Author: Sara Palmer

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In from the Street: When Homeless Christians Join

the Worshiping Assembly

Kimberly Bracken Long

Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

In virtually every arena of the academy and the church, people are talking about multicultural issues. This is a good thing as the world becomes a smaller place, and we find ourselves faced with people different from ourselves, within our own nation, our own cities, our own communities, our own churches, and in some cases even in our own homes. The more I am involved in these conversations, the more convinced I am that there are no standard principles for becoming a more multicultural church; there is no guidebook for churches that find themselves a more and more heterogeneous group of people. This is because questions of multicultural worship – or, to use Kathy Black’s term, culturally-conscious worship – are so closely tied to the context from which they arise. More than one liturgical theologian has insisted that it is absolutely necessary to approach these questions, and indeed all questions related to worship, contextually. Kevin Irwin, in his influential book Context and Text outlines a method for liturgical theology that assumes the “contemporary emphasis on liturgy as event” In other words, any enactment of liturgy, as well as any theological work done about that liturgy, must look at much more than the words that are spoken. It must look at all the component parts of worship – texts, yes, but also symbols, actions, gestures, “the times and places when and where communities…are engaged in these rites.” In other words “liturgical context is text” – that is, the “source – text – for developing liturgical theology.”1 In this essay, using class as the primary category and Irwin’s methodology as a foundation, I will explore a particular question related to worship and culture: how the presence of homeless Christians affects a worshiping congregation. As in any discipline, I come to the question with all sorts of unconscious assumptions . I am sure that my vision is colored in ways I do not recognize by my situation as a middle-class white woman with a high level of education who owns property. So that must be acknowledged from the start. I come, too, as someone who has studied and written and taught about worship, as someone who prays best when worshiping with others, and who is committed to encouraging the church toward faithful worship in all its fullness. I come as a preacher who has fallen in love with preaching in the midst of the assembly’s worship. Finally, and perhaps most important, I come as someone who worships with a congregation, and I approach the topic at hand from that starting point. I agree with the pre-eminent scholar of Byzantine liturgy, Robert Taft, who says that “liturgy can be understood only by one who prays it.”2 With that in mind, I share with you three stories.

I I worship in a church in downtown Atlanta that is known for its stellar music and long tradition of excellent worship and exceptional preaching, as well as its admirable social justice efforts. It’s a church where Sundays are memorable events, a church

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where more seminary professors worship than ought to be legal, one that boasts an education program that’s enviable. It’s a church that seems to have its act together. And then a woman we’ll call Annie started to show up. The first time I noticed her, she was sitting outside the doors of the building, and she asked me for money. The next time we spotted each other I invited her inside for lunch, which is served every week after worship. After that, she began to come to church for lunch on most Sundays, knowing that someone would make sure she was fed. One Sunday morning, though, I noticed her in the balcony, sitting alone and apart. Gradually I realized that she was showing up more Sundays than not, and always on the days when we celebrated the Lord’s Supper. There came a day, however, when Annie was not in her usual place in the balcony. I spotted her, instead, in the back pew of the church. It wasn’t long before she had chosen a new seat, right in the middle of the congregation, a seat on the aisle. She rarely sang, but she always came to the table. I was struck by the courage this must have taken, how brave this woman was to thrust herself into the middle of these well-behaved, well-educated, decently dressed Christians – to claim her place in the midst of the assembly and to come forward, hands outstretched, asking for the bread that she seemed to know was hers.

II There is another woman who has come to worship with our church. I met her at a service of Taize prayer, and I’m sorry that I failed to ask her name, even though she greeted me warmly. She was there early, settled in the pew wearing a knit cap on her head, a blue blanket folded neatly beside her. She not only smiled at me as we spoke, but embraced me as a sister. The candles burned, and we sang our hearts out, and then it was time for healing prayers. She was the first to come forward at the invitation. She walked down the aisle, her face lifted up, her arms held out, and her hands open, ready to receive whatever blessing might be bestowed. She was anointed with oil and received the laying on of hands, and after the service was over, she went to each person and embraced them with the peace of Christ. I saw her again at the next week’s evening service and then the following Sunday morning. Still wearing her cap and blanket, she sat near the back. When, during the final hymn, I looked up and saw her singing, it was like a vision. Her head was thrown back, her face upturned, her eyes closed, and her smile dazzling. She stood with one hand extended upward in praise and the other clasping her heart, as she and I, and everyone else there that morning, sang “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” I could not help but wonder at it – how this woman who seemed to be without much to give at all, would offer it up to the Lord. I do not presume to know anything about her life of faith – anything of her life at all – except to imagine that it cannot be an easy one. Had I seen her on the streets, I would not have taken her for a sister in Christ. But there in the sanctuary, it was unmistakable. We did not know one another, but we were not strangers; we were already bound, sisters in the faith, falling down before the same Christ in thanks and praise.

