Welcome, Neighbor!

DATE: October 26, 2014
SCRIPTURE:
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18; Matthew 22: 34-40; Hebrews 13:2
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton

It starts here, with this command:  Love God.  And another like it:  Love your neighbor. These are the hooks on which are hung all the other laws, all prophetic proclamations.  The foundation on which all faithful living is built.  The golden thread that is woven through all our sacred texts, to hold them all together.   Love God.  Love neighbor.   Simple, it’s tempting to say, and obvious.  Except:  What is love?  Where is God?  Who is my neighbor?

During their Exodus journey, the Israelites learned that God was with them, journeyed with them – like a pillar of fire by day and a pillar of cloud by night.  They learned that loving God meant living in community and looking after each other:  don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t covet.  Honor your parents.  Love God.  We’ve been reading about their journey in the book of Exodus, these last several weeks, but the conversation between God and the Israelites continues through the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, in which are laid out codes of conduct that build on those first 10 commandments, a kind of blueprint for living as God’s chosen people.  Among many other instructions, are the verses we read in Leviticus this morning:  Love your neighbor as yourself.

That’s the line that Jesus quotes, when the Pharisees challenge him to narrow it down, to sum up all the law, all of Torah:  “If you are so smart, Jesus, then tell us this:  What matters most?”  To which Jesus replies, “Love God with all your heart, soul and mind.”  This is part of the Shema, a prayer that Jews still pray daily.  The Pharisees would have known those words by heart…

then Jesus adds:  “There’s another like it.  Love your neighbor as yourself.”

On another occasion, a lawyer confronts Jesus and asks, “So who IS my neighbor?”

Read the verses in Leviticus and you might conclude that ‘neighbor’ means other Israelites; literally, your own tribe; the folks next door, maybe down the street.  But Jesus responds to the lawyer by telling a story about a certain Samaritan, a non-Jew, in fact: an adversary, who sees a Jewish man lying in the ditch, near death, because he’s been attacked by thieves.  The Samaritan stops to help.  “That’s the neighbor,” the lawyer concedes, “The one who extends himself to the stranger.”

And so it goes, throughout these ancient texts, and throughout our Christian history:  neighbor and stranger, bound up together.  The neighbor helps the stranger; the stranger is your neighbor… love your neighbor; love the stranger.

On September 28th, during worship, we said ‘thank you’ to Temple Israel for sharing their worship space while we reconstruct our own church building.  One of our members, Kathy Ross, created a beautiful piece of artwork for the occasion, which we presented to Rabbi Friedman (if you haven’t seen it, you can check it out on our Facebook page –it’s stunning!).  She painted the image of a pineapple, a symbol for hospitality, especially here in New England. Circling the pineapple are words from Exodus chapter 23:  “You know the heart of a sojourner, for you sojourned in the land of Egypt.”  Other translations read:  “You know the heart of the stranger, for you were once a stranger.”  Welcome the strangers, the aliens, God says to the Israelites, again and again, welcome them and do not persecute them.

There was an urgency to this command in ancient times, where failure to extend hospitality to a traveler could condemn that one to die of hunger and thirst in the wilderness.  So, too, in Jesus’ own time, there was great value placed on welcoming the stranger.  Jesus encouraged his followers to rewrite their guest lists:  don’t just invite your friends, he said, invite those who can’t repay you, the poor and outcast.  In fact, Jesus said, whenever you do something kind for someone, open your door, offer a drink of water or care for the sick, it is as if you are extending that kindness to the Son of God himself.

I started thinking about this way of expressing love, this practice of hospitality, in light of our pending move back to the church.  I’ve been reflecting on what it means to be displaced, and to return home.  It is wearing, I know:  this wandering, this waiting.  Be assured:  we are close.  It will happen.  And when we cross over that threshold, we will take with us the wisdom of the wilderness:  the memory of what it’s like to be the recipient of hospitality, to receive the kindness of strangers, the love of neighbors.  It will be a joyful homecoming – even for those of us who are not so much returning as worshipping there for the very first time.  We will hang up our traveling packs and dust off our traveling shoes.  Then, best of all, we’ll get to put out our own welcome mat and swing wide our very own doors.

