Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time September 18, 2016

Heb. 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14

© Copyright 2016 Rev. Rona Kinsley

A Welcoming Congregation

If today’s scripture readings sound somewhat familiar, it’s because you heard them three weeks ago, on the Sunday when you had the hymn sing. I chose to go back to these readings, because they relate to something we talked about in our Deacons meeting this week. How do we reach out to, and welcome, newcomers to Greensboro and others who might like to become a part of this church community?

We’ve all heard stories about the funny things kids say when they misunderstand something they’ve heard. I once heard a story about a little girl who had gone to church with a friend. When her parents asked her about the service, she said that the minister had talked about angels in their underwear. Her astonished parents consulted the friend’s parents and found out that the minister had preached on our reading from Hebrew’s, which, in the King James Version of the Bible, cautions, Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

There is something rather wonderful about the image of angels in their underwear. If we are at all nervous about entertaining strangers, how much more frightening it would be to entertain angels! It makes them a lot less scary to imagine that, under their dazzling, awe-inspiring garments, angels might just be wearing the heavenly equivalent of Jockeys or Fruit-of-the-Looms.

The instruction to entertain strangers is one of a list of desirable Christian behaviors which concludes the letter to the Hebrews. When the author of this letter wrote, Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it, his audience would have understood that he was referring to stories in Scripture, like those of Abraham and Sarah, Lot, and Manoah. In each of these stories, someone received a blessing because they showed hospitality to a stranger, who, in fact, turned out to be an angel. If they had neglected to show hospitality, the opportunity to receive a blessing would have been lost.

The instruction to show hospitality to strangers is a challenging one for me. Because I’m an introvert, it pushes me right to the edge of my comfort zone. Perhaps it pushes you, too. But the author of Hebrews isn’t just, or even primarily, speaking to individuals, he’s speaking to Christians in community. As a community, we are called to show hospitality to strangers. In his book, Wonderful Worship in Smaller Churches, UCC pastor and small church expert, David Ray, describes his experience of attending worship in two different churches in California:

Several years ago, I came to California from New England to visit my mother who was hospitalized. I decided to worship at both her Baptist church and the UCC church in her community. I showered, shaved, put on a coat and tie, and looked presentable. Then I went to the early service at one church and the later service at the other. There was little or no greeting at either church when I arrived. At both, I sat in the middle of the congregation. No one sat near me. After worship, I joined the procession out past the clergy. People chatted all around me, but no one greeted me or engaged me in conversation. In each church the pastor greeted me briefly (which doesn’t count because they’re paid to do that). I went to both coffee hours, stood by myself drinking my lonely cup of coffee until I could stand it no longer and fled. Why would I ever return to either church? Yet those churches would claim they are each a friendly church. 

Ray’s story invites us to ask ourselves, “How good are we at showing hospitality to strangers?” I’m going to read a list of questions about practices that have been shown by research to help strangers feel more welcomed and “invited” to be a part of a church community. Thinking in terms of “What’s good?” and “What could be better?,” how would you rate this church on these welcoming behaviors?

Do we introduce ourselves to newcomers and ask their names?
Do we invite them to share our pew, or sit with them if we see that they are sitting alone?
If there are children, do we let parents know how much we enjoy having little ones in worship?
Is our order of worship easy to follow, with enough explanation so that a newcomer doesn’t feel lost?
Do we make a point of asking them to join us for coffee and conversation, and do we escort them to Fellowship Hall and help them to meet people?
Do we ask them to fill out a pew card with their address and phone number?
Do we follow up with a visit, perhaps delivering a freshly baked loaf of bread or a plate of cookies?
And perhaps, most of all, do we, ourselves, have enthusiasm for our life together in Christ?
Do we demonstrate through our words and actions that this congregation is a joyous place to be?

 

You may be doing well on many of these questions, but if you really want to grow your congregation, you may need to become even more intentional about this business of showing hospitality to strangers. It’s also important for “welcoming” to be a commitment that is adopted by the whole congregation, rather than delegating it to the greeters or to the one or two outgoing people who regularly make a point of speaking to newcomers. No matter how welcoming your greeters may be, it only takes one or two unwelcoming people to make a church feel unfriendly.

