It’s been said enough times, almost to the point that I’m getting tired of hearing it, that since September 11, 2001, we live in a different world. The proper stance for surviving in our modern post-September 11 world seems to be caution and suspicion.
Back in 1985, a year after I had moved to Colby, three men and a woman came through the area. They had been on a robbing and killing spree from Florida to Arkansas to Kansas. They were finally surrounded at a farm house north of Colby by police, sheriff's deputies, and the KBI. One of the perpetrators was killed and the other three were captured after a gun battle. But not before a beloved Thomas County deputy was shot in the stomach (he survived), and two men who worked at a grain elevator in Levant had been taken as hostages and executed on a gravel road north of there. It was an awful time for Thomas County.
Caution and paranoia spread like a stubble fire across northwest Kansas. People who had never locked their doors before, began locking them. In fact, there were a lot of people who couldn’t even find their house keys, they hadn’t used them for so long. Locksmiths were suddenly doing more business than they could handle, replacing keys, replacing locks, and installing deadbolts on doors that never had them.
The same kind of fear that northwest Kansas experienced has now been experienced by our entire nation. Each time new reports of possible terrorist activity are issued, you can sense the collective muscles of our country tighten. When I was in the Denver airport, traveling to San Jose, California for my daughter’s wedding in October, a calm, female voice kept announcing that the national alert color had been elevated to orange, and that we were all to be wary of suspicious bags or activity.
For some reason it doesn’t sit right with me, because I don’t like living under fear, and I don’t like others to have that kind of control over my sense of well-being. Just because bad things have happened, and just because the government can elevate our paranoia with the announcement of a color change, doesn’t mean that that’s the way I have to view the world, or live in it.
Someone showed me a pamphlet they had received in the mail after September 11th. It was titled, “Surviving In Today’s World.” One line in this paranoid pamphlet was in bold letters and read, “Develop the habit of suspicion; assume that other persons are either enemies or predators.” The pamphlet listed items for sale, such as window bars and bulletproof doors for your home, as well as elaborate household intruder alarms. There were also items for your personal protection, such as bulletproof kevlar vests, mace sprays, and assorted concealed weapons.
This, and other matters going on in our world currently, have heightened our awareness that we aren’t living in a safe world. There are people out there, some people we thought we could trust, who molest our children, who are sending bombs in packages, angry teenagers who go to school and shoot their friends, and teenagers in other countries who are being groomed to strap explosives to their bodies, walk into a marketplace where people are buying their daily food and blow them up. It’s no wonder we look at each other through the squinty eyes of suspicion, trying to decide if that stranger is really an enemy or predator.
Having just celebrated Christmas and having just moved into a new year, I would like to make a bold counter proposal to our nations current state of suspicion and mistrust. I would like to propose that the church in general, and Christians in particular, take the lead in countering our fear with hospitality. The word hospitality comes from the same word as hospital, which has to do basically with making sure strangers are taken care of, and treated with respect.
The world Jesus entered was not a hospitable world. It was not a welcoming world. It was not a world that embraced the stranger, or treated them with respect. It was a world characterized by fear and distrust, suspicion and animosity.
Probably the saddest statement in the whole New Testament, if not the Bible, is the way John begins his gospel. Right at the start, before we find out much of anything about Jesus, we are told it’s not going to go well for him:
He was in the world...and yet the world didn’t even notice. He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him.
Imagine coming home one day and your family not only doesn’t recognize you, they won’t even let you in the door. Imagine going to work one day, to the business that you’ve been at for years, and your employer or fellow employees say they don’t know who you are, and, holding a shot gun, refuse to let you into your office/classroom/or whichever. Imagine being the Savior of the world, the one who created that world in the first place, and the world you have come to save treats you like it doesn’t even know who you are. And then kills you.
From the beginning of the story of Jesus’ birth, of God’s entrance into the world, a lack of hospitality and welcome have been at the fore front of that story. The inn keeper’s unwillingness to make room. Herod’s jealousy pushing him to instigate the murder of male babies in Bethlehem, in an attempt to expunge the Christ child from the face of the earth. And on the story goes once Jesus begins his ministry.
Later when Jesus was eating supper at Matthew’s house with his close followers, a lot of disreputable characters came and joined them. When the Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company, they had a fit, and lit into Jesus’ followers. “What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and riffraff.” (Matthew 9:10-11)
One Sabbath, Jesus was strolling with his disciples through a field of ripe grain. Hungry, the disciples were pulling off the heads of grain and munching on them. Some Pharisees reported them to Jesus: “Your disciples are breaking the Sabbath rules!” (Matthew 12:1-2)
Then he was back in the Temple, teaching. The high priests and leaders came up and demanded, “Show us your credentials. Who authorized you to teach here?” (Matthew 21:23)
The Pharisee’s eyes and mouths and hearts were dripping with skepticism and suspicion. Instead of welcoming Jesus, they treated him as if he were a problem. Instead of approving of Jesus, they treated him with an attitude of distrust and dubiousness. Instead of treating Jesus with hospitably, they treated him horribly.