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Ill One final story is about a man who joined us on Easter Sunday. Most of his teeth appeared to be gone, and though he looked clean and neat, his sport coat was decidedly too large. My husband was seated in the same pew, and when people passed the friendship pad, he saw the man had written his name in the proper space, and where it said “address,” he had written “homeless.” From my perch in the choir loft I could see him as he sang all the hymns and recited the creed. I had not seen him before; I have not seen him since. But he was, it seemed, a brother in Christ. During the announcements the pastor explained that a special offering was to be taken that day to benefit the poor and the hungry all around the world. There were envelopes in the pews for the purpose, and when it came time for the offering, he said, we were all to give generously. The appointed time came, and my husband watched as the man took one of the special envelopes. He did not put any money in, and for a moment my husband wondered if he ought to be giving his money to the man instead of the One Great Hour of Sharing. But the man had his own offering to give. On the envelope he wrote, “I love you very much.” These three are not the sort of folks that the pastors call on after they’ve signed the friendship pad. They’re not the kind the evangelism committee has in mind when they discuss how to attract new members. And yet here they are, Sunday after Sunday, sometimes the same faces, sometimes different ones. I won’t say we always know what to do or that even our best efforts at hospitality are not sometimes awkward. But if we pay attention, we can see that often these people who appear in our midst are following after Jesus, too. They are not “others” or “strangers.” They are seekers and believers just like the rest of us, and they are gradually becoming part of our worshiping community. It is not the identity we have chosen for ourselves, despite all of our efforts at providing shelter and ID cards and even political advocacy. But I am beginning to think that it is what God is choosing for us – that we not only seek to help those living in dire circumstances, but that we gather, together, around pulpit and font and table. The late Roman Catholic priest and liturgical scholar Robert Hovda once said that gathering around these symbols of word and sacrament save us from ourselves. To hear the gospel proclaimed, to be washed and renewed, to be fed with the bread of life and the cup of salvation, is to remember – even more, to act out in our imperfect way – what is most true about us. That despite the categories we create and the boundaries we set, Christ gathers us now as he will gather us then, already partners in the coming reign of God. Episcopal author Nora Gallagher once wrote that she could not forget some words of Paul’s: “God has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order.” She thought to herself, “What if those words are about something real? What if they are a hint about the kingdom? A hint about God? What if this religion Γ ve been practicing and this Gospel.. .Γ ve heard from the priest every Sunday, is not a metaphor but a description of reality?” What if she’s right? What if it’s real? What then? These experiences and questions are the starting point for the thoughts that follow. I do not claim to have any special insights about ministry with the homeless, and indeed there are many who are far more engaged in that ministry than I. But my task here is

