Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

September 7, 1997

from the Hebrew Scripture, Hebrews 13:2

As most of you know, I come from the South, where we are known for our hospitality—Southern hospitality, it is called. And, in truth, there is such a thing. There is a friendliness, a warmth, an easy graciousness in Southern living. If you happen by at meal time, there will be a place for you at the table. In my day in that small Louisiana town, that table would be covered with fruits and vegetables from our garden—butter beans, potatoes, onion, cantelope, fresh sliced tomatoes, and fried apple pie.

I grew up knowing that my part as a woman surely was to be skilled and able in the role welcoming people into my home and making them feel cared about and seen to. Unfortunately, I was not naturally bent in this direction as a hostess. You see, God really is in the details, as they say, and I am not good at details. I end up getting in a passionate conversation with one other person and forget to notice whether my guests have empty glasses.

I remember the first time in my married life that elegant hostessing was called for. I was married to a young surgeon, and he wanted to have some other surgeons and their wives to dinner. I spent three days, literally, getting ready for this event. I dusted the antiques until their patina gleamed. I polished silver. I arranged flowers. And of course I shopped and cooked. The menu featured cornish hen with wild rice and gravy. The important guests arrived, and we exchanged pleasantries, and then I invited them into the dining room where the food was set up buffet style. The room was lit only with candles and the food was actually difficult to see, but I thought the room had a kind of gleaming mystery that added to the romance of my perfectly appointed table. I invited the wife of the most respected senior surgeon to begin filling her plate, and everything was going well until this woman suddenly screamed. It was a little scream, not an ear-splitting scream, but a scream nevertheless. I went to her side and she said, "Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve put my dinner on a sponge!" And sure enough, in the dim light I had not noticed that I had not removed the flat sponges I put between the good china when I stored it. The gravy and the juices from a casserole had thoroughly soaked into the sponge to make a soggy mess there on her plate. Embarrassed, she began to try to scrape her food off the sponge, and I tried to take her plate away to give her a new spongeless plate. And so there we were, each pulling on the side of the plate, each insisting on making things right. I tried once or twice more to be the elegant hostess, but my other attempts were equally disastrous, and so I gave up on it. This, clearly, was not my calling.

But as I began to reflect on the meaning of hospitality, I realized that my early sense of it was shallow and wanting. There is a difference in hospitality and entertaining, and I had been entertaining. Entertaining without the spiritual dimension of hospitality can be a kind of bondage. You have to get things just right, you have to please, you have to---most of all—impress. "What will they think?" is the question you ask. But hospitality is of a different order. The question you ask there is, "How can I serve?" This is a very precious human being who has entered my home. What needs does she bring? What is the state of his stomach, yes, but more than that, what is the state of his soul? Here is a wanderer—for are we all not wandering through this world, to some extent—here is a wanderer who has left her home and is need of my comforting space. Isn’t that what hospitality really is—making space in your home and in your heart for another?

I went to a dinner party where truth got put on the table. The hostess, while beautiful and charming, is also one to cut to the heart of things. With little or no warning, while I was in the middle of a delicious bite, she looked at me and asked, "Your father was an alcoholic, wasn’t he? Did he become abusive when he was drinking?" Just matter of fact. Like "pass the salt." OK, well, that should get us started. She invited us ever so gently, one after the other, to open to the others in a deeper way than we had perhaps previously done. And it was all right. We knew one another. We knew her and the courage in her life. And so we felt safe. This was a meal, but it was also a ministry.

Another tale of hospitality. Recently I made a visit to the Bay Area to see my old friends Margot and Peter. They had just moved house, so this was not an opportune time, but when I suggested a visit, they said, "Come anyway. We’d love to have you!" And so they stopped their "moving in" work for two days and spent time with me. Margot made a simple meal of homemade soup and omelet and apple pan dowdy and then they insisted that I sleep on their bed because no other bed was set up, and they themselves slept in sleeping bags on the wooden floor. When I protested their generosity, Peter assured me that he actually preferred sleeping on the floor to sleeping in the bed. This is not entertaining, this is hospitality. That weekend we shared long hours of rich talk, walks on the beach, a worship service on Sunday. Come, come as you are. "Worshiper, wanderer, lover of leaving. This is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again come."

I moved to a new home myself just over a year and a half ago. During the ice storm in Portland. You remember that. My home is on the East side, in Irvington, a neighborhood of gracious older homes of the craftsman period. On the morning of my move the neighbor from across the street came over and introduced himself. He said that he was formerly the president of the Neighborhood Association, and asked me if I knew anything about the history of the house. I shook my head and the story began to unfold. My house had been newly refurbished just before I moved in, but apparently before that it had been known as the most run-down and disreputable house in the neighborhood. Painted a lime color, it was known as "the green slime" to the neighbors. He told me the house had originally been built, back in 1904, for the biracial child born of a relationship between the daughter of a wealthy family and the family’s black chauffeur. Years later the house became a house of prostitution. And still later a drug house. All I could think to say was, "I knew something about this house felt right." It’s right for a minister to live here, on the site of this brokenness and pain. It is my calling to help redeem brokenness and pain, after all.

Homes reflect our spirit, do they not? I very much want mine to make space that is warm and comforting for all who enter. I have chosen colors that invite peace and furniture that invites sitting. In the picture window of my living room hangs a stained glass window that I brought from England 25 years ago. It’s a church window that I saw thrown over in a corner somewhere in a repair shop. Long before I knew I would become a minister I saw it and loved it. Before I knew I would birth two children. Before I knew that my marriage wasn’t going to hold. I’ve been hauling this window around for 25 years, yes, and now I have a place for it. It’s just right there—you can even see the colors from the street when my light is on. And that window says to me, well, things do come round right at times. It says peace. It says home. It speaks of the sacred.

