’s people.

 In Southwest Minnesota, there are 6 Sudanese communities worshiping in Lutheran congregations.  There is no Lutheran church in Sudan, so how did they all happen to find homes in a Lutheran congregation?  Well when many of them were living in refugee camps, many of the supplies sent to the camps came in boxes labeled “Lutheran Disaster Relief”.  When they moved to the United States, they were assisted by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services.  So when they were settled and were looking for a place to worship together they looked around and said “the Lutherans!  We know them!  Maybe we can worship 

there?”  

I share this not to brag about how great the Lutherans are, but to offer an example of how we live from a place of radical hospitality.  Understanding that we are called to live as God’s people together, we offer our support to our brothers and sisters in crisis, we offer our country as a safe place to live, and we offer to walk with them as they begin a new life.  Because we as people of God intentionally walked with them through the challenges of life, they didn’t have to wait to be invited in- they knocked on the door because they knew they would belong. 

In congregations in nearly every denomination there is lamenting because there are less people knocking on their doors, fewer people sitting in their pews.  But living from a place of radical hospitality, we are called to change the story.  If fewer people are gathering around the table, take the table to them.  After Hours Church in downtown Denver does just that.  As part of their time together, they make sandwiches to hand out the next day to those who need them. But it is not just about giving food to people who are hungry.  It is about offering a sense of belonging.  It is about intentionally seeing those who we often prefer to ignore, seeing them and being in community together, if even for a brief moment, to relay the message that, “you are mine, beloved child”. 

A word of caution, however:  any offer of hospitality comes with a certain amount of risk. When Abraham and Sarah welcomed the strangers, they risked danger- these strangers could have been bandits, looking for their next victims.  They also risked things changing.   If we had continued on in the story, we would have read about Sara finding out she was to have a child.  Once they offered hospitality to the stranger- there was no going back, life had changed forever. 

And living out the radical hospitality of God means we risk change as well.  When we invite people into our homes, we often say “make yourself at home”- it is not simply an offer of a meal, it is an invitation to relationship.  It is about inviting people into our lives, sharing our stories and hearing theirs. And inviting new people into our lives, our community means our community will change.  And so radical hospitality also means receiving the gifts they bring, creating a new way of being this community. 

We also risk being hurt.  When we open our lives and our communities we risk being hurt because we are imperfect humans and relationships are messy.  We risk people not wanting to hear the message we share, we risk people walking away.  But we do it anyway.

Fully immersed in the radical hospitality of God, we do it anyway because there are people who need to hear God’s message of grace, who need to know they have a place at the table, who need to experience the love of Jesus.  And the only face they have of Jesus today is ours. 

PS:  I initially I wondered about the appropriateness of talking about radical hospitality on All Saints Sunday.  But I wonder if it isn’t one of the most fitting times.  When we gather as God’s people, we experience the radical hospitality of God in the waters of baptism, in the bread and the wine, and in God coming to us in the Word.  And on All Saints Sunday, we rest in the Radical Hospitality of God, knowing the community of saints who have gone before us were welcomed by God who came running out to meet them shouting “beloved child, Get in here, I’ve been waiting for you!”  

A Church Reforming

Grace and Peace to you from God our Creator and our Lord Jesus Christ.

In 1910, the Danish Lutheran Church (one of the many denominations that has merged to become the ELCA) felt led to support a mission church in Nigeria.  A farmer from Kenmare, ND heard about this and felt called to be a part of this.  He went to his congregation of Trinity Lutheran in Kenmare and talked about this.  Trinity ended up raising $2000 of the $5000 needed total seed money needed to start the Lutheran Church of Nigeria.  A few years ago, the presiding Bishop of the Lutheran Church of Nigeria came to the US and visited the small town of Kenmare.  While he was being shown around, he walked into a field and filled a container with dirt.  When people asked him what he was doing he simply replied, “I want to show my people the soil from which we were raised”.

It is important to know where we come from, the stories that shape us, the soil from which we were raised.  And that is partly what Reformation Sunday is about. It is the day in our church year when we all wear red, sing some of our best Lutheran hymns, and celebrate the series of events that happened 500 years ago that shaped us into who we are as a denomination today.  It is a powerful day of celebrating and remembering where we came from and who we are.  And this knowing of the stories that shaped us and knowing of the beliefs that ground us in our identity as ELCA Christians is critical to who we are so we can embrace who God is calling us to be. 