Back in the mid-nineties, when I was in seminary, I came to a worship service here with a friend who knew Leslie Simonson. We enjoyed the service, but on our way out we had to thread our way through a group of men and women who had gathered on the front steps. It was a glorious summer day, and we smiled, and said hello, and made some generic comment about the lovely weather. Well! The temperature abruptly dropped about fifty degrees. We found ourselves on the receiving end of a collective icy stare that said very clearly, “I don’t think we know you.”

We skulked away with our tails between our legs, feeling, as David Ray did, Why would we ever want to return?

Now, I’m sure the greeters that day did a perfectly fine job of greeting, and that someone might have come and talked with us, if we had gone to coffee hour. But our doorstep experience indicated that welcoming the stranger was not a value owned and practiced by whole congregation. Along with making the welcoming of strangers a whole-congregation value, we may need to go even further and reach out to strangers, going beyond our comfort zones, as our gospel story challenges us to do. Jesus tells us, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

I can’t emphasize too much that numerous studies have shown that personal invitation by church members is the single most effective way to attract new worshippers to a congregation. One of these studies also found that every single person, who accepted the invitation to worship, had experienced some major crisis or transformation, in their lives, in the previous two years. There are people out there who need this church, who ache to hear God’s word of love and forgiveness, who hunger to be fed at Christ’s table, who want to learn how to walk as Christ’s disciples, who long for the loving embrace of Christian community. Who do we know who is hurting, in any of the many ways we can hurt? Who might God be calling us to invite without any expectation of return?

Jesus tells us that when we extend hospitality to our friends, our immediate family, our extended family, and our desirable neighbors, we get rewarded, in the here and now, because they invite us in return. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be reaching out to our friends and neighbors, but it is important that we invite them because we have something here that we want to share, not because the church needs more warm bodies to fill its pews and its committees. In other words, not because of what they will give us in return. And if we want to practice kingdom hospitality, the kind of hospitality Jesus practices, we should also invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind— the very people who can’t return our hospitality.

The reward for practicing kingdom hospitality, Jesus tells us, is the blessing that comes when we take our place at God’s heavenly banquet. But I think that there is also a here-and-now blessing, that comes when we show hospitality to strangers and invite those who may be outside our comfort zone. Because we never know when we might be entertaining angels unawares. How many of us have had the experience of having a conversation with a stranger who gave us the blessing of some new and interesting perspective on life? And how often have we found that those who struggle with difficult challenges— the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind — have much to teach us about courage, about gratitude, about faith and trust in God? And how much might we be enriched, as a church community, if we made it even more of a point to practice hospitality toward strangers?

I’d like to close by sharing a story about the blessings we can both give and receive, when we show hospitality to strangers. A few years ago, a friend of mine spent a month in Jamaica with a Jamaican woman she had befriended here in the United States. One day, during her visit, my friend, Bonnie, decided that she just had to get out on her own. She was in Kingston, and she wanted to go to the National Gallery.

Bonnie took a cab and went to the crafts market first, and then looked at a map and noted that the gallery was just a few blocks away. She started to walk to the gallery, having a general idea of where it was, but she couldn’t figure out which building it was in. And she was a little nervous, an American woman walking in an unfamiliar area by herself.

Bonnie stopped and asked a sweet-looking elderly Jamaican woman, in a faded but pressed flowered dress, if she knew where the national gallery was. The woman responded, “What’s that — I never knew it existed.” Bonnie filled her in, and the woman stopped a taxi in the middle of the street, and asked if they knew which building the National Gallery was in. The six people in the cab all tried to tell them, all speaking at once.

When they finally understood, the woman offered to walk my friend over to the gallery. Bonnie invited the woman to join her and paid the minimal fee for her to get in. It was clear that the Jamaican woman, Clementina, had never been in any kind of museum before. They spent a

lovely afternoon together. Clementina had Bonnie read all the information tags. (Bonnie wondered if she could read.) Clementina filled her in on all the culture, plant life, and faces that were reflected in the artwork, and Bonnie filled her in on the artists, dates, and media. In Bonnie’s words, “It was way cool.”

 

Bonnie and Clementina both showed hospitality to a stranger, that afternoon, and both received a blessing because of it. And perhaps they each ended up feeling that they had entertained an angel unawares. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers . . . If we do this well, we might be blessed in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.

Amen.