A Pull Toward the Light

Had friends over for a dinner last night.  A welcome return to this form of hospitality we have missed during the pandemic. 

It was a challenging night.  Both are suffering.  One with memory loss.  The other with chronic pain.   Not how they envisioned life for themselves. The dinner conversation had much to do with suffering and our experience (or not) of God in our pain.  More so, it was an acknowledgement that our faith has not grown easier as we age as much as it has become more mysterious and yet, strangely real.

Suffering deeply challenges and changes our comfortable and packaged concepts of the Divine.  In suffering we do not experience a God who acts according to our expectations, hopes, or calculations.  God is frustratingly close and far, intimate and distant, comforting and seemingly callous, with us and against us.  Some eventually abandon God.  Yet some grow deeper.  Why deeper in the face of such struggle to understand? I believe it is because the faith we have, if we have it, is a gift.  God draws us.  

Even in the dark there is a pull toward the light.  Even during God’s silence, as I cry out in pain and frustration, is that not the evidence of a gift in action? Why would I otherwise choose to lash out to the God I feel has abandoned me? To leave God, to fully abandon any conversation or argument, is to be truly alone in this universe.  That is the most frightening suffering of all. 

The Risk of Hospitality in a Pandemic

It's hard to think of exercising hospitality in a pandemic situation. Typically we define hospitality as having someone over for a coffee or taking a meal over to someone. Being 'hospitable' in our day is to be friendly, welcoming and allowing someone in to your home & perhaps into parts of your life.

However for those of us who follow the way of Christ, it is so much more. Hospitality has always defined the church as a universal community that defies the significance of status boundaries and distinctions of the larger society and instead recognizes the value of every person by providing care and welcome to all, especially the marginalized. (Recommended reading: Making Room by Christine Pohl). This drove believers in previous disasters, at a time when the world didn't have the medical knowledge & resources we have now, to be on the front line of caring for the sick and even of rescuing the dying & infected who were discarded on the garbage dumps outside the city. 
(Recommended reading on this: The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark)

True Christian hospitality can be best described as having your arms wide open to others. Your time, space, love and resources are available to serve them, at any cost. In the past that sometimes meant the risk of your life. What does that look like today?

Clearly we must obey the law which now requires us to be physically distanced so that we can reduce the spread of this virulent virus. I am not advocating we break out of our homes! We need to be part of the solution. But how far will my faith go if I am needed to step into a situation knowing that the risk could cost me my life?

Nurses and other health care workers are living with that question - and heroically answering. But what about ME? If the situation arose where a call to care for the needy and neglected arose where I would be exposing myself to this virus, would I respond knowing it could have a negative, perhaps fatal impact on my life?

Its Passion week in the Christian calendar - a week where we reflect on the 'risk' Jesus took as He walked into Jerusalem, knowing the outcome would mean His own suffering and death. Of course we love the end of the story - a resurrection! But beyond that resurrection, those of us who are Christ followers are actually called to share in the sufferings of Christ (Phil 3:10 etc.). There is an expected, ongoing experiential participation in suffering that is part of our life in Christ. Now, is that just a theoretical or theological statement? NO.  It means that the outcome of walking in the way of Jesus means we will experience suffering.

In this time of history I am asking the question of myself - What is my life in the presence of a pandemic when there are people suffering who need to be served? History shows that in previous plagues and disasters, Christians stepped into the suffering of others to serve at the risk (and cost) of their own lives. Why? Because to serve was the way of Christ, and to risk was possible because the life they possessed in Christ held promise beyond death.

I hold dearly to my life - to my wife, my children, my hopes & dreams. I have seen and experienced the pain death causes to families. I also now have a family member who is a front line health care worker, so this is all pretty close to home for me.  Yet am I personally willing to serve Christ in this (or any other situation), knowing that by doing so it could expose me to suffering & possible death, while bringing love and life to the other? Sobering.

It was done before.

Harv Matchullis