NEWS ITEM: "Record numbers of migrants are dying in the Mediterranean this year, amid the largest wave of mass-migration since the second world war. So far in 2015, nearly a thousand asylum seekers have drowned, including 450 this week in at least three separate incidents. That puts the death toll at around 20 times higher than the equivalent figure in 2014, which was itself a record year."
Someone recently forwarded to me an email that contained a diatribe written six years ago by a professor at Michigan State University to its Muslim Students Association. The Association was objecting to those Danish cartoons that satired the Prophet Mohammad. Citing attitudes and behaviors of only the most extreme members of the Islamic faith as though they characterized all Muslims, the professor hoped the Muslim students would choose to leave the United States and go back home. The Council on American Islamic Relations got involved and asked the University to censure the professor, which it declined to do. There is a lot more to the story . . . which the email omitted so as to make its outrage even more vivid. The guy who sent it approved of the professor's sentiments and urged me to pass the email along. Not wanting to do my part to keep this unfortunate dust-up of 2006 current in anyone's consciousness, I passed it along to my email program's trash bin.
Whatever happened to "hospitality?"
Hospitality may be the most central idea in the Christian faith tradition. The word comes from roots that can mean stranger, enemy, host and power. Specifically, hospitality can be seen as the application of power to equalize the status of the stranger/enemy with that of the host. Thus, to show hospitality to another is to treat that person as one of the family . . . and a good family at that. Mi casa es su casa. In some understandings of the concept, when hospitality is shown three things occur:
the inequality in status between host and guest is equalized;
protection and the meeting of immediate needs is given; and,
guidance for the furtherance of the guest's journey is offered.
The meaning of the Incarnation, according to a hymn written by Geoffrey Ainger and Ian Calvert in the 1970s, is that "God has made our homelessness His home." In that act, however one wishes to think about the particularities and the "mechanics" of it, God shows humanity hospitality by bridging the gulf betwen the divine and the human, making the relationship between the two one of equality born of divine empathy and compassion. God makes our homelessness God's home! Equality . . . created by the power of God's own initiative as the host moving toward us, the strangers/enemies/guests.
When Jesus matured, what he said was the same as what he did: he met people with his compassion at the point of their needs. He taught and demonstrated what our deepest needs really are and provided resources to satisfy them. As for guidance for the next steps of our journey, he said "Follow me and you will do greater things than I. Furthermore even the Spirit of truth shall go with you."
For Christians, following Jesus is what it's all about. But how does that look in practice? What does it mean for us to follow Jesus in practicing hospitality in our own time and place? What does it mean when we encounter those who are religiously, ethnically, or racially different than we are? What does hospitality mean when it comes to the migrant workers who pick our crops . . . or the workers who landscape private and public spaces? What does it mean to practice hospitality to those caught in a thicket of absurd and hypocritical immigration laws and practices? What does the practice of hospitality look like between neighbors and friends who see important issues so very differently? What might it mean for spouses to intentionally extend hospitality to each other?
This Sunday, or some Sunday soon, the priest or pastor will offer us the communion bread . . . called the "Host" in some traditions . . . saying "Take and eat: this is Christ's body broken for you." And we will consume it: a thin wafer that is a symbol of a symbol of a symbol . . . or a piece of challah . . . or a torn piece of pita. And we will follow it with a sip of wine from a common cup or the smallest of shot glasses . . . or it will be grape juice in similar vessels.
What does it mean to take this Host into our own bodies if not that we will . . . with our souls and bodies . . . become that Host . . . the risen body of Christ who shows hospitality to others? And especially to the marginalized, the forgotten, the outcast . . . people who may even be members of our own household or extended family . . . people exiled by the long-held resentments of fellow family members. All these are examples of those very persons who, in a very un-hostess-like manner, the late hotel entrepreneur Leona Helmsley once dismissed contemptuously as "the little people."
God has shown us hospitality by making our homelessness God's home. Jesus' call is for Christians to do likewise. I'm trying to figure out what the practice of hospitality might look like in my life. What might it look like in yours?
A Satire of the Church,
Theology, and American Culture
Through the Lens of Progressive Christianity
