The Welcome Table
“The Welcome Table” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! We are now officially past the middle of November. For me, at Creekside this means getting planning finished up for Advent and Christmas, but at home it means making plans for Thanksgiving. That’s Thanksgiving with a capital T — the holiday which happens on the fourth Thursday of November, not the practice of gratitude which ought to be happening much more often than one day a year. Even though Tim and I haven’t hosted Thanksgiving for years, we still prepare food to share and give consideration to the dynamics of the day; what kind of activities people need or want to do, what childcare might be needed, who might have special needs. Anybody who has hosted a gathering for more than like two people knows what I’m talking about. If you are someone who invites people into your home regularly, you probably work through this checklist or some version of it automatically, without giving it much thought.
This kind of consideration is not very different from a lot of the planning I get to sit in on here at Creekside. You may know that Creekside has a Hospitality Team which is dedicated to welcoming folks to our church. I have a special appreciation for the Hospitality Team because it is one of the few teams which does not expect me to attend their meetings — probably because the chair is Tim McFadden who gets a big ‘ol dose of Pastor Rosanna on a regular basis. But it turns out that nearly all of Creekside’s ministry teams connect to welcoming and hospitality in some way: Media (check) Fellowship (check) Christian Ed (check), I could go on down the list. It’s entirely appropriate that all these different teams are considering welcome and hospitality, because it is a theological imperative. Being welcoming isn’t just a friendly thing, practicing hospitality is part of who we are called to be as Christians.
I cannot state it more clearly than Paul does in his letter to the Romans. Chapter 15 verse 7 says, “Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” But rather than saying, See, it’s just that simple! and letting you go eat cupcakes in the Gathering Area, I need to say — Not so fast. As much as we’d like to think that welcoming one another comes naturally to us and that we’re actually pretty good at it, we need to consider the rest of this section from Romans chapter 15, as well as our own context. I’ll let Paul go first.
Immediately after telling us to welcome others, Paul mentions Christ being a servant of the circumcised, which is code for Jewish insiders. Male Jewish insiders literally, but all Jewish insiders by a more generous accounting. Christ became a servant to the Jews so that the Gentiles — non Jews — might come to glorify God as well. And then Paul strings together some references from the Hebrew Bible, the prophets and the psalms, which talk about the inclusion of the Gentiles. This may not seem like a big deal to us now, but it was a HUGE issue for the early church, and one which Paul addresses again and again. Welcoming Gentiles was one of the cornerstones of Paul’s teaching. Non-Jews are not just a different religion than the Jews, they are a different culture. They are those other people. You know, the ones who speak a different language, dress differently, prepare and eat food differently. They are not like us. By Jewish law, they are literally unclean, and you are not supposed to sit at the same table and share a meal with them. So what are these Jewish Christians supposed to do when the laws which keep them pure and distinct from their neighbors are also keeping them from welcoming others as Christ welcomed them?
This is not only an ancient conundrum. It plays out in churches and families all the time. What about people who speak a different language or eat food which is unfamiliar to us? What about traditional hymns or contemporary worship music? And don’t even get started on politics. I don’t know if anyone has been uninvited from your Thanksgiving gatherings, or if it’s understood that certain topics will not be discussed, but I can remember as a child leaving a family Thanksgiving dinner before dessert because my father was so upset about a theological issue. To me as a twelve-year-old, inclusive language did not seem like something worth missing pumpkin pie over, but my father and my whip-smart cousins were never going to back down from their conflicting convictions, or hold back from expressing their opinions.
I think it is unlikely that we are ever going to live in a world where everyone is the same and we all agree. It would be a boring place and I would be out of a job, for sure. This is certainly not the kind of world which Jesus came to, or the world which Paul was writing about. For me, the crux of this text and the message about welcome is this: welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed you. Being accepted and belonging is a profound human need. Some people never have that need met in their family or their work place or their peer group. Deb Kauffman and I are part of a women’s group at Camp Mack which is studying the book Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown. Brown makes a clear distinction between fitting in and belonging. She writes, “Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be, to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are, it requires us to be who we are.”[1] God knows who we are. God knows who we are. Ten chapter earlier, in Romans 5, Paul says that Christ died for us when we were yet sinners. That radical acceptance and sacrifice from Christ is how we can find belonging and offer it to others. The goal, of course, is to follow Christ and become more like him, not to remain a sinner because Christ has accepted me — game over. But the good news of being welcome in Christ is that we get to start wherever we are. We don’t have to become someone different in order to belong. The challenging news is that we are called, for the glory of God, to extend that same welcome and belonging to other people. We don’t do that by being perfect; we do that by being authentic. And for us, those two are never the same thing.
I heard one of our new members say, “Every church thinks they are friendly; Creekside actually is.” That is a lovely thing to say, and I pray that it is true. I have been around long enough to know that being friendly, welcoming, hospitable, however you characterize it, church is not a task which can be delegated to a committee or a small group of people. I appreciate the Hospitality Team, but their work is not only to be individuals who are welcoming, it is to create an atmosphere of welcome here at Creekside. And an atmosphere of welcome is everyone’s work — because we have all been welcomed by Christ. And if Christ thought I was worth dying for, well then anyone else is worth dying for, because I am not better than anyone else. If I try to pretend otherwise, I am trying to fit in instead of taking the risk and getting the benefit of belonging.
Please take the opportunity to introduce yourself or reaffirm your connections with these new members. They are worth it — for who they are and for they gifts which they bring to enrich the body of Christ at Creekside. And as we prepare to join with family and friends for meals and celebrations in the coming weeks, may our tables reflect the welcome of Jesus Christ, who ate with sinners and healed sinners and died for sinners. Praise God for the fellowship of love which extends to everyone on earth. Amen.
[1] Brene Brown. The Gifts of Imperfection Hazelden Publishing 2010, p 35.