Borderland
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 3, 2021
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I’ll never forget the first time I flew. It was at the Rhinebeck Air Show in Rhinebeck, NY and my age was not yet a double digit. The plane I rode in was a single prop WWI era model with an open cockpit. I don’t remember every detail of the ride, but I do remember being nervous, especially when the pilot would roll the plane to the side to afford my father and me a better view of the vast Hudson River valley landscape below, but more, I remember being mesmerized. Seeing the world from that height filled me with a sense of wonderment different from any I’d experienced on the ground. That experience of wonderment persists to this day even when I fly in planes much larger and higher than that tiny plane over Rhinebeck so many years ago.
One of the things that always prompts some reflection on my part when I fly is that the lines we draw on maps and globes to indicate borders aren’t there. Sure, one can observe what some refer to as natural borders- a river or mountain range- but most of the borders that we have drawn and redrawn over the course of human history, dividing up people and resources and often at great cost, are in fact our own creation.
Which points to another fact, borders may not only be crossed, they can be changed too. And not just land borders.
"…do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Gen 19: 8). Such was the plea of Lot, resident of the city of Sodom.
Now, many of us have been told by various religious leaders that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, found in Genesis, is about God’s condemnation of homosexuality. Indeed, from roughly the 12th century the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, along with a few other texts in the Bible have been used as texts of terror against homosexuals. If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer or what we LGBTQ folk call a straight ally, chances are you have been slapped upside the head with this text, at least figuratively. I certainly have. Indeed, for too long selected texts in the Bible have been used as a tool of oppression, hatred, and violence against various peoples including people who are seen as different from, or a threat to, the dominant “norm.”
It’s not that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is devoid of sexual content. In the story, some male residents of Sodom do express their desire to sexually assault two angels disguised as men who are guests of Lot. Yet, while many religious leaders and even some political officials have pointed to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as evidence of God’s condemnation of homosexuality, the prophet Ezekiel seems to have a different take, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”(16:49).
Other Hebrew prophets…Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zephaniah reference Sodom as well, listing sins ranging from injustice and oppression to partiality and encouraging evildoers. Then, there’s the book of Wisdom which states the sin of Sodom as “a bitter hatred of strangers.” (19:13). Jesus too makes reference to Sodom in Matthew’s Gospel, saying, “Whatever town or village you enter…If any one will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment than for that town.” (10:5-15).
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a favorite among those seeking theological justification of their own bigotry against LGBTQ people and others. So how could all those prophets, including Jesus, miss it? Simply put, the story is not about homosexuality.
Indeed, it is really a story about borders.
The story, odd as it may seem to us today, uses the threat of sexual assault, an act of humiliation and violence, to make a point about something as sorely lacking in the world today as it surely was in the city Sodom: hospitality. In the ancient world, hospitality… offering shelter, food, and protection to strangers and vulnerable travelers was not only a social norm, to many it was a moral obligation. Today hospitality, extended to anyone outside of one’s tribe or family, is often described as radical, especially in political discourse. Nonetheless, it is clear the sin of Sodom is a wider, societal inhospitality, not homosexuality. And destruction its price.
It is strange then that many a contemporary preacher, politician and person of faith claiming a desire, even call, to protect and preserve a faith and country they love, can’t seem to grasp this. Especially when the prophets are rather plain in describing just what inhospitality looks like: pride, excess wealth, injustice, oppression, hatred of strangers, a refusal to help the needy, etc.
Sure sounds familiar.
And perhaps too familiar if you identified with the cry of the psalmist from this morning’s reading, “Be gracious to me, Oh God, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also…”
I cried the first time I read this Psalm.
It put to words anguish all too familiar to me growing up gay; my eyes still well with tears almost every time I read it. For the psalmist writes with intimate knowledge of what it is like to be treated as subhuman, to have one’s worth and dignity as a human being…as a child of God, if you will, denied. Indeed, the psalmist, to put it plainly has his doubts about the human race. He cries out for shelter… for justice. Like so many today, he cries out for hospitality in an inhospitable world.
As Unitarian Universalists rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but who today draw from many sources of wisdom, both sacred and secular, we are something of spiritual outcasts or misfits as religions go. As such, living in a world scarred by hatred and maimed by apathy, the call to hospitality, is ours to answer. But to answer that call, we must be clear not only what hospitality is, but also what it is not.
