“from outsider to belonging at the table. . .”
Every person on this earth has once, at least, been a stranger. In church communities, it can be difficult to figure out just what visitors, strangers at first, need on their first encounter with a new congregation. There are countless books, seminars, websites, commentary, etc on how to welcome the stranger, on how to change one’s thinking to better accomodate new faces.
But sometimes, what matters is a little, seemingly insignificant thing. Like a cup of coffee and a smile. Rev. Erika Hewitt, serving the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Goleta, California, preached on this very subject a few weeks back.
For consideration: What do you expect from the first time you walk in to a church community? What steps does your congregation take to welcome visitors, and are they effective? How does your faith call you to practice hospitality?
Hospitality: Not Just a Cup of Coffee
by the Rev. Erika Hewitt
The Universe tested me a few weeks ago.
I didn’t know that the Universe was testing me until it was all over – it’s not like a man in an “Official of the Universe” uniform approached me with a clipboard and a number 2 pencil.
It’s just that I found myself – in that mysterious, wily way that we all find ourselves, from time to time – at the butt of a giant but gentle joke that no one but God herself could have orchestrated. And by “God,” I don’t mean that man-with-a-clipboard-in-the-sky; I mean the wise, twinkly-eyed Auntie who chuckles us into good spirits and knows how to bonk us over the head in the most loving, nurturing ways when we need it most. That’s the God who set up this test, I’m pretty sure, the subject of which was hospitality, and which I passed, I’m absolutely sure, but not with flying colors.
If the Universe is keeping track on a clipboard somewhere, I think I probably earned a B+ on the test. But I’d like you to be the judge, and give me a grade yourself.
the testI had known for a couple of months that my sermon this morning would be about hospitality – what it means, what it requires of us, and how we find ways to practice it. I’d been jotting down notes, doing a little research into other cultures, and gathering stories to tell you about hospitality. But the Universe was trailing along in my blind spot, as usual, a few Sunday nights ago when I was midway through my Sunday Night Ritual.
That ritual goes something like this: I take a little rest in the afternoon, then go for a long, rambly walk at dusk to stoke my inner life. When I get home, I put on my fuzziest socks and then Gordon and I make crepes – because they’re so easy to make, and so much fun, and also because they’re a good vehicle for sugar – and then we have a little Quality Time together, usually with a DVD.
On this particular Sunday night, I returned from my walk to an empty house, vaguely remembering that Gordon had planned to see some new friends of his: two Europeans he had met only the week before, up in the Bay Area, who were passing through town. Both adventurous twenty-somethings, Martin and Adreana were on a short break from their internship and wanted to see the rest of California. As I started making the crepes, I knew that Gordon was taking them to the motel that he’d found for them. He’d be home soon, and I’d get to bask in the peaceful perfection of a mini-Sabbath at home.
Then the phone rang. It was Gordon, in the car with Martin and Adreana, en route to the motel, as planned. But they were so excited to be in Southern California for the first time, he explained, and so full of plans, but so short on language skills and maps. It seemed a sad ending for Gordon to simply drop them off at the motel, leaving them in a strange city at eight o’clock at night. Should he bring them over to our house?
Cue the Universe starting to chuckle, “Heh heh heh…”
the roots of hospitality
I wish that our word “hospitality” had been more strongly influenced by Greek, because the word in the New Testament that translates as “hospitality” is philoxenia, “a love of strangers” (see www.intelligentchristian.org/hospitality.htm) – a linguistic mandate, to my ears. (Imagine if we talked about “guestophilia” instead of “hospitality.”)
In fact, it’s from the Latin that our word derives. Latin has a number of “two-way” words, which “define both the relationship you have to others, and also the relationship they have to you.” (See http://proverbs.bestlatin.net/audioproverb/) The word hospes is one of them: it means both “host” and “guest.” Since etymological wires get crossed all the time, it’s no surprise that the Latin word hostis meant “stranger;” over time, hostis developed the negative connotation of “enemy.” (You can hear this root in our word “hostile,” but also in the word “host,” someone who receives strangers.)
