Just Hospitality

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, November 1, 2009

from Rosemary Radford Ruether’s review of Letty Russell’s Just Hospitality: God's Welcome in a World of Difference:

For (Letty) Russell, hospitality is central to the mission of the church.  It is above all a work of justice-making, expressing love across human differences that have long been sources of injustice and oppression.  (Russell) employed a postcolonial lens to analyze the differences that divide the world.  We are all the product of centuries of colonial oppression that have shaped the church as well as society.  And not only does the colonizer/colonized divide separate us from one another, we stand on different sides of this divide within ourselves.  We all partake of different kinds of hybridity, being privileged in certain ways and disprivileged in others.

Always something of a misfit in both American society and her church, Russell began serving as a pastor in 1951 and was one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (in 1958).  In her later years she was excluded from a pastorate because she was a lesbian.  In reaching out to empower women leaders of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the Doctor of Ministry program she created for them at San Francisco Theological Seminary, she was always aware of her own privilege as a white American theology professor.  She sought to use her power to empower other women without patronizing or demeaning them.  Just hospitality requires growing self-knowledge as well as communication with the other to create communities of mutual flourishing.

Hospitality, for Russell, is God’s welcome to us all in our differences.  We seek to embody God’s welcome even as we discover God’s presence in the others who receive our welcome.  In receiving the stranger, we have “entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb. 13:2). In reaching out to the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, we meet Christ in them. In her final book, compiled by friends, Letty Russell gives us a precious summation of her own life as one who sought to welcome the stranger and make the church a truly healing community.

 

 

Just Hospitality

I was reminded again this week just how friendly our visitors find this church.  Not everybody, of course, but many.  I was told by a new member that the first time they came here on a Sunday morning, several of you who’ve been members for awhile approached this person and wanted to know who they were and how they got here and what could be done to help them find their way around the building and into their place in the congregation.  I’m glad every time I hear such things, but I must admit I may become too used to being in such a place as this.  I recall the gentleman who visited one Sunday a couple of years ago and introduced himself to me as a visitor when he came through the line after worship.  Since I had other meetings to attend to, I told him I’d come find him when I was finished with the other meetings.  

About 20 minutes later, I did see him in the fellowship hall and went over to ask how coffee hour had gone for him.  He said it had been wonderful, that in just that 20 minutes he had met seven of the nicest people– which he said was exactly seven more than he’d met at the church downtown and seven more than he’d met at the church out in the county.

I tell you this not to try to run down other churches, but simply to let you know that the hospitality you exhibit towards one another does not go unnoticed by visitors or by your minister or by the staff and ministers at other churches – because I tell them that story, too.

Friendliness seems easy enough.  You just walk up and introduce yourself and start asking a few questions – no big wup.  But you can do it for the wrong reasons, and when you do, it’s as phony as it sounds and sets off alarms for the people you approach.  For example, if our Member Committee was all about the task of twisting people’s arms to become members so our membership numbers would look good, then that would be the wrong reason for you to become a member of this church.  If our Growth Committee was only in business to make sure new people keep joining, in other words, if they were all about fostering growth for growth’s sake, then they ought to be disbanded.

But the Member Committee doesn’t so much care what the numbers look like.  And the Growth Committee isn’t forcing people to join or offering them free tickets to heaven or even passing out get-out-of-hell-free cards like my colleague who was here a couple of weeks ago was doing.

No, the Member Committee is trying to serve the people who come to us and make sure they’re getting what they need out of membership.  And the Growth Committee is merely trying to handle the growth we’re seeing – they don’t have to be out beating the bushes trying to find more people, they’re just trying to keep up with what we’ve got.

People have asked me why we’re growing, and I usually say I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because we’re centrally located.  Maybe it’s because the world is such a mess and people are looking for help wherever they can get it.  Maybe it’s because you’ve all become evangelical all of a sudden – you’ve all seen the light and had tongues of flame land on you and you’ve become Unitarian Universalist evangelists and you’ve begun to tell your friends that you’ve found a place with friendly people that come together to learn to share a message of hope that resonates in today’s world where so much seems so hopeless to so many.  [You snicker, but it’s possible…]

So we’re friendly – so what?  Lots of people are friendly.  But not everybody who’s friendly is hospitable, meaning they’ll take you in no matter what you are or who you are.  Going beyond friendly, hospitality is about generously providing care and kindness to whoever is in need.

I think we do our best to practice hospitality, in our 4^th Saturday Lunches and in our racial reconciliation work and on Sunday mornings, but what we’re trying is even more than simple hospitality.  I hope we try to practice what Letty Russell calls Just Hospitality – the sort of openness to difference that goes far beyond mere tolerance of another person’s idiosyncracies, beyond mere acceptance of the fact that we are all different people from different places with different experiences.  Just hospitality is the practice of taking in the different and the dispossessed and the oppressed and the misunderstood and then reshaping a beloved community that accounts for, draws out, and celebrates difference.

