THE CHRISTIAN PRACTICE OF
FORGIVENESS, HOSPITALITY AND JUST LOVE
Texts: Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Hebrews 13:1-3; and Matthew 18:21-22

The week began with a trip to a Pastor / Theologian conference outside Memphis. On Monday it became more than a trip. It became a pilgrimage. We went to the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated April 4, 1968. It is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum. Can you see in your mind’s eye the motel? Just seeing it in person made me shiver. I stood a few feet from the spot on the second-story balcony where he was shot. Then I went across the street and stood in the bathroom where James Earl Ray, the killer, had stood when he aimed his high-powered rifle at King and ended his life.

But I saw much more at the museum built into the side of the motel. I saw pictures, words, and film footage from the Civil Rights Movement. I saw footage of four young African-Americans staging a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. I saw them assaulted verbally and physically by people around them. I saw them take it and not strike back. I saw police turn attack dogs and fire hoses on marchers, some of them children. I saw the picture of hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers, predominantly African-American men, marching, each carrying a sign reading in large block letters: I AM A MAN.

I heard Martin Luther King delivering his last speech, the night before he was killed. I saw on another wall the words of Gandhi: "An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind." And his words: "You must be the change you want to see in the world."

I

The trip-turned-pilgrimage gave resonance to the sermon I was already writing for you today.

It’s on what is called Christian Practices or Spiritual Practices, or Holy Practices, especially three: Forgiveness, Hospitality and Justice-Making.

Marcus Borg, one of our Jesus scholars, has written that an encouraging sign of renewal in the North American church is "the recovery of practice as central to the Christian life." "If the Christian life is about relationship and transformation," he writes, "practice will be central."¹

The phrase "spiritual practice" may not sound like too much fun. There’s the old joke about the tourist in New York City who stops a pedestrian on the street and asks, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The man replies: "Practice, practice, practice!"

So let me begin to carve out some meanings of these words. Spiritual practices are forms of lived, embodied faith woven into the rhythm of our lives. Done together, over time they form a way of life. They form us.

Spiritual practices become Christian practices when they are done walking with Jesus, as followers of his way. Some people call them "holy practices" because they keep us aware of God, and help us receive God’s transforming grace.

There are foundational Christian practices for all Christians. Like worship, prayer, study and service. I want to focus on three today.

II

The first is the spiritual practice of forgiveness. We have been moved these past few weeks as we observed the response of the Amish community to the shooting of ten of their school children, leaving five dead.

One of the older girls killed asked the killer to shoot her first, in hope that the younger girls might survive. Where did she learn such faith, courage, heroism, love?

There was the grandfather of one of the slain girls standing next to her body being prepared for burial. Less then forty-eight hours after her killing he told some young boys nearby: "We must not think evil of this man." And he urged them to forgive the killer.

There was the funeral of the killer, who had committed suicide at the murder scene. Over half of those who came to the funeral were members of the Amish community. Some of the Amish community reached out to befriend and help the widow of the killer. Some took food. "It’s our Christian love," said a relative of one of the slain girls, "to show her we have not any grudges against her."

Greg Jones, dean of Duke Divinity School, wrote in a Charlotte Observer article that such an extraordinary response was only possible because they are a people being formed over years in the spiritual practices of nonviolence and forgiveness.

Marney used to tell the story of the Amish farmer who grew increasingly agitated at his cow, who kept kicking over the milk pail as he tried to milk her. Finally, in complete exasperation he said, "Thou knowest I am nonviolent and will not strike thee, but if thou kickest the pail over one more time I will sell thee to a Baptist!"

Iris Murdock once said that a saint is a person who absorbs evil without passing it along. The Amish community showed us a community of saints. Such Jesus-like character is not formed overnight. It comes as we teach each other and our children the ways of God and the stories of Jesus. "When we rise and when we go to bed," as the Hebrew text puts it. We write the words on our hearts, we wear them. They are what we carry with us in the world.

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us," we pray with Jesus every week. I’m moved every time I say the Apostles’ Creed - - which is about once a year whether I need it or not - - when I hear myself saying: "I believe...in the forgiveness of sins." What if every day - - when we rose and when we went to bed...we said, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins"? It might make a difference in the forgiveness you are able to receive and the forgiveness you are able to give.

How many times must I forgive a person? Peter asked Jesus. Seven times?! (Expecting some commendation for suggesting as many as seven.) No, Jesus said. "Seventy times seven." Maybe after four hundred ninety tries it begins to become real.

When we forgive someone their sins we do more than say nice words. We actually "loose" them, free them from the power of sin. It is a form of deliverance. It is an act. Forgiveness, says one theologian, "is the only possibility for preventing the consequences of sin from continuing to devour its victims....[It] breaks off the advance of sin."²

No wonder the forgiveness of sins was at the heart of what the Risen Christ commissioned his disciples to do: Go loose people from their sins!