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something rather different. I would claim that the experience of worshiping with people who sleep on the streets – not because we have corralled them or because we have taken to them some sort of worship in the shelter or on the streets, but because they have come into our midst – raises a whole host of questions and implications. At the very start, if we act out what we believe, some things are inescapable. First, if someone comes to worship hungry, we must have bread, always. Forthose from traditions where eucharist happens every Sunday, that is not a new or surprising thought. But for me – and perhaps for some readers of this journal – eucharist every Sunday is still something to be longed for. Now, with people there whose stomachs as well as their souls are hungry, who are we to deny them bread? First from the table of the Word and then from the Table of the Meal and, of course, then from the lunch table that is downstairs after the liturgy. Their presence not only begs the question for them, but for all of us: for who are we to pretend that we who come to church wellscrubbed and fashionably dressed do not also need such bread? And lest we fall prey to the spiritualizing tendencies that domesticate the gospel, we must ask how the welldressed among us can come to church with full stomachs, hear the gospel proclaimed each week, and fail to provide daily bread, real bread and plenty of it, for those who come seeking? Second, it seems that our baptismal font must be visible and full to brimming each Lord’s Day, that we may see and touch and hear the water that gives us life. For those who sleep on the streets (and those who do not) need the constant reminder that we are washed clean, that death has been drowned in the river of life, that having passed through these waters, we belong to God and to one another. We need to be reminded every week that we are given a new start, that we have been forgiven again for the mistakes we have made and the pain we have caused. Do not these sisters and brothers need to be reminded, in the most profound ways possible, that hope is not a fairy tale and new life is not something that only happens to other people? Don’t we all? There is a simple ethical implication here, as well; just as the table reminds us of our call to feed the hungry, the font reminds us that there are those who need a place to bathe body as well as soul. Third, every soul needs beauty. Our sanctuary in Atlanta is one where symbols abound and color surrounds, where the sounds of voices and instruments can approach the ethereal, where flowers burst forth in unrestrained glory, and candlelight dances as if joyful to be representing the light of Christ. I often wonder what it feels like to have lived in a doorway or on a bench all week and then come to such a beauty-filled place. Then I remember that is one of the reasons that I come too. For the God who created beauty also created a space for it in every soul. It is one of the things that makes us human – one of the ways that we are fed. Perhaps we forget that when we are surrounded by so many creature comforts. For, as Robert Hovda reminds us, “Beauty is a human need more keenly felt as one’s humanity is less encumbered by luxury and excess.”4 This need for beauty goes beyond the desire for a lovely environment, however. In his Community of the Beautiful, Alejandro García-Rivera “argues for a strong link between aesthetics and ethics.” He describes a dynamic relationship between the Beautiful, the Good, and the True, asserting that one key component of a community that embraces this dynamic relationship is “that community’s willingness and ability to embrace difference.” A Christian community that loves difference imitates the love

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of God, he says, and “follows the theological aesthetic norm of ‘lifting up the lowly.’” He continues:

The glory of the Lord is a community that has caught sight of a marvelous vision, a universe of justice emerging from a community’s experience of divine Beauty, the “lifting up the lowly.” Such a community counts as members the sun and stars, the dead and the living, the angels and the animals, and, of course, the marvelous yet lowly human creature. Together, in their splendid differences, these individuals give witness of God’s power not only to give life but also to ordain it Redemption, in light of God’s ordaining power, is less a state of mere existence or an invisible inner reality than an ordained existence, a common reality in the midst of marvelous differences, a community where the invisible becomes visible by the power of a bold and daring spiritual imagination which makes manifest communities of Truth, Goodness, and, above all, the Beautiful.

From the vantage point of his concern with theological aesthetics, we can see that García-Rivera points us toward the need to reclaim eschatological proclamation – in word and in deed – in Christian worship. For the “marvelous vision” he describes will be fully realized when Christ comes again – and it is this vision that we enact when we gather for worship. The more the Christian community embraces and celebrates its “embodied diversity” (whether in race, ethnicity, age, gender, or class), the closer we come to living the vision of future hope in the here and now.5 In order to recognize this beauty, then, it must not remain an intellectual, or even a spiritual, concept. It must be enacted. It must be seen. Last year on Ash Wednesday, our church held a midday service, as we often do only holy days, to accommodate legislators and others from the State Capitol who want to worship at noon. This time there were some other people at this service, too. One of ourpastors had invited guests from the church’s homeless shelter to come. And they did. Forty homeless men filled the pews along with about twenty-five of Georgia’s lawmakers. When it came time for the imposition of ashes, the pastor put the mark of the cross on the first person to come forward, and then that person turned and marked the next person in line. And that’s when it happened. A man who spends his days on the streets took an already grimy thumb and covered it with ash. Then he took it and made the sign of the cross on the forehead of one of Georgia’s finest. “Remember that you are dust,” he said, “and to dust you shall return.” One with no power spoke truth to one with all the power: you and I both will die. You and I have both been claimed by God in baptism. You and I both rely – body, mind, and soul – on nothing but the grace of God. And it happened not once, but over and over again, hand to head, ash to skin, as both the greatest and the least of these acknowledged their common humanity and dependence on God.6 This, I think, is the “theological aesthetic norm of ‘lifting up the lowly’” to which García-Rivera refers – the bodily enacting of Mary’s Magnificat, at least for one brief moment. It is also another reminder of how our ritual life necessarily proclaims the gospel in ways that go beyond our words. That is, what we enact with our bodies – what we see and touch and hear – the sacraments as well as those sacramental acts such as

