2 Co 8:7-15
28 June 2009
“Hospitality”
“Love me. Love me.” You think I’m just kidding around, don’t you? I really mean it: love me!
That twice uttered command I began with has no doubt appeared in many places, but I was thinking in particular of a movie that came out five or six years ago: Bruce Almighty. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie stars Jim Carrey, who plays Bruce Nolan, a reporter at a Buffalo TV news station. (It’s WKBW, the ABC affiliate.) Bruce is routinely assigned the “human interest” stories, which he considers demeaning.
When he learns that Evan Baxter, played by Steve Carell, gets the job as anchor he was hoping for, Bruce freaks out while doing a story on location, gets beat up, and blames God for the sorry state of his life. Enter Morgan Freeman, who plays the manifestation of God. He agrees to give Bruce his powers to see if he can do the job any better.
All this time, Bruce has been neglecting his girlfriend, Grace, who’s played by Jennifer Aniston. Eventually, she gets tired of the way he treats her, and she breaks up with him. Bruce goes to the school where Grace teaches and utters the command I started with, “Love me.” And what is her response? “I did.”
Bruce, recalling
the warning he received about messing with free will, knows he needs to have a
heart-to-heart talk with God. “How
do you make so many people love you without affecting free will?” God-as-Morgan Freeman replies with a laugh, “Welcome
to my world, son. If you come up with an
answer to that one, let me know.” (I
won’t leave you hanging there. Suffice
to say, the movie has a happy ending!)
Bruce
Nolan learns that, even as Bruce Almighty, he can’t command Grace to love him. (We can’t command grace either!) It’s something that must come from within. It can’t be compelled. (Understand, that for the moment, I’m not
speaking of actions that demonstrate love.
Love is indeed more than a feeling, but right now, I’m not referring to
it in its full, holistic expression.)
Likewise,
commanding someone to display a quality that is a gift of God has similar
pitfalls. It’s a problematic
proposition. There’s a fine line the
apostle Paul treads in our epistle reading.
I began this sermon series on fostering Christian community three weeks ago. I started by noting some comments made at the last presbytery meeting by our executive presbyter. She briefly mentioned hospitality. I’ve preached about listening and dialogue as key aspects of hospitality. In doing so, I realize that I’ve barely scratched the surface. (By the way, and I’m not asking for a show of hands, have you been practicing your skills at listening and dialogue?)
So now, here I am, with a sermon entitled “Hospitality.” We do well to have our own “Bruce Nolan” moments, like the one in the movie. We do well to be reminded of that tricky thing, free will. Paul walks that fine line between laying down rules—issuing commands—and understanding that some things simply cannot be compelled. In our scripture text, that’s how he deals with hospitality, especially as it is expressed in generosity.
His message to the Corinthian church is filled with grace. I mean that literally. In 2 Corinthians 8, he uses the word “grace” (cari", charis) seven times. It’s in verse 1; in verse 4, it’s translated as “privilege.” (I’ll say more about that in a few moments.) In verses 6, 7, and 19, it appears as “service of love” (GNB) or “generous undertaking” (NRSV). And besides verse 9, it also appears in 16 as the “thanks” in “thanks be to God.” Friends, that’s a whole lot of grace!
The particular act of generosity in this chapter is the collection of money for the church in Jerusalem. As he’s traveled throughout the Roman Empire, Paul has supervised the fundraising. The Jerusalem church is a poor one, so he’s been making appeals on their behalf. That isn’t the only motivation; there is the awareness that the gospel originated in Jerusalem, so for the other churches, it has a special place.
It’s been noted that in his address to the Corinthians, Paul does not say “that God has done so much for [you that you] ought therefore to show [your] gratitude by [your] financial gifts.”[1] (And by the way, your gifts should be huge!) Just as in our time, there were plenty of charlatans and religious quacks coming up with all kinds of schemes to separate people from their money.
Mind you, it’s not that there’s something wrong with giving from a sense of thankfulness. What a crazy concept—actually being grateful! But that’s not Paul’s point. No, his “stewardship invitation [so to speak] is not about moral obligations to pay God back or even to express gratitude, but to engage with God in love in the world.”[2] For the apostle, giving to God is a gift of grace. It is a working of grace, just as surely as are faith, hope, and love.
For exhibit A, he cites the Macedonian churches. That’s how he begins the chapter. Paul wants his readers to see how God’s grace has flowed through them. He says that despite “a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part” (v. 2).
