Our national synod was in Long Beach, California in 2015. Not a bad place to be.

We’d do church stuff all day and then hit the hotel bar. We’d stay, catch up, go to bed way too late, get up way too early, and do it all over again. It was the best synod.

On our last night in the bar, a hotel worker asked, “So, y’all are a church?”

“Yeah, we’re a church. Why? Is that shocking?”

“Yeah,” the worker replied. “You all seem like you like each other.”

“Oh. Is that not normal? Do you get a lot of churches through here?”

“Oh, we get a lot of churches. In fact, one was here just a week ago,” said the worker. “They didn’t tip. They’d come down here for like 15 minutes, order Coke in front of each other, but then get room service. Let me just say they drained all of our hard liquor. Lots of room swapping going on.”

I was shocked. They continued.

“But you guys, you hang out. You drink beer with one another. No one is drunk. And you are laughing. And you all seem to walk to walk. In fact, we’re having a conversation now, and I’ve talked more than you. You ask good questions. The last church treated us like we were invisible. But we saw it all. For all of that, they didn’t even tip at all.”

I say all this not to put down another denomination or say that we’re the best. I used to have that interpretation, but that’s pride. Now, it just makes me sad.

Christians, at least as I understand through the life of Jesus, should never treat anyone as if they are invisible. Christians should seek out the servant role and elevate others who serve. Christians should be the best tippers in town.

Duke ethicist Stanley Hauerwas finds most Christians are too intellectual about their practice of faith. He once wrote that Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be Christian, but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.”[1]

Put another way: an atheist buddy of mine was trying to challenge me on the bodily resurrection. “You love science. How can you believe such a thing? Can you prove it?”

I thought for a second and said, “I can’t prove it. Nor is it the top of my faith. For me, it’s the incarnation. It’s Christmas. It’s the embodied life together, where our doctrines must take on flesh. I can believe whatever I want, but if there’s no single consequence I can point to, then it’s meaningless. I’m a clashing gong or a noisy cymbal. The resurrection only matters because Jesus’ life was so incredible. The mystery doesn’t explain Jesus. Jesus’ life explains the mystery.”

I hear a lot about the decline of religion. Folks point to bad music, inept clergy, and too much red tape. For me, I think it’s hypocrisy. Maybe it’s as simple as trust. Do what you say. There’s enough hypocrisy in the world, let’s not add to it.

Church is full of hypocrites, and there’s always room for more. Yet there are those who aren’t aware of their own hypocricy. They look to the speck in their neighbors eye. Maybe just saying that is not attending to the log in my own eye. I don’t need you to believe that other people are bad and we’re good. I don’t want to talk about sending others to hell. That’s above my paygrade. I want to talk about the stuff Jesus actually talked about: feeding the poor, kindness to the stranger, visiting the sick and the prisoner. We keep hearing how Christians want to put the Ten Commandments in schools. Why not the Beatitudes? Blessed are the poor in the New York Stock Exchanged. Blessed are the peacemakers in the Pentagon. Blessed are the meek in the White House. Blessed are the merciful in our schools. Or why not Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats, where Jesus says the merits we will be judged on and saved by are feeding the hungry, sheltering the stranger, and all that jazz. It’s almost like we made a religion about Jesus instead of a religion of Jesus.

We have to incarnate this stuff. Take it into us and let it shape our lives in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable. The church is in decline because we’re not doing what Jesus would have us do. And people notice that.

I think that’s what The Gathering sings about when they sing, “I want more of you, God.” Not more about God… more God. Do you hear the difference? I want more of Jesus. More of his actions and attitude in the world. Sitting with sinners and eating with them. Healing folks. Welcoming the outcasts. Multiplying bread and fish so that all are fed and we have baskets and baskets left over.

I was once in a pastor’s prayer group. One pastor accused me of putting too much emphasis on loving my neighbor and not enough on loving God. In fact, he argued that anything that isn’t loving God is blasphemy.

As if love is pie. As if love is a limited resource. God is love, according to 1 John 4:8. True love is God, and it’s abundant. Expansive. When I feel loved, I expand, I don’t subtract. Loving never negates; it always adds. When we had children, my love for Kate only expanded. And with my mom and in-laws. And my grandparents. And humanity in general as now I have a small glimpse of the challenges it took to raise me. Love expanded.

