Pennsylvania Council of Churches

April 10, 2000

I consider it a great blessing to be here for this day of celebration. I have deep appreciation for the ministry Gary Harke has done within a Moravian context, and it will be fun to see the ministry God works through him, together with the rest of you, here in the council of churches.

Before I launch into this presentation, I need to say a word about it. Gary, in his nondirective way, told me that I was free to speak about whatever I wanted-but it should deal with the essence of ecumenism, help us to integrate the various dimensions of the movement, be relevant to the Pennsylvania situation, and, of course, be firmly rooted in scripture. As I was wrestling with what to do, Gary sent me background materials on the council, and it struck me that much of your work fits under that great biblical theme: welcoming the stranger. The statement entitled “Our Partnership,” for example, says that the council

 §ministers to campers in public and private parks.

 §serves residents in Pennsylvania’s correctional institutions, mental hospitals, mental retardation centers,

 §ministers among truckers, travelers and truck stop staff through chaplains and volunteers,

 §assists traditionally African-American church bodies in Pennsylvania in a program of cooperative witness and service,

 §supports councils of churches, cooperative networks, and coalitions dealing with justice and morality so that the dignity of each person is enhanced, and

 §befriends seasonal farmworkers who tend and harvest field crops, fruit, and mushrooms across the state.

And so I decided, for this first presentation, to come at the heart of the ecumenical movement somewhat indirectly by exploring this theme.

My hope is that this will be useful for you in at least two ways: (1)

Ecumenism, let’s say it boldly, can (at times) seem a little stale. So perhaps this indirect approach will add a bit of freshness to our discussions. I am assuming that most people who come to a workshop such as this one don’t really need “Ecumenism 101”-and besides, if you do, you have Alton Motter right here in Pennsylvania! (2) I thought it might be useful to name a common theme that I, as an outsider, see in the ministries of this council. Perhaps it will be encouraging to think about the PCC not as a series of discrete programs but as a ministry of hospitality grounded firmly in scripture, that takes various forms. Understood scripturally, welcoming strangers is not an act of altruism but a faithful response to the one who has already welcomed us (all of us) beyond any possible deserving. What you are doing when you welcome strangers is not only social service but embodied theology, and I think it is important to recognize this.

The terms will become clearer as we go, but we still need to start with a couple of definitions. Strangers, as I see it, are those persons who are outside “our community,” persons whose lives and commitments are in fundamental ways unknown to us-which generally means persons who are unlike ourselves.

Ask yourself. What was your first experience of the stranger? I grew up in a small town in southern Iowa, surrounded by corn fields and hog farms that practically functioned as barriers against strangers. My first real experience of “the stranger” was when Amish began moving into the country (not an unknown situation in Pennsylvania). At first, there were only a few families, and the response was, generally speaking, cautious, distant curiosity. Then came more families; signs began to go up along the highways saying “watch for horse drawn vehicles;” and the tone of fear was unmistakable, even for a child. “They don’t buy insurance or clothes. If they take over any more land, this town’s finished.” As far as I know, my father and his friends had no direct dealings with the Amish; but they sure talked about them all the time-how they treated their horses, how they treated their women. These were strangers, and they were anything but welcome.

This leads us to the other key term. Welcome, as I understand it, means “to make the other feel at home.” A closely related word in scripture is hospitality-which meant opening one’s home to strangers, giving a meal to anyone who shows up. The Jewish Talmud, that mammoth collection of commentaries on scripture, says that Job (the quintessential good man) had a door on all four sides of his house so that strangers wouldn’t have to walk to the other side to find a way in. I’ll have much more to say about the biblical view in a moment; but for now let me simply note that hospitality, in our social context, has come to mean entertaining friends. Far from being a key dimension of the ethical life, hospitality is now thought of as an urbane equality on the order of table manners. We leave dealing with strangers to the “hospitality industry.”

