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Each of us belongs to various interdependent communities - family, church,
neighborhood, city, nation, world - in which we have some common history,
stories, norms and values. These boundaries of community, as well as
physical boundaries such as buildings, define who we are as community,
protect us, and provide the space of nourishment from which we might
nourish others.
Guests can become
members of the community, and thus hosts, if they are willing to take on
certain responsibilities and to buy into the covenant of the community.
Caroline Westerhoff says in regard to covenant, “if belonging is without
obligation and accountability, then we finally have not joined much of
anything at all, and any significance that community might have held for us
evaporates like mist.”
Each community must
have some agreement about what it expects from its guests. We find
mutuality in honoring such covenants together, as well as in expecting our
guests to honor them. The basis of our covenant as a faith community is our
baptismal covenant. This covenant is renewed, and our community nourished
through our sharing in the Eucharist and through our fellowship with each
other. Acts 2:42, 44-47 describes what the early Christians saw as their
covenant together with God.
It is this nourishment
from God and the community that empowers us to serve the world, to advocate
for justice, and to heal the things that cause or contribute to poverty and
homelessness - addiction, disability, lack of job skills, lack of adequate
child care, and lack of self-worth. (At least 90,000 San Franciscans live
below the poverty level. We can help by continuing to support food
programs, evaluating our neighborhood resources, and advocating for easier
access to government programs - shelters with safety and privacy; welfare
and disability assistance that make a difference, and include case
management; safe and affordable child care.) Christine Pohl writes, “As a
way of life, and act of love, an expression of faith, our hospitality
reflects and anticipates God’s welcome.”
In that we are all
the Body of Christ together, and that our covenant with God is lived out in
such community, it is together that we must determine how best to do so.
Within this relationship, we may challenge each other. Pohl writes, “The
practice of hospitality challenges the boundaries of a community while it
simultaneously depends on that community’s identity to make a space that
nourishes life.”
A community’s
boundaries are those things that we are not willing to sacrifice. (For what
would we be willing to die? For what do we live?) They must be held fast,
and may only change with the agreement of the community. Caroline
Westerhoff writes, “A healthy boundary is firm enough to hold, but not so
tight that it binds, confines, and cuts. It is flexible enough to allow
movement and change within time and circumstance, but not so loose that it
encourages sloppiness and aimless wandering.” Individual boundaries, on the
other hand, may be more permeable or flexible, as long as they don’t
conflict with those for which the community has covenanted.
In offering
hospitality, we invite the possibility of encounter with Christ incarnate
(Matthew 25:36-36 and Hebrews 12:28-13:4,5-6 referring to Gen 18:1-8 and
19:1-8). Such incarnation calls us to treat people as sisters and brothers,
and to engage them as individuals. We explored the difficult question of,
in the face of great need and great scarcity, how do we welcome all the
Christs in a way that honors each of them? As Christine Pohl writes, "…if
you're going to let Christ in, you don't want to have Christ sleep under
the sink, and you don't want Christ to crowd out all the other Christs that
are already in there."
Conversely, in
offering hospitality, we risk that our guests will not be Christ-like. We
have to agree as a community to what we are willing to risk. If we never
invite the stranger, we may never encounter Christ. If we never lock the
door, we may open ourselves to evil. It is in this tension that hospitality
becomes a spiritual practice.
Vitale suggested that we "live with one foot in the world as it
is, and the other in the world as it should be" (the Kingdom of God).
Pohl writes,
“Offering hospitality in a world distorted by sin, injustice, and
brokenness will rarely be easy. We need a combination of grace and wisdom.
Substantial hospitality to strangers involves spiritual and moral
intuition, prayer and dependence on the Holy Spirit, the accumulated wisdom
of a tradition, and a pragmatic assessment of each situation. But grace is
always primary…our first priority must always be one of welcome, embrace,
hospitality.”
And Monica Hellwig
writes, “To preach that the salvation of God has come into the world in the
person of Jesus, the one and only thing that is necessary is that a
community that lives the new life of the Resurrection should touch the
lives of the hungry of the world with authentic and generous compassion,
drawing on the bread of life that is Jesus, to become themselves bread of
life for the needy with their whole heart and their whole mind and their
whole substance."
Those of us who have
participated in the ministry of hospitality to our homeless neighbors
shared a bit about how we've been blessed by the presence of these
strangers, and how this hospitality has been transforming to us. We also
explored some of the covenants we have with each other. We noted that
Christians have covenanted to love God with all our heart and our neighbor
as ourselves. We also noted that God covenanted with us first. In addition,
we are bound by our baptismal covenants, and doctrine and discipline of our
denominations.
Lastly, we examined
where our hospitality enhances or conflicts with our covenants, and where
we draw the lines about what we can offer. My hope is that the
congregations in the Polk Gulch will come together to examine how
Scripture, faith traditions, and our own reason and prayerful experience
inform our understanding of the covenants we have with God, with each
other, and with the surrounding community. As communities, we need to agree
on the boundaries necessary to honor those covenants, decide how we will
communicate them to each other and enforce them, then proceed to offer
hospitality with love - for each other, for God and for the world.
The Rev. Kathleen
McAdams
Previous Director of Homeless Ministry
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