Come on Up to the House...redux

COME ON UP TO THE HOUSE…

Rev. Kit Ketcham

Oct. 8, 2017

            Thanks, Bree, I love hearing you sing and that song is once again just right for our service today as we think about the Radical Hospitality that we as UUs are called to give.

            Memory Lane time:  Let me tell you a story.

            It was just a normal Sunday in the year 2005, with the normal smiles and greetings as people passed by me before joining others in the sanctuary.  There had been the normal “hi, so nice to see you today!” and “how’s your Mom?” and
“what do you hear from so and so?”  and “welcome to our UU congregation!  Would you like a nametag?”  and “yes, I think there is a plan to go out for a meal after the service; I hope you can come”

            UU Congregations are always on the lookout for visitors and this congregation was no different.  We want to be able to say hello, offer a friendly smile---and a nametag!---and give the best welcome we can offer to someone new, someone who is perhaps hurting, perhaps lonely, perhaps unfamiliar with UUism or---perhaps a longtime UU looking for a new church home.  It’s our normal Sunday routine.

            On this particular Sunday in 2005, however, members of the small congregation took one look at the visitor coming through the door and did a doubletake.  No, it wasn’t President Bush, coming to see how we liked his environmental policies or disaster response; it wasn’t some glamorous movie star or bedraggled reality show survivor; it wasn’t the mayor of our small town or any other well-known local personage.

            This visitor’s appearance was startling in itself, and I could feel my own apprehensions rise up.  Why would anyone choose to look the way this person did?  I quickly began to think about how best to approach this individual; how would others in the congregation respond?

            And then, I saw our 85 year old greeter step forward toward our visitor and the two ordinary-looking people who had come in with him.  I saw a friendly smile on the greeter’s face and then a handshake.  I watched as the greeter helped them prepare nametags and gave them orders of service.  And when the three visitors came to where I was standing outside the sanctuary door, I had been given a clear model for how we were going to welcome our unusual visitor.

            “Cat”, as we came to know him that day, is a Native American who has adopted the practice of changing his appearance to resemble his totem animal, a tiger.  Cat is tattooed with tiger-like markings; he uses special contact lenses to give his eyes a catlike shape and color; his nails are shaped into claws; his face has been surgically altered to a more feline shape and his teeth are sharp and fanglike.

            Cat is not your typical visitor.  Wherever he goes in the community, people stop and stare and perhaps walk the other way. Now, I don’t know all the reasons Cat looks the way he does.  There are lots of questions in my mind about how he has chosen this path.

            But on that day, my task and that of the rest of us attending that service was to welcome Cat and his friends, to make a place for them among us, to offer them the simple hospitality of our sacred space, of our worship time, to invite them to have a cup of coffee and a cookie after the service, to go with our group to the Chinese place for a meal after church. 

This was not necessarily our first gut reaction, as you might expect!

We humans are almost automatically suspicious of anyone who doesn’t look or seem quite like us.  And hospitality can be tough when we are faced with offering acceptance and welcome to someone very different, someone who may appear a little frightening or unusual.

We are protective---of our children and ourselves, we are concerned about how we may look to others, we are leery of being conned or taken advantage of, and we may worry about the effect of a stranger on our children or on our quiet lives.

What is hospitality?  We often associate it with “the hospitality industry”, meaning hotels and travel agencies and restaurants and tourist attractions.  We may think of it as greeting guests in our home, inviting friends to join us for a gathering.

My dictionary says that to be hospitable means to welcome guests or strangers with warmth and generosity.  But in Cat’s case, we’re talking radical hospitality.  Again, my dictionary says that radical means “carried to the farthest limit or extreme.”   So to provide radical hospitality seems to mean that we welcome the least welcomed, the one who is most different from us.

In one of his famous parables, the teacher Jesus tells of a king who is rewarding his faithful servants for their loyalty.  The king tells his servants, “I was hungry and you gave me food.  I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.  I was sick and you took care of me. I was naked and you gave me clothing.  I was in prison and you visited me.”