Still, I imagine that all of us have been genuinely welcomed as strangers at some time or other. One incident came immediately to mind as I was preparing this presentation. When I was nineteen, I studied for a year in Israel and then spent several months traveling overland from Istanbul to Calcutta-and back. Since then, I have taught fairly regularly in India, where my family and I are always generously welcomed. But now I am a professor. Then I was just another weird-looking student who arrived third class in Delhi (along with what seemed like a billion other people) and who experienced acute sensory overload. As I stood there looking, I am sure, completely lost (since I had no tickets or reservations), a Hindu man asked if he could help me find where I was going and, after a brief conversation, invited me to his family’s modest home for a meal.

Let’s turn to scripture. The basic theme is sounded clearly by Miroslov Volf, a Christian theologian from Croatia (where strangerliness is an obvious issue!). There are, he writes, two persistent commandments in the Bible: have no strange gods and love strangers. Why love strangers? The paradigmatic passage is in Leviticus 19: “. you shall not oppress the alien [the Hebrew word is ger, which also means “stranger”]. The ger who resides with you shall be to you as a citizen among you; you shall love the ger as yourself for you were aliens [strangers] in the land of Egypt.”

A year or so ago, I came upon a woman in a sari in the middle of the St. Louis airport, obviously lost. I helped her find her gate, even though it meant I got to my gate with about two minutes to spare. Did I do this because I am a nice guy?! The real reason, you see, is that I remembered that man on the train platform in New Delhi. Exodus 23:9: “You shall not oppress an alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Memory is the basis for empathy. You know that strangers are easy prey for unjust treatment, because you were strangers. You know that they deserve not just occasional compassion but equal treatment (“as citizens among you”), because that’s how God treated you. Treatment of the stranger, therefore, is a key criterion of faithfulness to your covenant with God.

This message was internalized by the early Christian community and applied to its experience of Jesus. Through sin, we have made ourselves strangers to God. But in Christ God has still welcomed us, even to the point of death. Therefore, says the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, you must “welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you, to the glory of God” (I 5:7).

There were religious persons in the society in which Jesus lived who contended that outsiders were sinners, by definition impure. But through his table fellowship with strangers, Jesus turns this notion on its head: the real sinner is not the outcast but the one who casts the other out.

Even more dramatically, the Gospel according to Matthew suggests that Jesus identified himself with these strangers. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory…he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…. He will say to those on his left hand.`I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.'” They will answer-well, we know how they answered and how, according to Matthew, Jesus replied, “If you did not welcome one of them, you didn’t welcome me.”

The key idea, I think, was expressed by the well-known theologian, Kosuke Koyoma, at the 1998 assembly of the World Council of Churches. “For God,” said Koyoma, “no one is a stranger…. Therefore, when our actions say `I am not my brother’s or sister’s keeper,’ we treat God as a stranger.” You see his point. We are related to all of humanity through common creation and to other Christians through blood-not ours but his. Welcoming the stranger, in this sense, is what Christians call a sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible unity as children of God and followers of Christ.

Perhaps a good way to summarize the Judeo-Christian teaching on this subject is to recall the wonderful story of the three strangers who appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre. Abraham serves them bread from the choicest flour and kills the finest calf for them to eat-and, as you know, the strangers turn out to be a manifestation of God. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews recalls this story in one unforgettable verse: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels unawares” (13:2). “No one,” writes Thomas Merton, “knows that the stranger he meets is not the one who brings a providential message that will change his life.”

I hope these brief reflections have been sufficient to establish just how central this theme is to scripture. I want now to offer four overlapping observations about these texts and what they tell us about being a welcoming, ecumenical people. (These observations could easily apply to interfaith relations; but, for our purposes, I’ll be concentrating on the Christian ecumenical movement.)

I

Welcoming strangers, those who are unlike ourselves, is not a matter of politeness or distant charity. We have not necessarily done it by giving money, since the issue in welcoming others is relationship.

To put it another way, as understood in scripture, welcoming is not the same as tolerating. History shows that strangers will be tolerated so long as their case arouses sympathy or so long as they don’t challenge the prevalent political convictions or standard of living. Strangers, that is to say, will be tolerated when times are good; but tolerance often evaporates when times are tough-as people of Japanese ancestry found out in this country during World War II.