III

The second spiritual practice is hospitality. It is the welcome of the stranger, the one who is different, the "other." As Christ has welcomed us, so we welcome others. This is the spiritual dynamic of all Christian practices: As Christ has...so we.

Hospitality is at the heart of the part of our church covenant which says that as a community of the new creation we are "open to all and closed to none." And we’re trying to mean it. Barbara Brown Taylor has remarked that the "All are welcome" signs most churches display have the truth in advertising veracity of the signs in the supermarket which say, "Vine-ripe Tomatoes."

The text from Hebrews has the famous words: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

The passage we read from Hebrews starts off with love of one another in the community: "Let brotherly / sisterly love continue." The keyword is philadelphia, love of the brother, sister.

Then it quickly adds, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers." The key word is philozenias. Love of zenia, the stranger, the foreigner, the one who is different.

Our culture, as every culture, is tempted to zenophobia, the fear or hatred of the stranger, the other, the foreigner, the one who is different. We are called to a higher place, philozenias, the love of the stranger. This love is stretched to places we might never otherwise go. So the third sentence says: "Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them. Remember those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured." Our love extends to county jails and to Soviet gulags, to Darfur, and Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Philadelphia and philozenias, the love of one another in the community and the love of the stranger, are deeply connected. There are days we all feel like strangers, and we wonder whether we will be loved and accepted. A friend in the church said to me a few years back: "Somedays you and Gene Owens make me so mad because you’re so darned liberal, but I’m glad both of you have been my pastors." Then he added, "Sometimes our church is so open-minded it drives me crazy, but it’s a God-send." And it seemed to me that he was saying, the love that accepts all those others is also the love that accepts me.

IV

Finally let me talk about the spiritual practice of justice-making or of Just Love, as theologian Catherine Keller has called it.³ The Law of Moses laid out the laws that make a good society. They always, always included laws of mercy, that is, the special care of those who were weaker and disadvantaged, specifically the stranger, the immigrants, the poor, the widows and orphans, the powerless. In other words God’s justice always mixed with mercy. The justice that is saving the world is Just Love. As Reinhold Niebuhr once said, "Justice that is only Justice always becomes something less than Justice. It is saved by something more than justice, that is, love." (Paraphrased, H.S.S.)

God’s call to us to be justice makers is the call to do justice as spiritual exercise. We go into the world not as any political hack or as just another partisan player but as one sent by God and being changed by God. Again to use Gandhi’s words: "You must be the change you want to see in the world."

If we dare to make justice we will meet opposition. We will meet opposition in ourselves. But as the great African-American Frederick Douglass said, "If there is no struggle there is no progress."

The problem with most of us, including myself many days, is that we won’t let ourselves get close enough to the struggle even to feel the heat.

The civil rights marchers were trained what to do, how to be when they felt the heat. They were not only raised, many of them, in the ways of Jesus, they were trained in the art of nonviolent protest. They opposed unjust laws, unjust acts, unjust structures as those dedicated to nonviolent resistance. They were trying to be the change they wanted to see in the world.

What will you do in the face of the inequities of this fair city, a city of many blessings and many inequities? What will you do as citizens of a nation of growing inequities? What will you do in a nation of war in Iraq, a war which falls short of all the standards of just war, not to mention the standards of Jesus?

I do not speak infallibly here. I do not believe in Papal Infallibility or Pastoral Infallibility. And I KNOW you don’t. Whatever your position on the justice of the war in Iraq, we as Republicans, Democrats and Americans are now engaged in a profound moral debate over how to leave justly. What should a Just Leaving look like? If you enter this debate enter it with passion and with respect for those with whom you disagree.

The final question: If you feel called to the ministry of justice-making, will you do it as spiritual practice?

V

Harvard’s Robert Cole’s life and career were changed when he saw Ruby Bridges that day walk through a wall of angry protestors. She was the first black girl to integrate her elementary school. Every day she walked through a gauntlet of jeers, hate and verbal abuse. One day her teacher saw her coming through the mob and saw her lips moving. When she got to the classroom her teacher asked, "What were you saying to them?" Ruby said, "Oh, I wasn’t talking to them, I was talking to God. I was praying for God to forgive them." "Please, God," she prayed, "try to forgive those people because even if they say those bad things they don’t know what they are doing."⁴

Only a person formed in the spiritual community of Jesus could do that. Later she would say her mother and her pastor had taught her to love her enemies.

"Keep these words...in your heart," Deuteronomy says. "Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead."

God’s people talk their faith, wear their faith, walk their faith. This is spiritual practice.