Letty Russell, who you heard about in the reading this morning, was a Christian seminary professor and at heart a biblical theologian, so I would not be remembering her well if I didn’t share with you the foundation she found for her thoughts on just hospitality.  She used as two biblical bookends the stories of the Tower of Babel and the visitation of the Spirit on Pentecost.  They are bookends because the first is very early in the biblical tradition and the second is relatively late.  The first comes from the mythic prehistory recounted in Genesis – the Tower of Babel story is mythic rather than historical, and is a myth apparently addressing the question of why there are different cultures and different languages in the world.  It comes after the story of Noah and the Great Flood and prefigures the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar.

So here we are, Genesis 11:1-9:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east,* they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ 5The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ 8So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused* the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The usual take on this passage is that it is about the advent of misunderstanding at the dawn of human history - the imposition of different languages on the people of the earth was said to be a punishment from God for the sin of trying to be like God and reach all the way to heaven.  Letty Russell reads this quite a bit differently.  Her reading follows that of theologian Jose Miguel Bonino, who saw God’s action at Babel as twofold – the thwarting of the project of the false unity of domination and the liberation of the nations that possess their own races, languages, and families.

Russell goes on:

“We, like the tower builders, continue to struggle with difference – differences of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and so on.  God’s response to the tower builders’ pride and lust for power is… to create the gift of difference!  Differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, language, or culture are not problems to be resolved and controlled by a dominant group.  Rather they are important ways of assuring that God’s gift of riotous diversity in all creation will continue.  In fact, these differences are gifts in themselves.  God’s gift lets new voices be heard and languages and cultures flourish.”

So for Russell, the diversity imposed at Babel is a gift in itself.  In the story of Pentecost found later in Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, Russell finds other gifts. 

[Acts is one of the historically later writings in the New Testament.  The author of the Gospel of Luke also wrote the Book of Acts, in fact wrote one long book and later editors broke them apart so we have Luke and Acts separated by the Gospel of John.  Luke-Acts was written between 90 and 100 of the Common Era – some thirty years after Mark, about the same time as Matthew, and some years before John.  Of course the earliest of New Testament books, Paul’s authentic letters, were written in the fifties and the letters attributed to Paul by tradition but actually authored by others, were probably all written before Luke-Acts.  So the Acts tradition is late in terms of biblical writings.]

This is Acts 2:1-17, abridged –

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.  ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.  ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?...

¹⁷“In the last days it will be, God declares,


that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,


and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

 

It’s hard to get past that image of tongues of flame.  But the orthodox understanding of Acts 2 is that God came down and repealed the punishment God had inflicted on the nations of the world back at the Tower of Babel, gathering all those God had made to speak different languages into the one true church where everybody spoke the same and everybody understood the same and everybody loved the same.  But since Russell shed a different light on the story of Babel, we need to reevaluate the story of Pentecost in that new light as well.

Peter Gomes, the American Baptist minister of Memorial Church at Harvard, is seeing with Russell’s new light when he says:

“The important thing to remember about the Spirit’s work at Pentecost… is not the ecstasy which is usually invoked on Pentecost Sunday...  That’s an interesting point, but (not the main one.  The main) point is the Spirit-induced understanding.  That was the thing the Spirit did, and that was how the people could say that they each heard in their own language the wonderful works of God.  The work of the Spirit is designed to foster understanding and ultimate reconciliation.”

And Letty Russell continues:  At Pentecost, “God makes unity possible by the gift of the Spirit that enables people of all nations to understand one another, no matter what language is spoken.  Acts 2:6 says that ‘each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.’  It does not say that people no longer had their own languages and customs, but that they could understand one another.  This is a very different kind of world from the one envisioned by the builders at Babel, and in it the unity comes, not from building a tower of domination or uniformity, but through communication.”

 

Communication is hard work.  True and Just Hospitality is, too.  In the hard work of hospitality we discover, as the writer Andre Lorde put it, that although there are among us real differences of race, age, gender, and orientation, these differences are not a ‘problem to be resolved’:  “…it is not those differences between us that are separating us,” Lorde says.  “It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences...”

It’s hard work, and we get some of it right.  But not all.  Lest we break our arms trying to pat ourselves on the back for being so friendly, I would point out that we still have trouble communicating with one another:  I experience it a lot.  Sometimes we talk past each other or get so busy we forget to listen carefully to what someone else is saying.  Sometimes we minimize the differences between us because we are different and unique in our own ways and it’s hard to always keep that in front of us.  Sometimes we expect too much of each other because we are human and we do have limitations and we do ask a lot of life and the universe. 

There are still people who show up at our doors and don’t feel welcome to come in.  There are still people who feel excluded by us because of what they are or who they are.  There are still people we consider strangers rather than neighbors, but, as it is written, by welcoming strangers, we entertain angels without knowing it.

 

I’ll end by reminding you of this congregation’s statement of mission:

The First Unitarian Church of Alton is a welcoming and inclusive faith community committed to nurturing lifelong spiritual growth and to inspiring lives of love and service which strive toward justice and compassion for our community, our neighbors, and our world.

Welcoming and inclusive; nurturing and inspiring; justice and compassion;  our community, neighbors, and world – we’re doing well, but we have more work to do.  Let’s keep at it.

So may it be.