Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

The Fragile Art of Hospitality

Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern
September 25, 2005
Palo Alto, CA

Welcome
In the words of the Rev. William Schulz:

This is the mission of our faith:
To teach the fragile art of hospitality;
To revere both the critical mind and the generous heart;
To prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness;
And to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands.

Reading: Genesis 18:1-8

In the plains of Mamre . . . [Abraham] sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in they sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:
And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.
And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.

Sermon

The story of Abraham’s guests has a moral. A couple of verses later, the guests are revealed to be angels; in fact, the implication is pretty strong that one of them is God himself. And they tell Abraham and Sarah--who have never been able to have a child together, who are 100 and 90 years old respectively–that Sarah will give birth to a son.

The moral is familiar from centuries of folktales and fairy tales from many lands: welcome the stranger without hope of reward, and you will be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. I believe this is deeply true, even if your guest doesn’t turn out to have supernatural powers.Welcome the stranger and we will reap untold rewards.

One of my themes this year is hospitality; I’ll be preaching on it at least three times. I believe that hospitality, in its broadest sense of receptivity and openness, is central to what we are as a church and who we are as human beings. It’s an oddly old-fashioned word, rather genteel, almost archaic. But I believe it is very relevant to where we are right now, as a church, as a nation, as a species. And as Reverend Schulz says in our opening words, it is a fragile art, worth teaching and hard to practice.

My etymological dictionary tells me that the word “hospitality” means “friendliness to guests,” and that its root, hospes, means both “guest” and “host.” When we are genuinely welcoming hosts who practice hospitality, the two are one: there are no guests–there are no hosts–just people sharing a home.
When you first seek hospitality, you are a stranger, merely a guest. A sojourner, one whose stay is expected to be temporary. But true hospitality welcomes the wanderer home–when we offer our hospitality, we are offering to make this his or her home, as well as our own.; We are asking them to no longer be guests.

The interesting thing about a community that practices hospitality–whether it’s a family, a town, a country, or a congregation–is that it feels like a family but doesn’t make outsiders feel like “outsiders.” There is so much warmth and shared history, even shared language, in these communities that newcomers feel like they’ve come to a family gathering–but it’s one where the family is just delighted to have someone new join them. This is the kind of family where you can be the sole visitor to their Thanksgiving dinner who isn’t a member of the family and yet feel right at home, because they ask you about yourself, and listen to you, and include you in the conversation. If everyone laughs at a reference that’s incomprehensible to you–and this happens all the time in families, because every close family has its private jokes–then someone will tell you the story that makes it so funny so that you can laugh too.

And then there are families where, when you come visit, you feel a bit like a paying lodger.The jokes go over your head and no one explains. They talk scornfully about people with opinions that are quite a lot like yours (but you’re not inclined to tell them that). They talk about family members you’ve never met and don’t tell you, “That’s my Uncle Gus we’re talking about–he’s very eccentric.” You can see that they feel affection for each other, but they don’t turn it outward, so it just makes you feel shut out instead of drawn in.

Attuned to Harry Potter as I am, I know just the illustration: the two families of the Dursleys and the Weasleys.The Dursleys, Harry’s horrible aunt, uncle, and cousin, who became his foster family only because they were forced to, are a close family. But there’s no room in it for anyone outside, certainly anyone who isn’t just like them. Even though Harry’s closely related to them, he never feels for a moment that he belongs there. And then he meets the Weasleys, his best friend Ron’s parents and six brothers and sisters, another close family, and they just open the circle of the family and welcome him right inside. His first visit is a classic case of culture shock, because he’s never been to a wizarding home before and doesn’t know about the things they take for granted, like mirrors that talk back to you, or how to get rid of the gnome infestation in the garden. But because they welcome him so warmly and matter-of-factly, he feels from the first moment that he belongs.

As a church, we can practice that kind of hospitality too. We want to be a family, with all the warmth and ease of people who have known each other for a long time and understand each other’s quirks. I want people to feel that sense of family the moment they come in the door, like guests invited to a friend’s big Thanksgiving family dinner.If you’re new, I know it’ll take awhile for you to sort out all the “aunts and uncles,” and awhile longer to learn all the stories, and that you might hesitate to share all about yourself until you get to know everyone a little better. But I want the family to make sure you do become that much a part of things:that the family feeling doesn’t keep you out, like at the Dursleys’, but welcomes you in, like at the Weasleys’.

My mother says that one of the best compliments she ever received came from an occasional visitor to her home who said, “Susan, whenever I come into your house, I feel like taking my shoes off.” My mom smiles when she tells this story.; She says, “I told her, ‘Please do!’” It is the utmost compliment to her as a host that when she says “make yourself at home,” guests know she means it. She’s created a home that says to the sojourner, You are at home here too. We want you to do what we do: take your shoes off. Put your feet up. If you get a hankering for a late-night snack, poke around in the fridge.

If she were a member of the church my mom might put it like this: Share your beliefs. Speak your mind. Even if you’re visiting for the first time and you don’t know all the expectations, much less the acronyms and little jokes and who so-and-so is who was reported to feel better at Caring and Sharing, we’d like you to make this your home. So we’ll tell you what we expect of each other, avoid acronyms, explain the jokes, and introduce you to so-and-so. Soon you won’t feel like a guest anymore, and as a church that practices the fragile art of hospitality, that’s our goal.

