Strange Friends A Sermon by Jeff Carlson St. Pauls UCC, Chicago May 29, 2016 Text: James 2:1-­‐8 (The Message) My dear friends, don’t let public opinion influence how you live out our glorious, Christ-­‐originated faith. If a man enters your church wearing an expensive suit, and a street person wearing rags comes in right after him, and you say to the man in the suit, “Sit here, sir; this is the best seat in the house!” and either ignore the street person or say, “Better sit here in the back row,” haven’t you segregated God’s children and proved that you are judges who can’t be trusted? Listen, dear friends. Isn’t it clear by now that God operates quite differently? God chose the world’s down-­‐and-­‐out as the kingdom’s first citizens, with full rights and privileges. This kingdom is promised to anyone who loves God. And here you are abusing these same citizens! Isn’t it the high and mighty who exploit you, who use the courts to rob you blind? Aren’t they the ones who scorn the new name—“Christian”—
used in your baptisms? You do well when you complete the Royal Rule of the Scriptures: “You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Today we heard a reading from the book of James. St. James doesn’t get a whole lot of attention in a church named after St. Paul. The two writers have traditionally been seen as rivals. That comes from the great reformer Martin Luther who loved Paul, but couldn’t stand James. He thought that the book should never have ended up in the Bible. The author of James was one of the brothers of Jesus. Yet James only mentions his famous older brother twice. James also doesn’t spill much ink telling you what to believe. He doesn’t focus on faith the way that Paul does. Instead James says, “You say you believe in God? Big deal. The demons believe in God. It’s what you do with your faith that matters, not what you say you believe. The only kind of faith that’s alive is faith that’s actually lived.” So, James focuses his attention on what we do, how we put our faith into practice. And in that, he has a lot in common with his big brother. When I read James, I am struck with how contemporary he is. He describes two people visiting his church for the first time on a recent Sunday, one wealthy and one poor, and he’s appalled at how his congregation reacted to them. It rings true because we still respond to strangers based on how they look and what they wear. And so it takes courage to visit a strange church. You never know how you’ll be received. Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, May 29, 2016 | page 1 of 5
I was reminded of that just last Sunday. Joe and I were in a small town in upstate New York visiting his family and we went to church. Even though I’ve been going to church most of my life, it’s still a bit awkward showing up as a stranger. We went to the old, downtown Episcopal church. We climbed the steps and opened a heavy wooden door and found a cluster of people talking together in the narthex. When we walked in they stopped talking and turned their heads to look at the two strangers. Then an usher tentatively approached us and said (it was more of a question), “Good morning?” handed us each a bulletin and a thick Book of Common Prayer, and that was it. We were on our own. We sat down in a pew. Joe hoped we weren’t sitting in somebody’s usual spot. And the service began. I love the liturgy of their worship, but I’ve only been to an Episcopal church a handful of times. They were celebrating Trinity Sunday, but after we sang Holy, Holy, Holy I started to get lost. Their bulletin had no signals about when to stand, when to sit, when to cross yourself. At one point, everyone suddenly dropped to their knees. Now, I knew that would probably be coming, but we weren’t prepared, so we fumbled around and made a racket getting our kneeler into place. And when you’re in a strange church and it comes time for communion, you’d better pay attention, because you never know how they’re going to do it. If you zone out and you forget to watch the person in front of you, you might find yourself grabbing for the chalice to take a drink unaware that everyone in front of you has been dipping their wafers into the cup. It’s awkward. It’s happened. It’s not easy to be a stranger in church. And if you haven’t been to church in ages, it takes an act of courage to just walk through the door, and even more courage to walk downstairs to coffee hour. And if you take that step, you hope that what’s waiting for you is hospitality. The New Testament Greek word for stranger is xeno. It’s the word Toula’s father uses in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” when she brings a WASP home for dinner. “Now we have boyfriend in house. Is he nice Greek boy? Oh no no, no Greek! No Greek, xeno, xeno with big long hairs on top of his head! My daughter going to marry xeno.” It’s the word from which we get xenophobia, the fear of the stranger. I’ve told you before that my favorite Greek word is philoxenia. Philo -­‐ the Greek word for friendship or love as in Philadelphia –brotherly love, philanthropy – love of people, philately – love of postage. So, philoxenia is the love of strangers. That’s the Greek word for hospitality. Isn’t that awesome? I think it’s an incredibly beautiful word. Philoxenia. Love of strangers. It has an edginess to it as well as a beauty that our impoverished English word hospitality just doesn’t have. Hospitality in our world is an industry. We pay for hospitality: we pay people to open the door and smile at us, we pay people to listen to us, to feed us, to clean up after us, to take care of our children, to take care of our aging parents. We pay for hospitality. That is, if you can afford it. Like James’s first century church, the rich in our world receive far more hospitality than the poor, and the poor are usually the Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, May 29, 2016 | page 2 of 5