Hospitality, then, is about the relationship between strangers and their hosts, (a paraphrase of Anthony Gittins, in Ministry at the Margins, p. 123-4) and whether those hosts invite the strangers to become guests. Observes one theologian, [Dr. Cathy Ross]:
To be a stranger is to feel out of place, to be unsure, to experience dislocation. To be a stranger is to feel vulnerable, to make mistakes, to be dependent, to have needs. To be a stranger is to lose control. To be a stranger is to be ‘other.’ To be a stranger is to need a host – but on whose terms?
All of you have lived the experience of being a stranger: of negotiating your relationship as stranger to host, whether that host was an individual, a family, an institution, or an entire country.
Think back to being that out-of-place stranger. It could have been at a dinner party in town, or at a festival halfway around the world. Do you remember the vulnerability of being “other”? Do you remember the bewildering knots of unstated and invisible rules? Of course you do. And some of you remember, painfully, how easily and unwittingly you committed a cultural faux pas. For my part, I’ll never forget how angry I made my European hosts –- on a long-ago trip -– when I poured myself a glass of wine. In their culture, women don’t do that. How was I to know? Strangers often don’t know where hosts set the terms of hospitality until they’ve blundered past them.
Remember, too, then, the times when, as an outsider, your transgressions were overlooked, or forgiven, or plainly ignored. Remember those times when you were wrapped in courtesy and grace, and treated as a valued
guest, shifting you from dislocation into connection; from outsider to belonging at the table. Inclusivity and fellowship, not boundaries, are what we human beings crave, and are worthy of.I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you cared for me. I was in prison and you visited me.” So said the rabbi from Nazareth to his disciples. But they didn’t understand. “When did we see you needy and do those things?” they asked. And he replied, “Just as you did it for one of the least among my sisters and brothers, you did it for me. (Matthew 25:31-40)
On the other end of the phone, Gordon was saying, “It seems wrong to just drop them off at the motel…Should I bring them home?
In her poem, [“Red Brocade”,] Naomi Shihab Nye writes:
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.Well, good for Naomi, but I was making preparations on that Sunday night: preparations to go inward, to catch my breath and restore myself for another week – not preparing to cook for strangers.
Her poem continues:
That’s the armor everyone put[s]
to pretend they ha[ve] a purpose
in the world.
I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.symbols of hospitality
In Nye’s poem, a cup of hot tea with fresh mint is more than just a cup of tea –- just as the tea in a Japanese ceremony and in a British home are more than something to quench thirst: in all of these settings, a cup of tea is a powerful symbolic gesture of welcome.
But it doesn’t have to be tea; depending on the setting, there are many other symbols of hospitality that catalyze the transformation from “stranger” to “guest.” Names are one of them. Earlier this week, Susan Clarke and I were chatting and stumbled onto the subject of names: remembering names, forgetting names, spelling them correctly. (Susan gave me permission, by the way, to share this story with you.) Susan’s vocation and ministry in life is nursing, and she told me that she makes a special effort to learn the names of her patients –- and to call her patients by name. It’s a sign of her esteem and respect that Susan learns these names, making her patients feel more human in the alien territory of (yes!) the hospital.
As symbols of hospitality go, Kleenex are also significant. Sometimes people walk into my office and say, “I’m so glad you have a box of Kleenex here, because I know I can cry.” Therapists, counselors, ministers, and other caretakers know that a box of tissues isn’t just a box of tissues (which is why we have so many here in our Fellowship Hall): it says, “You’re welcome here. Every part of you is welcome here, even the parts that are broken and need to be stitched back together.” Kleenex are an invitation to take off your public mask and, without shame, wrestle with what’s underneath.
One of the prevailing symbols of hospitality at Live Oak is coffee.
