Dr. Jim Hart’s presidential address this afternoon drew on Elizabeth Newman’s Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and other Strangers. The following is an excerpt:
…we cannot draw a clear line between our receiving and our giving. Even our giving is not “ours” but a sharing in what God is doing. Our worship is possible only because God gathers us and gifts us with the capacity to worship. Even more, God does not give to us only as individuals (for our own sakes) but God gives to the church as a whole. Truly to receive from God is to be made part of a people, called to worship, to give and to receive for and on behalf of the world.
This dynamic of giving and receiving can be seen when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” Through this prayer, the disciples learn to enter into the communion that Jesus has with the Father. The disciples are adopted into this communion (what Jesus is by nature, one early theologian said, we are by adoption). In learning to pray in this way and thus receive from Jesus, the disciples participate in the Son’s gift (offering) to the Father. In receiving from Jesus, the disciples learn to give. We know of course from scripture that this dynamic of learning to receive and give is a journey; the disciples at times falter and fall, but nonetheless (minus Judas) they continue on until, as the church later realizes, God had made them holy.
She goes on to quote John Milbank:
Without the virtue of worship, there can be no other virtue, for worship gives everything back up to God, hangs onto nothing and so disallows any finite accumulation which will always engender conflict. Confident worship also knows that in offering it receives back, so here the temporal world is not denied, but its temporality is restored as a gift and thereby rendered eternal.
The ethos and spirit of hospitality is, then, inherently (and creatively) redemptive of human culture and its icons.
For conversation: How does your worship extend the grand hospitality of Jesus by restoring a sense of eternality to the “stuff” of worship?