But the servants are confused and ask when all this happened, because they don’t remember these events.  And the king says in reply these memorable words:  “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me”, saying, in effect, that every effort they made to make another person comfortable and at home was as important as if they had done it for the king.

In our current society, the struggle about who deserves hospitality and who does not is intense and far-reaching.  Ironically, one of the chief bulwarks of homophobic religious denominations is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hebrew scriptures.

The story is about two angels in human form who visited a man named Lot, a citizen of Sodom, to warn him that the city was about to be destroyed by God.  An angry mob of men saw the two strangers arrive at Lot’s home and descended upon the house, demanding that Lot surrender the two men to them, that they might get to “know” them, a word which occasionally in Hebrew refers to sexual intercourse, though infrequently.

This story has been misconstrued to say that the sin of the city of Sodom (from which the word sodomy comes), the sin was homosexual behavior.  However, according to Bible scholars, the real sin in this instance, in addition to the sexual violence implied, the real sin was the mob’s destructive behavior toward two strangers who were receiving hospitality from Lot and his family, for hospitality has long been an important religious principle in most world religions.

When Bree first sang this song for us, over a year ago, I told you all at that time that the phrase “come on up to the house” revived memories for me of growing up in Athena, OR and hearing it repeated by a rancher friend of our family.  Kohler Betts’ Christian belief in hospitality prompted him to say to some of the wanderers who came through our town during pea and wheat harvest seasons:

“Come on up to the house, we’ll find you a job, or a meal, or a place to bunk”.  Come on up to the house; we care what happens to you and you can help us bring in the crops.

In the past several weeks, our planet has undergone many radical weather and geologic events which have disrupted communities, killed scores of people, caused billions of dollars in destroyed property, and underscored the clear message of climate change and its catastrophic potential.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria have forced evacuations of millions of people, from Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean nations, and bordering US states.  These four storms have caused the largest evacuations in US history and have decimated entire cities.  Where are these folks going to go?

What if no other states or countries would take them in?  Imagine if Georgia and Alabama built walls to keep them out.  Imagine if we forced them to stay put and drown.

And yet this is what our nation is currently doing every day all over the world, from Mexicans fleeing the violence of drug cartels, Syrians fleeing a civil war, Yemenis (YEmenis)fleeing forced starvation, Palestinians expelled from their homes, Rohingya (Rahinga) fleeing genocide in Myanmar (Me-en-mar).

We know in our hearts that this is wrong.  We know that if humans have any rights at all, they have the right to flee certain death.  We know this.  We know this.

I occasionally join an elderly friend named Billy in his booth at Geno’s on Sunday night for my granny-burger and tater tots.  He’s a veteran of the Korean War, lives in Naselle, and drives over to Astoria nearly every day to sit at Geno’s and talk with friends who come and go.

He’s concerned about all the veterans and other homeless folks he sees on Astoria’s streets.  Why are they there?  Where can they go?  Can they get jobs?  Who is responsible?  Does anyone care?

And I think “Come on up to the Warming Center”---and then remember that the Warming Center’s legitimacy has been challenged and threatened with closure, though that crisis appears to have been averted for now.  Will it be available when it’s most needed?

Another friend feels lonely because she has few friends like herself and doesn’t know how to find others who share her world. “Come on up to the Lower Columbia Diversity Coalition”, I think, and then remember that most of those members are straight and white and abled. Will she find what she needs there?

I meet someone looking for a new church home where he can share his liberal Christianity without needing to recite a creed or sing songs that are not in tune with his beliefs.  He kinda likes to use the word God too.  “Come on up to PUUF”, I think, and when he does, I overhear an anti-Christian joke.  Will this UU Fellowship really be a good fit for him?

I go to the library and I notice that somebody must have said “come on up to the library” because sitting at a table reading a magazine is an older guy with raggedy clothes and a wild beard and a backpack beside his chair.  And at one of the computers is a young woman who seems to be looking for a job.  And upstairs in the stacks is a boldly pierced and tattooed teenage science fiction buff checking out the classic fantasy books his dad told him about.  Quite a few people are coming on up to the library.

