Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Margaret A. Beckman

READINGS

Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Gollins Pratt. Paraclete Press; New Exp edition (June 1, 2011)
“When we speak of hospitality we are always addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Each of us makes choices about who will and who will not be included in our lives…Issues of inclusion and exclusion, while personal, are not just personal. Our entire culture excludes many people. If you are in a wheelchair, for example, you are excluded because there are places you can’t go. If you are very young, if you are very old, you are excluded… Hospitality has an inescapable moral dimension to it… It is an issue involving what it means to be human. All of our talk about hospitable openness doesn’t mean anything as long as some people continue to be tossed aside…

“But calling hospitality a moral issue does not tell us the whole truth about hospitality either. A moral issue can become bogged down in legalisms, and hospitality is no legalistic ethical issue. It is instead a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality.”
 

“Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” – Ethan Smith
Dear Emily,
Every time I watch baseball a voice I no longer recognize whispers
“Ethan, do you remember? When you were going to be the first girl
To play in the major league Seattle mariners rally cap?”
But to be honest Emily I don’t
Dad told me that like it was someone else’s bedtime story
But I do know you had that drive
Didn’t let anyone tell you to wear shorts above your knees
Didn’t care if boys thought your hair fell on your shoulders just right
But with girls, sleepovers meant the space between your shoulder and hers
Was a 6-inch fatal territory

The year you turned 11
Was the first time you said out loud that you didn’t want to live anymore
In therapy you said you wouldn’t make it to 21
On my 21st birthday I thought about you
You were right
At 19 you started to fade
I tried to cross you out like a line in my memoir
I wished I could erase completely
And maybe I’m misunderstanding the definition of death
But even though parts of you still exist
You are not here
Most of my friends have never heard your name until now

I’ve been trying to write this letter for 6 months
I still can’t decide if it should be an apology or not
But now you will never hear “Emily Smith” announced at a college graduation
Get married, give birth
When the prescribed testosterone started taking effect my body stopped producing the potential for new life every month
I thought about your children, how I wanted them too
I let a doctor remove your breasts so I could stand up straighter
Now even if I somehow had those children I wouldn’t be able to nourish them
My body is obsolete
Scarred cosmetic but never C-section

I was 4 days late
There will never be grandparents
I was one week late
They will never hold their lover’s sleeping figure
I was 11 days late
They will never breathe in a sunset and a sunrise in the same night
I was 2 weeks late
They will never learn to jump rope
I was 3 weeks late
They will never shout “Watch mummy, watch me on the slide”
I was 2 months late
A piece of us will never wrap their arms around our legs for comfort
Just to keep them from falling down

And I am sorry that this process is so slow and all you can do is wonder if you ever had a place
You did
You still do
Don’t forget that
Yours, Ethan
P.S. I never hated you
 

SERMON

And when they were all gathered together at the table, Jesus took the bread and he blessed it and he broke it and he shared it with everyone.

And when the sun had set and the neighbors were together, the elders took the figs and the olives and they blessed them and as broke the Ramadan fast, they shared them with everyone.

And when the young monks had come in from their long day of meditation and were seated on the floor around the low table, the teacher lifted the tea pot and she mindfully began to pour the tea for everyone.

And when Sophia believed that the most important guest in the world was about to visit her, she made bread and cookies and delightful treats and she made a pitcher of iced tea with lemonade. And when neighbors and strangers and hungry people and happy people and all kinds of people showed up at her door, she welcomed them – and with all the food that she had prepared for the very special one she was expecting, she served everyone.

It does seem that our Holy Days and our holidays are marked by the sharing of food. Needless to say, Thanksgiving will be a food extravaganza for many families. At Thanksgiving, we gather together as families – both families of origin and chosen families. We invite friends to share the turkey and stuffing with us. Some of us even have a dining room table scene reminiscent of a Normal Rockwell painting.

Sharing the table, is fundamental to our culture. It is also deeply embedded in most religious traditions – whether the Buddhist Tea Ceremony or the Christian Communion or the Jewish Passover Meal or the Muslim breaking of the Ramadan fast. Sharing the meal is an essential part of who we are and how we express our affection for each other. Those who are welcome to join us at the table are typically those we know and love – or are those to whom we related … not necessarily the same folks. We easily welcome those who are like us; those who share our values, our educational and economic class, our ways of seeing the world, our philosophical, spiritual and religious orientations. It is easy to break bread with those with whom we are already comfortable. And that is typically how we fill our tables.

Most of you already know where I am going with this – I’m going to the places that are not so easy; the places where we encounter people very different from ourselves; the places that scare us; the places we have thus far refused to go because we do not feel comfortable and safe. We resist sitting at the table with people who are strange to us.

What would it be like to expand the welcome you offer for your holiday table? And I mean this both literally and symbolically; both personally and communally. What would it take to welcome people so unlike us that we have nothing in common and little to say to each other – except that we are all human beings created in the image and likeness of the divine and except that, really, the only thing we need to say to each other is, “I love you.”?

Now more than ever it is important that we expand our Welcome Table. There are powerful forces and people in our nation who are trying to figure out how to keep a great many people from being included at the table; the table they think they now control. People are afraid for their safety and many are afraid for their lives. These are not idle or inconsequential fears.  I think we can expect that the Welcome Table of the United States of America is not going to be expanding again any time soon. It is, rather, undergoing great pressure to contract. There are those of us who have spent the last many decades trying to include more and more people, to welcome more and more people – people who have been marginalized or intentionally excluded from the bounty of our nation’s table. Now we are faced with an eruption of negative energy trying to tear apart that fabric of inclusion that so many have worked for so long to weave together in bright and intricately beautiful patterns.

