Practice Hospitality

Practice Hospitality

Romans 12:13

Most of us don’t have much experience of being a stranger or being in need or being vulnearable.  Try this thought experiment, though.  It’s time to go to the doctor.  You check in.  You pay your co-pay. They check your insurance.  You sit down and wait.  Your name is called.  You’re led down a hallway to a small room.  You are weighed and measured.  You are given a paper gown that fits no one and left to sit on crunchy paper—just to increase your discomfort. Could you feel any less welcomed or any more vulnerable.

The doctor knocks and walks in.  If you have a good doctor, you are asked, “How are you?  How are you feeling?  Any complaints?”  Then, your blood pressure, ears, eyes, throat and lungs are all checked.  Any past concerns are revisited.  If you had bloodwork done, results of those tests are reviewed. “How are you sleeping?” “How is work going for you—remind me again what do you do?”

This is all really familiar, right?  If you’re in for a physical exam and generally feel good, some issue that you might not have been aware of might get raised:  “I don’t like what I hear;” or “I’m concerned about this test result.”  Then, you follow up with a test or two for greater understanding.  Mostly, though, if you felt good coming in, you’ll feel pretty good going out, except for maybe some lifestyle adjustment your doctor wants you to make.  Even if you’re sick, most of the time, your illness will be familiar—a sinus infection, a strep infection—and you will be given a prescription and in a couple of weeks, you’ll feel better.  The vulnerability disappears.

The system is built to work smoothly with most people.  The vast majority of the time, it works well.  Then, one day, it doesn’t.  You present with a vague symptom:  a headache; a stomach ache; just “feeling off.”  The doctor thinks to herself, “Well, that certainly narrows things down, right?”  Or, your bloodwork isn’t that off but it shouldn’t really be off the way it is.  There is not an easy answer.  You are now a unicorn.  This system is not built for unicorns.  Unicorns get sent to other doctors.

In the best of all possible worlds, instead of being annoyed with what you’re presenting, your doctor is intrigued:  “I haven’t seen this before.”  In the worst of all possible worlds, the doctor dismisses your complaints.  Maybe they don’t have time to puzzle things out becasue they are getting pressured to see so many patients.  Of course, there’s always the chance that your symptoms are temporary and will dissipate on their own.  Still, what if this is a missed opportunity to address what’s going on?  What if the issue will be way more difficult to manage next time?

All of this is a challenge.  Imagine, though, that instead of being socially skilled the way you are—a patient any doctor would love to have—you’re awkward or you’re mentally ill or you’re really limited verbally.  Imagine that you’re elderly and well trained to never challenge a doctor.  Imagine that you’re of a different race or religion or you happen to be gay and your doctor turns out to be prejudiced.  Imagine that you’re poor and all you can think about is how much this visit and any future testing is going to cost you.

Medicine works a certain way because is works for the greatest number of people.  The process catches most issues.  The structure has even been tweeked to account for some biases.  People work hard to make it work the best that it can.  Still…the sytem works best for the people who fit the system who have illnesses that the system is designed to detect and treat. If you are a different kind of person or have a different kind of medical challenge, there may not be a place for you. You may not be welcomed.  

Of course, the best thing that you can have going for you on the day that you become a unicorn is…a long term relationship with your doctor.  If you and your doctor know each other, you’re not just any person passing through the office.  They remember you and ask, “Hey, how is your dog?  You still walking?” And you are connected to them:  “Doc, I remember you were picking out a new oven.  What’d you choose?” In a world of good science but little hospitality, a personal relationship may be what leads your doctor to stick with you and walk with you down your unicorn path.

Really, think about how many moments in life depend on relationships and connection:  the successful visit to the d.m.v.; a decent experience buying a car; a call to some help line—any help line—that is actually helpful.  Wherever you go, whatever you are doing, there will be a moment when you can either be treated as an problem or treated as a human being.  You get to choose whether to be decent to the person in front of you, too.  Everyone has needs.  Mostly, everyone needs to just get through “this,” whatever “this” may be.  Can we be respectful and get that done?

