Welcome across race

For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page, which includes Powery's current Living by the Word column as well as past magazine and blog content. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.

For this Sunday's Living by the Word column, I focused on the theme of hospitality in the reading from Romans.

For my own sermon on this text, I almost went with the title "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" In the 1967 film—starring the likes of Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn, and Katharine Houghton—the daughter of a well-to-do white couple brings her fiance home to meet her parents, who do not know he is black. His parents also come to town to meet her; they learn she is white at the airport.