My dear Spiritual Companions, we cannot, we must not, let this happen.

We are called to practice hospitality. In these most difficult and challenging times, we are being called to practice radical hospitality. Radical hospitality acknowledges the difficulty and the absolute necessity of changing the way we – individually and collectively – welcome people to the table of life. As Father Daniel Horman and Lonni Gollins Pratt have written – “Hospitality has an inescapable moral dimension to it…it is an issue involving what it means to be human. All of our talk about hospitable openness doesn’t mean anything as long as some people continue to be tossed aside…” They go on to say that radical hospitality is a moral issue. We are talking about human beings – people not very different from you and me. Hospitality understood this way is at once spiritual imperative and a spiritual practice. It is both the answer to bigotry and injustice and the path to a deeper spirituality. I agree with them. You probably do too. The question now is, What do we do? Can we walk our talk and live into the changes that would come as a result of overwhelming achievement of radical hospitality?

Listen friends, I know it’s Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving will be small and quiet. Thank goodness. But I have been giving some thought to just how welcoming I really am and whether or not I am prepared to expand the diversity of my own Welcome Table. This is only partially a rhetorical consideration. In my mind I think that I would welcome to my table people of all races and ages and ethnicities. I like to think that I would welcome both rich and poor and everyone in the middle (if there are any middle class people left in America). I want to offer a sincere welcome to the Muslim and the Buddhist and the Mormon and the Pagan and the Christian and the agnostic and the atheist and the spiritual-but-not-religious. In my mind I welcome the heterosexual and the bisexual and homosexual and the non-sexual. I want to make room for all the folks who slide across the gender continuum with ease and deliberate non-conformance. The transgender person will be as welcome at my table as anyone else. All this I want to be true because I believe in affirming and promoting the inherent dignity and worth of every person and I try hard to live every day with that belief in mind and deed. And yet, if I am really honest, I’m not sure I can manage it on a consistent basis.

Here’s the thing—once I know you I will probably be fine with you. I don’t need to agree with you or even like you, but I can probably find a way to include you at the Table. Trouble is, I don’t know that many people who are distinctly different from me. Typical isn’t it? Don’t most of us hang out with people mostly similar to ourselves?

A commitment to Radical Hospitality demands that I do better. In our reading this morning, radical hospitality is described as a spiritual practice. It’s not easy, but our faith demands it. We are called to be radically inclusive. The world is about exclusion. Our faith is about inclusion. We now see that there are many who will, if they can, move us toward excluding all kinds of people. There are those who are actively seeking to reverse human and civil rights for people simply based on race or immigration status or religion or gender or gender identity or sexual orientation or physical or emotional disability. There are people in real danger in our country right now – more danger than they were in a month ago. This is important. We cannot continue to be intellectually inclusive; we must become demonstrably and consistently inclusive. And we must demand the same of our lawmakers and leaders.

Let me digress for a few minutes – you can stand it.

Today is November 20th. November 20th was designated as Transgender Remembrance Day. These words were posted in a blog on Thursday – November 17th:
As a matter of sheer statistical odds, I should not be alive to write this piece. My name is Cecilia, and I am a 44-year-old transgender woman of color. I am also a survivor of rape and incarceration.

These elements have put me at severe risk of life-threatening diseases, mental health illnesses, and deadly assaults. I would call it a blessing, or perhaps the product of incredible luck, that I am alive today to write these words. Today I am a survivor, but tomorrow I may very well be the next trans woman of color to suffer a fate unfurled by those who insist that we are not welcome to share their right to live, and to live freely.
As a group, transgender people are at tremendous risk for dying. They are routinely harassed, denied services, beaten, and murdered. I don’t really know the statistics, but I saw a list this week of trans people who have died this year – by murder and by suicide. Believe me, it’s a long list and very incomplete. This discrimination and terrorizing of transgender people is wrong. We will have many human and civil rights battles to fight in the next four years. Some we thought were already settled and here we are fighting them all over again. You probably know what many of those battles are. Today, I want to lift up the battle for transgender people. I cannot begin to imagine how afraid they are right now. The Lesbian and Gay communities are afraid, more afraid than we’ve been in many years. But our fear is minimal compared to what is happening to trans people. This is a human crisis and we cannot simply say that trans people deserve dignity and respect. We must find ways to protect them and to work for the permanent establishment of their rights. And, we need to include them at our table. It might be Nicole Maines – the young woman from Orono, Maine who fought for her right to be Nicole – and to use the bathroom that corresponds to her gender identity. It might be Ethan Smith who fondly remembers the Emily he once was though he cannot be anyone other than Ethan and live. Are they at welcome at our table?

This concludes my digression but not the work that all of us must be doing.

We’re about to sing the song We’re Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table – only three verses in our book. It turns out this is one of those songs that has a life of its own. There are many versions and many different sets of verses. You will know why that is when we sing it. As we sing, let yourself imagine the faces of those who are presently excluded from sitting at the welcome Table.

Imagine what it would be like to dine in the company of all of humanity in all our wonder and colors and shapes and beliefs and fashions and practices. Imagine the vast array of foods from every corner of our world. Imagine all god’s people together to break bread and drink tea. Imagine.

Then, may we be inspired to work toward that day. None of us can do this hard work alone. May we know always that we are not alone in this work. We have strong and committed companions at every step of the way. We are strong and committed companions. We are the face and hands of Love. May we not disappoint.

Blessed Be. I Love You. Amen.