Welcome, Strangers

Deuteronomy 6:1-8

November 4, 2018

This time last year Martin and I had just finished up work on the initial part of a film project whose subsequent phases did not, alas, get funded. For no particular reason – and for all the obvious reasons – I was thinking about that project this week.

You see, we had come around, after three or four months of preliminary research and interviews, to the conclusion that the story we wanted to tell was about the Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center in the Hudson River Valley about 40 miles up the river from Manhattan. We started out looking at small worshipping communities that have food, in some sense, at the heart of what they do. Sound familiar?

We didn’t lose that focus, as the Community of Living Traditions places great emphasis on hospitality and food justice, but we came to see, at Stony Point, a decisive emphasis on multifaith community which led to the conviction that, if faith has a powerful future in our North American context, it must find expression in authentically multifaith communities.

What does that look like? How might it matter at Clarendon? How do we live into it?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, and, honestly, I know that there are probably a dozen other essential questions and I don’t even know what the questions are, much less the answers.

But I do know that the texts we’ve read this morning offer some crucial guidance.

The shema, “hear, O Israel, the Lord is one,” is a reminder to the people of God to remember who they are. God tells them, “y’all are about to cross over a boundary to a new location: remember me and what I have commanded you. Remind your children. Live by this word: I am your God and you are my people.”

In other words, hold on to your core identity every step of the way. One of the challenges of multifaith community is holding on to one’s own identify while honoring what is core in every other.

That, of course, is true in every community and of every human life.

We all have to differentiate ourselves, to recognize what in our own lives marks us as distinct – first from other members of our immediate family, and then, over the rest of our lives, from other members of every circle in which we stand.

Even as we do that work, we’re also identifying and navigating the circle itself: who are the members of my family? Who are the members of my neighborhood? Who are the members of my community? What marks them as such?

And what happens along those boundaries when I come into contact with those of other families, neighborhoods, communities?

These are not merely questions of individual development, but they are, essential, also always already political questions for they are about who gets to define the circle, who gets to cross the line.

One great gift of multifaith community comes in the growing recognition that the question of core identity cuts two ways. That is to say, first, we all differentiate ourselves from one another in order to begin answering that most basic of human questions: who am I? But, at the same time, in multifaith community we see something else: people in other communities and traditions are confronting the same questions, and their traditions offer an essentially similar response: we are creatures who carry within ourselves a trace of the Divine.

We put that core conviction in different words drawn from our different traditions, but the fundamental claim – we are created in the image of God, in the words of Abrahamic traditions – is translatable.

We carry that with us and hold fast to it. It marks our very dwelling places, as the text from Deuteronomy reminds. Marked by this conviction, then, our dwelling places must also be welcoming places. Again, on this Sunday before an election of profound importance marked by the questions of race and nationality, this is fundamentally political.

Lest we forget, I was reminded of that truth last week at a service of mourning and remembrance held to honor the victims of recent racist and anti-Semitic violence. Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, senior rabbi at Temple Rodef Shalom, reminded the gathered communities of a rich midrash on the Abraham and Sarah story. She reminded us that the tent of Abraham and Sarah was different from all other tents. The rest of them had but a single entrance in the front, but the tent of Abraham and Sarah had entrances on each of its four sides so that travelers from any direction might find a welcome there in the home of fellow travelers.

The story of Ruth, likewise, reminds us that refugees are nothing new under the sun, and that people of all times and places have longed for the welcome that the tent of Abraham and Sarah provided. Ruth, a widow from Moab who has already crossed one cultural border by marrying an outsider from Judah, clings to Naomi, her mother-in-law, herself a widow, when Naomi heads out to cross the actual border back to the land of Judah in hopes of escaping the same kind of famine that had driven her to Moab in the first place.

Borders mean nothing in the face of hunger and desperation. The Central American refugees heading North today can feel in the marrow of their bones the plight of Ruth and Naomi, and the drive to move creates new bonds that erase old boundaries. “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

Ruth’s experience reminds us of an additional essential truth of life in community: it will change you. We are transformed by life in community, and we come to new understandings of our own core convictions. That truth, and the fear it engenders in those who cannot imagine that the change be anything other than loss, lies at the root of so much of the fear and anger driving our current politics.

Real life in authentic community teaches us that sometimes we reside inside the tent and other times we are the strangers looking for the welcoming doorway. Whether we come or we go, whether we are welcomed or are offering welcome, we are bound by the command to love: to love the Lord with heart and soul and strength, and to love the neighbor as we love ourselves. Perfect love casts out all fear, including that fear that we might somehow find ourselves outside the circle altogether.

But that center moves with us wherever we go, and our lives circle out from it but always around it. Forever and always, inescapably so. Amen.