When I was a
child, we lived in a crowded house. I had three sisters, and my grandmother
lived with us for much of my childhood, as well. And there was about a year
when we had someone else living with us too. My mother brought a young woman
into our home who was struggling with grief. I was too young to understand the
circumstances; I just knew that Marie was broken, fragile. Still, she was a
beloved big sister to me and my sisters.
I remember, too,
gaggles of young Filipina women in our house. Back in the 1960s the U.S. opened
immigration and many nurses came into the country from the Philippines, to meet
the need at the time. The hospital where my mother worked hired a lot of them.
When my mother looked at these nurses she saw girls who were lonely for their
families and living in a strange land; she drew them into our family.
My mother didn’t
seem to mind a crowded house. Actually, she seemed to love it. It gave her joy
to open her house and her heart to others, even when she didn’t have much – and
most of the time she didn’t have much. My parents always struggled. But this
never closed my mother’s heart.
She gave of
herself completely. She worked long days, then would sometimes go back into the
hospital on her day off to visit a patient she knew was lonely.
She always
seemed remarkable to the rest of us, even more so because of how little she
had. Compared to others, my mother had little to give, yet she gave so much. I
always wondered why that seemed paradoxical.
But I read
something recently that made me think about this. There is a kind of
hospitality that goes beyond the conventional type. There is the usual kind of
hospitality, such as having the family over for Sunday dinner. But this unusual
sort involves reaching out to the people way out at the margins and drawing
them in.
Those who
practice such radical hospitality are usually ones who, themselves, feel like
outsiders in some way. They are the ones who know what it is to be at the
margins, who know what it feels like to be the last, the lost, or the least.
And I know that certain experiences in my mother’s life put her in that
category.
It seems like it
takes an experience of loss to learn real compassion for others. That, somehow,
we have to get really near to the edge of the cliff to understand what truly
matters. When we have plenty, when everything seems manageable, our priorities
can become all kinds of messed up. We think: If I can’t have that purse, that
car, that boat, that whatever it is, I will just die. It is almost as though we
have tightly gripped that shiny object even before it is in our hand, and to
not acquire it feels like loss. The loss of something that is not even ours.
I know this
personally: the more I have, the more comfortable I become with comfort, the
more I feel it is actually my right. The more entitled I feel. And so it
strikes me then as bewildering to read Paul’s letter to the Philippians and
hear him speak about joy. Because Paul was writing this letter from a prison
cell.
For people who
have never been behind prison walls, it is mystifying. How could he possibly be
overflowing with joy, as his letter shows him to be?
During his many
years of traveling around the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, of
discipling new believers and guiding new churches, Paul had the task, again and
again, of teaching these new believers how to live into their faith; teaching
these new churches how to be the church. It was a monumental task. But Paul was
a patient and gifted teacher.
In the case of
the Philippians, what we know from this letter is that they learned that Paul
was imprisoned and they were deeply concerned for his welfare. They loved Paul
and it hurt them to imagine his suffering. So they sent one of their own to him
with provisions. Paul was, of course, grateful for what they did. But the focus
of his concern was somewhere else.
Paul, in his
letter, instructed the church at Philippi to keep their eye on what truly
matters. He told them his current situation was not something that really
mattered. Not that he liked being in prison, but he knew that God was
accomplishing wonderful works through the church in spite of his circumstances
– or maybe even because of his current circumstances. We recall that Paul is
the one who wrote in another letter that all things work together for good for
those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose. That might even
include, Paul thought, his imprisonment.
I imagine it is
possible that spending time in a prison cell could be an opportunity for a
person to re-evaluate what really and truly matters. But there are also plenty
of other experiences we might have that could do the same.
Have you ever
had an experience that taught you about what really and truly matters?
What are the
things that really matter to you?
For my mother it
was not being alone. Knowing that you were someone of value. She fed people.
She sheltered people – and probably not so much because they were hungry or
homeless, but more because they were alone. She needed them to know that there
was someone who loved them. and there was always a place at the table for them.
Paul believed
God was able to do extraordinary things through the church. Paul knew that the
gospel of Jesus has the power to transform people, to shift our vision so that
we can see what really matters.
As Paul says to
the Philippians, we are not there yet; we are a work in progress. But I hope we
are always on our way to seeing that all of God’s children really matter. I
hope we see that the stuff we spend a lot of time and money and worry on are
insignificant when measured against the well-being of one another. I hope we
see that in God’s realm there is a place at the table for everyone.
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