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“Love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
May 23, 2010

Good morning. I’m so happy to be with you this morning, one day before the 7^th anniversary of my ordination. Yes, for those of you who were here that night, it’s already been seven years.

Some of you have heard the story of my call to ordination. In the summer of 1989, I was asked to lead a summer service. I decided to speak about sexuality and religion, simply because this was a church and I was a sexologist.  I didn’t have any particular interest in the topic at the time, but I worked all summer on that talk, not quite a sermon. In the middle, I felt a voice: “this is what you are supposed to do.” Now, to be clear and so you don’t worry about me, I didn’t actually hear a voice – I felt it. My first reaction was disbelief and I went on with my talk. A little bit later, I felt it again, “this is what you are supposed to do.” I sat down, shaken, but quickly convinced myself it was my ego talking. I liked giving talks, I liked being in the pulpit, I had a great job, I certainly wasn’t going to become a minister. It took me 9 years to actually listen to that call, and another seven to go through the education, field work, and internship to become a UU minister. 

But that story actually began a year earlier, when I walked into this church for the first time. It was also a summer service, and although I don’t remember who was speaking, I remember loving the sanctuary, the music, and the genuine warmth I experienced from people here. But, I also remember wondering if I would fit in, if we would like this church as much as we did the congregation in Bethesda, MD that we had just joined, and whether we would like the minister when he returned in the fall. 

We were strangers in the land of Westport…and one woman went out of her way to welcome us, include us, and find out what we had to offer. Some of you are nodding – yes, Jane Bickford, whose warmth, and hospitality, and phone calls, and cups of coffee had me creating an adult education committee and Ralph teaching RE by the time our first year here was over.

Think about your first time here – whether it was last week or last year or 30 or 40 years ago. How did you feel walking in for the first time? Do you remember the moment it was that you knew that you wanted to stay? Can you remember how long it was before you knew you belonged? Does a person or people come to mind?

90% of people who visit here – or any other church for that matter – don’t come back. For some it’s theological, we’re not what they are looking for…but for most, it’s because we’ve forgotten that we were once strangers here too. My colleague Steve Clapp, who is one of the country’s experts in church hospitality, said that churches need to stop thinking about newcomers as visitors and start thinking about them as “guests.” Steve says the number one rule is that when visiting a congregation, most people don't want to be ignored. People expect those who are sitting near them to share brief introductions before or after the service. People especially do not want to feel ignored during a designated fellowship time. If they go to a gathering spot for coffee and donuts, they assume that some people will visit with them. They will feel rejected if congregational members are all in tight groups with people they already know. They want to feel that others are interested in them and pleased to have them present. They respond very well to genuine expressions of delight at their presence. People appreciate returning the following week and finding that people to whom they were introduced remember them and are delighted to see them again. Make a sincere effort to remember the person's name, or make a note of it  on your service bulletin or in your Blackberry.

Visitors appreciate greeters and ushers who not only show warmth and genuine interest but who also have been trained to anticipate needs and to answer questions effectively. Ushers can often help by making an introduction of another person in the congregation.

So far so good. We may not always remember these things, but we can do them. And then Steve told me that congregations that are growing are likely to have a member drop by the guest's home sometime that week with a gift of fresh bread or cookies or flowers. Steve says, “Simply bring the gift to the door, perhaps with a brochure about the church, thank the person for having come, and depart unless there are questions. People are usually busy; and you don't want to give the impression that you are expecting to stay for a lengthy conversation; but the gesture of a small gift makes a positive impression.” He also said that people almost universally appreciate an invitation to share a meal either that day or at a mutually agreeable date later in the week. Few things show hospitality in a more meaningful way than having someone as your guest for a meal. Even if a person declines the initial invitation (which often happens), the fact that it was given is still appreciated. Congregations which focus on hospitality have a lot of people hosting others for meals.

It made me think about my trip to visit the megachurch in Danbury, at the request of a Pentecostal woman who was part of my CPE group. When I got there, there were special parking spaces for new visitors. I was met at the parking space and walked to the building. I was handed an information packet. When we left, I was given a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Midweek, I received a handwritten note and a phone call asking if I’d be back. I didn’t much like their theology, but I sure felt welcomed.

Some of us may still feel like strangers here…or may discover that we don’t know each other as well as we’d like. How well do we know each other? Have you ever had the experience of being at a funeral here and realizing that there are whole parts of people’s lives that you knew nothing about? I remember hearing about Tom Funk’s folk dancing and Beb Kennedy’s athletic prowess at their funerals, and being so sad that I didn’t know, that I hadn’t taken the time to ask them questions about their past or the things that they loved outside of our church community. 

Take the time.

Love the stranger because once you were a stranger in the land of Egypt.