Remember what I
said about grace (charis) being
translated as “privilege”? He continues,
“For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and
even beyond their means, begging us earnestly for the privilege [the grace] of
sharing in this ministry to the saints” (vv. 3-4). These Christians actually begged for the grace to give. They pleaded to be
able to help their brothers and sisters!
As Paul says, “It was more than we could have hoped for!” What would inspire people to yearn for the grace of giving, the
grace of hospitality? Notice what the
apostle says about their priorities.
Every word is important. “First
they gave themselves to the Lord; and then, by God’s will they gave themselves
to us as well” (v. 5, GNB).
Paul turns his attention to
the Corinthians in verse 7, which is where the lectionary reading picks
up. He realizes that he can’t order them
into a state of generosity; again, it is a gift of God’s grace. However, he does hold up others as an
example. And in verse 9, he holds up the
example par excellence: “you know the
generous act [the grace] of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet
for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”
Even
so, Paul doesn’t say that the Corinthians, and we, must wait until we feel the
Spirit moving before performing acts of generosity. Like love, it’s more than a feeling! There is a sense of justice and equality
involved. He tells them, “I am not trying to relieve others by putting a burden on you; but
since you have plenty at this time, it is only fair that you should help those
who are in need. Then, when you are in
need and they have plenty, they will help you. In this way both are treated equally” (vv.
13-14, GNB).
At one
level, I want to reply to Paul, “Yeah, right.
Can you guarantee that if I’m hospitable, people won’t take advantage of
me?” And at the same time, I realize
that that’s a mindset based in fear, in anxiety. Anxiety has been described as a “fear
of scarcity [which] closes our hearts and tightens our grip on what we have. Anxiety’s central message is that we cannot
afford to share because we can never have enough.”[3]
Of course, the message of anxiety runs counter to that of Jesus
Christ, who took a little boy’s freely-offered lunch, and turned it into a
banquet for thousands.
So, how can we as a congregation give ourselves more fully to hospitality? In exploring hospitality, as I noted earlier, I’ve barely scratched the surface. Since I tend to be an inhospitable fellow, I’ll deprive you of the three to four hour exposition I previously had planned!
Instead, I’ll focus on what we’re doing now: worship. Churches do many things, but at their core (and this is most important), they are communities who worship. In his article, “Toward a Welcoming Congregation,” Paul Wadell has a few thoughts about worship.[4]
“It
is principally through worship,” he says, “that Christian congregations learn,
are formed in, and become living instruments of the hospitality of God. But this only happens when worship is rightly
understood and enacted. Too often today
Christians forget that the focus of worship should be God, not ourselves. We deform and diminish worship when we think
the primary aim of worship is to uplift us, to satisfy us, to entertain us, or
to meet our needs and make us feel good about ourselves.”
Well,
why not say how you really
feel? Actually, he does. “Such worship is a sham, an affront to God,
because it turns worship away from praising and glorifying God to consoling and
affirming ourselves. When this happens,
worship is little more than an act of communal self-deception.”
He
uses some strong language, but then, so does the apostle Paul. And if you think about it, so does Morgan
Freeman in Bruce Almighty. We constantly want to make it all about us,
but it just isn’t that way. And thanks
be to God, that’s a good thing!
Wadell has some more thoughts about worship
and hospitality. “Nothing schools us in the
divine hospitality more than Christian worship and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the preeminent sacrament of
hospitality, because at the Eucharist God is the host who gathers us in order
to feed us…
“More than anything, worship should foster
gratitude and generosity, because it teaches us that the whole universe
reflects an economy of grace and abundance, not one of stinginess and scarcity.
Worship should help us see that to know
life is to know a gift, and that we are given one another as gifts, entrusted
with one another as each day we live from, and hopefully extend, the
hospitality of God.”
The grace of giving—the grace of hospitality—removes the
fear that our consumer culture brainwashes us into. The culture tries to tame hospitality; it
tries to co-opt it. It tries to make it
about cruise lines, entertainment, and Martha Stewart. But as the church, we are called to be
counter-cultural, to reclaim what is properly seen as a gift of God.
I want to close with a comment by the Benedictine writer Joan Chittister. “Hospitality in a culture of violence and strangers and anonymity has become the art of making good connections at good cocktail parties. We don’t talk in elevators, we don’t know the security guard’s name; we don’t invite even the neighbors into the sanctuary of ourselves…Benedict [and indeed, Christ] wants us to let down the barriers of our souls so that the God of the unexpected can come in.”[5]
Thinking about that, I can see how hospitality is a gift of God. We need the grace and strength of God to go against the tired old rules imposed by our culture. We need that grace and strength to live lives centered, not on ourselves, but on Jesus Christ.