I think of the words of Samuel Clemens: "Our house was not insentient matter. It had a heart, a soul, and eyes to see with, and approvals and solicitude and deep sympathies. It was of us and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the presence of its benediction."

A home is where memories are kept: photographs and keepsakes; furniture inherited from the family perhaps; art that speaks to some place deep within us; Christmas ornaments that have been collected over the years. We surround ourselves with treasures that say to all who enter our home, "This is where I’ve been, this is who I am. Come in and be at home with me. Share for a while in this life I’m living, and may you be blessed for having done so.

So to me there is a sacred dimension in hospitality. Some families suggest this dimension by adding an extra plate at the table on feast days. It is there for the stranger, the one who might turn up with a friend of the family. The invitation is not granted because of family origin or station in life, and nothing is expected in return. The stranger is viewed as one sent by God, from whom one might very well gain a blessing. The stranger could be an agent of transformation. I find it interesting that one New Testament word, the Greek word "xenos," means "stranger," but it also means "guest" and "host." The essence of hospitality is then perhaps a kind of mutuality. To share what we have with a stranger is to affirm that we own nothing really, and that every good gift comes from the larger creation. It is our part to live in thankfulness and in generosity. Because the stranger, or the one in need, ties us to the Creator and to the earth, the stranger takes on a sacred character.

As members of an urban church, questions about sharing with the stranger emerge in powerful ways. Many different kinds of people come to our door: people of color; gay, bisexual and transgendered people; working class people; people with mental illness or other disabilities, for example. How do we become truly hospitable, in terms of our building, our programming, our worship?

And what about those people who never come in through the door, but who are our neighbors, nonetheless? Many of us feel the irony of our asking homeless people to move off the church steps on Sunday morning so that we can go inside and worship. Our hearts are bothered—we wish we could fix the pain of poverty here and now, and we cannot. And yet we have chosen to remain downtown for a reason. We are not running from the ills of urban life, and we are responding through our social justice task forces not only to immediate need but to the necessity for systemic change. Mother Teresa, who did not so much involve herself in systemic change, nevertheless understood the sacred character of working with the very poor. "It is Jesus that I met in the black holes of the slums," she once said. "Jesus, the naked man on the cross."

What if we looked at every person who came through our door as sacred—each person, whether than person was elderly and wealthy or young and in cut-off jeans with purple hair; whether that person was a fancy dresser or a cross dresser; whether that one was a Socialist or a liberal Democrat or a Republican who calls himself a "fiscal conservative"? How would this encounter be different from the usual? What if we gave up judging and comparing and sizing up and just allowed ourselves to be present with those who are here in this sacred space this morning, to be present with them in all their fullness of being?

To make this church truly hospitable, we must soon take another step: we must translate our sense of the sacred into bricks and mortar issues. Those are very significant issues in our church just now. A recent church consultant who was here to review staffing needs looked around our labyrinth building and declared, "Your facility works against community in every way." He said that the buildings themselves and their configuration will keep us from doing the good work that we want to do here. I feel the truth of his words in small and large ways all the time. One Sunday morning last spring, I was about to go down the aisle in the Naz to preach and a newcomer asked me where the bathroom was. I wish she had asked me instead about life after death. I didn’t know where the bathroom was. You know, it was like, "I only preach here. I tend to the soul, not to the body." There are rooms in the church that I myself have yet to locate.

Although we may plan carefully and prepare well, whether or not the home or the church brings the gifts of hospitality depends to some degree on grace. There needs to be a readiness, an openness to the unknown, on the part of both the host and the visitor. The blessing comes in forms we hardly recognize until there it is sitting on our plate and we are surprised into consciousness or smiling with unexpected pleasure. Amazing grace. In Isak Dinesen’s story "Babette’s Feast" the general stands up near the end of the incredible meal Babette has prepared and makes a speech. In part he says: "We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. . . . We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude."

Babette, the title character of the novel and the film is an exile from France, a stranger, and two sisters from a little town in Denmark take her in. Babette asks if she make cook and keep house in return for their kindness, and they agree. Twelve long years pass, and Babette cooks, but mainly the plain, standard fare of this seaside town. Then she wins the lottery. Her only request is that she be allowed to cook a real French meal for the pious sisters and the remaining members of the church flock formerly presided over by their severe father while he was living.

What happens at that meal might be called miraculous. The church members are rigid, unpleasant elders who have formed little cliques and schisms; they gossip and criticize. Suspicious of the opulent food and drink, they decide to sample the various dishes and drink a bit of wine just in order to be polite, but resolve to not actually enjoy any of it. They keep pleasure at bay as long as they can, but soon the wine and the delicious tastes and smells quite overcome their resistance. Loosened of their sensual restraint, then, they begin to smack their lips and smile and speak warmly, the one to the other. Old flames light again in aging lovers’ eyes, and past indiscretions are forgiven.

Dinesen writes: "…the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air."

Why is it that we insist so often on being cut off from one another? Why do we let our bodies and our souls go rigid? After all, we are all strangers on this earth. Are we not, each of us, uprooted from the very time of our birth and cast upon the mercy of others? None of us really knows the heart of another. And no one can truly know our own heart. Why, then, do we let our judgments keep us from comfort and love?

On this day of homecoming, may we know what it is to soften and open. To allow grace to work in our lives. And to see just what miracles of pleasure and forgiveness and hope come to light upon our plate.

So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.