The Bible actually includes almost 120 passages about welcoming, taking care of, loving the stranger. Early on in the story of God’s covenant with Abraham, three strangers come to Abraham and Sarah’s home and they are welcomed with a lavish meal. The strangers turn out to be angels from God who bless them with news that they are to have a son at their advanced age, and in a great line about sexuality in later life, Sarah asks, “Am I to have pleasure again?” The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is NOT about offering the strangers to the men in the town, but rather of denying them the hospitality of the day. 

Our Universalist heritage also calls us to love the stranger. Universalist theology is based on the idea of universal salvation – the radical notion after the Reformation that all of God’s children will go to heaven. Our first and seventh principles– we affirm the dignity and worth of every person and the interdependent web of existence -- grow from our Universalist heritage and theology.

Rev. Forrest Church wrote in his new book, The Cathedral of the World, “In the good news of universalist, God is a loving God who will not rest until the entire creation is redeemed. All creatures will be saved. There is no hell.” A century earlier, Thomas Starr King, who was our greatest Western missionary in the 19^th century, said “The Universalists believe that God is too good to damn us forever, and you Unitarians believe you are too good to be damned.” 

In the abstract, Americans are good about loving the stranger. We are quick to reach out to anonymous strangers in crisis, but we quickly become inured. Half of Americans donated money to help the earthquake victims in Haiti, but how many of us did to Chili or Mexico? We respond generously to this year’s call to support women in the Democratic Congo of the Republic, but then ignore an email asking for support for the Sudan or Darfur.  Later today and last night, we helped raised money for our churches in New Orleans, but how many of us have sent funds or letters of support to our churches in Tennessee which  were just massively damaged by floods?.  Fundraisers actually talk about compassion fatigue among donors: the world is too large, there are too many seemingly intractable problems, we can only help a little. 

The Religious Institute’s Rachel Sabbath Initiative was designed to educate congregations across the country that more than one third of a million women die each year – half in just six countries – from preventable conditions of pregnancy and childbirth. I’m pleased that close to 200 congregations included ours participated, but I had more than a few ministers tell me, “we already did one global sermon this year” and “I did AIDS in the fall” as if their congregants had limited interest in international affairs.

In fact, the brilliance of people like journalist Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times or Greg Mortenstern who wrote Three Cups of Tea is that personal stories cause us to respond the most compassionately. Hundreds of thousands of women dying each year in childbirth is hard to comprehend…the news story of a child bride of 13 in Africa dying after forced sexual intercourse with her middle aged adult husband is not.

We live in the world surrounded by strangers…how many people do we encounter each day…? Jim Francek encouraged us last week to sign up for the caring circles, so that church could become a place where “everyone knows your name.” My sister Jodi Wallace taught me one of my most prized spiritual practices – I call it “name ministry”. It’s asking and using the name of everyone you meet or who serves you during the day. It’s the fed ex man or the post woman who brings the mail; it’s the person at the dunkin donuts who gets your coffee, the person who bags your groceries, the dry cleaner, and the person who works at another company down the hall who you ride the elevator with. 

I make it a point to say “Hello officer, X” standing in security lines at the airports. That’s why they wear name tags. The other day, I did it, and the man looking at my boarding pass, didn’t look up. I tried again, “Officer Holiday, I hope you’re having a nice day.” He looked up surprised, and then looked me in the eyes. “No one ever talks to me”, he said. 

I don’t do name ministry though to make other people feel better…it makes me feel better to be connected, to have those moments, to not quite feel like a stranger as well…and how wonderful to walk into the coffee shop, and have Fred at the coffee shop next to the train station pour my French vanilla decaf with room for skim milk before I even have to ask…

Rev. Forrest Church  at General Assembly in 2001, a few scant months before 9/11 said, “taken seriously no theology is more challenging-morally, spiritually, or intellectually: to love [the stranger] as yourself, to view your tears in another’s eyes; to respect and even embrace otherness.”

It was difficult in Biblical times; it is difficult still to love the stranger. 

Think for a moment about the hateful new law that has been passed in Arizona, a law that will make it possible for police to detain and ask anyone – in Arizona’s case, any Hispanic or Latino – for documentation of their citizen status. It is as if the 70% of people in Arizona who support the law forget that they were once strangers too. A political cartoon I saw last week had a Native American in Arizona. In the first frame the bubble over his head said, “Know who we call illegal immigrants in Arizona?” In the second frame, the answer, “White People.” They seem to have forgotten that America’s motto is E pluribus unum “out of many, one” – or that as English writer, G.K. Chesterton, wrote more than a hundred years ago, “America is a home for the homeless…making a new nation out of any old nation that comes along.”

I wrote this week in the Religious Institute’s newsletter about why a sexual justice organization would care about immigration. For me part of it is personal:  my father’s parents were immigrants escaping persecution from the Nazi’s.

But, I think if we are honest with ourselves, we know that we too have not always welcomed and loved the stranger.

I think about sitting at an international AID’s conference next to a man with weeping open sores from Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1985, thinking to myself, “Oh I hope they are right about casual transmission.”

