Unaware
Hebrews 13:1-16
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There are a whole lot of people who have a whole lot of ideas about what it means to call oneself a Christian these days. That isn’t all that surprising. A Pew Research article from a couple of years ago estimated the global number of humans who claim to be Christian at somewhere around 2.5 billion or 31.2 percent of the planet. There is the Roman Catholic Church and its 22 Eastern Catholic branches, as well as the nine branches of Eastern Orthodoxy. Then you have any number of Christian traditions that would fall under the umbrella of Protestant Christianity. And still others that would be considered more Pentecostal, or holiness in nature. And that’s just the broad strokes. Within those categories there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different and nuanced understandings about Jesus, the good news, and obviously just what it means to be church. But if you were looking for a good, concise mission statement for the body of Christ in the world, for the members of that body seeking to walk in the way of Jesus from Nazareth- who we trust as God’s anointed, the one Word of God we have to hear and obey, in life and in death, made flesh to dwell among us full of grace and truth- you couldn’t do much better than the first verse of our reading this morning from the biblical letter to the Hebrews. “Let mutual love continue.” Just four words, but they have a way of cutting through all of the noise created by the disputes and disagreements that separate us. “Let mutual love continue.” Which assumes a few things. First, that we have already, at some point, been practicing mutual love in some way, shape, or form. But are we? So, the words also hang in the air with a whiff of indictment. “Let mutual love continue.” You have been practicing mutual love, haven’t you? To which we might reply with a somewhat uncertain, “yes?” Our uncertainty stems from the second assumption, which is that the love we express and live is in some way mutual. That is, do we return the love extended to us, and is the love we ourselves extend returned. It isn’t always obvious
The history of Christian community is littered with lists of prescribed and proscribed behaviors. Do this, don’t do that. Those lists are often heavy with behaviors and habits deemed either beneficial or detrimental to one’s standing before God: prayer, church attendance, and bible reading on one hand; drinking, smoking, sex, usury just for starters on the other. But to commit one’s life to letting mutual love continue, what’s that look like? How, exactly, might we know if what we’re doing, how we’re living, qualifies? As if in answer to that question, the preacher of Hebrews, offers us some clear examples of a few things.
First on the list, and perhaps most vividly, is a directive offered in the form of a negative. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. Why not just say, be hospitable to strangers? Why frame it in the negative? Well, perhaps it has to do with the status quo. For sure there are plenty of people who don’t think twice about making an effort to welcome someone they don’t know, people who go out of their way when they see someone unfamiliar to show some form of kindness to that person. But it still tends to be the exception. And really, no one would fault anyone for keeping their head down and minding their own business when it comes to strangers. We give that kind of advice all the time. We caution our children away from strangers, and the habit sticks so that steering clear, or choosing not to engage a stranger is not only perfectly acceptable, there are times when it’s considered just good common sense. Unless you are in the business of mutual love. Unless you are seeking to continue a way of being in the world that God models for us. Just last week we sang that classic American hymn that served as the theme for this year’s Youth Triennium, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. Their theme came from the final verse, “here’s my heart; O take and seal it.” But in the second verse of that hymn we also sang, “Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God.” We acknowledge that we ourselves at some point are, or have been, strangers. So, to keep our heads down when there is a stranger in our midst, to look the other way or to build walls that turn strangers away is to neglect something fundamental to what it means as Christians to put our trust in God’s way of being in the world.
Hospitality is what we practice by opening our Christian Education building as home to A Child’s Garden preschool. Some of the children that attend the school come from our congregation in some way, but the vast majority of them do not. And while A Child’s Garden is a non-sectarian preschool, meaning we aren’t teaching those children religion, it is faith-based in the sense that the hospitality the school represents is an expression of the mutual love that Christians are called to continue in the world. That’s an easy one. But it is also what we have been practicing this past week, hosting our guests from Family Promise who have experienced homelessness. That can be a little more challenging because some of our guests have had things happen to them, or come from backgrounds that are completely foreign to us. They may have encountered substance abuse, or domestic abuse. They may have had run-ins with the law, or difficulty completing their education. Or they might simply have fallen victim to a catastrophic health crisis that’s left them destitute. To extend hospitality, to meet them where they are (even if it is in our own Westminster House) may mean venturing out of our own carefully constructed worlds. It may mean put ourselves not at physical risk, but at the kind of risk that threatens to re-shape the way we see the world and the assumptions we’ve made about it. Thought of in that way, we begin to understand then why the preacher of Hebrews brings up the image of sacrifice. The sacrifices offered on the altars of Israel, and our own understanding of Jesus’ execution as a form of sacrifice. Because if we continue to do it long enough, we discover that the practice of mutual love is a form of sacrifice. We offer ourselves, what we have, who we are for the wellbeing of another, whether that’s a young child and their family, or someone working to create some stability for themselves and their children. We set space and money aside for them. We spend our time getting to know them, preparing a meal, cleaning up, staying overnight.
