The Ethos of Welcome

By Robert Carey

In the reports that follow, beginning with this one, I want to explore the interior of the term. What does it mean for us as a congregation, as a cathedral congregation?

Welcome is a style and a behavior that runs through our most basic texts. The images of the table, of sitting down together, of welcoming the stranger, of offering hospitality. Paul works all the changes on the images of family, of belonging, of enfolding. It is fundamental to what a community is.

But here we come up hard against the realities of our history as a tradition and the particularities of American life. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the history of the Christian church knows at least two things. That it is a very large tradition, and that it comes in an apparently unending variety of packages.

If we were a store, we would look something like Home Depot. Think about it.

Right from the beginning, the issue of who sits at the table, who can or cannot be in the body, who is or who is not welcome is front and center. Paul's letter are early examples of conflict resolution. The church early on divides into East and West, Greek and Latin. In the West, our branch of the family, the dividing picks up speed with the shattering of Catholic Europe into regional and national churches. The Church of England becomes the mother of a legion of church styles.
None of this divisions was the result of whimsy but reflected deep and, alas, unsolvable differences.

In America, the divisions keep up and keep on. For an astute historical, sociological and theological reading of our immediate divisive religious culture, H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism, remains current and urgently insightful. And these issues are still with us. Who should be at the table? Which stranger do we welcome?

The traditional answer, sometimes appropriate, sometimes wildly narrow and restrictive, is a list of behaviors that represent--at least for those who make the list--the unacceptable. Usually, these have been a string of No's. Can't go here, can't do that. Can't even think of doing that--or the other thing that those people are doing. The result usually has been a dry and angry asceticism that guards the borders while other problems go unremarked--pride, a lack of generosity, an unreflective sense of superiority.

But, I think, this is not the road we want to go down. In the weeks and months ahead, we will want to explore how our several forms of participation can work to create that welcoming place, that sense of the thing that would move a visitor to say: I think this is where I want to be.

Email: wardens@saintsaviour.org

Remembering Dr. King

by Robert B. Carey, Ph.D.

Every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day makes me wonder about the quality of American memory.

I served as an assistant pastor in Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1963 to the summer of 1965, when I left, first , to get married to Ms. Patricia Morris and then for the both of us to return to New York City where I finished the senior year of my M.Div. program and began working in East Harlem with the City Society of the United Methodist Church. We are still married and we still live in East Harlem.

Part of the difficulty in talking about Dr. King and those times is conveying to someone what that time felt like; what it meant to work in the South, to be arrested, to be held in a holding tank, to be surrounded by people with guns who could "loose" you and not be held accountable. That was the shadow side of the dream, but it was also an incredibly hopeful time, a time of awakening into a thinkable future. Dr. King's speech gave new meaning and luster--since considerably diminished--to the idea of the city on the hill, to America as a beloved community.

I first experienced the problem of remembering him when our children were growing up and had to do a report for school, so they interviewed my wife and me about our lives. Their great organizing question was:” When you were alive.......... " We have always treasured that moment, but it made very vivid the difference between the history that I had experienced and can conjure up even now--dinner at the King house just around the corner from where I lived, talking with Daddy and Mrs. King about programs for the young people at Ebenezer, prayer meetings, paying visits at Grady Hospital and on and on--and the history our children had to get at through texts, pictures, television news clips. All very vivid but just a tad distant. Someone else's history and historical moment.

And accompanying that and shadowing that growing sense of distance is the shaping of Dr. King into a "comfortable saint," the preacher of love and reconciliation. But what could be wrong with that?, someone says. The difficulty with that is what falls away in the American haste to "move on" to come to "closure" over things. What falls away was remembering that he was going deeper and farther at the time he was killed. He was beginning to link racial and economic justice, getting down to the deep disenfranchisement that haunts this country.

We get comfortable in our discussions of diversity at our peril and we bend, fatally, the trajectory of his thought If we settle for simply celebrating the fact that you look like you look and I look like I look--rather an acid way of thinking about diversity. But, alas, it can come to that and no more—everyone comfortably encased in agreed upon labels. But the deep question of Who Gets What? of Who is not at this table? gets too easily swept away when we settle for a group photo reading of diversity.

That is where the permanent radicalism of Dr. King's idea of reconciling love insists that we go. Everyday. All days. Not just his day.

Email: wardens@saintsaviour.org