Christ Our Light Catholic Church - Loudonville, NY

March 29 and 30
Fourth Sunday of Lent

From Deacon Dick~

OUR PARISHES MUST DEVELOP A CULTURE OF HOSPITALITY

Hospitality is at the heart of Christian life, drawing from God’s grace and reflecting God’s graciousness. In hospitality, we respond to the welcome that God has offered and replicate that welcome in the world. While our understandings of hospitality may be limited to the hospitality industry of restaurants and hotels or coffee and donuts at church, the practice itself is biblically, historically, and theologically much more substantive and significant.  We must expand hospitality from something we do to an expression of who we are.

This shift from doing to being involves a deepening relationship with both the Holy Spirit and people who may not look like us or share our experiences. Shifting our focus from doing to being allows us to become more fully the community that Scripture calls us to be. Though we may begin with hospitality, where we are saying “we welcome you,” Scripture calls us to journey from that place, through a place of solidarity (“we stand with you”), and ultimately to mutuality (“we need you”), where we comprehend just how deeply the global community of Jesus’ followers need each other in order to be the people of God we are called by Scripture to be.

Jesus exemplified mutuality in every way: in the stories he told, in the way he related to others, and even in the way he died. When the church works to embody mutuality in our daily life, and especially in their approach to immigrants and refugees, we learn to lament, celebrate, and learn together. Ultimately, this leads to the healing and wholeness that God wants for God’s creation! And this means not just doing but being the reflection of Christ’s love, which the church is called to be; to witness Christ not just in our words but in our mutual identity as members of Christ’s body.

~ Theologian Christine Pohl & Preacher Sandra Maria Van Opstal