For about two-and-a-half months this spring, we had they opportunity to extend hospitality even further. To venture out a little more from our protected and protective spaces. Through our partnership with Lutheran Family Services we were able to welcome families who had come from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador seeking asylum at our southern border. They were bused up here by Immigration Customs Enforcement to find their way to the homes sponsoring them in their asylum claim. On one occasion, a staff member from Lutheran Family Services brought her daughter to help out. The girl was shocked when the bus arrived. Perhaps she imagined they be brought up on a charter bus, or maybe a school bus. What she saw instead was a vehicle with bars on the windows, like a prison bus. And when the people got off those buses, you could see the disorientation on their faces. Where were they now? What next? The difficulty they had already been put through and the uncertainty of what lay ahead was visible. But as they were led into the fellowship hall of our church; as they were offered the first fresh fruit some of them had had in days, if not weeks; as they got they opportunity to make a bathroom stop with their children and see the smiling faces of the volunteers eager to welcome them; you could see their bodies relax. You could see them change in the presence of the mutual love that was being extended to them.
There’s a temptation to see such an effort as nothing more than do-goodery, the stuff of non-profits and non-government organizations the world over. In an attempt to avoid offending anyone with our faith and the claim it makes on our lives, we might chalk all that up to the kind of good works humans often engage in to make themselves feel better, to believe that they are doing good in the world. And while there’s merit to doing good in the world, we know the limitations of that kind of thinking, and the trap of self-righteousness that it too frequently creates. But the preacher of Hebrews frames such hospitality, such expressions of love differently. Because it is mutual love. That is, it goes both ways. We aren’t called to extend hospitality so that we can think of ourselves as good people. That isn’t the point at all. We are called to extend hospitality because, as the preacher of Hebrews reminds us, to do so is to encounter messengers of the divine among us. To do so is often to encounter emissaries of God that we fail to recognize at first because of how they come to us: with big emotions and diapers that need to be changed, or with the rough edges of life lived at the margins, or with a desperate desire to keep their families safe. To do so is the enter into what Jesus is talking about when he talks about the kingdom of God- a place where commitments are honored, where the love of money is seen for the soul danger that it is, where we cannot turn a blind eye when the buses stop coming, even though those seeking asylum haven’t, and we realize that when we hear that families are being detained with the prospect of release that what we’re effectively talking about is concentration camps. And the preacher of Hebrews reminds us that the sacrifice of mutual love we are called to continue includes remembering them as though we were the ones being held indefinitely. The sacrifice of mutual love that we are called to continue in Christ, who sacrificed himself for us that we might know what the depths of such love looks like, means paying attention to those who are being made to suffer, enduring conditions that amount to torture as though we ourselves were the ones being tortured: made to sleep on concrete floors, denied access to basic hygiene, subject to glaring lights at all hours of the day and night. To do so means sacrificing a measure of our own safety for the sake of the love we are called to continue. To do so means venturing out of our camps of like-mindedness and affinity to be a part of something much larger than ourselves and our own comfort.
In the end the sacrifices of mutual love that we are called to continue aren’t about advancing some notion of our own goodness, they are what it means to praise and worship God. To do good and to share what we have to give is how we acknowledge the goodness of God in our own lives and how we advance what it is that God wants for us and for our world. And it is how we ourselves experience what it means to be called God’s children, receiving the blessing that comes from the unlikeliest of people and places, even when we are completely unaware.