Radical Hospitality Sermon
Third Sunday in Advent, Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary
December 15, 2013 at
Lelanda Lee
Isaiah 35:1-10
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11
Psalm 146:4-9
Me Ke Aloha Pumehana. Aloha Kakou. Mahalo E Ke Akua No Keia
La. Amen’e ~ I greet
you with the warmth of my love. May there be love between us. Thanks be to God
for this day. Amen.
I am delighted to have
been invited to be among you this morning. It is a huge privilege and joy to be
here with you. I was excited to read your parish profile and learn more deeply about
who you are and who you seek to become. Among your parish goals you listed two
things that jumped out at me:
·
To transform
your warm welcome to a deeper understanding and practice of genuine hospitality;
and
·
To clarify
and deepen your understanding of church membership and develop more intentional
practices of integrating new members
Today’s
Gospel about John the Baptist in Herod’s jail resonated in the context of our
conversation this Sunday. I picture gnarly John the Baptist, he of the
wilderness appearance and itinerant lifestyle, stuck in a jail cell that must
have caused him untold stress and uncertainty. That uncertainty caused him to
send his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are
you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?"
In
light of one of the major events of this Advent – our global celebration of the
life of another once jailed individual, Nelson Mandela – I think of how that
great man must have also experienced untold stress and uncertainty during his
27 years – 27 years! – of imprisonment. How he must have wavered, too, from his
certainty of what is right and what is wrong, and how much his faith, his
belief in his call and his purpose in life, must have been what he held onto in
order to maintain his great discipline and commitment to that right and that
purpose throughout those long prison years. In all that I have read about
Nelson Mandela and his prison years, one thing has struck me as profoundly
important and strategic – an early decision Mandela made, which was to show radical hospitality to his jailers.
That hospitality also was expressed much later when he invited his primary
jailer to sit in the front row at his inauguration as president of South
Africa.
Now,
you might ask, how can someone who is the prisoner, and not the jailer, be one
who shows radical hospitality? Let us engage in some deconstruction of what
radical hospitality means for us as followers of Jesus.
In
the usual course of events, especially in this season of holiday preparations
that began with Thanksgiving and extends to New Year’s Eve, we might be tempted
to think of hospitality primarily in the context of a large family and friends’
meal with a roasted turkey or ham, or both, as the centerpiece of our
celebrations and how we extend hospitality to those we invite to share our
joyous and thankful times together. We might, through our charitable impulses
and sense of gratitude for all that we have been given, even extend our sense
of hospitality to helping to prepare, pay for, and serve such a holiday meal to
those less fortunate than we are, to those who don’t have a home, or the
resources, or a family, with which they can enjoy what we think of as a
hospitable Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s Eve gathering.
Let
me help us find a new definition of hospitality in Radical Hospitality. The
word “radical” is from the Latin “radix,” which means “root.” Radical
Hospitality, then, is about hospitality that is at the root of who we are and
what we do. Radical Hospitality is embedded in our identity as Children of God.
Let’s start at the beginning and talk for a moment about who we are and whose
we are.
As
Children of God, we are created in God’s image with God’s attributes shaped in
us. God is love. God is goodness. God is compassionate. God is merciful. God is
about relationship with God’s Creation. God wants God’s Creation to be
reconciled with God. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight,
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and
the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no
offense at me." God cares for the least among us, for those who have
the greatest needs. We often say, “God has a preferential option for the poor.”
God wants to be reconciled with all of us. As Children of God, it is our “Attitude
of Radical Hospitality” that sets us apart as belonging to Jesus, an attitude
that we carry with us wherever we go, wherever we encounter the Other. The
parable that stands out as an exemplar of Radical Hospitality is the story of
the Good Samaritan who extends hospitality to the man lying in the street, to a
man in need who was a stranger to him in a place that wasn’t his home but
merely along the path of where he happened to be traveling.
I’d
like to share with you some examples of Radical Hospitality that we find in
various cultural settings around us.
· How
many of you have seen the blockbuster film of a few years ago, “Avatar,” about
the science fiction planet and its blue people, known as the Navi? The Navi had
a way of expressing love and caring for each other that I found very profound
and moving. They said, “I see you.” “I see you.” Just think for a
moment about how it would make you feel if someone said to you that they “see you,”
really see you. What an acknowledgement of your personhood. What a validation
of who you are. Do you see the checkout clerk at the
supermarket? Do you see the newcomer in church on Sunday morning? Really see
them as individuals with their own stories to tell?
· In
the East Indian subcontinent, the greeting “Namaste”
is often used, and we Boulder County people certainly are familiar with being
greeted with “Namaste.” [Bow, with
hands together in front of my chest, and say “Namaste.”] “Namaste” may
be translated as “the not-me salutes you,” or more loosely and more commonly, “the
divine in me greets the divine in you.” What a beautiful acknowledgement of
your creation in the image of God from my creation in the image of God.
· In
The Episcopal Church, we have an Anti-Racism Training curriculum dating back to
2005 that is entitled, “Seeing the Face of God in Each Other.” Anti-Racism
Training, which over time has morphed into addressing not just Racism, but the
other “-isms” that we humans inflict upon one another, such as ageism and
homophobism and other oppressions, is comprised of content and exercises geared
at helping us, as Christians, to see God’s characteristics and divine spark
contained in each person, and to learn to acknowledge and honor God in each
person.