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the one I just described – shows forth the gospel in exquisite beauty. Of course, this is not to say that words don’t matter. They do. In fact, if one is paying attention at all, one cannot help but pray differently when homeless Christians have joined the worshiping assembly. For the words, “thy kingdom come,” which are at the heart of all Christian prayer, sound less like good theology or words spoken in obedience and more like insistent pleading when the person next to you has a rumbling stomach and a wool blanket instead of a tweed jacket. And it’s not just that your better self, your faithful self, longs for relief and comfort for this poor soul, but your own soul, convicted of the truth of the gospel, cries out for the cosmic rearranging of the world that Christ promises will happen when he comes. Because if there is a shred of honesty in you, you know you need it as much as the poor soul next to you. We all need to be freed of the injustices that keep us oppressed or keep us as oppressors. Now – it is important to say at this point that I do not mean to imply that it is good for the rest of us to have homeless people worshiping with us – that we are, in any way, consumers of their misfortune so that we can have better worship or a better spiritual experience. Please do not misunderstand me. I mean, rather, that the very people we think we are here to help may very well have a great deal to teach us if we are willing to see. And even more, that it may be the will of Christ that we allow ourselves to be changed by them. And this brings us to the crux of the matter. At some point we begin to realize that because the woman in the knit cap is sitting in the pew next to you, she is no longer “them” but “us.” And as simplistic as it may sound, I think that all of our discussions of worship and culture come down to this. To move from “them and us” to “we” is not a simple move, of course, but we must begin somewhere. In prayer and in preaching, as in life, we begin by paying attention. It sounds ridiculously simple, but the first step is to notice who’s in the congregation. (As Roman Catholic theologian Ed Foley mused to an ecumenical group not long ago, “Maybe we are to take notice that Jesus took notice….”) A preacher who sees a person in a knit cap wrapped in a blanket will – or should – make different assumptions about her hearers. The example of the lawyer in the Lexus driving past a beggar on the street all of a sudden sounds much different when both the lawyer and the beggar are in the pews. The tirade against materialism sounds different when at least one person in the congregation doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Even the injunction to go out and feed the poor sounds a little off-pitch when the poor are right there in front of you. Because now the “needy” are not out there somewhere; they’re in here – they are not they, but we, part of the body. So noticing is the first step. Empathy is the second. This is not the same as making assumptions or simply imagining what life must be like out there. At one level, though, this is an act of the imagination. In the introductory preaching courses I’ve been privileged to help teach at Columbia Seminary, students are required to do an exercise we call “dislocation.” We ask the whole class to consider the same text – the story in Mark 5 of how Jesus interrupts his trip to Jairus’ house in order to heal a hemorrhaging woman, and only then proceeds to the authority’s house to raise his daughter who has died. The students are instructed to read it in a place they wouldn’t normally go to do biblical study. They read the text on the train or in the ER or in a downtown public park. They notice things in the text they wouldn’t see while sitting in the library, because they notice things about the world – like how different the access to health care is in