There’s a Jefferson Airplane song that bemoans the terrible loneliness you feel when “your friends . . . treat you like a guest.” What’s wrong with being treated like a guest? Nothing . . . unless it’s your friends who treat you that way. With them, you want more. When you’re really welcome somewhere, you aren’t a guest anymore. You’ve been made to feel at home.

Maybe now we begin to see why the art of hospitality is “fragile”–it’s hard to sustain, it’s an endangered species of behavior. Because opening your home to other to that radical extent is hard. It’s a little scary.

It’s all very well when the guests are just . . . guests. If they keep leaving the milk out, or putting the dishes away in the wrong place, well, it’s all right–they’ll be gone soon and then you can quietly put everything back where it belongs and get back to normal.

But if the guests move in with you--say, because they actually marry a member of the household and become a part of the family--then they’re going to change things around. They might think the logical way to organize a kitchen is with the cutting board next to the stove instead of next to the sink. (I ask you!) They might even want to arrange the furniture, or paint the walls a different color. A new member of the church might have a different favorite hymn, one you never could stand. He might have political opinions that clash with yours. She might be so thrilled to discover that UUs have a variety of spiritual paths that she chooses one very different from your own. And if this has become their home, they’re going to have just as much right to say how things are done as you are. Yikes!

This month, as Hurricane Katrina has flooded people out of their homes and the new refugees have flooded other communities, we’ve seen just how difficult this transition can be. Communities that welcome the guests with extravagant generosity take on a very different tone when it appears that the “guests” may actually stay for good. Within a week of Katrina’s landfall, some people in Baton Rouge were saying it was time for the refugees to go home. I sympathize with them–their city will be changed forever by this, just as New Orleans has been. Hospitality does change us, if it’s true hospitality and not the “hospitality” of a hotel, where you stay a few days, pay your money, and leave.

What about us? We have hosted Hotel de Zink all month because there are people in Palo Alto who cannot afford homes and need help. We generously open our church to them as a place to sleep for thirty nights, and take turns making them dinner. What if one of the residents read our pamphlets, recognized kindred spirits, and decided to come to church every Sunday from now on? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And wouldn’t it change the church in ways that we hadn’t bargained for?

Abraham and Sarah welcomed strangers into their home. They thought all they were doing was providing food and drink to three tired, hungry men. Their lives were never the same afterwards.

When we welcome guests to be more than guests, we get more than we bargained for. I knew a little boy once who enjoyed his new baby sister for a week or two and then informed his parents, “Okay, you can send her back now.” They were a bit taken aback, but not nearly as shocked as he was when they gently told him that she wasn’t just a visitor. She was a member of the family. For keeps. For better or for worse.

It may take ten or twenty years, but he’ll be glad they didn’t “send her back.” Like Abraham and Sarah’s angel guests, she has gifts to bring him that he can’t even imagine: gifts of companionship, humor, challenge, and adventure; all the gifts of having a sister. If we each reflect for a moment on our dearest friends, the people aside from our family who mean the most to us . . . we’ll realize that every single one of them entered our lives as a complete stranger. What wonderful gifts these strangers have brought us!

That’s what we get when we practice hospitality as a church. Like the little boy with the new sister, we get an extended, expanded family. I like that we’re a family. That sense of closeness and connection is what I look for in my spiritual community. But there’s one thing about family, and it’s both a blessing and a curse: they can’t choose you, and you can’t choose them. Family is family, and you’re stuck with them, all of them, not just your favorite cousin, who bakes such wonderful bread and tells such funny stories, but her no-good brother, the one who drinks a little too much and spends family gatherings slumped in a corner criticizing everybody.

The church/family analogy only goes so far, of course. No matter how much we talk about church as our extended family, church members aren’t really related (most of us). If you decide to leave and never see any of the other members again, it’s unlikely that your next-door neighbor will shake her head, call it tragic, and say “you really shouldn’t cut yourself off that way,” the way she probably would if you stopped speaking to your parents.

Churches are like all intentional communities–like the families we choose instead of the ones we’re born into. They take commitment. If we left a community every time someone in it got on our nerves–or if we told others they had to leave whenver they got on our nerves–no community would last long. And they often don’t. Happy communities are rare and delicate creatures, frail and in need of careful tending. And they seldom thrive, because we are seldom taught the art of hospitality.

Reverend Schulz is right: as a church, we’re here to teach it. We’re here to learn it. We’re here to practice it so that maybe, if we can get it right at least most of the time here, then just maybe we’ll know more about how to practice it out there. The world needs people who know how to welcome each other. Imagine a cadre of trained welcomers going out into our troubled communities. Cities, red and blue states, nations arguing around the amphitheatre of the United Nations, would learn to extend hospitality to each other: to welcome the stranger, who is foreign and different and a little frightening, and to discover, sometimes, that the stranger’s dirty face is that of an angel.

An angel is a being who brings a blessing. And when we open our homes and churches and hearts to others, and make our home theirs, I believe we will find ourselves unexpectedly blessed.