ones giving it. But if you pay for it, it’s not Christian hospitality. It’s not philoxenia, the love of the stranger. We also tend to think of hospitality as entertaining – entertaining friends and relatives in our home. I love doing that. Eating with friends and loved ones is one of the richest enjoyments of life. But it’s not hospitality. Entertaining your friends is not the love of strangers. I was being entertained in a friend’s home and the conversation turned to travel. Somebody mentioned having been to Mexico and the number of poor people they had seen. Another guest said, “I don’t want to travel where there are lots of poor people. I don’t want to see that when I’m on vacation.” While I recoiled at what she said, her honesty was refreshing. She simply stated what we don’t want to admit. The hospitality industry has made it possible to enjoy a luxury vacation isolated from the uncomfortable fact of the poor. There is an all-­‐inclusive resort on a guarded beach in Haiti that you can arrive at by boat so that you don’t have to see the slums of Port-­‐au-­‐Prince. On a cruise or in a luxury hotel, the only strangers you have to deal with are people of your own social class who took a shower in the morning. And so when Brother James sees that same sort of behavior creeping into his church he says, “What are you doing? Do you really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus?” For Christians, hospitality is all about Jesus. When God came to us in Jesus, God came as a xeno, a stranger. From his birth to his death, a stranger. As a little boy, he lived as a refugee in Egypt. As an adult, he was a stranger to his own family: his mother Mary, his brother James -­‐ they all thought he was strange. He was homeless. He says at one point that foxes have holes to live in, birds have nests, but he has no place to lay his head, no place to take a shower in the morning. And you always find Jesus eating at other people’s tables, on somebody else’s dime. One could get the idea that Jesus was a freeloader, living off of handouts. Not supporting himself. Not paying his own way. And after he’s put to death, they lay him in a borrowed tomb, the grave of a stranger. When God comes to be with us, God comes as a stranger: a refugee, homeless, misunderstood, lonely. What a strange friend we have in Jesus. It’s out of his experience that Jesus could say those familiar words — “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed me, in prison and sick and you visited me, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Whatever you do for the least of these you do for me.” Historian Diana Butler Bass notes that the early Christians argued a lot about beliefs — they argued about the meaning of the divine nature of Jesus, the Trinity, the Holy Sermon by Jeff Carlson: Sunday, May 29, 2016 | page 3 of 5
Spirit — they argued about beliefs, but there was one thing they were unanimous about, for the first 500 years of the church: the single most important Christian virtue is hospitality to strangers.1 Why? Because that’s how God came to us in Jesus, as a stranger, and it’s in the stranger that we are likely to meet Christ. I think we come to church in order to learn to be a bit stranger ourselves. We live in an inhospitable culture. In America, political campaigns are being run not on philoxenia but on xenophobia. Loving strangers — foreigners, the undocumented, refugees, Muslims — that’s strange. Unlike the national borders that divide the peoples of the world, Jesus brings us into a kingdom without borders, a country without any walls to keep the strangers out. That’s strange. And, as James reminded us today, the constitution of the Kingdom of God is very short and easy to remember: Love your neighbor as yourself. Throughout the Old Testament, God reminds the people: welcome the strangers in your midst. Love them as you love yourself, because remember, you, too, were once strangers. Remember that you were a stranger. That’s where a heart of hospitality begins. Do you remember what it feels like to not fit in? To walk through a door into a strange place? Do you remember what it feels like to be lonely? That’s where you will find Christ – in your place of deepest need, in your insecurity, your loneliness, your pain. When you welcome the stranger that lives inside of you, you welcome the Christ within you, and you will find that you are more prepared to welcome the stranger at your door. At the Episcopal service in upstate New York last Sunday, the minister invited anyone who wished to receive prayer for healing to come forward after the service. (I didn’t know that Episcopalians had altar calls.) It was a small congregation, but at the end of the last hymn about 25 people were lined up down the center aisle. I sat in my pew during the postlude, watching them go up one by one for prayer. I don’t usually join in with something like that in a strange church —too much of an introvert. But last Sunday I felt the urge. I recently had pneumonia and was very sick for a couple of weeks. After the worst was over, I was discouraged at how long the fatigue and ache in my chest just kept hanging on. So, I got up, and I joined the back of that line of Episcopalians who were not ashamed to stand in front of their congregation with their neediness exposed. When it was my turn to stand before the minister, I told him about my sickness and weakness. He reached for some oil, made a cross on my head, and then he and two deacons put their hands on my chest and they prayed. A strange thing happened. As they prayed, a deep heat began to radiate in my chest. Now, I’m not the sort who regularly experiences miracles. But I can’t explain it. They felt it. I felt it. I was a 1
Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity.
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stranger who had stumbled through their liturgy, but in a simple act of hospitality from those strangers I received healing and a fresh experience of the love of Christ. Henri Nouwen links hospitality with healing.2 Hospitality opens up a friendly space, space for us to be ourselves and to be vulnerable about our pain and our fear. That is a true gift in our inhospitable world, where we marginalize and institutionalize people who are in pain. Hospitality invites strangers into a place where they know that they are loved, valued, accepted and seen. The writer of the book of Hebrews said, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, because in doing so some have entertained angels with out knowing it.” Imagine that. There are angels among us. Jeff Carlson
Associate Pastor, Saint Pauls UCC
Office: 773.348.3829
www.spucc.org
2
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
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