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a public hospital that caters to the poor than it is in a private suburban hospital. Or how in an upscale shopping mall you can tell who has the buying power and social situation required to maintain the sort of public image that goes along with social status, and who is there to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms – the people who become virtually invisible in such an environment. Those observations about the world and how it works give them new insights into this familiar text – like how the bleeding woman has no name, hasn’t enjoyed so much as a caress in twelve years – the sort of woman who might slip unnoticed into a back pew – or how Jairus was clearly a man to be noticed, one used to the privileges that go along with being important, powerful, and male. So empathy begins here, with the imagination. At a deeper level, however, empathy requires asking questions of one another, “Who are you? What is your life like? What brings you to this place?” And eventually questions like, “What do you see or know or wonder about God?” This is obviously not a twenty-minute endeavor or something you can find out from having people fill out information forms. It takes time and patience and more than a little humility. I have a friend who invited to worship a man he had met on the streets. After the service, the man took a rather systematic poll of twelve people in the congregation. “Why do you believe in God?” he asked them. My friend told me, sadly, that not one person would engage him in conversation. Some, I imagine, figured he was a little crazy. Some may have been uncomfortable discussing their private faith with a stranger. Some may not have known how to answer the question. Where are we if we cannot, even in church, raise such a question? Mark Francis, whose Shape a Circle Ever Wider: Liturgical Inculturation in the United States, is considered by many the state-of-the-question book on the subject, urges Christians to have a “listening heart” – that is, to be willing to listen to and learn from the people to whom one is ministering. In other words, one must be willing to be changed – to have one’s own faith deepened, one’s own vision broadened. He borrows the term from Peter Schindler, who says that this “listening heart” is “an ability to listen to the call of God as it comes through the tradition, and equally important, an ability to listen to the call of God as it comes through the persons in the situation where one is ministering.” Francis further explains that this means “putting the tradition in dialogue with the lives and the experiences of others in order for all involved to see the movement of God’s spirit which is constantly ‘making all things new.’” In fact, as Thomas Groóme points out, this has always been true for the people of God – the Christian story “is still unfolding…it has depths yet to be fathomed, and a surplus of meaning that will never be exhausted.”7 In other words, we must allow ourselves, our congregations, to be changed. For when “them” becomes “us” we are all of a sudden different. We cannot help but be changed. If you think this sounds threatening or frightening or difficult you are right. But it’s faithful, too – it is the life to which we are called. And in responding to that call, we find that not only do we need to be open, but our worship and preaching must necessarily be pliable as well. Perhaps we will find that, in fact, we cannot afford not to be changed. So how do we begin to put these ideas into practice? After attending to who’s around us, practicing empathy, and nurturing a listening heart, we can do a very basic thing. We can read the Bible together. After opening our imaginations to the possibilities that others might hear texts – our shared texts – with different ears, then it’s time

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to move to sharing what we hear. James Nieman and Thomas Rogers, in their book Preaching to Every Pew: Cross-Cultural Strategies, describe a pastor who serves a congregation of people from different social classes. This pastor has a Wednesday morning Bible study group that includes about a dozen people. About a third of them are unemployed or unemployable, about a third are employed, and the other third are pretty well educated and independent. The discussion that results is pretty freewheel­ ing. It’s taken several years to get to this point, but people have come to trust each other enough to speak out of their personal experiences while reading the texts together. By taking part in these conversations, the pastor approaches the pulpit each week knowing that a slice of the congregation has been engaged during the process of preparing the sermon. 8

One doesn’t have to search the Scriptures long to imagine how challenging this process might be. In a society where the class system reinforces the inequities between people, one look at the Magnificat or Amos or Revelation – to name a few – is enough to uncover the volatility involved in reading texts together. And, of course, in preach­ ing them. So then, not only must we be reading texts together – with people whose situations or worldviews are strikingly different from our own – but before ever entering the sanctuary, those who pray and preach must spend as much time building relationships – that is, building trust, as they do studying texts or crafting words. In his book, The End of Words, Richard Lischer, a Lutheran and professor of preaching at Duke University, points out that while ministers are “set apart for the gospel,” as Paul says of himself, the preacher’s vocation is not what it once was. “As a matter of public policy,” he says, “the wider culture still wants something like ministry, much as it encourages charity and volunteerism, but it thinks it can have it without the word of God. Faith-based initiatives are fine so long as no preaching is attached.” He points out that this professionalism has caused pastors to drift from the pulpit. “But,” Lischer continues, “the proclamation of the word of God cannot be professionalized. It has no functional equivalents in secular culture. It cannot be camouflaged among socially useful or acceptable activities….If you are filling out a job application, see how far it gets you to put under related skills: Ί can preach.’” Here we are getting to the heart of things. Says Lischer: “When ministers allow the word of God to be marginalized, they continue to speak, of course, and make generally helpful comments on a variety of issues, but they do so from no center of authority and with no heart of passion. We do our best to meet people’s needs, but without the divine word we can never know enough or be enough, because consumer need is infinite. We are simply there as members of a helping profession….” 9

In other words, if we listen to Lischer, there is no substitute for preaching Scripture. And maybe not much point in doing otherwise. He’s right. For there is too much at stake. In our preaching, as in all of our worship, we are charged with nothing less than proclaiming the kingdom of God, which is at the heart of the gospel. It’s not so different from what Robert Hovda said about worship: “Good liturgical celebra­ tion, like a parable, takes us by the hair of our heads, lifts us momentarily out of the cesspool of injustice we call home, puts us in the promised and challenging reign of God, where we are treated like we have never been treated anywhere else…where we are bowed to and sprinkled and censed and kissed and touched and where we share equally among all a holy food and drink.” 10 This is what we enact when we are together

in worship. This is the gospel we preach.