At one point during my ministry at Colby, I thought I was ready to move to a different church. I began fishing around for a new position. I found out the church I grew up in, in the Seattle area, was looking for an Associate Pastor. I sent them my dossier. It just so happened I knew the moderator of the Pastor Nominating Committee. She and her husband were youth leaders when I was a member of the senior high youth group.
It just so happened I was going to be taking Ryan and Kristin to Seattle for vacation to see my mom and I got an interview with the committee. I knew half the people on the committee, and it was good to see them and catch up with them. The interview was going well, and then one of them asked, “How do you expect to minister here since you are divorced?”
I answered that if statistics held true, half the couples in that congregation have gone through divorce, and there probably wasn’t a member there who hadn’t been touched by divorce in one way or another. Maybe I could minister even more effectively with those folks because I have gone through it like they had. But the question kept coming, with a tone of uppity hostility. I suddenly realized the interview was over before it had ever begun.
As I sat in my car for a few moments before driving away, staring at the A-frame roof of the sanctuary, my heart sunk into my stomach. I became a Christian there, was baptized and confirmed there, preached my first sermon there, heard the call to enter the ministry in worship there, was president of the senior high youth group, did my first work of ministry there with the junior high youth; I was married there, and eventually was ordained into the ministry there, after the church had supported me through my four years of seminary.
And it wasn’t the fact that I wasn’t going to be considered for the position that made me so sad. It was the way I was treated by that committee, with such a lack of hospitality, simply because of my marital status. And they didn’t even ask the circumstances; it didn’t matter at that point. I had been classified and judged. I thought I had come home, and that I would once again, at least enjoy the hospitality of people I knew. But they made it very clear that because I was divorced, it wasn’t my home anymore.
“He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him,” John wrote. From Christ’s entrance into the world, he continually met the world’s suspicion, judgement, cruelty and rejection with Godly hospitality. What did that kind of hospitality look like? It was a hospitality that was nonjudgemental and welcoming. It was a hospitality that was offered to anyone no matter what their story was: from stinky shepherds at his birth, to a woman who was a known adulterer, to a woman who had been married 5 times and was living with #6, to a lepers whose skin was falling off in chunks, to a self-righteous Pharisee visiting in the night, to the demon possessed and psychologically disturbed people, and to tax collectors. Jesus’ kind of openness didn’t make distinctions like we are apt to do; he welcomed with open arms anyone and everyone.
One of the reasons I am so drawn to Jesus Christ is because he does not, in any way, make distinctions about whom he extends hospitality to or not; all are received by him with great warmth and acceptance, no matter what. Hospitality, then, becomes an expression of grace. It is an embrace of those whom we may not want to embrace. As Jesus said in the sermon on the mount,
This is what God does. He gives his best--the sun to warm and the rain to nourish--to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? (Matthew 5:45-46)
That’s what hospitality as grace is supposed to look like: giving our best to all. It doesn’t make a difference who the recipient is. It’s more about who the giver is, what is in the heart of the giver, and what it is, exactly, that is motivating them to give their all to all.
One of my friends up in Colby is Larry Booth. When he was serving a church in Wichita, he preached about this theme of acceptance and hospitality. At the end of the service, he asked that people get up, mill around, approach someone and say, “Your name is _____________, and I accept you.” A simple statement to say. Then that person would say your name and tell you they accepted you.
Everyone was doing that, and during the course of all the hand-shaking and hugging, Larry ended up facing his wife. He said, “Your name is Beth, and I accept you.” But she couldn’t bring herself to say back to him, “Your name is Larry, and I accept you.” I could still hear the quiver in his voice as he talked about how it felt to be refused hospitality, on the level of basic acceptance, from his wife. And there were others in the congregation who couldn’t go up to each other and say that statement of acceptance.
“He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him,” (John 1:11). Through Larry’s and my eyes, and experiences of others I’ve pastored, I gain little glimpses of how that must have felt for Christ. We can only imagine the expectations of God, by sending his Son into the world. God must have been thinking, “I’m sending my Son; surely they will respond with a loving embrace, and obedience to my Son.” But from the start, John’s gospel makes it clear, God’s expectations for how He wished it would go, was not going to happen. And I have wished to God that our rejection experiences didn’t have to happen in a church, amongst God’s own people. But many do. That is sad.
I think if we are ever to turn this world of hostility and suspicion around, if we are going to move away from rejection and judgment, we in the church had better get this hospitality thing right, first among ourselves. It must start with us. It must start with the Christmas story. It must start with the New Year, of new beginnings, and determining to come at life and others differently.
First, we must be totally welcoming to the Savior, whom God sent into the world. Without that, any other form of hospitality will be overpowered by paranoia and hostility. Secondly, once we have opened our arms to Christ, as God has opened his arms to us through Christ, we can begin to treat others with the same welcoming, grace-full hospitality Christ did. Then I think we will see the world, at least our own little part of the world, arise out of this current morass of hostility.
No comments:
Post a Comment