Sign #2 of Healthy Church Culture-We Practice Hospitality & Forgiveness

1      Review

Welcome to everyone here with us at St. Hagop and also joining us via livestream on facebook and watching later on facebook or youtube. The aim of this sermon series has been to start a prayerful reflection and conversation on who we are as a church and what type of culture we foster to grow us all in our Christian walk.  I am very thankful to see that this conversation has gained traction, our Wednesday zoom discussions are delightful, and I am happy to see that now 51 people have taken our church culture reflection assessment.  These are all just conversation starters, of course, prayerfully reflecting on our spiritual journey is a lifelong journey that is a slow joyful evolution! To review where we have been, in the first week we started off with an introduction on the importance of culture, how it is the single most important factor in nurturing individuals and a church who are committed followers of Christ. Last week we talked about how a healthy worship culture, especially in our worship-centric oriental orthodox tradition, is absolutely crucial; When people come to worship, are they laser focused on knowing and growing in God?  We talked about that principle of Orthodox worship, the Latin phrase translated; ‘As we worship, so we believe.’ That is, what we sing and say and do in our church actually helps form us in what we believe. 

2      Culture of hospitality forgiveness and the love of Christ

To help us transition from last week’s focus on a healthy culture of worship to this week’s focus on a healthy culture of hospitality, forgiveness and the love of Christ, all we have to do is add the final third term to that life phrase of Orthodoxy ‘as we worship, so we believe.’  The third term is ‘as we worship, so we believe and ‘so we live.’ This crucially extends what we do in worship, what we believe in our hearts, and applies it in our everyday lives. We will get even more into this when we talk about vocation and ministry next week. But for today, it is sufficient to remember what we have noted a million times; that Christianity is an applied, lived faith.  We have about 110 waking hours in the week, this 2 hours we spend in worship is not some strange ethnic pittance, 2 hours like throwing $2 in the plate and doing our duty.  It is designed to be the heart of life, the small seed whose roots and vines, nurture and lift up the rest of the week, the 110. This is the life-long adventure and challenge of me you and every Christian. 

3      Kiss of Peace: Revisited

So let’s use the same practical example from our liturgy that we used last week to illustrate how this ‘As we worship so we believe, and so we live.’ maxim is to work.  The hymn of Kiss of Peace, we said reveals the two movements of worship and our belief, that the transcendent almighty God is invoked and bowed before in our worship, and yet paradoxically God is also with us intimately, so much so that he is within us, through communion and by the Spirit.  This is our worship and our belief, but how might this effect the way we actually live?

Well we didn’t have time to reflect much on the next part of the hymn of the Kiss of Peace which is relevant to our topic of love, hospitality and forgiveness today.  You can turn to page 26 in your Badarak again or just listen to the powerful words. “The Voice of Peace has Resounded; Holy greeting is commanded. The Church has now become one soul, the kiss is given for a full bond.  The enmity has been removed; and love is spread over us all.”

So now instead of two movements in worship, we now have three, which is fitting since all things of God are based in 3.  First you recognize God’s greatness, second you feel the gift of his unconditional love for you, and third, we treat others the same way God has treated us; with unconditional love; hospitality, non-judgement and forgiveness.

Put another way, if we are doing worship right, if knowing and growing in God is the aim of our worship, then this is not just rote ritual that we perform, this calls us to love in action.  This calls us to practice, right here and right now, every Sunday.  Practice loving the church and all the people that God has brought into it. Practice loving the ones you like and the ones you just tolerate. Practice refraining from judgement of those who are strange or even repulsive to you.  Practice forgiving and letting go of grudges that inevitably build up, in every family, when people have lived and worked so closely together.

4      ‘Holy Greeting is Commanded’

This is not optional and it is not pie in the sky. It is actually commanded by God.  ‘Holy Greeting is commanded’ we just read in the hymn of the kiss of peace. Our liturgy commands it, so does our Lord in the scriptures. One example if the sermon on the mount (Mt 5) which we read to begin Lent.

‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 

So, far from being optional, Jesus is basically saying here that love of God in worship is impossible without practical love of each other; self-sacrificing, non-judgmental, forgiving love.  The Hayr Mer, the prayer which Jesus gave us also makes this connection, that God’s forgiveness of us is deeply connected, if not conditional on the forgiveness we extend others, ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’  It seems that all of the beautiful communion and intimacy with God, the flow between God and us, becomes blocked, if we don’t have it with those around us in church.

5      Confession

This all sounds great, and I am sure we all agree. Who wouldn’t want to love more, to forgive more and judge less? Well that’s where going from beliefs and ideas about God, which are relatively easy, meets putting them into practice by broken people in a broken world, and that is hard.

This is of course why the first necessary step to being in Holy Communion with God, as well as our spouses, teenagers, parents, priest and fellow parishioners is confessing weekly how terribly we fall short. I have sinned willingly and unwillingly, I not only do the things I shouldn’t, but I don’t do the things I should. Our confession is deep and key, several people in our Wednesday evening session said that for them, the confession was really the time where we make our sacred and transcendent worship very personal. It is also the time where we get extremely practical. Confession should take us out of beliefs in our head and remind us how much we have to go in applying it in our lives.  But confession is also perhaps the most affirming practice of our faith, because we see its results in transforming our relationships and our lives, now and for always.

6      Culture Confession

And so today again, since we are talking about the entire culture of the church, I think it might be helpful to try a bit of communal reflection and confession about where we are doing well and where perhaps falling a little short on our calling to a church culture of Christian love, hospitality and forgiveness.

Let’s repeat another time what we do well. We do a good job of welcoming people.  So many people mentioned that in the surveys, but I hear it also in my daily interactions with people who visit our church. It is worth remembering that we changed this, and God has blessed it.  We used to be distrustful or suspicious when someone who wasn’t Armenian would come. There were stares and comments at people who looked different. We would confront first time visitors if they weren’t dressed formally. Now we have all taken it upon ourselves to first be welcoming.  Not as a duty, but as a natural outflow of who we are and what we become in church through worship.

That is our strength when it comes to our church culture of Christian love, hospitality and forgiveness, but today I want to mention two areas for growth, also mentioned by you in our survey to reflect on and prayerfully improve when it comes to our church culture of Christian love, hospitality and forgiveness.

Tribalism: The Cultural Sin of Pride, Envy & Anger Toward Other

The first confession is that we Armenians and our churches must always confess and repent of the first big three sins; pride, envy and angry.  How do pride, envy and anger manifest themselves in the culture of our people and churches?  If I had to use one word I would say a tendency to tribalism. How would I define tribalism? Well I got a nice book for my birthday from Yn. Anna and the kids written by columnist David Brooks called The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. In it he says ‘community is based on shared love. Tribalism is based on shared hate.’

I think that we Armenians, for quite obvious reasons if you know even a little of our history, have tribalism in our cultural DNA.  At times being bonded together in mutual hatred of our enemy was perhaps necessary for survival. The problem of course is that the emergency solution of tribalism is a short term strategy for survival when you are under attack. It’s like war. Sometimes you have to do it.  But it should be a last resort and war doesn’t solve any problems, you still have to eventually live in peace.  This peace can never be found in a shared hate of the enemy, but only in a shared love of something greater. What specific tribalism do we sometimes encounter in this church and other Armenian Churches?

• Shared hate of Turks & Azeris
• Shared anti-Semitism (Holocaust museum, and Cleveland examples)
• Shared homophobia, shared racism
• Shared chauvinism (all peoples are inferior to us, meruh urishn eh)

So, you might be thinking, so what if we are united in disdain of these ‘other’ people, what’s it to us.  Well the problem is pride, envy and anger is like a fire, you just can’t aim it at certain people and stop.  It goes everywhere.

• Shared disdain of the other side of the church (Prelacy and Diocese).
• Shared disdain of the lesser Armenians (we are real Armenians not you).
• Shared disdain of the odar (my child is marrying an odar, it’s a failure)

Tribalism: The Cultural Sin of Pride, Envy & Anger Toward Brother

So most of us are not explicitly tribal in these way.  Some of us are though, and as our scriptures instruct us, it is the job of our community to lovingly correct those who perpetuate these communal sins of pride, envy and anger.  ‘We love you, we all fall short of glory of God, but we just don’t tolerate that here.’ But because it is awfully difficult to see ourselves clearly, and all are sinners, we must all be aware of our lingering tribal DNA, and ask God’s guidance and grace to  transform it.