In the most basic sense, to me, this connection, this relationship, this willingness to see the person in front of you as an actual human being is called hospitality.  It is all the ways, large and small, in which we communicate to the person in front of us that they matter:  “If I can help you, I will help you. Even if I can’t help you as much as I’d like or as much as you’d like, I do care.” The truth is that in the ebb and flow of daily life, we actually have to welcome the chance to be welcoming—to practice hospitality. Every signal may suggest that I don’t have to care about that person.  The challenge is to fight off those temptations and care.

The miracle of lived hospitality is deeply spiritual and profoundly meaningful.  Hospitality is the precondition for almost any thing else that’s good that might happen.  Before we can ever learn to love one another, we have to accept one another, respect one another, and care for one another.  You can’t treat someone as less than a person and claim to be a person of faith. You have to overcome your prejudices.  You have to be willing to risk being judged for being kind.  You have to learn to care for people no matter what else is going on.  You’ll know that you’re actually being hospitable when you are inconvenienced, when things feel uncomfortable, when caring requires real effort. 

Plain and simple—I think the core value that Jesus lived was hospitality.  For three years, he went on the hunt for unicorns—blind people and deaf people and sick people and poor people and women and foreigners and everyone else who didn’t fit the norms of his day as people worth caring about.  Jesus sought out the overlooked and the ingnored and he cared for them—whatever it takes, however many times it takes.  This angered the people who did fit the norms.  It especially angered the people who created the norms.  In the end, this cost him his life—telling people who had never mattered that they mattered and showing them how much he cared.

Jesus did this while he was on the move.  It wasn’t that people got to build a twenty year relationship with him.  He wasn’t the doctor that we’ve gone to forever.  No, Jesus showed up, recognized the needs of those before him and did what he could.  People had to make a choice.  “He seems like he cares. Do I trust him?  Should I follow him?” Almost all human beings struggle with such choices.

Consider the disciples.  Jesus pretty much blindsided them:  “Follow me!”  To their everlasting credit, they did.  Then, though, the real stuggle began:  are we special because he called us; what was it that made us so special; which one of us is most special? The problem is that Jesus’ hospitality, it turns out, is a lot more about who Jesus is than it is about who they are. Of course, this means that Jesus’ hospitality is a gift, not a transaction.  We don’t size someone up and decide they deserve to be treated decently. We just are hospitable, welcoming caring people, no matter who the other person turns out to be.

In other words, we’re not hospitable in order to win friends and influence people.  We’re welcoming, caring people because that’s who we are:  “I’m present;  I’m paying attention; how can I help?” When we live this way, we show people not only who we are but who’s we are, too.

So far, we’ve just been looking at hospitality as an individual way of being in the world—how I’m going to strive to treat people, no matter where I go.  Here’s the thing:  the central challenge for the church is to be a welcoming, caring community—to be a group of people who create an “oasis” of hospitality in this transactional, “what’s in it for me” world.  No matter what you look like, no matter who you love, no matter what you think or what your background is, whether you make us comfortable or uncomfortable, you are welcome here.  

Here’s the real kicker:  as soon as we sit limits on that hospitality and make someone else’s acceptance conditional, we cease to be the church.  This is not a new member strategy or a plan for church growth.  This is the very heart of what it means to be a community of faith that follows Christ.  How could we ever follow someone who loved unconditionally, who cared universally, who invited everyone to follow him and think our job is to exclude people? The church has to be the place where unicorns gather or it is not the church.

This is the tension within which we live as a faith community.  For many of us, this community has been a part of our lives for decades.  We have “our pew” in which we sit.  We have our favorite hymns.  We have the comfort of doing things in familiar ways. We do those things with people who know us, people we know well. .  Those relationships are a gift from God.  There’s joy in life together.

Yet, what keeps us alive and awake and aware and not just comforted are the ways that we welcome the people who are new and invite even more people in.  This may mean that someone might sit in our pew.  (I remember how angry Lavergne Wesselhoeft got the day that the bagpiper’s wife sat in her spot!) This means that we might have to sing a new hymn or do something really different in worship.  This means we might have to go out of our way to welcome the new person and discover what it really means to practice hospitality.   

Before we can be loving, in our individual lives and in our life together as a church, we have to remind ourselves that everything depends on practicing hospitality first.  How we treat people from the start will shape everything that follows.  Remember Paul’s words:  “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.”