What I think we forget however, is that our identity is not simply a Church born out of the Reformation, we are called to be a church that is reforming.  Luther challenged the church authorities because he believed that along the way, they started to get off track.  He believed that the message and love of God was getting twisted up in church law and indulgences.  His writings and actions didn’t create a denomination overnight; his writings and actions set into motion a series of events that eventually led to the formation of a new church.  Beliefs continued to be shaped and changed throughout the years as scholars and theologians took Luther’s writings and expanded on them or challenged them.  Although there are many jokes about Lutherans and hating change, we forget that we were born from change and we evolved through change.  Who we are today as Lutherans and Christians is not same as the Christians in Luther’s time and not the same as in Jesus’ time.  We are different because the world we live in is different.  And so we must not be simply the Church of the Reformation, we must be the Church that IS reforming. 

 I wonder if our fear and hesitation toward change is a fear of losing who we are, losing our identity.  In a culture of action and busyness, we are defined by what we do.  If we change what we do, we change who we are. And in a chaotic world, we long for stability, for rootedness.  And so we fear change. 

But lucky for us, we can tell a different story.  We don’t have to fear change.  Because change doesn’t impact the core of who we are, or more accurately, whose we are.  In Jeremiah we are reminded who we are:  you shall be my people, and I shall be your God.  This is big enough that it bears repeating: you shall be my people and I shall be your God.  We are a people of God- that is our identity.  And so we can change, question, wrestle, and reform what we believe and how we look and act as a church, because that does not change whose we are. Quite the contrary- knowing whose we are, empowers us to change what we do and how we act as a church for the sake of the world.  For the sake of a world that needs to hear this message of belonging and love, for the sake of people who need to hear Jesus’ message of acceptance and grace in ways they can understand.

And yet, there is lamenting, a looking back with longing of who we were.  All around the country, as a Church we look back fondly of when pews were fuller, we had more youth, budgets weren’t stretched quite so thin, etc.  Often people talk about partnering with another congregation or ministry with a tone of failure; failure because they no longer have the resources to do it on their own. 

 Much like the Jewish people Jesus was talking with, we cling to who we were, and forget who we are.  In the gospel the Jews Jesus is talking to respond to him with a bit of shock- we are descendants of Abraham! We have never been slaves!  They conveniently forgot the minor detail of being slaves in Egypt, and slaves to the Romans.  But their identity was rooted in their past, rooted so deeply that they couldn’t see who else they might become.

In his words today, Jesus echoes the words in Jeremiah- continue in my word and you will be my disciples.  “You will know the truth”- that’s the part I think that gets them stuck.  They fear having to change, having to be different.  Because I think they know that if they continue to follow Jesus, they will be different.  Their identity as children of Abraham will be changed if they take on the identity of Jesus’s disciples.

And that’s where we have an advantage over the disciples.  Because we know that this God that called Abraham and his descendants, the same God that wrote the law upon our hearts and has claimed us as God’s own, is the same God speaking to the disciples and speaking to us in the Gospel.  It is not an either/or choice.  Our identity is people of God and followers of Jesus, and we know they are intricately connected, not 2 different things. 

And so remember who you are!  People of God, followers of Jesus- the Son makes you free and you are free indeed. Free to be a people and a church who is always reforming.  Looking around, it is easy to see we are in the middle of a Reformation.  I thinking we are becoming the church, becoming the people, God is calling us to be in our world today.

I see it in congregations like First English in Columbus, Ohio.  First was a dying inner-city congregation, staying open just long enough for a members’ son to get married, and then they would close their doors forever.  But God had other plans…and the faithful members were listening.  They looked around and saw hungry people in their neighborhood.  Trusting in the Holy Spirit and with mission support from the ELCA, they threw open their doors and began a breakfast worship, where people could be fed both physically and spiritually.  And now First Lutheran is a congregation full of  new life and mission and continuing to do God’s work in their neighborhood. 

I see this reformation in the 12 Social Statements adopted by our Church.  Did you know we had that many?  Have you read them?  We continue to face new challenges in our world and as people of faith we continue to respond to them.  These statements are rooted in our understanding of the Gospel and are created as new questions arise in our culture and our world- we are a church reforming.

And I see reformation in Ridgeway, Colorado, in the congregation of the United Church of the San Juans.  This congregation is a joint congregation of the ELCA, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and United Church of Christ.  Rooted in their identity as followers of Jesus, they worship and serve their community together for the sake of God’s mission.