Now the other cultural sin that I think we must confess is the other side of the coin of tribalism, which is our tendency to harbor enmity. Enmity is not a word we use much, but is the word used in the Kiss of Peace, tshnamootyoon in Armenian. Where tribalism is anger, pain, pride and distrust aimed at the other, enmity is anger, pride and distrust aimed at our brothers and sisters within the community. I could write a book on this one. I am invited into people’s enmity a lot. Sometimes, as a leader, it is projected on me. And I of course struggle mightily to rid myself of enmity for those who have it for me!

Enmity is universal of course, it happens in any church, family or culture, not just Armenian.  But I think historically persecuted people like ours struggle more with it.  We Armenians tend to have a stubbornness, a defensiveness, a pride which does not allow for the flexibility and largeness of spirit to let things go, to bury the hatchet, to forgive. It is of course natural for anyone who has been victimized, to fiercely defend against ever being victimized, disrespected, fooled again.

7      Forgiveness

But again, that shell, that wall which helped us survive, now becomes a prison cell, a divider in our lives which blocks God’s call to peace, unity and love. In the past, we have done a whole book club on forgiveness, so I won’t go into all the detail here, but one idea I think is crucial.  A lack of forgiveness, a vengeful mentality is very much connected to living in the past, and robs us of the present.  An Anglican Bishop writing on revenge said “’It is as though revenge believes itself morally bound to make the past come out differently.’”

On a large scale this has to do with we Armenians dealing properly with our genocide, which I think in the last years has loosened slightly to release us from a prison of the past.  On a smaller scale, for my and your families and for our St. Hagop family, we can use the wisdom that forgiveness is “giving up all hope for a better past (Lily Tomlin).”  I have found that so many of us who struggle with forgiveness in our marriages, with our kids and parents, within the church, we are all stubbornly clinging to a past wrong.  That this should not have been like that, he shouldn’t have treated me this way, they should have shown me more respect.   Holding onto this past is not only a sin against God, but like all sin, it just hurts us. Enmity, as the saying goes, is like drinking poison every morning and thinking that it is going to get back at someone else, but it merely hurts us.

I guess that is why Jesus set no limits on forgiveness. He set limits on lots of things, but not this. ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. 

I have heard many in our community say that forgiveness is at best an impractical ideal. Others will be so bold as to say that these Christian teachings of forgiveness are for suckers, that somehow our being Christians has kept our people down from advancing as a people and nation.  To this I would say what Chesterton said of Christianity as a whole, that it’s not that it has been tried and found lacking, it just hasn’t been tried.  Let’s actually try the hard discipline and great grace of forgiveness before we say it doesn’t work. 

And to conclude, I want to show you that-deep in our tradition-you will find that the most committed Armenian Christians did indeed take this commandment of our faith very seriously. You may have noticed it, as Chuck did in the Arevagal service that we have been saying for Lent.  In it we pray specifically for ‘those who rule over us, those who do evil and our enemies.’  That this prayer exists in the daily worship of a people who have endured what we have endured, is a most powerful witness to the power of God’s love to transform evil into good for those who practice what we preach. Let us end with this prayer in your booklets p.8.

Prayer from Arevagal Service (p.8)

Remember, father, your servants: our parents, our teachers, our brothers and sisters, our friends, those who provide for us, the pilgrims, the travelers, those who give us rest, those who work hard, those who profess your name, those who are in penance, those who are enslaved, those who are sick, those who are affected, those who rule over us, those who do evil, those who do good, our enemies, those who hate us, and those who asked us in faith to pray for them.

Next Time

So to conclude, a healthy culture of worship, if done right, encounters God, forms us in what we believe, and finally commands us to bring our ritual into practice.  The greatest challenge and blessing we have as Christians is to practice self-giving love, the love of Christ which is hospitality, non-judgement and forgiveness.  Next week we will talk about a very powerful aspect of a healthy church culture, that everyone know, not just certain people, that they have a calling to ministry, in church and in their lives. Join us next week to continue our discussion!