Let me begin by telling you what it is not.
Hospitality it is not “customer service” in an attempt to be all things to all people. It is not a scheme to adopt in order to fill pews and church coffers.It is not all smiles or the absence of tension. It is not political correctness in the interest of feigned civility. It is not tiptoeing around truth at the expense of justice.
Instead hospitality is bold. Which means it is challenging, tense, and even scary at times. And in relation to the current socio-political discourse, it is radical. Hospitality is all these things because it turns conventional wisdom on its head. It asks that we embrace, rather than flee what we fear most, the opening of our heart’s border between us and them. Hospitality challenges to take up the hard task of love. Indeed, it is, as the spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen wrote, “…a virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.” Nouwen is describing a trip to the spiritual borderland of the heart.
Back when I was in seminary, I spent ten days in a literal borderland, a handful of towns on along the US/Mexico border, including Nogales, Altar, Magdalena, and Agua Prieta, in Mexico and Tucson, Douglas, and Nogales, in Arizona. There I met and spoke with migrants, humanitarian workers, clergy, and government officials from both sides of the border. We mostly ate at and stayed in shelters for and with migrants while in Mexico. When I returned several people asked me what I found most compelling or moving about the trip. My response has remained the same even all these years later.
What continues to stand out in my memory was the warm, generous hospitality offered to my colleagues and me in Mexico, a hospitality that seemed easy and natural. When I read about or hear how many in this country, including state and the federal officials, talk about or act towards migrants, immigrants and undocumented people, particularly from south of the border, I often recall the hospitality extended to me by the people I met in Mexico and can’t help but think of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Then, as now, the more formidable wall is the one constructed along the border of this nation’s heart.
That wall is especially formidable because we often start and stick with political and policy debates when hospitality is first and foremost a spiritual issue. Hospitality invites us to live at our most human and humane level…to make our heart a refuge for the weary. It is a way of relating to each other and ourselves rooted in the understanding that we are all children of the Divine, or in UU terms, part of the interconnected web of existence. Indeed, at its most basic, hospitality is the recognition of another as one’s sibling. To offer hospitality to someone then is to greet and care for another as one’s own kin.
To get there we must undertake a demolition project, and better we take it on in ourselves before wholesale destruction of Biblical proportions does it for us and rebuilds something worse.
Recall the words of the poet, “Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.” These remind us hospitality is an ongoing practice, not a final achievement. It is a deeply spiritual practice in which we are constantly faced with the realization, as Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt write in Radical Hospitality, that our “…biggest barrier is not the state of the world. It is the state of our minds and hearts.”
Indeed hospitality challenges us to change the labels we use to describe “the other” into faces. So, the “illegal” immigrant becomes a human being; the trans kid becomes a human being; the single mother, prison inmate, and homeless veteran become human beings, all bearers of a Divine spark; all with inherent worth and dignity.
The practice of hospitality is not for the faint of heart. As Homan and Pratt note, “You cannot ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you.” Nor is it for those who cling to certainty or bind themselves to outcomes as manifestations or proof of faithfulness. “Only the secure person”, says Pratt and Homan, “can live with an open heart. To do so is a whole lot braver than it sounds. You become susceptible to all sorts of human oddities and strangeness. You will be misunderstood. You will be rejected. Doubts you could otherwise avoid, will circle at your feet. You have to resolve the issue of whether or not the universe is a safe place. Only the brave keep the door ajar.”
The practice of hospitality is an ongoing project a the borderland of our heart in which we pry loose all that walls it off and imprisons it. A sustained effort to lift and loosen old foundations that keep us fettered to societal structures that normalize oppression and justify prejudice in the name of an order ordained by no one but those who benefit most from it; and by the way, that’s not any of us here. The practice of hospitality is to demolish that which blinds us to our kinship with each other and join in the formation of a nobler world.
One only need read the newspaper or listen to the news to know that much of our modern society too often rests on a foundation of unabashed callousness towards others, fortified with walls of arrogant pride painted as patriotism, greed papered as fiscal necessity, and hatred white washed as religious truth. Our faith calls us to be the change we so desperately need in the world; we don’t leave it up to a deity to do it for us. Are we, then, ready to pry loose old walls, lift and loosen old foundations? Are we willing then, to journey to the borderland of our hearts and take up the call of hospitality?