And so it’s time to change the story we tell.  In Albuquerque, NM we have the congregation of Camino de Vida, a joint Lutheran/Episcopalian congregation.  Recently, they partnered with St. Paul Lutheran to jointly call a 2^nd pastor, who serves each congregation half-time.  They do this together knowing they can serve their community and do God’s mission better if they do it together.  There is no sense of failure that they don’t have the resources to do it on their own, quite the opposite.  They rejoice that together they are growing.  They are rooted in the belief that we are in this together, that we are the church and we are better together. 

It’s time to change the story we tell.
If we look around and see our pews less full than before, let’s not continue to struggle to answer the question of how we get more people in the door- let’s take the message of love and grace out of the door and to where people are at.  Let us invite them to the table by taking the table mobile.  In St. Paul, Minnesota there is a new ministry operating out of a food truck.  A free lunch is given no questions, and a Bible study is offered for those interested. 

But this changing of the story, the changing of how we do church today comes with risk.  There is risk because changing how we live out Jesus’ message in our world requires us to let go of some things.  In our gospel today, Jesus tells us that we must stop being slaves and then we will know freedom.  If we truly want to be a church that is reforming, committed to living out our faith in the 21^st century, what do we need to let go of?  What is holding us back from truly being free to boldly do the work that God is calling us to do?  Like the disciples, I think what holds us back is knowing that if we take this call seriously, we will be changed.  And so maybe I need to adjust what I said earlier- being a people of reformation won’t change whose we are, but it will probably change who we are.  We know that we can’t keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results.  But we also can’t do new things and expect things to stay the same.  Because that’s not how Jesus works.  When Jesus entered the world, he did things differently and changed the world that he was a part of.  And he keeps doing that today, he comes to us in the Word and in the bread and the wine, inviting us to be different, inviting us to share his message anew, in however we need to so that people hear it, so that people experience love, grace, and freedom- so that people experience God- through us. 
That is what it means to be this Church of the Reformation in our world today.  We are not simply the Church born from the Reformation, we are the Church reforming, changing and reforming for the sake of sharing God’s story and doing God’s work in the world.
Amen.

Get in here! We've been waiting for you!

Okay, I admit that last week’s post was a bit more academic/historic than usual.  But the ambiguity or queerness of that text isn't apparent until you do some of that research.  And seeking out those meanings and putting in that work  is what part of what makes it so radically hospitable.  It’s the difference between welcoming someone when they walk into the church versus running out to greet them, shouting, “get in here, we've been waiting for you!”  So now it is your turn to do some to this work.  I leave you with a handful of passages that may be quite familiar to you.  But I invite you to read them through a lens of radical hospitality towards our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and let me know what you find…

Psalm 139
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.  You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.  You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with  all my ways.

Hebrews 13:2
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without even knowing.

Galatians 3:28
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ.

John 20:2
So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “they have taken my lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

Titus 3: 4-7

But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Who is this guy?

A bit behind in posting this, but back on track after the holiday craziness!  Continuing from last post about "Queering the Bible".

In Acts 8, we read the story of Philip baptizing the Ethiopian Eunuch.   In this story, Philip meets the eunuch on the road to Jerusalem and proceeds to interpret the words from the Prophet Isaiah, and then  proclaims the good news of Jesus,  which leads the eunuch to be baptized.  And we are left with a wonderful story of evangelism and conversion.  But what we often miss, which would not be lost on first century communities, is the impact the character of the eunuch has on the story. 

During that time, the audience would have been familiar with two different types of eunuchs.  The first would have been a court eunuch, who would have been a servant or slave charged with guarding the royal harem.  These servants were usually men who were castrated as young boys.  This forced castration made them “safe” to be alone in the presence of women.  In addition, the timing of their castration (pre or post puberty), would have impacted both the physical and sexual characteristics of those castrated.  The second type of eunuch were men who may or may not have been castrated, but were celibate, sometimes for religious reasons. 

So which type was this eunuch?  We don’t know.   You couldn’t tell by looking at him, and it’s not like you could ask him if he was castrated.  But that is sort of the point, don’t you think?   This foreigner, this person who might be a slave or might be a high court official, whose physical and sexual characteristics may have been changed by castration- is by all definitions an “other”. This eunuch wasn’t a “normal guy”. He didn’t fit into the prescribed definition of male in that society, he could easily be considered queer.  And yet, from what we know, Philip doesn’t ask the eunuch to explain or define himself.  The eunuch is baptized, because he had heard the good news of Jesus.  That was all that mattered.  And this baptism of a eunuch marks a shift in the story.  If a eunuch is baptized, how can anyone be denied baptism?  As the story of Acts continues, we see this message of inclusion influence and expand the mission of the disciples- the message of Jesus is for everyone.  And it all starts with this unknown, ambiguous, queer eunuch.