Ballymena - where I grew up - used to be a small and friendly. It's a lot bigger now, and maybe it's changed over the years. But in Ballymena, if you were walking down the street and you passed someone you would meet their eye, nod, and say good morning. It didn't matter if you didn’t know them. You were just acknowledging each other. That’s how things were, and as far as I was concerned that’s how things were meant to be.
And then at the age of 18 I ventured out into the big bad world and moved to Birmingham to study. And I remember my first shopping trip to Asda in the Bull Ring, walking up Corporation Street, and if anybody caught my eye I’d smile and say ‘morning’! And they looked at me like I had a screw loose!
I very quickly learned that in the big bad world, this is something you don’t do. Whether out of fear, or preoccupation, or self-preservation the world soon trains us not to acknowledge each other, especially if the other is a stranger to us.
This is so entrenched in our psyche that it’s now quite possible to go to Tesco or Asda and have your shopping scanned through and packed and paid for and not once make eye contact with the person who’s serving you.
We’ve got this down to such a fine art now that on a couple of occasions recently I’ve bought something and not only has the shop assistant not looked at me, they’ve managed to keep a conversation going with another member of staff throughout the whole transaction. I might as well not have been there.
That really hacks me off, I have to say!
And I guess you could say – well that’s just modern life in a big city, It’s not like that in a wee village. Oh no!?
There have been plenty of times when I’ve been going down to the school or the nursery, or walking along the boardwalk to the dunes and I’ve passed people and they blank me! I’m beginning to wonder if it’s personal!
When I’m feeling mischievous what I do is I stare at them ‘til they’re forced to look at me and then I smile and say ‘morning!’
All I’m asking for is a wee acknowledgement that I’m a fellow human being. I’m not asking to be invited back for dinner or anything!
But there’s something in us that finds it terribly hard to give even that simple acknowledgement to a stranger. So in the lift, or in the queue, or at the bus stop we tend to keep our eyes lowered in a shared conspiracy of not seeing. Not engaging. It’s the easiest way for all concerned.
Well, maybe it is. But it’s not God’s way.
God takes the opposite view, I think. He wants us to go out from ourselves towards the other. That’s how God’s people should be, even though we may find it hard.
What’s my Biblical mandate for saying that?
Well here’s an interesting fact to reckon with. The command to love your neighbour – with which we’re all very familiar - occurs just once in the entire Old Testament. Meanwhile, there are 36 occasions in the Old Testament when we’re told to act lovingly towards the stranger in our midst.
This, from Deuteronomy 10:18 is pretty typical -
God defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are strangers, for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.
Love the stranger – God says. Why? Because you were strangers yourselves – you know what it feels like when you don’t belong; when nobody knows your name or your stories or your worth.
If we’ve been strangers ourselves, we know what it’s like to be the outsider. We know how uncomfortable that can feel, and how welcome it is when you find someone who’ll make time for you. If we’ve never been strangers, perhaps we have to use our imaginations a wee bit more, but we’re not excused from observing the command.
Love the stranger - 36 times. God’s serious about this. This is to be one of the hallmarks that sets his people apart. And then in the New Testament, we have not just the words but the example of Jesus.
Most of his time wasn’t spent in the synagogue, but out on the hoof among the people. And when you look at how he is with them, you realise that he doesn’t just gravitate to those who were like him, which is – of course – the easiest option for all of us.
He gives his time to Roman centurions, Syro-Phoenician women sitting by wells, hostile clerics and despised tax-collectors. He welcomes children and touches lepers, puts his arm around grieving widows and reasons and debates with the powerful and the privileged. No-one’s excluded from his circle – he makes room for everyone and is prepared to engage with everyone, regardless of who they are. His basic stance is one of openness to the other.
And though he didn’t have a house to invite people to or a table to eat around, you could argue that his whole ministry was one of hospitality.
Now when we hear that word, straight away we think of food. I cook a meal, I invite someone round – usually a friend – and that’s hospitality.
Here’s something I didn’t know until I started reading up on this a little.
We're familiar with the word xenophobia – which means fear of strangers or foreigners.
Well the Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia, which means love of the stranger.
Hospitality - at least hospitality as a Christian virtue - isn’t directed first and foremost to those we know, but to those we don’t know.
And though hospitality often involves food, it’s better thought of as a general openness – a willingness to engage. The opposite of the attitude I was describing at the beginning of the sermon.