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 3, 2021
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I’ll never forget the first time I flew. It was at the Rhinebeck Air Show in Rhinebeck, NY and my age was not yet a double digit. The plane I rode in was a single prop WWI era model with an open cockpit. I don’t remember every detail of the ride, but I do remember being nervous, especially when the pilot would roll the plane to the side to afford my father and me a better view of the vast Hudson River valley landscape below, but more, I remember being mesmerized. Seeing the world from that height filled me with a sense of wonderment different from any I’d experienced on the ground. That experience of wonderment persists to this day even when I fly in planes much larger and higher than that tiny plane over Rhinebeck so many years ago.
One of the things that always prompts some reflection on my part when I fly is that the lines we draw on maps and globes to indicate borders aren’t there. Sure, one can observe what some refer to as natural borders- a river or mountain range- but most of the borders that we have drawn and redrawn over the course of human history, dividing up people and resources and often at great cost, are in fact our own creation.
Which points to another fact, borders may not only be crossed, they can be changed too. And not just land borders.
"…do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Gen 19: 8). Such was the plea of Lot, resident of the city of Sodom.
Now, many of us have been told by various religious leaders that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, found in Genesis, is about God’s condemnation of homosexuality. Indeed, from roughly the 12th century the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, along with a few other texts in the Bible have been used as texts of terror against homosexuals. If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer or what we LGBTQ folk call a straight ally, chances are you have been slapped upside the head with this text, at least figuratively. I certainly have. Indeed, for too long selected texts in the Bible have been used as a tool of oppression, hatred, and violence against various peoples including people who are seen as different from, or a threat to, the dominant “norm.”
It’s not that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is devoid of sexual content. In the story, some male residents of Sodom do express their desire to sexually assault two angels disguised as men who are guests of Lot. Yet, while many religious leaders and even some political officials have pointed to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as evidence of God’s condemnation of homosexuality, the prophet Ezekiel seems to have a different take, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”(16:49).
Other Hebrew prophets…Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zephaniah reference Sodom as well, listing sins ranging from injustice and oppression to partiality and encouraging evildoers. Then, there’s the book of Wisdom which states the sin of Sodom as “a bitter hatred of strangers.” (19:13). Jesus too makes reference to Sodom in Matthew’s Gospel, saying, “Whatever town or village you enter…If any one will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment than for that town.” (10:5-15).
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a favorite among those seeking theological justification of their own bigotry against LGBTQ people and others. So how could all those prophets, including Jesus, miss it? Simply put, the story is not about homosexuality.
Indeed, it is really a story about borders.
The story, odd as it may seem to us today, uses the threat of sexual assault, an act of humiliation and violence, to make a point about something as sorely lacking in the world today as it surely was in the city Sodom: hospitality. In the ancient world, hospitality… offering shelter, food, and protection to strangers and vulnerable travelers was not only a social norm, to many it was a moral obligation. Today hospitality, extended to anyone outside of one’s tribe or family, is often described as radical, especially in political discourse. Nonetheless, it is clear the sin of Sodom is a wider, societal inhospitality, not homosexuality. And destruction its price.
It is strange then that many a contemporary preacher, politician and person of faith claiming a desire, even call, to protect and preserve a faith and country they love, can’t seem to grasp this. Especially when the prophets are rather plain in describing just what inhospitality looks like: pride, excess wealth, injustice, oppression, hatred of strangers, a refusal to help the needy, etc.
Sure sounds familiar.
And perhaps too familiar if you identified with the cry of the psalmist from this morning’s reading, “Be gracious to me, Oh God, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also…”
I cried the first time I read this Psalm.
It put to words anguish all too familiar to me growing up gay; my eyes still well with tears almost every time I read it. For the psalmist writes with intimate knowledge of what it is like to be treated as subhuman, to have one’s worth and dignity as a human being…as a child of God, if you will, denied. Indeed, the psalmist, to put it plainly has his doubts about the human race. He cries out for shelter… for justice. Like so many today, he cries out for hospitality in an inhospitable world.
As Unitarian Universalists rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but who today draw from many sources of wisdom, both sacred and secular, we are something of spiritual outcasts or misfits as religions go. As such, living in a world scarred by hatred and maimed by apathy, the call to hospitality, is ours to answer. But to answer that call, we must be clear not only what hospitality is, but also what it is not.
