Colin Miller offers his own thoughts on Bishop Curry’s charge: Reflect the Radical Welcome of Jesus by Being a Church for Others

 

One potential problem when I try to speak about “radical welcome” is that it is such a plastic phrase. It can mean whatever you want it to mean. What do we mean by “welcome” and what makes it “radical?” “Radical welcome” risks being empty, communicating nothing. So let me start with some of my own experience, in order to give us something concrete to work with. But I want to be very clear that I offer this not as a model that must be imitated, not because I know how to do welcome, much less radical welcome. I don’t offer this as something that “worked”, or something to strive for, but as a fellow traveler with you on the journey towards reflecting Jesus’ radical welcome.

 

It all starts with prayer. In 2005, I came to Duke University for doctoral studies in theology, and decided to start praying Morning and Evening Prayer at Saint Joseph’s Episcopal Church with whomever I could get to come. St Joe’s which I had just joined, was a tiny little struggling church, so prayer seemed prudent. For a while no one showed up, except occasionally my wife Lisa. I just walked over to the Church every day, at 8 and 5:30, opened the doors, put out sign, and said the Prayers. Slowly, very slowly, over the course of a year and more, one, then, two, then three regulars started showing up. First Chris and JR, then Adam and his family, then a few more. Most came in because they saw the sign, and the open door. I knew Onye and Willete this way before I ever knew St Titus. Since then we’ve established several other regular and semi-regular attendees, the majority of whom are members of other Episcopal parishes in the area. Apparently people in Durham want daily prayer, and we were happy to welcome them. The Daily Office at St Joseph’s is and has always been, an entirely lay-member headed and staffed enterprise.

 

Fairly quickly we discovered that, since we were around the church a lot, we were slowly getting to know a group of homeless men taking refuge on the church grounds (which we found out they called “the Hill”). This was and is a semi-permanent community of homeless men (that we creatively named “the Guys”), the core of which consists of about five guys in addition to a rotating squad of about a 12-15 people, any number of which may be found in the group on a given day. We were surprised to find in the beginning that the most welcoming thing we did was not have the police trespass the men off the grounds (something we were advised to do on more than one occasion). But we figured that Jesus’ words that “when you did it to the least of these you did it to me”, and our daily petition in the prayers we had come to pray, “let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor be taken away”, committed us to welcome the Guys at least to point that any other member of the St. Joe’s was welcome on the property, day or night, awake or asleep.

 

So at first we would just stop by the Hill to chat for a few minutes while walking to and from the church for prayer. Eventually we decided that those conversations in passing were not really making us into a community, the goal to which we figured the Gospel called us. So, JR and I decided to eat breakfast at the church, after Morning Prayer, five days a week, with whomever we could get to come – whether you had come to prayer or slept next to the Church door. We had to eat anyway, so why not after prayer in the Parish Hall? Nothing special. Cereal. Sometimes bacon and eggs. We invited anyone that happened to be around to join us. Then a couple of ladies at Blacknall Presbyterian said they wanted to do something for the homeless but they didn’t know what. They offered to make us a breakfast casserole each week. Whether the Guys showed up or not, we'd be there eating breakfast. Some slept through it, some came to the table, some preferred a glass of juice or the rest of last night’s beer. Sometimes they would even come to prayer. It didn’t matter. We just made friends.

 

We continue to have breakfast together, six days a week, after Morning Prayer. Cereal eggs and toast eaten together around a table. Sometimes there are three of us, and sometimes there are 10. Most folks we know, and most we have known now, for almost four years. But newcomers are everpresent, and become part of the community. It dawned on me in fact, just this last week, that breakfast at St Joe’s is as much a place that people come to check in with each other, part of the daily routine, as it is about food. We always called it “breakfast fellowship” but for a long time the accent was firmly on breakfast. Last week I looked around the room one day and realized that several of the poor had come in but not to eat. They were there because this was where they found their people.

 

This basic relationship with the Guys, trying to be a community, continues and evolves to this day. A couple of years ago a few of us rented a house where three of the Guys, and St Joe's own seminarian Andrew, live, and where many of us involved with the guys spend a good bit of our time. This winter for the first time a few of us have made a habit of opening the parish hall on especially frigid nights to give another handful of our homeless friends a warm place to sleep.  Saint Joseph’s body itself, including its clergy and vestry, has over the last years discerned long and hard in trying to know how exactly they fit into the mission of the church. The discernment continues.

 

This is one very specific story of welcome. No two such stories will be exactly the same. But let me see if I can offer a couple of short reflections on this experience that might be applicable to the concept of welcome across the board.

 

The most basic conviction of welcome is that in receiving our neighbor we welcome Christ. We do not welcome them “as if they were Christ”, but as Christ. We are not just pretending this person is Christ to get our motivation up, nor are we just being sentimental. Jesus makes himself mystically present in the one who comes, asking for hospitality. “In as much as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” They are welcomed not “as if they were Christ”, but as Christ. To receive this one is to come into the presence of God. And we welcome Christ because he has welcomed us. St Paul says “welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you.” How has Christ welcomed us? He welcomed us into his body the Church in spite of our wretched unworthiness. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We had done everything not to deserve his welcome, and yet he welcomed us anyway. This is how we are to welcome one another. We do not welcome based on our assessment of another’s merit or of another’s worthiness. If we are scandalized or even wronged by another, judgment gives way to forgiveness, since Christ forgives us. The journey into welcome is a journey into reconciliation.

 

The second reflection is that, in my own story and in others I’ve heard; welcome is most obviously God’s work when it is open ended. When it is not overly programmed and its limits strictly defined. For how can we define the limits and outcome of a welcome that reflects Christ’s? This means that welcome will be an occasion for continual discernment and prayer - there is no goal predetermining what it means to “get it right.” Indeed the only “right” there is to get is the welcome itself.  Welcome is not a tool for reaching some further end, like getting more people in the pews. Welcome is the end itself.

 

Third, and finally, welcome is really about presence, from top to bottom. To welcome the other, we have to be around and available. In a particular place at a particular time. And to welcome the other into the Church, the Church has to be around an available, and that task cannot devolve onto clergy alone. The Church has to be around and available. What exactly that means for St Titus is a good coffee hour topic. But the presence implied in welcome is also our ability to be present to one another and our neighbors we have never met. To welcome others into our lives in a way that does not seek a predetermined outcome is to give up our own sinful desire to control - to secure a safe outcome for us. For only when we are not striving for control can we really see and hear, touch, feel and understand one another. For we will never find our neighbor, much less Christ, if we shirk the ability to be surprised by them. Only then will we find the delight and joy that comes from resting in each other’s presence.

 

But radical welcome, of course, is nothing new. It is as old as the Church. For our Lord taught us to find heaven in a shared meal of bread and wine. The logic of radical welcome, its best model and guide, is none other than the Eucharist itself. Here we find the divine presence – Christ’s own body and blood – given freely to those who can never be worthy of it. And yet, we know him in the breading of the bread. What does it mean to practice radical welcome? What does it means to be a Church that takes the Eucharist seriously?  Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more information on the House of Hospitality e-mail Colin