Reflecting Welcome

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 114
Romans 14:1–12

We have been sent dangerously by God’s address—
called by name, entrusted with risky words,
and empowered with authority.
We are to tell the truth openly, work for justice,
and stand in solidarity with our neighbors.
The cost is high, but the purposes are those of the Holy God.

Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People

Dr. Brene Brown is an Episcopalian graduate school professor and qualitative theory researcher. In her newest book, Braving the Wilderness, Dr. Brown has delved into the idea of belonging. She defines belonging this way: “Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us . . . [and] because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance” (Brene Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, p. 32).

When she visited with people about their desire to belong and the obstacles they faced, many of the research participants reported feeling surrounded by an “us versus them” culture—a culture that creates feelings of spiritual disconnection and contributes to a diminishing sense of shared humanity. “Over and over,” Brown writes, “participants talked about their concern that the only thing that binds us together now is shared fear and disdain, not common humanity, shared trust, respect, or love. They reported feeling more afraid to disagree or debate with friends, colleagues, and family because of the lack of civility and tolerance” (Braving the Wilderness, p. 33).

From my conversations with many of you over this last year, I know many of you could make a similar claim. Beginning around September 2016, I started to receive emails and have visits in which church members reported high levels of stress and anxiety just thinking about being around other family members during the holidays. You anticipated so many different political perspectives sitting around the same dinner table. A few of you spoke with me or wrote to me about even losing friends or having to proactively end friendships, because what used to be good-hearted conversations—or even passionate yet respectful debates—over issues like immigration reform, climate change, and police-community relations had morphed into full-out yelling matches and name-calling. The friendship was not worth the pain anymore, one of you said. What Brown found in her research rings true with many of us: “The only thing that binds us together now is shared fear and disdain, not common humanity, shared trust, respect, or love.”

Now, I’d like to think that kind of fear and disdain, or that kind of anxiety about being honest as to how we truly feel, only exists “out there” in the larger political world or “out there” with your extended family or “out there” with the other parents from the soccer team or “out there” with the other residents on your floor at the Admiral or the Presbyterian Home. I would like to think that somehow the moment we walk into this grand sanctuary space or into the lofted beauty of the Gratz Center, we are immediately transformed in the ways we talk to one another and view each other. That is what I would like to think. Fear, disdain, anxiety—all of those things are only bonding agents out there, not in here—not in this set-apart space in which we’ve now gathered for 103 years. Surely not in here, in church.

And yet, though I have not caught wind of any church fights brewing, my guess is that’s partly due to our tendency to fall back into polite niceties whenever we sense a rise in tension in the room. We’d rather keep the peace, even if it means just skimming the surface of certain topics, like this weekend’s protests in St. Louis, rather than getting into hard conversations. But that is not necessarily because we don’t care about issues of justice and racism, for example, but rather we do that because it is hard to know how to even have those conversations anymore. Even in here, in 103-year-old sacred space.

But why have we seemingly lost that skill to be honest and gentle with each other at the same time, assuming we once had it? Bill Bishop, author of the book The Big Sort thinks it is because we no longer even have to interact with folks with whom we differ. We all know this, but here is how he puts it:

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups. We all live with the results: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life. (Braving the Wilderness, pp. 46–47)

He published that book back in 2009! Can you imagine what he would write today as a sequel? His analysis reminds me of an old cartoon. In it, one dog is talking to another dog. “It’s not enough that we succeed,” the dog proclaims. “Cats must also fail.”

While that is a funny cartoon, it is a sentiment running wild these days. But it is a “win-lose,” “you’re either for us or against us” sentiment that breaks God’s heart. God did not create us to constantly reject each other, to constantly judge each other, to constantly malign each other, whether that is out there or in here. God created us to be in loving relationship both with God and with each other. In God we are all inextricably connected, made in God’s very image—an image that is, in the very being of our holy triune God, a divine community. Furthermore, as people made in God’s image, we are called to not simply tolerate each other but to welcome each other with the same kind of welcome that God has given us in Jesus Christ.

Let me say that again: God does not ask us to simply learn how to put up with each other. Rather, as we see in this section of Paul’s letter to the Romans, God asks us to fully welcome each other with open arms and mutual love. If there is any bias we are supposed to have as parts of Christ’s body, it is a bias towards acceptance rather than toward rejection. Why? Because in Christ, God has accepted all of us. God has redeemed all of us. Even if we struggle to know how to belong to each other, God has shown us in Jesus that we all already belong to God. So who are we, Paul asks, to take it upon ourselves to not accept each other, to refuse someone a seat around God’s table? From our Roman’s translation: “Do you have any business crossing people off the guest list or interfering with God’s welcome? If there are corrections to be made or manners to be learned, God can handle that without your help.”

Allow me to tell you yet another Waco, Texas, story from my youth (don’t worry: you’ll only have to hear these stories for another twenty years or so). As I have said before, the church my father served, the one in which I grew up, provided a theological alternative to Waco’s typical religious life. Though probably the majority of the congregation’s members would have considered themselves theologically and politically moderate to conservative, they also put up with my progressive father for thirty years and were bound and determined to hold space for people with all perspectives. That was what made them alternative: you were encouraged to “think in your believing,” as my father would preach, and you did not all have to agree.

