Feeling Irrelevant to the Poor and the Stranger?

15  Pentecost, Cp17, August 28, 2016

Jeremiah 2:4-13 Ps. 112

Heb.13:1-8        Luke 14:1, 7-14

Lectionary Link

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.  When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.

Since we are an inclusive church, why don't we just take our Book of Common Prayer to the streets of San Francisco and invite the homeless and the poor to celebrate the beauty of our liturgy.  Are you ready to go with me?  If we could get them to worship with us, then their lives would be able to change and they would learn to become fully integrated into middle class or upper middle class society and live more happily ever after?  Anyone think this would be wise evangelistic strategy?

Sometimes the words of the Bible seem to place before us an unattainable standard for us.  The words about hospitality to the strangers and homeless we are happy to leave to the saintly specialists like Mother Teresa of Calcutta and we are happy to help much more indirectly with some money gifts.

People who specialize in advising about safety do not always recommend an open policy toward strangers or even the poor.  If in fact one invited to the normal banquets of one's life strangers and people with impairment, it would be unusual unless one had the situation of that being a regular practice.

How can we read these words of the Bible and not feel guilty about our own fear about opening our homes and lives on a regular basis to the people who inhabit the tent towns of our inner cities?

We need to be honest about our lives.  In our lives it is most common for us to be found with people who have some compatible and pragmatic relationship with us in our lives.  That is, we live with people with whom we can practice mutual reciprocity.  I will do this for you and you will do this for me.

What do the poor and strangers have to do with mutual reciprocity?  If you are poor and a stranger how do you function in my life?  I can actually make the stranger and the poor person to have a function in my life.  By giving to a poor person or helping a stranger, I can feel good about myself as being altruistic or as obeying the words of Jesus.  Do I need the poor and the stranger in my lives to feel good about how I am obeying Jesus?

It could be that we often can read the words of Jesus and the Bible and feel guilty about an unattainable standard, particularly toward the poor and the stranger.  We might think that these words should compel us to visit the homeless on streets of San Francisco or San Jose and bring them to our homes and place of worship.

It is important to understand the contexts of the biblical writings.  The New Testament writings were writings which arose to teach and to expose the habits of the early Christian practice within their communities.

The chief event of hospitality within the early church was the Holy Eucharist.  The practice of the Holy Eucharist was actually the banquet of the church.  The early church invited to the Holy Eucharist a wider crowd than had been invited to the synagogue.

What had happened in Judaism of the time of Jesus was what can and does happen in any community, segregatory practices.  Segregation can happen when people want to protect themselves from outside threats and influences.  Segregation can happen when people believe that outside contact will change the community's institutional identity and purity.
Segregation can happen when people of like interest get comfortable in meeting together.  Why would we want to meet with people with whom we have no compatibility?

One of the side effects of segregatory practices is that strangers can feel like they can never belong in a group with such exclusive practices.  Outsiders and strangers may not want to change their lives in order to fulfill the requirements of community membership.

When the New Testament was being written, the urbanization of the cities of the Roman Empire brought together strangers.  When strangers arrive in a new place how do they acculturate themselves to a new place, in employment, places to dwell and social contacts?   If a new family arrives in a place to live permanently where do potential suitors go to form relationships, get married and raise families?

The secret of the success of the early Christian movement was it provided a meeting setting, a social club which allowed strangers to feel like they belonged in a new place.

Hence, we have the words of Jesus as an oracle in the early Christian community, actually touting what the Holy Eucharist had already become within these growing Christian Clubs within the cities of the Roman Empire.

The Gospels and other New Testament writings present a contrast in the practice of these new Christian Social Clubs being places where strangers were welcome and the practices of the synagogues which were places only for people who were able be completely observant Jews, complying with the ritual purity rules of Judaism.

How are the strangers and the poor and the impaired found in the early church different from the homeless poor who live on the streets of our cities today?

The strangers and the poor who became members of the early church, were people who had the ability to enter into covenantal relationship with others.  They were people who were able to perform the baptismal vows.  The strangers, the poor and the impaired of the time of the early church were those who wanted community; they wanted to be contributing members of a community but they for various cultural reasons could not find a accessible way to belong within synagogues which enforced the ritual purity of Judaism.

The reason that the strangers and the poor on our streets seem so foreign to us today is because they are socially and community impaired when it comes to the community life of most churches.  I am not suggesting that street people and the homeless do not have community;  it is just not community behaviors that conform to the socio-educational requirements of people who are formed by the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.

In interacting with people who arrive at the door of the church asking for money, I used to say to them: "If you come to our parish and attend every week and participate with us for three months, I think we can help change your life."  In 35 years of ministry, I have only seen it happen once, since only one woman has ever taken the challenge.  And it did work for her and her children.

What this reveals is how confused we can get when we try to make wrong interpretation of what stranger and poor meant for New Testament communities and what stranger and poor mean for us today.  The early Christian strangers and poor were people who wanted community identity but were denied it in other places but found community in the Christian social neighborhood clubs in the cities of the Roman Empire.  These Christian social clubs became called churches.   And the stranger and the poor and the impaired became expressive of health and salvation as they interacted to fulfill their baptismal vows.

I don't think that we can apply the words of Jesus and the early church in exactly the same way to the conditions of the poor and strangers we find in our cities today.  This does not mean that we do not have a responsibility to the poor on the streets of the city today;  we still have to build strategies and tactics to help the poor and the people who forever will be strange to people who use the Book of Common Prayer in their worship.

A community with common prayer accessible to the street poor and homeless is another kind of ministry and it is always worth the efforts to promote the kinds of accessible community to the homeless and poor and we cannot demand that they be able or required to follow how we practice the baptismal covenant with equal mutual reciprocity within significant community.  We cannot be disappointed that homeless poor are different than us;  we cannot ask that they become like us in how we practice our faith in communities expressive of the social aspects of middle class or upper middle class values.

We need to appreciate the success of the early churches in becoming effective social clubs for strangers to become friends, for poor to find contacts and support and for the impaired to be regarded as equally able to be gifted by God's Spirit.

The long success of the church also means that there are large sectors of the world population which inhabit the places where the poor and strangers can be found.  Some poor and strangers can become integrated into parish communities.  The immigrant strangers who have become prominent citizens need to be aware of the new immigrants.  The poor who have become people of means need to be aware of those who are still poor.  Within immigrant population there are people who have the ability to be in mutually reciprocal relationship as is found in a parish church.

The New Testament writings represent the time when strangers were becoming friends through mutual commitment to each other.  The New Testament writings represent a time when poor and isolated people could join a community and have their fortunes changed.  The New Testament communities were places where people who had impairment did not have to believe that God had punished them because their bodies came into this world formed differently.

We as a parish church still need to be a place where strangers can be come friends; poor can network to find enough; and the impaired to be valued for how they have been made by God.

Beyond this there are people who are still poor, strange and foreign to us and segregated by various kinds of impairment.  We always are called to seek tactics of love and justice which honor people for what they can do and give based upon their actual conditions.

Let us not condemn ourselves because there are still poor and strangers in our world.  Let us not condemn ourselves because not that many people will ever enjoy or appreciate Episcopal liturgy in the way in which we do.  But let us not forget that essentially the Eucharist is God's banquet to which everyone is invited to be fed by the equal and great presence of the Risen Christ.

And let us pray that the presence of the Risen Christ also gets known to people in having enough to eat, a place of shelter and dignity for themselves in the uniqueness of how they are coming to know their own integrity in their life circumstance.  Amen.