There just aren’t very many places where people are welcomed no matter who they are or what their needs are.  Lucky we have the library.  Lucky we have the Armory and the parks.  Lucky we still have the Warming Center.  Lucky the Lower Columbia Diversity Coalition knows it needs to up its game.  And lucky that PUUF has gotten more comfortable with its theological diversity.

            As I was on my way home from my weekend on Whidbey Island on Monday morning, the news about the massacre in Las Vegas NV was all over the airwaves.  And I began to think about the pattern of mass shootings that has developed in the US over the past years.

            There are some scary similarities among the shooters,  as documented in various psychological publications:  they tend to be angry white males, feeling wronged and wounded by society, narcissistic, seeing violence as the only cure for their pain, single or divorced, isolated loners, highly intelligent, crying out for help (or attention) through social media or journals, having weapons at hand, particularly semi-automatic rifles, possessed by hatred and paranoia, idolization of radical politics, who has been planning his act for a long time.

            Not every mass murderer has all these characteristics in equal measure, but when I look at the list of common traits, my many years as a professional counselor come to my aid, and I see loss and the resultant anger all over the place.

            We have been made sharply aware of the pain of many white men, particularly those who feel that their authority as white males has been challenged by women’s accomplishments and the rise in power by women and by people of color.  Their pain is compounded by difficult relationships; they may have been abused as children; they often have domestic violence convictions; they want revenge for their pain, to hurt in return for being hurt; their intelligence gives them both the ability to strategize and plan but is turned toward violence, not altruism; big guns give them a sense of power and control and the knowledge that they can take revenge---and skip out on the consequences through suicide.

            Our president called the massacre an act of ultimate evil and while I don’t disagree that this was an evil act, I began to wonder about where evil comes from.  I just don’t think it comes out of nowhere.  I’m coming to believe that it arises out of fear.

            Perhaps this is why most world religions include the instruction to give hospitality to the stranger, to welcome the stranger, to offer kindness rather than pain.  If the stranger in our midst is not afraid they will be hurt, not afraid they will be rejected for their different skin color or ability or religious belief, if the stranger receives kindness instead of cruelty and rejection, perhaps our world would be a different place.

            I have come to believe that hospitality, giving kindness and support to people we don’t know, even people who are scary-looking or very different in some way, is one of the building blocks of a healthy society.  When we can set aside our fears and reach out in kindness to one another, we nudge that other person toward goodness, encouraging kindness toward others, rather than anger.

            Hospitality, then, radical hospitality, is absolutely necessary for a healthy nation, or person, or community.  Fear kills.  Fear kills people, animals, the environment.  When we let ourselves fear that we will not have enough---enough money, enough food, enough love, enough power---we are most likely to strike out in anger and recreate anger in others.

            Unitarian Universalism’s Poet Lynn Ungar has offered these thoughts, which I quote in closing.

(But) The bizarre US fascination with powerful weapons capable of killing large numbers of people is only a symptom of the disease. It’s a symptom that needs to be addressed. But the disease, the fury and dominance and entitlement of Angry White Men, is the rot at the heart of the matter.

It’s not a problem that has a legislative answer, although electing people who don’t fit the description of Angry White Man might help.

Fighting fire with fire, punching Nazis or breaking windows, only invites the Angry White Men into the kind of fight they are eager to have. And it’s not as if reasoned discourse will get at the root fear that drives the anger. There aren’t answers that are easy or quick, but there are answers. Raise children who know both how to express their emotions and how to listen to the feelings of others. Work to dismantle white supremacy in all of its complicated manifestations. Address economic inequality and the need for meaningful work.             

              Stand up to the gospel of greed. Build communities. Build diverse communities. Build communities where people can experience being both safe and challenged. Build communities where people learn to practice love, which is ultimately the only antidote to evil.

Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.

HYMN #131 “Love Will Guide Us

            As Nancy extinguishes our chalice, let’s close with our benediction.

BENEDICTION:

            Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place.  Let us go in peace, remembering that we have the power to change the world, through our commitment to kindness, respect, and open communication.  May we use our powers for good, to the benefit of all living things.  Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

CLOSING CIRCLE