We will become the hosts.  All of us.  Have you thought of our church like that?  Not just as a home into which we can settle, a refuge from life’s trials, but as a threshold on which we can stand, that we might better greet our neighbors and welcome wayfarers?

Every Sunday morning, we have volunteers who serve as ushers. They meet you at the door and hand out bulletins. So maybe, when you come to church, you think of them as the hosts, and yourselves as the guests.  But the truth is:  we are ALL hosts – all of us who are members of Saugatuck Church.  All of us who have chosen to be part of this covenant community.  If you are a visitor today, a first-timer or a some-timer:  Welcome!  Your only task this morning is to soak up this worship, to participate as you feel so moved, and to see whether you can’t feel a bit of God’s Spirit among us.

As for the rest of us, those who have made covenant promises to be a part of this community:  Our role is to extend our arms in greeting. To intentionally, persistently make space for newcomers, invite their stories, listen deeply, and ask ourselves, “What do we have to learn from this one that God has sent our way?  What passions might we share?  What needs might we lift in prayer?  What good work could we accomplish together?”

That’s the starting place for hospitality, according pastor and theologian Henri Nouwen:  NOT to make the guests more like us, but to create space in which guests can bring/contribute/become their full selves. ¹ That’s how you love a neighbor:  you meet them where they are, as they are – just like God meets us.  Along the way, the lines get blurred:  guest becomes host and vice versa.  We surprise each other, learn from each other, grow together; until we are all transformed.

The need for hospitality doesn’t stop at our threshold.   On my desk at home I have a pile of recent NY Times. I started saving every paper that had a picture of refugees on the front cover…and the pile kept growing: 58,000 unaccompanied children crossing our southern border to escape violence in Central American countries; thousands of African refugees fleeing on boats across the Mediterranean to reach Europe; and a staggering 3 million Syrian refugees flooding into countries like Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq.  These are the truly displaced, a vast sea of sojourners for whom home is utterly unreachable.

Elie Wiesel has observed, “Our century is marked by displacement on the scale of continents…”²

What does that mean for us?  For the way we love God, love neighbor?  One of those NY Times articles ³ tells the story of Pozzallo, Sicily, where a Catholic vicar and a Muslim imam pray over the bodies of African migrants who drowned when their smugglers’ boat capsized in the Mediterranean.  The vicar, Monsignor Angel Giurdanella, says this during his homily for the dead:  “The opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference.”

What is love?  Love is the opposite of indifference:  it is realizing that our lives are bound up in the lives of others – not just those who walk through our doors, but sisters and brothers around the globe, because we are all God’s children, neighbors one to another.  It means faithfully, persistently practicing hospitality.

This is our vocation, Sisters and Brothers – because it is the vocation of every Christian, and also because we know something about being sojourners.  Know, and don’t know.  Know the discomfort, the inconvenience of being displaced for a time, but know nothing at all about the more profound displacement that plagues millions of our sisters and brothers around the globe.  That’s ok. We don’t have to have shared their experience to cultivate compassion.  We need only let our own experience, the wandering and even the weariness, be an occasion for God to open our eyes to see the plight of others, and not to turn away.

We can start with whomever is right in front of us.  4th Century Archbishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, insisted that hospitality should be “face-to-face, gracious, unassuming, nearly indiscriminate, and always enthusiastic.”

Then we’ll see what happens.  God knows where we will be led next:  Maybe we’ll find ourselves called to a ministry with refugees; as we have already been called to welcome homeless neighbors; and to open our doors to folks in need of a place to recover from addiction.  God knows how we will we put God’s love to work, once we have our own place again…

We will discern that call together.

As we listen for the leading of the Spirit, we would do well to remember:  That though we are hosts, the Church does not belong to us.  It is God’s house, an outpost of God’s beloved community. Here (wherever ‘here’ is, at any given time), we are ALL welcomed by God’s open arms; here, Christ greets us, sometimes in the guise of the stranger.  Here, we are prepared to carry the love of God out into the world.    For that I say:  Thanks, be to God.

Amen!

Scripture Texts

Leviticus 19:1-2; 15-18  NRSV Translation

1 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy…

15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. 17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Matthew 22: 34-40  NRSV Translation

34 When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Hebrews 13:2  NRSV Translation

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