Hospitality
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
Looking back over my files this week as I prepared to write this sermon, I discovered that I have preached on the matter of hospitality twice before. As this is my third sermon on the topic in 19 months, one might surmise that it’s either something I think we haven’t gotten right, or that I’m just getting a bit too wooly headed to remember what’ I’ve already said to you. I’ll note right away that it is not the case that you all haven’t heard my message and that I need to say it again. Indeed, this is a very friendly congregation, welcoming to all who come, our members are ready with a quick smile and hand extended in friendship to those who enter our doors.
And, in fairness to myself, I’m not so wooly headed that I don’t know all of what I’ve said before, though I do admit to some amount of surprise when I discover that my brilliant ideas are often the same year upon year. Still, let it be said that this is a topic which will not be exhausted by three sermons, perhaps not even by a whole lifetime of sermons. Hospitality, as is the case with most important acts, is something that is practised, learned again and again, each time the lesson is given, a new insight can come.
Today I’d like to consider the idea of hospitality as a spiritual practice, a way of becoming in the world that can both nourish and challenge.
We think of hospitality mostly in the way that I already described it: making our guest feel welcome. We offer tea and biscuits, perhaps a little cake. We ask polite questions, find the little areas of conversation that we can agree to explore together. First the weather, then if that goes well, then we might move into our recent travels or how the garden fared over the summer. But taking on hospitality as a spiritual practice takes us somewhere else. Of course we still offer the tea and biscuits, still we begin with the weather. What changes is how we open ourselves to the other.
As our reading indicated today, the change is subtle.
I have spoken already about how this book I’ve quoted from has changed me. Some of you know that I used to work with homeless teens. My office was in a church building that was let during the days to serve as a daytime drop in centre for homeless men and women. Day on day, I would meet them in the hallway, a few would stop and say hello, and we became friends after a fashion. Jim always had a twinkle in his eye and a cheery word.
‘How’s business?’ he inquired one day.
‘Fine,’ I called back, ‘how’s business with you?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘business is picking up. Picking up cans, picking up bottles.’ He would turn the bottles and cans into a recycling centre to get a few meagre cents to help support his alcohol addiction that had driven him to the streets.
Upon leaving that work, I found that my heart hardened. I declined to give money to beggars on the street, making them disappear as I walked by. With an intensity of focus, I would not notice them.
A few months ago, I decided to include the few men who are sleeping rough here in Richmond in my community. One fellow in particular sits on the Thames pathway, and Claire and I see him some mornings with his hat set out before him, sometimes he has a small pot that he has made a fire under. Making tea, he is, there under the bridge. I look at him, now, put a few coins in his hat and say good morning. He is part of my community.
Last Sunday, a young man approached me as I stood on the platform at Clapham Junction, holding out a handful of change and talking about how he needed just 50 pence to get through the turnstile to get out of the station. He didn’t know he’d need it, he told me, he was just stuck in the station. I fumbled in my purse for a coin. He told me that people wouldn’t talk to him, that they ignored him or told him off. ‘Should I put my hood up or down?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean to be threatening,’ he went on, in a slurred, confused voice. I gave him the coin, and wished him well. He off wandered up the steps.
I find that my heart is opening again, opening to the stranger, the people I disregard, those who are like me.
‘Benedict’ it says in the book, ‘finds God in people.
You can’t ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you. In the tiresome, the invalid, the rebellious, we are faced with God. It is our own failures to love that we have to deal with when we talk of hospitality.
Hospitality cuts through the sham of our excuses. Benedict is a realist about loving. He knows love comes only through effort and practice. It is costly. It is fatiguing.'
Making that first choice to change, and to become more deeply hospitable does cost in our hearts, does cost in our time. But the rewards of choosing to be open to another are many.
There’s a story in the book that one of the authors tells. Her two year old daughter had cancer and was being treated. Week on week, the two of them went to a waiting room in the hospital where they sat with other families and children waiting for their chemo treatments. By some mysterious process, they learned the story of each child, of each family. As happens in this sort of place, they drifted to the same seats. On this one particular day, there are empty chairs, and all who enter know that another child has lost her or his battle against cancer.
I’m not the only young mother in the room. There’s one next to me with her son Matthew. Matthew is a year old. He’s very thin with sticks for arms and legs. He has the largest eyes you’ll ever see on a child. He’s bald. Most of the kids are bald. Chemo.
Across from Matthew is a teenaged girl, probably fourteen or fifteen. She, too, wears a stocking cap. Matthews is red, hers is navy blue. The girl has been there since before Angie and I started in the waiting room. She’s curled up in her chair in something like a foetal position. In any other place on the planet, people would be very concerned about what she is doing and how she looks. Here—well, here nothing is like anywhere else on the planet. She is with her aunt, because her single father won’t go into the hospital with her. It is too hard for him to bear, he says.
Matthew’s mother puts him on the floor. Show time. He pulls himself up to standing, using one of the orange plastic chairs to balance, and then he lets go and just stands there wobbling. He has our attention. When a child like Matthew does something as ordinary as take his first steps, it is good news in a place like this, a sign of hope. We cling to every crumb of hope.
The girl is watching. She doesn’t want you to notice, but she’s untangled those long, skinny arms and legs of hers and is slouched in the chair now, peering at the wobbling Matthew from under her stocking cap. Matthew’s sky-blue gaze fixes on the girl. He waves his arms and he’s off—walking, really walking, while his mother beams at this never-before-seen event.
He takes seven steps to the girl. I count them. He bumps into her bony knees, slaps his hands down on her legs, and looks up at her with a great big grin and grunt of triumph. Magic. Her face is changing, transforming into a smile that reaches her young eyes and makes her pretty again. She speaks. Another first.
‘Can I hold him?’ she asks the mother.
‘Sure.’
She scoops up the baby into her arms. ‘Well, Mr Matthew, aren’t you something!’ she says softly and snuggles him tight to her caved-in chest. He relaxes against her, tucks his head under her chin, and spreads his arms wide enough around her shoulders. He takes a deep breath and exhales. He goes limp. The sit there like that, the two of them. It’s hard to tell who is holding who.
Finally, this is what is true about being hospitable.
* We are, each and all, living on a the terminal ward. None of us will get out of here alive.
* We, each and all, when we are attentive enough to notice, cling to all the crumbs of hope that come our way, the glory of a morning, the pleasure of beloved companions, the blessing of silent awe, the step of a baby, the smile of a friend, the relief of a word of love spoken without reservation.
* We are each and all of us, the lost and the found, the broken and the healed, the one who sits with the dying and the one who is dying, too.
As we are able to open to each other, to those who share this glorious human condition with us, we will grow in wisdom and in compassion, we will strengthen the bonds of this worldwide family of which we are a part. And each little bit, each new awareness, each movement of compassion in our hearts, each time we feel those bonds between us and this world that is our home and family, the universe leans a bit more toward wholeness, toward peace, toward the embodiment of love that embraces and overwhelms all.
May it be so with us that we are makers of that love, in the small moments every day.