One tip for offering Extravagant Hospitality
By Jim Perdue Burke, Missionary for Immigration and Border Issues
Every time we go through the check-out line at my grocery store, we are reminded that there are at least ten tips for doing everything under the sun. Magazines use this as a hook, trying to catch the eye of a would-be buyer… ten things that make buying a new car a cinch… ten tips for removing every germ from the house… or ten tips for finding the right soul mate on the internet. It seems that managing life has come down to receiving the right tips of information.
We’re now about halfway through a four-year period in the church; we call it a quadrennium. Our theme for the next two years will continue to be “extravagant hospitality.” But the basic image of what it means for the church to be an extravagant host doesn’t come to us from the New York Times “Living” section. It comes instead from a rabbi named Jesus who lived two thousand years ago.
Jesus could set a table for five thousand strangers he had never met before, just because he felt compassion for them, he was moved by their quiet suffering and hunger. He set an extravagant table for his twelve closest followers and friends one night, knowing that every one of them would betray and abandon him before the morning sun rose. He did so because he knew that extravagant act of hospitality would define them forever. And just when it looked like one group of his followers would give up and go back home forever, he turned them around, appearing to them as a host at their own table in Emmaus. His hospitality was always extravagant; it was always over the top and totally undeserved by the guests who received it.
From the earliest books in the Old Testament to the latest ones in the New, extravagant acts of kindness and inclusion toward the stranger, the visitors, and the foreigner, have set those who follow the Lord apart from all others. While all the main characters in the Old Testament were immigrants in a land to which God led them, all the main characters in the transformation of Christianity from a small sect in Jerusalem to a global religion became so by migrating to foreign lands. Not only being but also finding and including the immigrant has always been and will always be part of the DNA of the church of Jesus.
Arizona, California, and Nevada have always been filled with strangers and visitors from other places. Our current economies depend upon acts of extravagant hospitality offered to strangers who come from all over the world with money and plastic in their pockets. Arizona, California, and Nevada have led the world in knowing how to make tourists feel more than welcome. Up until now we could have written the definitive list of ten tips for extravagant hospitality.
But something has been changing in recent years. Seemingly over night, Arizona has grown into a populous state, forty-two percent of which are Hispanic and people of color. The figures are almost identical for Nevada, and California has always been a melting pot of cultures. To make matters worse, upwards of seven percent of their populations are believed to be undocumented, here illegally. With almost three million people of color now living in the Arizona and over a million living in Nevada, one in six of which is not authorized to live here, fear and suspicion are becoming the society’s main way of viewing the immigrant and the person of color.
Rapid changes like these naturally create fear, which almost always produces either hostility or hospitality. So here is one tip for radical hospitality: the choice between these two outcomes must be made in the hearts of the majority, host culture. In his book, Reaching Out: Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, twentieth century theologian and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen described the movement from hostility to hospitality as one of the transforming spiritual movements for today’s church. Through an act of hospitality, says Nouwen, the person who could end up being our enemy, becomes instead our friend. Sometimes, what makes hospitality extravagant is the atmosphere of uncertainty in which it is offered. But without the exorbitant risk of such hospitality, the unavoidable alternative is extravagant hostility; and such hostility is palpable and transformative in a negative way.
According to Pastor Rosemary Anderson, whose parish is the south side of Phoenix—the “barrio”—Memo and Lidia (their names have been changed) are second generation immigrants, natural-born citizens of the U.S. whose hometown is Phoenix. But they have recently decided to move and leave their extended family behind, a monumental adjustment for Hispanic people. When asked why, they say that they are very sad to leave their hometown and their parents and friends behind; “but they don’t want to raise their children in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust,” says Pastor Anderson.
What should be the response of a church like ours that stands under the banner of “Extravagant Hospitality”? Could the attempt at such hospitality transform the fear and mistrust that are consuming our states? Memo and Lidia will leave by the end of May. Primera church will lose a good family, and so will The Desert Southwest Conference and the State of Arizona. There will be no fanfare as Memo and Lidia drive off, but something almost irreparable is happening here. Could real acts of extravagant hospitality by our churches, starting even now, help to transform our states, which daily are becoming more polarized and more afraid? Do we really believe we can reinvent the church in this atmosphere? The only answer of faith ever given at the Lord’s Table is “amen, we believe.”
UMNS Photo by John Coleman.