No. Welcoming strangers, in scriptural perspective, is an act of affirmation which says that we value the other prior to any judgment about them. Welcoming is based on a recognition of fundamental relatedness prior to any specific knowledge of who they are.

This is also key to understanding the vision (or, at least, the original vision) of the ecumenical movement. Ecumenism rests on the conviction that there is one church whose members are deeply related to one another thanks to what God has done in Jesus Christ-no matter how strange we may seem to one another. The ecumenical task, to put it another way, is not to create unity but to make God’s gift visible. The best succinct statement of this is his own and he is not divided.” I love the way that William Temple, great leader of the Anglican communion and the ecumenical movement, once put it: “Those who have nothing in common do not deplore their estrangement.” It is because we are one in Christ that we lament the scandal of competing denominations. It is because we have been commonly welcomed that we welcome one another, not just tolerate one another but welcome one another, ecumenically.

Of course, there are important theological differences (as well as cultural differences) that make Christians feel like strangers to one another. But the hard work of reaching a common mind is a consequence of our fundamental communion in Christ, not a prerequisite for it. Ecumenical dialogues often suggest that unity (communion) is dependent on our agreement-but this is simply a form of works righteousness. The logic of the gospel is not “if we love our neighbor, then God will love us.” Rather, “because God loves us, we are freed and empowered to love our neighbor.” In the same way, the logic of the ecumenical movement is not “if we agree, then we will have communion.” Rather, “because we are one in Christ, we are freed and empowered to seek common mind on those matters that have kept us apart.” Welcome one another because Christ has welcomed us. Then, work together on building up the body.

It is this theological insight that gives the movement its prophetic edge. U.S. Christians are bound in one fellowship with Cuban Christians and Iraqi Christians, whether we like it or not. Welcoming them is not an option on which we get to vote. Protestant Christians are related by blood to Catholic Christians, whether we recognize it or not. Welcoming the other is not our accomplishment, but our thankful response to the good news of God’s reconciliation. Rich Christians cannot say, “I have no need of you” to those who are poor. We are one body in Christ, and we are called to express that relationship through tangible acts of welcome–not charity but welcome.

II

This leads directly to my second observation: Welcoming the stranger is not a matter of altruism (self-less goodness on our part). Rather, welcoming the stranger is crucial to our own spiritual health. In one sense, this is an obvious point. The stranger, from another church or another religion or another culture, is one who doesn’t see through our eyes and who, thus, can challenge our pet assumptions, can shake us from our conventional point of view. I recall a discussion at the seminary where I teach (during one of the tedious election debates over “family values”) in which western students were taking it for granted that people fall romantically in love and live in nuclear families-until a visiting student from India told them that people in her context didn’t see it that way at all. We can duplicate examples such as this endlessly.

There is, however, another dimension to this theme. Perhaps the deepest of all human fears is the fear of not being loved, not being accepted. What we seek in another person is often simply ourselves in the other. We increase our sense of self-worth by restricting the circles in which we move to those who look, act, and think as we do. “Look at me! I am worthy of being loved.” The stranger, as one who doesn’t see through our eyes, is precisely the one who can “see through” our fa §ade-which is why so many of the spiritual giants of our age (Elie Wiesel, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen) write explicitly about the importance of strangers.

Apply all of this to the church and you will have grasped the essence of ecumenism. Ecumenism is a unity movement, but it is also a renewal movement (or, rather, it is both together). The point is not that Christians ought “to get along,” but that we need each other, and are given each other, in order to be the church. “Why are you still pushing this ecumenism business?” Disciples sometimes ask me. “After all, we cooperate with the Presbyterians and Methodists and even the Catholics.” But have their joys become your joys? Have their sufferings become your sufferings? Christians can cooperate without being changed; but we can’t welcome one another without, in some basic ways, being transformed.

The late Raymond Brown, great New Testament scholar and ecumenist, once observed that Christians generally read scripture to assure ourselves that we are “right” rather than to discover where we haven’t been listening. The same, I fear, can be said about much that passes for ecumenical dialogue. We enter it to determine whether the other is worthy of fellowship, to discover what gifts they are lacking, rather than to challenge and renew our own life by receiving the gifts God has granted to these former strangers.