My
purpose in sharing these examples of Radical Hospitality is to point out that
this kind of hospitality is not about being the hostess with the mostest or the
Martha Stewart of home entertainment. Rather, it is about exemplifying the
Great Commandment, which is to Love God with all our hearts and minds and souls
and to Love One Another as Jesus has loved us. That Great Commandment doesn’t
say Love One Another, but only in your homes; it’s not place limited. The Great
Commandment trumps all the other rules about how we behave towards one another
as fellow humans created in God’s image.
When
we exchange the Peace in our Eucharistic services, it is an important
theological part of our entire worship service. Exchanging the Peace is about
acknowledging and extending to one another through the human touch of shaking
hands, with family, friends, and strangers, the Peace of God – not my Peace,
but God’s Peace – that is shaped in me, to another person, and receiving the
Peace of God that is shaped in that other person. That is why I always say, “The
Peace of God,” or “The Lord’s Peace,” when I shake someone else’s hand in the
Exchange of the Peace. That is why I sometimes bow and touch my heart, when I
exchange the Peace, as if to say, “Namaste,”
“the divine in me greets the divine in you.”
There
are other words for the exchange of the Peace from our fellow descendents who
trace our heritage back to Father Abraham: Shalom in Hebrew,
and Salaam in Arabic. I was on a dual
narrative study tour of the Holy Land – Israel and Palestine – in mid-November,
with Churches for Middle East Peace, which was led by its executive director
and an Israeli guide and a Palestinian guide, as part of my duties as a member
of The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council, the board of directors of the
church. It was largely a political tour in that we met with embassy, consulate,
Knesset, and Palestinian Authority leaders, as well as with Bedouin chiefs in
the Negev and Israeli and Palestinian activists on the ground. The Arabic
perspective on Salaam is an important
one, because the exchange of Peace for Arabs encompasses an element of safety
as well as an element of welcome and hospitality. We eleven pilgrims on our
study tour were extremely humbled by a Bedouin chief who greeted us with
coffee, followed by tea, made with water that is trucked in at great expense,
seated on blankets spread out under a tree, just one day after his village’s
guest tent had been demolished for the 61st time in a continuation of that area’s
land disputes. “Salaam” or Peace
means Welcome and Safety and that we share what we have with you, a guest also
shaped in our Creator’s image, even in the midst of our personal hardship. We expose our vulnerability and share what
we have with you, our brother and our sister in the human family.
The
word that I like best to express Radical Hospitality is the Hawaiian word “Aloha,” because I think “Aloha” really captures the sense of how
Radical Hospitality is not place-bound, not limited to being expressed in only
a particular place like your home. Instead, “Aloha” is carried in one’s heart and expressed as an attitude of
love, peace, safety, and acknowledgement of the God-in-you from the God-in-me.
We refer to “Aloha” as the “Aloha
Spirit,” and we understand the “Aloha Spirit” to transcend the Hawaiian Islands
and to be expressed by Hawaiians wherever they find themselves in the world. We
non-Hawaiians could also benefit from and practice the “Aloha Spirit.”
I
think it’s important to emphasize that Radical Hospitality also has a
requirement for an ancillary or corresponding response associated with it. This
idea of an ancillary or corresponding response is something that we probably
don’t emphasize enough when we do Christian Formation work and prepare people
for baptism and confirmation, or in other words, to state right up front, explicitly,
that becoming a follower of Christ has a price. We are called to renounce “Satan
and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God.” We are
called to renounce “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the
creatures of God,” and we are called to renounce “all sinful desires that draw
us from the love of God.” Renouncing is not just to say the words, “I renounce,”
but it’s a promise to engage actively to resist and to turn away from all those
things that draw us from the love of God, one of which is a failure to behave
in a Radically Hospitable way to all the Children of God, including
those we don’t know, perhaps don’t like, and feel judgmental towards. Radical
Hospitality is about practicing the reconciling love of God towards all of
God’s Creation.
So,
dear friends, Radical Hospitality calls us to deepen our actions, to deepen the
way that we live as the Children of God and as the followers of Jesus. Here are
a few suggestions for how we might engage our call to living into Radical Hospitality:
· First,
let us identify God’s characteristics shaped in us as individuals and as
members of the parish of St. Mary Magdalene. This entails both theological
reflection and self-reflection, both individually and as a community, on an
on-going basis.
· Then,
let us practice our “elevator speech” about our identity as Children of God and
practice with intention opening ourselves to be known by the Other and to know
the Other as our part of seeing the Face of God in Each Other.
· In
today’s Adult Forum between the services, we will be introduced to a few
exercises that can be practiced on a regular basis to engage one another in
sharing who we are and learning who the Other is, through some simple
conversation starters.
· And
finally, there are a number of topics that could be covered in workshops here
at St. Mary Magdalene, such as Racial Justice and Reconciliation, intercultural
versus multicultural engagement, effective conversations on difficult topics,
and so forth. I lead many of these workshops and would be delighted to be
invited back to spend time with you. These may also be conversations that are
timely in your parish search for a new rector, to help you explore your parish
identity and goals more fully.
Let us
pray: Loving God, may the words and thoughts
of our hearts and minds be guided by your holy attributes shaped in us, and may
we remember that we are created by you and belong to you, Our Creator,
Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.
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