We are to love God with everything we’ve got, and our neighbor as ourselves. That means there are three parts here: loving God, loving neighbor, and loving ourselves.

If we love ourselves without our neighbor, that quickly turns selfish: greed, abuse, entitlement. We’re seeing a lot of self-love without love of neighbor in our headlines.

If we love our neighbor without love of self, we become people-pleasing doormats. If we think we can love our neighbors without also receiving love or care, that cuts off relationship. It inhibits our neighbors from following the Golden Rule as well. If we never let other people love us, we deprive them of the chance to fully live into their Christian call to love their neighbor, which is us.

If we love God without loving our neighbor or ourselves, we reduce God to an absentee landlord, demanding loyalty to abstract doctrines of our own making, not the neighborly love that demands action. We can easily write off inconvenient, needy, frustrating, and strange people, who are all made in God’s image.

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”

Be kind and just to yourself. You are beloved by family and friends, and you are made in the image of God. Be kind and just to your neighbor, because they are too. And who is your neighbor? Everyone. Even the one you’d rather not acknowledge. And walk humbly with your God.

Walk humbly.

As I walked the fine city of Long Beach during the Synod of 2015, I learned a lot. I learned that I wish Christians tried to prove their faith less and incarnated it more. By tipping their servers well. By asking the name of their wait staff. By treating them as human beings, whether they are pouring our drinks, picking up our trash, or caring for us in the emergency room.

In a sense, we’re all strangers in this world. In the first five books of the Bible, there’s a refrain that runs through with a few variations: “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Some of the meanest people I’ve met have never been strangers. A relative recently stated they couldn’t remember the last time they left the county. I get it.

Growing up, my family had horses. They often stuck to the same trails. They wore deep grooves in the pasture. The horses were predictable. They carved narrow paths to their favorite shady spots and patches of clover. I think humans do the same. We know the way by heart. We stick to our favored paths. Nothing inherently wrong with that. I love my routine as well. Yet if we cling to it, we get mean. We’re not meeting strangers and we’re just assuming that our paths are universal. This simply isn’t the case.

If we’re never a stranger, we’re never challenged. We’re never able to discover neighbors we never knew we had. More importantly, if we’re always the host, we never discover the humility of being a guest, or the kindness of the strangers who host us.

Augustine of Hippo once wrote, solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. What is it that’s solved? If you want to find out, you’ll have to do your own walking.

Jesus walked a lot. He preached God’s expansive love. He taught us to love God with everything we have. And since God is love, we could say he taught us to love Love with everything we’ve got. And the second is like it: to love our neighbor as ourselves. Which means we must also love ourselves. He met plenty of strangers and turned them into friends. More impressive than water into wine, if you ask me. And for that, we killed him. And he came back with the same message.

We didn’t recognize him at first. Not Mary at the tomb. She thought he was the gardener, and such helpers are often invisible to people of faith. I get it. The folks on the road to Emmaus thought Jesus was just a stranger. It wasn’t until he broke the bread that they truly saw him. The resurrection do matter because it shows that we can throw the worst at God and God never changes. God is love. I can miss it when it shows up in my neighbor. Especially if I had already written them off.

All this to say: our spiritual practice is to notice people. And if we are so lucky to dine out somewhere in Medina’s amazing food scene, we are to ask their name and tip at least 20%.

Maybe to take a walk. To plan some travel where we can be a stranger. Somewhere new, beyond the narrow rut we’re used to traveling. That way, when we come back home, we can experience our home again for the first time.

May this practice take away any fear you might have of God, for God is love. May it make you more generous with yourself and your neighbor. May you practice until one day you can say, like the Sufi poet Hafiz:

I have learned so much from God
that I can no longer call myself
a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of itself with me
that I can no longer call myself
a man, a woman, an angel,
or even pure soul.

Love has befriended Hafiz so completely
it has turned to ash
and freed
me
of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.[2]

Paul put it another way. In Galatians he writes, “In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

So go ahead. Make someone’s day. And find that love is a renewable resource. The more you make, the more you have, until the earth overflows with the stuff. And may grace and peace be yours. Amen.

Works Cited

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A geography of faith. Harper One, New York, NY, 2009. Page 44-45.

[2] The Gift, poems by Hafiz the great Sufi master. Translations by Daniel Ladinsky. Page 32.