III

Scripture also shows us that a genuine welcome doesn’t mean inviting the stranger to become “like us.” White churches often put “all welcome” signs on the doors, without changing anything inside, and then wonder why African-Americans don’t feel welcome. True welcome is not absorption; it allows the other to remain other. It doesn’t insist that strangers become grateful allies. It enables them to feel at home.

It has long been a slogan of the ecumenical movement that “unity is not the same as uniformity”-but, to be honest, ecumenical documents have often sounded as if diversity were a problem to be resolved. Particular confessional identities must die as the cost of union. Particular racial-ethnic groups need to be “included” (read, submerged) in the majority. Theological differences must be eliminated through negotiations aimed at reaching consensus.

On the other hand, it is also possible to over-emphasize diversity to the point that wholeness is lost sight of in favor of particularity. Anyone who attends denominational assemblies will recognize this problem!

The vision of the ecumenical movement values diversity as intrinsic to, constitutive of, any authentic unity. The point of the ecumenical movement, at its best, is not to find ways of uniting Christian diversity but of celebrating and leaning from the diversity of our given oneness. We don’t absorb one another; we welcome one another as co-inhabitants of God’s oikos, God’s household.

IV

My fourth observation is probably the most difficult. Welcoming strangers includes welcoming those who don’t welcome strangers-even as we cannot (must not) affirm their lack of welcome.

As you know, there is a divide that runs down the middle of many our communities between those for whom the welcome of strangers, in all their diversity, is a key religious value and those for whom such welcome is, at best, secondary to the preservation of the community’s orthodoxy or purity. It is one of the ironies of faith that these fellow Christians are often more strangers to me than many Jews or Muslims or Bahais or Hindus-and yet they, too, must be welcomed.

I need now to speak very carefully. There are many conservative, even fundamentalist, churches that practice extensive hospitality to strangers. Some congregations in Lexington, for example, have difficulty welcoming gays and lesbians or people of other faiths, but have wonderful ministries to welcome refugee families from the former Yugoslavia or Central America. Meanwhile, congregations that are more liberal may give lots of lip service to the idea of welcoming, but don’t do much actual welcoming. All of us, then, need to be called to accountability-and it is with that in mind that I offer my next observations.

While all neighbors, however strange to us, must be welcomed, there are certain ways of acting and thinking that we cannot welcome if we are, in fact, to welcome the stranger. The apostle Paul hints at this when he urges the Roman congregations to “let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.” Genuine love, in other words, knows when and how to hate, to oppose, those things that stand against its realization. To put it bluntly, there is in the Christian tradition a principled basis for refusing to tolerate intolerance. Saying yes to the stranger means saying no to those things that harm the stranger. Otherwise, our very openness can mask what Herbert Marcuse called a “repressive tolerance” that allows racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia to flourish in the name of diversity.

Let me see if I can make this clearer. Christians, as I see it, have frequently been guilty of two distortions of the commandment “love your neighbor.” First, we have restricted the boundaries of our ethical obligation. One of the most haunting questions in the Bible is surely, “Who is my neighbor?” When that question is put to Jesus in Luke’s gospel, he responds by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan (the Good Stranger) in which need and common humanity-not race, nationality, class, or religion-define the community of neighbors we are called to welcome (a point made powerfully by Martin Luther King, Jr., in one of his finest sermons).

The second distortion is the tendency to think that the command to love neighbors-to welcome strangers-is fulfilled if we refrain from doing them harm. But in a world such as ours, it is not enough to say yes to strangers; we must also say no whenever they aren’t welcomed. “Our community renounces racial bigotry.” Good. Now work for racial justice. “We have cordial relations with the local mosque.” Fine. Now speak out against the stereotyping of Muslims as violent and intolerant.