Sometimes, Freud said famously, a cigar is just a cigar. But in congregations, a cup of coffee after the service isn’t “just a cup of coffee.” Our precious half-hour of social time after the service does more than just wake people up after one of my sermons –- it’s a vehicle for conversation, a matrix for connection, for getting to know one another in ways that can’t happen in worship.
In talking to Pat Johnson about our coffee hour (Pat is the Live Oak member who coordinates our Sunday morning hospitality) we discovered that both of us still cherish our childhood memories of wandering around coffee hour at church when we were young. We were both imprinted by our childhood churches, I believe –- our young hearts opening like flowers to the warmth and spirit of community surrounding us in that familiar, family-like crowd. We both learned from a young age –- and maybe you did, too –- that the purpose of coffee hour is to create bonds between people, and to offer a cozy welcome to guests who hunger for our company. The coffee is beside the point.
That’s why, I confess, I feel unsettled to hear that Pat has a hard time finding volunteers to set up or clean up coffee hour on Sundays. People don’t seem to view this precious ritual as the ministry that it is. I think there’s a misconception that we serve coffee to save people money at Starbucks, rather than creating a collective expression of hospitality to strangers and friends alike.
Again, the words of Naomi Shihab Nye:
The Arabs used to say,
when a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.How well are we doing at creating an atmosphere of welcome and caring? And how long could each of us recite the litany of reasons that we can’t provide hospitality to others, that we don’t have time?
If to be a stranger is to be vulnerable and outside of one’s comfort zone, then to be a host calls for the same. I believe that providing hospitality requires us to brew tea, yes, to learn names, to put out the Kleenex, to serve coffee, to make others feel welcome. But we’re also called, I believe, to respond to the vulnerability of the stranger by tapping into our own: to meet the stranger by stepping beyond our own comfort level. That’s radical hospitality.
the test, revisited
Gordon was still waiting on the other end of the phone, waiting to see if I’d be willing to give up our night together. “Honey? What do you think?” In an instant, I saw the simple, quiet evening I’d prepared for connecting to myself and my partner…and that vision dissolved into memories of the countless times I’ve been a stranger in strange territory, taken in and cared for by a host.
Which choice would reflect my values, and my gratitude for all that I have received from hosts? Which would reflect my own self-interests? Do I want to be a person who sees, in the “other,” strangers or guests?
“Bring ‘em home,” I said into the phone. “We’ll find more food somewhere.”
Minutes later, Gordon and I set two more chairs around the table for our young visitors, one from Austria and one from Spain. We pulled cold chicken from the fridge to supplement our small stack of crepes. We gave them our road maps and a handful of computer print-outs for their road trip to Disneyland and the Grand Canyon. We learned a few new words in each others’ languages, and made some new friends.
We gave up the night we had imagined for ourselves, and became hosts. Not without some inward grumbling and hesitation on my part, as you’ve heard –- which is why there’s a B+, not an A, on my report card in the sky. But our table was set, and the guests invited to sit around it, and that’s what mattered.
Days after I had passed this little test of hospitality (“Can she practice what she preaches?”), the Universe sent me a message just to get one last dig in. She was still chuckling, I imagine, lovingly shaking her head at how stubborn we, her sweet children, can be.
The message was a quote that I stumbled on, from Don Skinner, Chaplain Emeritus at Allegheny College, [in A Passage through Sacred History]:
“The scope of who it is that God means to invite to the feast, you see, is not ours to define. We are not put in charge of the guest list.”
The scope of who it is that God means to invite to the feast…is not ours to define.
We are not put in charge of the guest list. We are merely in charge of putting the feast on the table, and pulling up as many chairs as necessary, making of every stranger a guest.
It is so, my friends, and so shall it be.
Source: “Hospitality: Not Just a Cup of Coffee” by the Rev. Erika Hewitt, serving the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Goleta, California, presented November 18, 2007. Used with permission.
Tags: community, connection, Erika Hewitt, radical hospitality, welcoming