I think about the first time I shared a woman’s bathroom with a transwoman, somehow feeling that she didn’t belong there and spending too much time thinking about what biological sex the transgender educator who had no distinguishing gender expression might be at a recent conference.

I think about the Pentecostal woman in the hospital dying of cancer, who when she asked me to pray to Jesus for her, I went to my supervisor and told him he needed to assign her to someone else. He said no, and she became my most influential teacher.

I think about the first time I was on a plane and the captain said, “This is your pilot speaking” and it was a woman, and I – yes, ME! – wished for an older white hair MAN flying the plane. 

I’m not proud of these moments, far from it, but I know that they pushed me to learn and to open my heart to difference. You probably have your own moments like this…and it at least makes me feel a tiny bit of understanding for those making laws in Arizona, or fighting against marriage equality or …

You may remember that the Bible also asks us to Love Our Enemies…as someone who regularly gets hate mail, I have to say I’m still working on that.

But, loving the stranger means resisting that fear of difference and moving to a place of radical welcome and inclusion. And that means embracing people who are different than us. Letty Russel, one of my first divinity school professors at Yale wrote about “just hospitality”. She said, “We can risk joining in the work of mending the creation without requiring those whom we encounter to become like us”

But, what about when the stranger is you?

I remember a New Yorker Cartoon, which has a well dressed Englishman looking at his reflection in the mirror, except the reflection is of a hairy, scary, deranged looking beast. The caption: “Dr. Hyde is not feeling like himself today.”

As any of us who have struggled with mental health issues – or have family who have struggled with these issues knows, sometimes we hardly know or recognize ourselves because of our uncontrollable thoughts and emotions. Or sometimes we learn information that changes how we see ourselves in the world – people who find out family secrets, that they were adopted or, people who learn a family member is gay or lesbian or trans when they had believed they were straight or sometimes vice versa…

But there are times when all of us have been strangers to ourselves. You may have think about it as a four part Jihari window: there are things  I know about me that you know as well, things  only I know about me that you don’t know, things you don’t know and I don’t know, and the most interesting to me, are the things you know about me that I don’t.

You may know something simple like seeing someone come back from lunch with spinach or a poppy seed in their teeth…or something more profound. I remember an experience many years ago quite vividly where I learned this: I was out to dinner with an intern from my organization and we were sharing childhood stories and influences. I told her that I had learned from my mother that women with strong personalities led people to have strong reactions to them. I think I said something like,

“I know that some people like me a lot, and some people don’t like me at all, but very few people have lukewarm feelings about me.” 

She looked at me puzzled. And then she said, “Uh, Debra, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t like you a lot, but I don’t dislike you either. I just think you are okay.” 

It was a stunning moment, as you can imagine. At that moment, I learned that this story that I had told myself for years, ever since I was a child, might actually not be TRUE. I learned in ministerial formation that one of what in ministry we like to call our “growing edges” – which in the world are called “weaknesses” or “personality flaws” – was that I often was not aware of the impact I had on others, that some people found me intimidating, and that sometimes I needed to turn it down.

Sometimes I still do.

Have you read 3 Cups of Tea:  Greg Mortenson’s journey from mountain climber to builder of schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan? 

A village leader in town of his first school, where he is getting increasingly impatient because that they aren’t moving faster, tells Mortenson:

“If you want to thrive [here]…you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stronger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything, even die…Doctor Greg, you must time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.” 

Mortenson reflects, “That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesion I’ve ever learned in my life…Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down, and make building relationships as important as building projects. I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.” 

Love the stranger.

Celebrate the difference even when there are seemingly major obstacles. 

Do you know the parable about the bird and fish? A goldfish and a starling admired each other’s beauty, and met at the water’s edge to talk. “Let’s get together as a couple” proposed the starling. “Ah, but where would we live?” answered the fish. And they went apart sad.

But after thinking it over a little, they met again.  “You know, we don’t have to live together or be a couple to be delighted with each other,” said the fish. “Let’s just tell stories to each other every evening” sang the bird. So they did, and they enjoyed knowing each other for a long time.

Thank you to this community for taking this stranger in 22 years ago. 

Thank you for that evening seven years ago when you ordained me to the Unitarian Universalist Ministry. It was the most magical, sacred evening. I remember vividly that during the words of ordination how the words became flesh. I experienced a gold light coming in from the opening at the top of the sanctuary, bathing it in warmth and light.

This is what you said, “We charge you to speak the truth with love; to listen with sensitivity and compassion; to provide support and encouragement to those you are called to serve both within in our denomination and other religious institutions; to offer a prophetic voice to the world with courage and humility; to search for the sacred in all people, and to allow them to see the divine in you and in one another.”

In other words, to love the neighbor and to love the stranger.

I answered, in words that I repeat to you today with the same commitment as I did then:

“It is with joy and appreciated that I accept the ministry to which you ordain me. I will serve faithfully, with humility and courage, mindful of both the privileges and responsibilities this ministry brings. I am blessed to be ordained and endorsed by this congregation. Thank you.” 

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