If I had to name the crucial tension at the heart of the ecumenical movement, I would phrase it this way: Is the ecumenical movement a forum where conflicting perspectives welcome one another, or is it a prophetic effort which boldly declares the gospel’s partisanship on behalf of the excluded and oppressed? The answer must be both. In the ecumenical movement, we find ourselves at table with those we otherwise would shun. And because God has bound us to them, leaving the table is not really a possibility. But precisely because of that, we proclaim God’s love for those whom the world rejects. I tell students that, as Christians, they are called to welcome all those whom God welcomes; and, because of that, they are also called to resist those ways of acting, that narrowness of spirit, those attitudes of mind that threaten these whom God welcomes.

Understood in this way, ecumenism is by no means easy. It also is not optional. It’s the gospel.

V

Finally, we need to ask: Who are the strangers in our midst? This is a question you must answer, but I will prime the pump by speaking briefly of my own context.

Let’s start with racial-ethnic minorities who continue to be the object of discrimination and even hate crimes, acts which definitely say, “You are not welcome.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors twelve active hate groups in Kentucky, the state where I now live and raise my children. How do we stand against such hatred? The best way, argues the National Conference for Community and Justice, is with a show of unity. “Treating an attack on one group as an attack on all of us,” says the NCCJ, “sends a clear message to the panderers of hate that bias, bigotry and racism will not be tolerated against any member of the community.” This is a theological imperative, not just a sociological concern.

What about refugees, migrants, or the poor in this and other countries? In Lexington, we do a pretty good job of welcoming the Bosnian or Kosovar families who are our “official strangers,” but we do a lousy job of welcoming the Spanish-speaking migrant workers who pick the tobacco and groom the horses on our farms. And those who live in grinding poverty in Sierra Leone on Nicaragua-they, generally speaking, aren’t even on the radar screen.

Let’s take a harder case: gay men and lesbians. I realize that gays are not strangers in one sense. They are our fellow students, neighbors, co-workers…. But often these persons are forced to keep part of themselves hidden and, in this sense, to live as strangers. I suspect that there are persons here today who hold that homosexual activity is a violation of God’s will. But even that conviction should not preclude active welcome for persons whom the society around us often reviles.

Then there are neighbors of other faiths. Often, I suspect, we know such persons through business or recreation, but we are strangers to one another as persons of faith. We meet each other in public, but our deepest religious commitments remain unknown to one another. This needs to be said clearly. I believe that Christians have a calling to witness to the good news of Christ everywhere, the good news that God has welcomed us in Christ. But surely we are also called to welcome our Buddhist and Jewish and Muslim neighbors, not as the objects of conversion but as strangers loved by God. This, too, is good news.

What about other Christians? Many of us are less strangers to one another than we were twenty-five or fifty years ago. Think about the change in Protestant-Catholic relations over that period-and give thanks to God for the work of the Holy Spirit! It’s not at all clear, however, that we have always or truly welcomed one another in the biblical sense. Many of us still can’t eat together at the table of our Lord-and table fellowship is the most profound sign of welcome. Others of us continue to think in us-them terms. When the local missionary Baptist congregation struggles against discriminatory housing patterns, do you claim it as your struggle? When the local United Methodist congregation anguishes over questions of homosexuality, do you recognize it as your struggle, or do you say “Thank God it isn’t us!”? When the Roman Catholics start a new parish in a growing part of town, do you rejoice in this shared witness, or do you wonder why you didn’t get that property first?

Beyond that, the culture wars of our age have turned former brothers and sisters into strangers. I sometimes think that the strangest strangers for liberals are conservatives, and the strangest strangers for conservatives are liberals. So let’s say it loudly: Welcoming strangers isn’t a liberal agenda or a conservative agenda. It is a biblical agenda. We welcome even those who passionately oppose things we passionately affirm, not because we are nice people but because we are followers of one who has welcomed even us.

All of this, I would suggest is appropriate ministry for you to undertake together through the Pennsylvania Council of Churches. Indeed, as I have tried to show, the agenda is fundamentally inseparable. Welcoming truckers and seasonal farmworkers is part of the same theological whole as dialogue between Christians regarding baptism or authority. Until we have grasped that, we have not grasped the vision at the heart of the ecumenical movement.

 © 2000 Michael Kinnamon

Eden Theological Seminary

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