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For my brothers and sisters in Baptist churches kicking out Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts from their oh-so-very-holy spaces, I have one word for you: HOSPITALITY.
Hospitality isn’t just a church committee serving sandwiches and cookies after worship. It is a spiritual practice with deep roots in Judeo-Christian tradition. For you fundamentalist, law-loving, quoters of Old Testament “homosexuality” passages, hospitality is written into Jewish law. Deuteronomy 10:19 says, “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Unlike the passages on homosexuality, this law is in the same section with the Shema, right after the command to circumcise, both of which are integral to Jewish identity. Showing love to the stranger comes from who Israel is and claims to be as chosen of God.
In case you are wondering how far God expected them to take “loving the stranger,” check out Leviticus 19:34, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
If you obey this OT passage like you obey the command that disallows lobster (Leviticus 11:10-11), the New Testament is even clearer on hospitality.
- Romans 12:13: “Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.”
- Hebrews 13:1, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
- Jesus’ parables: The Sheep & Goats (Matthew 25:31-46), The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), The Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1-14).
In the two thousand years after the Jesus event, hospitality became a bedrock in nearly every Christian religious order, including the Rule of St. Benedict, 53rd chapter, and the Carmelite Constitution (1995) n. 36.
For you “love the sinner, hate the sin” kind of Christians, let me remind you what love looks like. Love looks like welcome. It looks like hands-on care. It looks like kindness without expectation of return. You cannot love people and at the same time keep them at arms’ length. Love requires vulnerability and openness. Love gets messy and isn’t always comfortable. Love can only manifest in relationship.
Love does not and will never look like exclusion.
I know that we disagree on homosexuality. I used to be Baptist, I know where you are coming from. I’m not trying to change your mind, because that would be an exercise in futility. However, our differences in doctrine should not matter. Hospitality is incumbent on us both no matter where we stand on the issues. Why?
Because “love trumps doctrine, every time,” (Vincent Harding.)
This is the premiere teaching of Jesus and why they crucified him. Jesus touched the unclean against conventional doctrine, because he loved the unclean. Jesus partied with tax collectors and prostitutes against pharisaical regulations, because he loved the tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus healed Gentiles and crazy people and the ungrateful against the wishes of nearly everyone around him because he loved Gentiles, crazy people, and the ungrateful masses. That love challenges us to this day.
Doctrine is helpful for creating handbooks for newcomers, but when it comes to dealing with the messiness of relationships and the desperate needs of humanity, love is the only guide. Not that “love the sinner, hate the sin” kind of love, but the real stuff that welcomes, includes, nourishes, and heals. Doctrine never got dirty, but it also never healed or changed anyone. Only love can do that.
I’m not suggesting that gay boys need to be healed or changed – quite the opposite, in fact. It’s the church that needs to heal and to change. If you let the Scouts into your church, you fear that you be seen as approving a sexual orientation that you believe is wrong. But you’ve got it backwards. Jesus already loves those boys. God made them just right. They don’t need anything from you. And if you don’t provide a space, they’ll find another church or synagogue or temple that welcomes them in with open arms.
The practice of hospitality isn’t for their benefit – it’s for yours.
What makes hospitality so dangerous isn’t so much a physical threat of violence from a stranger or becoming a pariah to your peers. Hospitality is a threat because it will change your very soul. You can’t help but change by loving someone different from you, it’s inherent in the act of loving. As Henri J. M. Nouwen says in Ministry and Spirituality, “Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.”
Hospitality, like forgiveness and generosity, doesn’t benefit others only. That’s not the full intent. It’s for you. The door you open will change you. The people you welcome will open you to unfamiliar situations and pain and unbelievable confusion. New relationships will open you to possibilities that are beyond the tiny scope of your doctrine. It will not only broaden your mind, it will broaden your understanding of God.
And that’s why you close your doors. You don’t want to change. You don’t want the doctrine to change. You don’t want to practice that kind of love because it’s hard, much harder than practicing doctrine. And you are afraid that if you do change, God won’t love you any more.
Now hear the good news: love trumps everything – even your fear, even your reluctance, even your change. God loves you and isn’t interested in perfect soldiers administering doctrine. God doesn’t care if you got your doctrine right or if you credit score is good or if you fall in love with a member of your own sex. God is interested in relationships – with everyone, all the time, in all the crazy places people find themselves. God wants all of us to be interested in that, too.
You have nothing to lose, except a lot of doctrine that changes from generation to generation anyway. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said when he was fighting against a church dead-set on the doctrine of racial separation, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
Don’t you want in on this kind of hospitality? It’s not easy and you don’t know how things might turn out, but that’s the beauty and excitement of it. Opening doors to those who differ from you opens places in your heart you never knew existed. It’s a journey with astonishing surprises within and without. And it’s a journey you do not take alone. “Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but it is the only answer,” (Dorothy Day).
The church, in it’s very beginning, kept us separate. We Gentiles weren’t allowed at the table with apostles and other Jewish Christians still practicing the Torah. It was because St. Paul pleaded for inclusion and hospitality, that we, who were considered unclean, were accepted as clean through Christ, who became our peace (Ephesians 2). The wall that once fractured God’s creation is gone. No matter how many walls you put up, even if they are church walls, God’s just going to keep knocking them down. He is our peace. We need to act like it.
It’s silly, really – all this fuss over whether to let gay children into your church. You were called to radical hospitality, love beyond comfort, opening your mind to a Spirit that blows through places you cannot imagine. You don’t have control when this kind of love gets loose. So why pretend you do?
Hospitality is quite hard at times, but it is nothing compared to the burden of blindly adhering to doctrine out of fear of your own God.
of course i love the example of sodom and gommorah – so many baptists claim the sins of those cities were sex-based, when it’s quite clear their sins were of being inhospitable jerks.
I voted with my feet on the Boy Scouts issue –
and I am happy to have my kids in AWANA Bible club now now instead.
I see that you are way to the left of me – but I still like your rants and your blog a lot !
Welcome, care, and kindness are to be expected from any Christian congregation anywhere anytime. But to provide or practice these things does not mean we must assent to or approve of sinful lifestyles..
RE: Niikki’s comment above – doctrine is in no way incompatible with hospitality – it should encourage it !
I adhere to doctrine – because I believe it and it makes total sense to me.
“Blindly” is the questionable word she would like to put in my mouth. But I respectfully spit it out…