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So then – if we are proclaiming nothing less than the coming reign of God, and if sitting in our pews are people who have risen from both feather beds and from drafty doorways in order to make their way to church, then what are we to do? Do we dare preach such holy disruption, the upturning of the social order as we know it? Dare we pray for the kingdom to come – really? Dare we not? For the truth of the matter is, we all need this gospel. To proclaim the coming reign of God is to proclaim, in word and sacrament, both justice and comfort – the two sides of hope. The poor need to know that they are worth something in the eyes of God and that the inequities and injustices they suffer are not God’s will for either them or the world. And the rich need to know that they are not defined by their work or possessions or power or standing, but by the same baptismal waters that their poorer sisters and brothers have passed through. We all heard the same words when we emerged from those waters: “This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We are all invited to the same welcome table. Acknowledging the differences between us may, in fact, be the saving grace of pastors. As Lischer puts it,

When men and women take a deep baptismal plunge into ministry, they invariably surface as changed preachers. One pastor discovered the poor in his parish – not in some other neighborhood, but in his own parish – and his preaching took on new urgency. Another devoted herself to prayer for the sick as never before and began to speak with power she had never experienced. One discovered the ministry of his congregation as his wife lay dying, and in the midst of unspeakable sorrow he developed a new power to speak. Many a church’s mission has loosed the tongue of its preacher.

This, explains Lischer, is because “the words of the sermon belong to the common life of God’s people.”11 And in fact, this is true. For preaching, though it may seem on the surface to be a form of one-way communication, is deeply dialogical. So is prayer, even when led by one person, for it grows from the shared experience of fellow disciples and seekers. As Lathrop has said, the pastor must be open to all that is human, and nothing human should be alien to the one who faithfully lives and prays and preaches from the midst of the assembly. What is emerging, then, is a picture of worship that is rooted and grounded in Scripture, and its vision of the coming reign of God – worship that attends to the lives of the people in the pews and to those we can imagine there. And so we arrive at our conclusion: What is good for some of us is good for all of us. I am beginning to suspect that the presence of those people in our midst who do not sleep in comfortable beds may be bringing us closer to the fullness of the kingdom. Whether they are present in our congregations or not, we must pray and preach as though they were there in the pews next to us – or at least listening at the door. For the only way we can keep the present unrighteous order of things in place is to keep ourselves comfortably cloistered against all those who would be different from ourselves. What a sad and deprived church that would be. What an impoverishment – perhaps even abandonment — of the gospel. The remedy? Let the kingdom break in. And in doing so, we shall be saved from preaching that is doctrinaire, irrelevant or dispassionate, delivered from worship

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that disintegrates into psychobabble, advice for daily living, or vague spirituality. We will no longer pray “thy kingdom come” while secretly thinking “but not yet” because we do not want to leave our comfortable lives. But we will pray the prayer of Jesus with fervor because our sisters and brothers long for justice and healing – because we all yearn for the world to be made whole. And so I pray that we will learn, more and more, to welcome the stranger – not just because it’s the right thing to do, not only to show hospitality – but because in doing so, God reveals to us who we really are and a depth of the gospel that we may not otherwise know.

Notes

I. Kevin W. Irwin, Context and Text (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, Pueblo, 1994), 53-54. 2 Robert F. Taft, Through Their Own Eyes (Berkeley: InterOrthodox Press, 2006), xxv. 3 Nora Gallager, Things Seen and Unseen ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 73. 4 Robert Hovda, The Amen Corner, ed. John Baldovin (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1994), 216. 5 García-Rivera discussed in Edward Foley, “Re-Attaching Tongue to Body: The Aesthetics of Liturgical Performance,” in Ars Liturgiae, Worship, Aesthetics and Praxis (Chicago: LTP, 2003), 106-109. 6. Thanks to Gary Charles for relaying this story to me. 7. Mark R. Francis, Shape a Circle Ever Wider (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2000), 72. 8. James R. Nieman and Thomas G. Rogers, Preaching to Every Pew: Cross Cultural Strategies (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 64. 9. Richard Lischer, The End of Words (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 22-23. 10. Hovda, 220. II. Lischer, 37-38.