SPEAKING OF RELIGION Column  published in the Bennington Banner, 11/15/2008

Growing up in rural Kansas, the nearest neighbors were a distance away, rarely seen. Being good practitioners of the Protestant work ethic, we rarely took time out for socializing. Life was about by the unending toil of the day: fence to mend, fields to plow, cattle to pasture, grain and hay to haul. On rare occasion, a little potluck would be held on a Saturday evening where the men talked of grain prices, the women talked of the vacations they wished they could take, and the kids played in the yard, sliding down ancient slipper slides and screaming with glee. The meals rarely happened but they were wonderful!

My childhood memories prompt a theological observation: how we choose to live in this world matters. In God’s good wisdom, God made us social creatures. Created to be in relationship with others, we humans tend to spend most of our time doing so only in part. Instead, we spend much of our time racing around, tending to the affairs of life, and settling for repeating the mantra of “I’m too busy” rather than engaging in conversations and a common meal that is not “fast food”.

A worse habit, however, happens when we look around us and see persons who we choose not to see. We engage in practices, written and unwritten, keeping those persons acutely aware of our disinterest in making them our neighbors. Much too often, some people are kept at arm’s length from being “our” neighbors.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus teaches that the sum of faith is to love God and our neighbor. If we take it seriously, a sacred text that says, “take your neighbor as seriously as you do your devotion to God” should press us, letting an ancient word tweak our modern sensibilities and myopias. Practicing well such a faith might wind up freeing us to live in ways we have left unexplored or forgotten.

To love your neighbor as yourself is to realize “one’s own welfare is intertwined with that of the other”, writes scholar Warren Carter. In his masterful commentary on Matthew’s gospel, Carter claims that this theme of radical hospitality weaves throughout the narrative. Jesus instructs the disciples and the crowds how to love the poor, the dispossessed, the unclean, and yes, even one’s own enemy. He encourages his followers to lead what Carter calls “a life of indiscriminate loving”.

To love indiscriminately is a noble vision, but living it out is another thing altogether! Jesus weaves together the sum of faith (“love God with all of our own being”) with the realities of life, where we falter too often in loving someone completely, especially if they seem too much the part of “the other”. Jesus teaches that the righteous way of leading life has little to do with exacting purity and ironclad authoritarianism. Only in humility and due deference to one another can we start embodying, rather than merely citing, the values of the sum of the faith we seek to keep.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, offers a helpful word. Williams writes, “We can cling harder and harder to the rock of our threatened identity—a choice, finally, for self-delusion over truth; or we can accept that we shall have no ultimate choice but to let go, and in that letting go, give room to what’s there around us—to the sheer impression of the moment, to the need of the person next to you, to the fear that needs to be looked at, acknowledged and calmed (not denied). If that happens, the heart has room for many strangers, near and far”.

This past week, I found the words of Jesus coming alive at First Baptist. The congregation invited other religious communities involved with the Greater Bennington Area Interfaith Council to gather for a potluck meal. I thought we would have two dozen at best, given that it was a midweek evening. Nobody will make time as we are all much too busy. Sigh!

Instead, we found ourselves putting up more chairs to accommodate the fifty persons who attended. Around each table, persons from differing religious faiths broke bread and had some great conversations. By the end of the evening, the question was being asked, “When can my own faith community host the next meal?”

Religious communities can be places of great exclusion (written and unwritten) or great inclusion. Indeed, I suspicion one reason for the Church’s decline in North America has been a neglect of the radical hospitality embodied by Jesus and the earliest Christians. If we listen attentively, our sacred text schools us well. Our neighbor is the one in whom the very reason we keep the faith is embodied. In our neighbor and our engagement and treatment of them, we discover how well we love God fully and authentically. The “wholly other” becomes our way toward becoming holy. As Rowan Williams says, when we realize this, “the heart has room for many strangers, near and far.”

The Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot is coordinating minister of the First Baptist Church of Bennington, Vermont. To correspond: fbpastor@sover.net