Let me begin by telling you what it is not.
Hospitality it is not “customer service” in an attempt to be all things to all people. It is not a scheme to adopt in order to fill pews and church coffers.It is not all smiles or the absence of tension. It is not political correctness in the interest of feigned civility. It is not tiptoeing around truth at the expense of justice.
Instead hospitality is bold. Which means it is challenging, tense, and even scary at times. And in relation to the current socio-political discourse, it is radical. Hospitality is all these things because it turns conventional wisdom on its head. It asks that we embrace, rather than flee what we fear most, the opening of our heart’s border between us and them. Hospitality challenges to take up the hard task of love. Indeed, it is, as the spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen wrote, “…a virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.” Nouwen is describing a trip to the spiritual borderland of the heart.
Back when I was in seminary, I spent ten days in a literal borderland, a handful of towns on along the US/Mexico border, including Nogales, Altar, Magdalena, and Agua Prieta, in Mexico and Tucson, Douglas, and Nogales, in Arizona. There I met and spoke with migrants, humanitarian workers, clergy, and government officials from both sides of the border. We mostly ate at and stayed in shelters for and with migrants while in Mexico. When I returned several people asked me what I found most compelling or moving about the trip. My response has remained the same even all these years later.
What continues to stand out in my memory was the warm, generous hospitality offered to my colleagues and me in Mexico, a hospitality that seemed easy and natural. When I read about or hear how many in this country, including state and the federal officials, talk about or act towards migrants, immigrants and undocumented people, particularly from south of the border, I often recall the hospitality extended to me by the people I met in Mexico and can’t help but think of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Then, as now, the more formidable wall is the one constructed along the border of this nation’s heart.
That wall is especially formidable because we often start and stick with political and policy debates when hospitality is first and foremost a spiritual issue. Hospitality invites us to live at our most human and humane level…to make our heart a refuge for the weary. It is a way of relating to each other and ourselves rooted in the understanding that we are all children of the Divine, or in UU terms, part of the interconnected web of existence. Indeed, at its most basic, hospitality is the recognition of another as one’s sibling. To offer hospitality to someone then is to greet and care for another as one’s own kin.
To get there we must undertake a demolition project, and better we take it on in ourselves before wholesale destruction of Biblical proportions does it for us and rebuilds something worse.
Recall the words of the poet, “Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.” These remind us hospitality is an ongoing practice, not a final achievement. It is a deeply spiritual practice in which we are constantly faced with the realization, as Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt write in Radical Hospitality, that our “…biggest barrier is not the state of the world. It is the state of our minds and hearts.”
Indeed hospitality challenges us to change the labels we use to describe “the other” into faces. So, the “illegal” immigrant becomes a human being; the trans kid becomes a human being; the single mother, prison inmate, and homeless veteran become human beings, all bearers of a Divine spark; all with inherent worth and dignity.
The practice of hospitality is not for the faint of heart. As Homan and Pratt note, “You cannot ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you.” Nor is it for those who cling to certainty or bind themselves to outcomes as manifestations or proof of faithfulness. “Only the secure person”, says Pratt and Homan, “can live with an open heart. To do so is a whole lot braver than it sounds. You become susceptible to all sorts of human oddities and strangeness. You will be misunderstood. You will be rejected. Doubts you could otherwise avoid, will circle at your feet. You have to resolve the issue of whether or not the universe is a safe place. Only the brave keep the door ajar.”
The practice of hospitality is an ongoing project a the borderland of our heart in which we pry loose all that walls it off and imprisons it. A sustained effort to lift and loosen old foundations that keep us fettered to societal structures that normalize oppression and justify prejudice in the name of an order ordained by no one but those who benefit most from it; and by the way, that’s not any of us here. The practice of hospitality is to demolish that which blinds us to our kinship with each other and join in the formation of a nobler world.
One only need read the newspaper or listen to the news to know that much of our modern society too often rests on a foundation of unabashed callousness towards others, fortified with walls of arrogant pride painted as patriotism, greed papered as fiscal necessity, and hatred white washed as religious truth. Our faith calls us to be the change we so desperately need in the world; we don’t leave it up to a deity to do it for us. Are we, then, ready to pry loose old walls, lift and loosen old foundations? Are we willing then, to journey to the borderland of our hearts and take up the call of hospitality?
Amen and Blessed Be
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