Barbara Taylor puts it this way “While others opened their homes to Jesus, lending him a table to preside over for a night, his own philoxenia was much more likely to take place in a field or a boat, on a road or a mountain – wherever people who felt like strangers happened to meet this man who made them feel like kin”.
Do you see what she’s getting at? Hospitality isn’t just about eating together, though it’s marvellous when we make the time to do so and great things can happen as we eat together. The hospitable person is the one who conspires to engage, however and wherever they are. The one who treats the stranger with such kindness and interest, they feel like they’re being treated like kin.
Have you ever treated a stranger in that way?
Have you ever been the stranger and been treated in that way?
I have. I’ve spoken about it before – the wee church in Birmingham where folk took us hungry students home Sunday by Sunday and fed us to the gunwales. And the food was great, but better still was being welcomed into someone’s home and family at a time in our lives when most of us were away from home and family for the first time.
No-one had to do it. It was a choice that people in that congregation made – a costly choice - but here – 25 years later, I can still remember the names of those folk and some of the things we spoke about over those meals.
And I also remember, in the context of a church who had been hospitable to me, standing up on trembling legs at the end of a morning service and saying the first words I ever uttered in public worship. They had open meetings where anyone who wanted to could bring a prayer or a reading or a reflection, or choose a song, and I shared some lines I’d written that week. And I don’t know whether they were being kind, or were just delighted that I’d had the courage to open my mouth, but the words seemed to bless them.
We shaped each other, I guess. And that’s the thing about hospitality. It’s a two way street. If we open ourselves to the other, not only do we bless them, we bless ourselves through what they bring into our lives.
God’s made us in such a way that we need each other – that we can’t grow into our full humanity without one another.
It’s not an accident that believers generally gather together in communities. Even the monastics of the early church, who took themselves off to live alone in the desert, gathered together in convocations every now and again. We need each other - for affirmation, for guidance, for correction sometimes, to have our rough edges knocked off a little bit. To widen our understanding.
It was Jean-Paul Sartre who once said that hell is other people. I know what he was getting at, but I think he’s wrong. I think it’s far more likely that hell is where we get the isolation we think we want.
One of CS Lewis’s images of hell is that of people moving so far away from one another that they’re like constellations of stars in the night sky – separated from each other by unfathomable distances. Forever locked in the prison of their own selves with no prospect of anyone ever unlocking the door and leading them somewhere new.
Martin Luther was fond of saying that the essence of sin was to be incurvatus in se – turned in on yourself, and by definition, away from the other.
There’s no doubt that community – whether the community of the family, or the church, or the wider human family – is something that takes a lot of working at. But it’s where we learn what it means to be genuinely human. And it’s also one of the places where we meet God, in the face and the person of the other.
Hospitality is costly. Going out to the other, especially the stranger, is costly, but it’s what we as Christians, are called to do, in imitation of Christ.
We may choose not to, of course. We may say we’re too busy, or too afraid, or that’s simply not the way we do things here. We mind our own business.
Well, we have that choice. But we risk missing God in so choosing.
“I was hungry and you fed me, said the Son of Man. Thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you received me in your homes”.
“When did we ever do those things, Lord?” say the righteous. “When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger?”
“I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these members of my family, you did it for me.”
Why should we take the risk of opening ourselves to the stranger?
Because many of us know what its like to be a stranger, but also because God often meets us in the guise of a stranger.
So where are the strangers in your life? You don’t have to ask them back for dinner just yet.
You could start by simply noticing them. Notice the person packing your bags in Tesco. They’re usually wearing a name badge. Thank them by name and have fun seeing the surprise in their eyes,
Notice the person hoovering the carpets in the office, or bringing you your food in the restaurant, or wondering who to sit with at coffee time in the Forsyth Hall.
Maybe it’s the new mum at the school gates, or the new staff member, or the person beside you at the bus stop, or the new person at the club.
Maybe all you have to do is meet their eyes and smile – take a second to acknowledge a fellow-human being rather than walk past them. Maybe you could take the initiative and be the one to start a conversation. Maybe, next time you’re having friends round, you could take your courage in your hands and invite one or two folk who are on the fringes – begin the process that sees them become friends.
In a world so fearful of the other, what message would it give out about the church if we were all able to start living with a little more openness?
We close with some words of the Puritan George Fox.
“Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being”.
Good advice, I think.
It seems to me that in life God’s arranged things so that we might just be one another’s best bet for becoming fully human.
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