hospitality

I asked an older English woman who left the church long ago why she now wants to come back. Her response made the color drain from my face.

We like to think of our congregations as families. That's a powerful thing—but it can also be exclusive and off-putting.

A man stumbled into church drunk and bleeding from his hand. "I have hepatitis C," he said. I remembered this as I read Richard Beck's book Unclean.

So it sounds like Tony Perkins--whose relative civility we both acknowledged and declined to be overly impressed by last week--will accept a dinner invitation from gay rights activist Jennifer Chrisler, who is married to a woman. Chrisler's invitation to Perkins followed Dan Savage's to Brian Brown, of the anti-same-sex-marriage National Organization for Marriage.

Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz is opening a
food-truck this week, a date set to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the
beginning of the Iraq War.

Through his project Enemy Kitchen, Rakowitz has been using
Iraqi food and culture to break down cultural barriers for several years. He is
launching the food truck as part of the Smart Museum of Art's new exhibit
called "Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art."

To build stronger communities, we need to get in the habit of recognizing what undergirds our relationships. We can't afford to take it for granted.

In Bosnia, I was reminded that the God who shows up at communion is a God who brazenly seeks us out of the crowd.

One congregation's epiphany

When Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church was built by German immigrants 100 years ago, it stood alone on the block; now luxury condominiums are boxing us in. A preservationist says it will cost $8 million to repair our church, give or take a million. The stained glass windows have already been removed because of the danger of breakage during the construction next door. The steeple alone, leaning to one side, will cost over a million to repair. “It’s a substantial building,” the preservationist said when he delivered the news. Sometimes I curse this substantial building as an albatross, a black hole, a money pit. And yet . . .

Many Christians can name the hour and the place of their salvation. For me it was answering not one but two altar calls at Billy Graham crusades in the 1960s. For Reinhold Niebuhr, who was asked if he could name the time and place of his salvation, it was “2,000 years ago on a dusty hill named Golgotha outside Jerusalem’s wall.”

As I write this, the kitchen table is shaking. If our table is shaking, I worry that the church’s beautiful stained-glass windows, desperately in need of repair, are also shaking. The parsonage is attached to the church and shares the same foundation. Seven feet away all hell is breaking loose. Several blocks of businesses that have served this neighborhood are being knocked down by giant backhoes and inflated real estate prices to make way for towering apartments.

Gothic cathedral. A gay couple approaches holding hands. “Step aside, please,” say the muscle-bound guards. They speak similar words to an African-American girl, a Hispanic man, a young man in a wheelchair. Then, just as we realize that the two large men are “church bouncers,” the scene fades to black and the tag line reads: “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”