One Sunday, when I was in middle school, we arrived to find a large protest going on outside the doors of the church. The protest was actually against our church. Not everyone in Waco appreciated a theological alternative, and not everyone in Waco appreciated my father’s regular editorials in the paper either. Once I realized they were protesting us, I was self-righteously indignant. I tried to convince my Sunday school teacher we actually needed to launch a counter-protest to show them how wrong and mean they were. Our mean could beat their mean any day: I was convinced of it. My Sunday school teacher, however, along with other adults, had a different approach in mind. They took our box of doughnuts to the protestors, along with cups of coffee, and invited them to worship if they so chose. That wasn’t exactly what I had planned. But it was exactly how God would have hoped the church, Christ’s body, would respond.

“Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don’t see things the way you do,” Paul writes. “And don’t jump all over them every time they do or say something you don’t agree with—even when it seems that they are strong on opinions but weak in the faith department. Remember they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently. . . . It is God we are answerable to—all the way from life to death and everything in between—not each other. That’s why Jesus lived and died and then lived again: so that Jesus could be our Master across the entire range of life and death and free us from the petty tyrannies of each other.”

Our NRSV translation of that last sentence might sound more familiar to you: “If we live, we live to the Lord. And if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Nothing we do falls outside of God’s claim on our lives, regardless if it is our behavior out there or our behavior in here. It all takes place under God’s reign.

Just as I needed my Sunday school teachers to remind me I was not in charge of setting other people right, deciding who got to belong to God and who did not, Paul wanted to make sure the early Roman church remembered they were not actually the ones in charge either. None of them had been called by God to act as the gospel’s bouncers—deciding who could be a part of that community and who had to stay behind the velvet rope line.

While their arguments about whether or not one had to be kosher around a shared meal or which day was to be sacred in the community’s practice might not seem as dramatic as our arguments over the hot-button issues of our day, they were dramatic for that small faith community back then. Paul felt their communal life was on its way to becoming fractured, and he wanted to do whatever he could to keep that church from becoming a community of sides. As biblical commentator Sarah Miller has written, “Paul was trying to make their lives together a little easier by helping them understand that their differences of opinion regarding disputable matters was not something to fight about. They could hold on to their beliefs and still love and respect one another and remain church family—and, most importantly, not lose their Christian witness” to the rest of their larger community (Susan Miller, “Romans 14:1—15:7: Unity in Essentials, Opinions in the Non-Essentials, Charity in Everything,” Review & Expositor, 1988, p. 103).

“Each person,” Paul writes, “is free to follow the convictions of conscience.” The focus of the Christian life, according to Paul, ought to be about learning how to honestly love each other and to act accordingly, no matter what, for that kind of life together is what reflects God’s welcome, what reflects Christ’s claim on us all, what reflects the one to whom we always belong, even as we battle fear and disdain all around.

My friend Agnes Norfleet recently heard a story on NPR (15 January 2017) about Coventry Cathedral in England. In 1940, during the Coventry Blitz, it was nearly bombed to destruction. The ruins of the medieval tower and the outer wall have been kept as a space for remembrance, and the only thing added was an inscription on the wall behind the altar that says simply, “Father, forgive.” They congregation built the new cathedral next to the remains of the old. But now, many decades later, in the middle of a world that seems primarily bound together only by fear and by disdain of others, Coventry Cathedral has erected another sign, this one on the front door of the church. The sign says this:

We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, widowed, straight, gay, confused, well-heeled, or down-at-the-heel. We welcome wailing babies and excited toddlers. We welcome you whether you can sing like Pavarotti or just growl quietly to yourself. You are welcome here if you are just browsing, you just woke up, or just got out of prison. No matter what color you are, you are welcome here. We don’t care if you are more Christian than the Archbishop of Canterbury or haven’t been to church since Christmas ten years ago. We extend a special welcome to those who are over sixty but still not grown up yet and to teenagers who are growing up too fast.

We welcome keep-fit moms, football dads, starving artists, tree huggers, latte sippers, vegetarians, junk-food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or still addicted. We welcome you if you’re having problems, are down in the dumps, or don’t like organized religion. We’re not keen on it either. We offer welcome to those who work too hard, don’t work, can’t spell, or are here because Granny is visiting and wanted to come to the cathedral. We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throats as kids, or just got lost and wound up here by mistake. We welcome pilgrims, tourists, seekers, doubters, and you.

When asked about the sign, the current rector said in the interview, “It’s simply about being a place where people can leave their differences at the door and come into conversation with one another and with God.” Now, while I do not think leaving our differences at the door is necessary or even useful, I get what the rector and that congregation are trying to create. They are trying to create a community that is as wide and as welcoming as God’s own grace. They are trying to create an honest community where everyone knows to whom they belong—to God primarily, but also to each other. They are trying to treat each other gently, trying to be a congregation in which everyone can succeed and no one needs to fail for that to happen.

I think Paul would be pleased with Coventry Cathedral. They are living out what he was trying to convince the Romans to do. But even more than that, I believe with all my heart that God is pleased with Coventry Cathedral and with that new sign, for in the shadow of literal destruction caused by hate and war, by fear and disdain, they have their arms stretched out in as wide a welcome as they can reach. Of course, Paul would simply say they are just being the church, the church who belongs to God and who is charged with reflecting that belonging to each, to every, to all. Amen.