I wonder how many times I have heard a faithful church member talk about the need for new members as way of insuring the future of the institutional church. “If we don’t get new members,” they say, “we’ll shrink until there is no one to do the work of the church.” “New members are essential to our future.” While I don’t disagree with their sentiment, it somehow falls short of understanding how much radical hospitality is a practice of our faith.

Long before Jesus, our people were taught hospitality as a basic tenet of their relationship with God. Welcoming the widows, orphans and immigrants was something that was necessary because our people had known the experience of widows, orphans and immigrants. “Remember that you were once strangers in a foreign land,” our scriptures remind us. When we forgot our basic calling as people of God, prophets reminded us of what we were to do. Isaiah was especially strident in his reminders to the faithful of the need to practice hospitality and of the threat that the failure to observe that practice was to the entire community. From the words of the prophets we learned that we cannot be faithful to God when we think only of ourselves.

By the time of Jesus, however, there were many who had forgotten these basic practices of our faith. Instead they had begun to think of faith in terms of rigid rules that could be judged by others. What has been taught as deep hospitality became a kind of code for taking care of our own. Jesus observed that even the priests and Levites failed to show hospitality to strangers and foreigners in our midst.

In contrast to that rigid path, Jesus was constantly amazing his disciples with his ability to recognize and learn the stories of those around him. When they discovered him talking with a woman at a Samaritan well, they didn’t understand why he gave her the time of day much less learned her entire life story. When a man possessed by an evil spirit was disruptive, they tried to quiet him. Jesus, however, offered him healing and got to know who he really was. When Zacchaeus climbed a tree to get a look over the crowd, Jesus not only shared a meal with him and got to know him, he inspired him to immerse himself in the work of the community. When the disciples tried to keep the crush of the crowd from Jesus, sending people bringing children for blessing away, Jesus said, “Let the little children come and do not hinder them.” When a woman, plagued by an illness for decades, touched the hem of his robe, Jesus noticed her and got to know her story when everyone around him was content to ignore her.

Over and over again, our Gospels are filled with stories of Jesus reaching out to people who had been marginalized by the community. He saw, and then he got to know, people who had previously not even been seen as full members of the community.

Being a disciple of Christ involves practicing that same kind of radical hospitality. It is an essential practice of God’s faithful people. We cannot live out the tenets of our religion without practicing hospitality.

Sadly, many who are not active in congregations do not see the church that way at all. They think that a church is an exclusive place where people take care of their own and shun those who do not share their theological viewpoint. They have been wounded by tight-knit communities that refuse to accept those who are in some way different from their idea of what a member of a church should be. There are a lot of people who are not involved in churches who think of the church as a place of exclusion and rejection and they think that way because they themselves have experienced that exclusion and rejection.

Once again our people find ourselves in need of a prophet who will remind us of the basic elements of our faith. The poetic words of Micah remind us that we already know what is expected of us:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and love kindness,
and walk humbly with your God.

To do justice, to love kindness, and to practice humility are all things that we have already been taught by our scriptures, by our experiences, and by millennia of faithful people seeking relationship with God. This isn’t some new understanding of our faith, but rather something that we have been taught for generations. It is at the core of our faith.

When we attempt to pass on the faith of our ancestors and fail to pass on the practice of hospitality as a basic tenet of faith, we fail to fully tell the story of who we are and where we have come from. Christians have been known to make all kinds of noise about their view of one of the ancient creation stories and how they believe it stands in contrast with the discoveries of science and use their views as a way of separating themselves from others, while at the same time forgetting to heed the commands of Deuteronomy to welcome the stranger. There have been many instances of church members raising a ruckus over the public posting of the Ten Commandments while failing to practice the Beatitudes. And this despite the fact that one of the commandments is a ban on making graven images of the ways of God.

It is not difficult for our critics to point out the ways in which we fail to practice our faith.

Teaching our faith, then, requires us to return to that kind of radical hospitality that Jesus practiced. We need to see and get to know the very people who are often unseen in our midst. We need to welcome those who are on the margins of our community. We need to experience hospitality as a faith practice - not because of the needs of the institution, but because of our own call to live lives of faith.