Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The Hard Work of Hospitality

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

We first take away their cell phones. We take away their cell phones and then we take away their access to Facebook, followed by their access to email and the internet, and finally (gasp) we take away their IPods. We call it a Technology Sabbath. All of their forms of media are gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You can almost see the scratch marks on their laptops and IPods as we pull them all away for thirty long days.
After this, we put them through one month of hard situations in which they, as a group, are required to crawl together over various obstacles. Some of these obstacles are solid and real, even terrifyingly real. They find themselves high above the treetops on a high ropes course and dangling on the side of a mountain on a rope climb. Some of the obstacles are less concrete but every bit as real as they are confronted with theologically rich questions they cannot answer easily. Finally, they are required as a group to confront the discomfort and dissonances of a cross-cultural setting in South America.
For many summers now, I have had the opportunity to observe cohorts of approximately thirty young adults each year being challenged by a Lilly-funded youth program we host at the Ockenga Institute called Compass. They move from living in a wilderness setting, to the classroom, and finally to a missions context. It has been a laboratory of community of sorts for us as we have had the privilege of standing back, year after year, and observing intentional community in the making, where complete strangers are transformed into a lifelong community of brothers and sisters, all in the confines of one month. How long does it take for the awkward glances of a nervous stranger to become heartfelt straight-ahead, eye-to-eye acknowledgements of a fellow believer in Jesus Christ? We have found it has not taken long when these fellow believers are required to face hard times together.
And it does not take long for these young people to express authentic forms of hospitality toward one another. We see it everywhere, from the simple words of encouragement extended to a sister who is trying to make it up the last 20 feet of the side of a mountain, to their small group conversations as they tell each other their stories, to the youth sitting up all night next to a fallen comrade who was a stranger only a few weeks prior, caring for her as she barfs up foreign food in a foreign land, to the worship they share that, at moments, are deeply moving and instructive to their souls as brothers and sisters in Christ.
The lesson learned in simple ways is that extending hospitality to one another in our churches is not always easy. It is not easy for these youth on a one-month excursion into community building, and it certainly is not easy for us in our churches. But too often we have relegated our expressions of hospitality to its entertainment value. Isn’t this, in fact, what we point to in our culture when we talk of the ‘hospitality industry?’ We point to entertainment in all its forms. Hospitality and entertainment have become synonyms in our cultural consciousness.
Unfortunately they have become synonyms in our church lexicon as well. Too often we have built our lives together around entertainment. At worst, our times together serve as distractions; we use them like watching a good movie or a baseball game on television where the entertainment value of the experience itself becomes an end in itself. Too often hospitality is relegated to self-selected venues where we invite those we feel most comfortable with to share a common experience of mutual gratification. Often times not much is required of us outside of the effort it takes to make a salad or, in the case of a typical men’s ministry, pancakes. We like to keep things light and conversational. In fact, this is how we measure success and failure for ourselves; the degree to which we individually leave feeling at least mildly satisfied.
There is nothing wrong with any of these forms of entertainment in themselves. However, the danger that entertainment brings to the topic of hospitality is when the entertainment value of our lives together takes over. The various enticements of the forms of entertainment at our disposal can easily serve as a distraction to the hard work required of expressing true hospitality to one another.
Look and listen closely to the stories around you in your churches. You will see and hear hard choices being made everywhere: An unemployed brother over there just trying to keep his credit rating from exploding; the teenager over here making decisions surrounding new temptations that could impact the rest of her life; the couple over there whose marriage secretly isn’t going all that well; the single sister over here who is so lonely she can hardly keep herself together; and the elderly woman over there who has got to make a decision on when to pull the plug on a life partner. If all that our hospitality involves is simply about entertaining ourselves, none of these stories will be heard let alone responded to.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Approaching the Center (and Temptations) of Imperial Power

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament
I spent last week in Istanbul. It was my first time ever in Turkey and I loved the experience. Most of the week was spent with some of my favorite kinds of people – Bible translators – as an invited participant in a global consultation called by SIL International to discuss some challenging issues being faced by Wycliffe Bible Translators and others working in the field.
On Saturday¸ my last day in the country, I was able to do some basic exploring of the city. I visited the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul and got to see the Soreg Inscription, the Siloam Inscription and the Gezer calendar, among other things. I also visited the Hagia Sophia museum, which was Constantinople’s cathedral from A.D. 360 until it was turned into a mosque in A.D. 1453. It has been a museum since 1935. It is a fascinating place, the key to so much important history in that time period. Among other sights in the main hall one may see the Omphalion, the spot where the coronation of every Byzantine emperor took place over many centuries (the large round slab in the middle of the smaller marble slabs) and where they would sit during religious ceremonies.
I couldn’t help but think about the continuing relationship between religion and politics through time – of both the good and the bad things that flowed from establishing Christian (and then Islamic) empires – and of our current political situation here in the U.S. where one can find a fusing together of some forms of evangelical piety with Republican political agendas with little or no attention being given to the exploitation that takes place when political agendas and religious identification are merged. All the talk about “culture wars” suggests a very dangerous metaphor is at work that is designed to lead to militant political fighting and to perceiving some Americans as enemies to be opposed and beaten. As the political campaigning in this country begins to get more and more heated I’m sure we can expect to see more and more candidates seeking votes on the basis (in part, at least) of the religious convictions they hold, and with the explicit or implicit promise that those convictions would lead them to support policies that would be pleasing to those who hold similar religious convictions.
I confess this keeps me thinking about issues of cultural and religious imperialism and their presence even in places that lack kings, emperors and thrones…. May God give us all wisdom to discern the kind of leadership our nation needs and to live out our faith with a humility that honors Christ, the perfect King, the one who taught us to put the needs of others (especially the weak, powerless and marginalized – those who are unable to help themselves) above our own interests. In 1 Peter 5:3-4 we are told that Christian leaders should follow Christ’s example and “not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away” (NRSV).
If only our politicians (and the Christian leaders they woo) would demonstrate a commitment to using their influence not to build the coffers and power of one political party at the expense of the other, or to lead one sector of our society to lord it over any other, but to lead us all to adopt stances of humility marked by wisdom, compassion and selflessness. I think that kind of power would show just how wrong-headed both explicit and implicit forms of imperialism are when it comes to seeking the common good.