By Liv Larson Andrews
“You’re the strangest person I ever met, she said & I said you too & we decided we’d know each other a long time.” – Brian Andreas, creator of Story People
In some ways, 2015 has been kinda rough. Violent events jar us awake on the morning news. Reports of increased conflict between religions and nations lead to further distance and knee-jerk assumptions. Recently, as an Islamic center burned in the city of Houston, a firefighter posted “let it burn.” Quite locally, police in a nearby city shot and killed a troubled man wielding only a rock.
One word is often used to describe the hatred and fear that perceived insiders have for perceived outsiders: xenophobia. Fear of the stranger.
In their excellent book, “Slow Church,” Chris Smith and John Pattison advocate that Christians practice the opposite, philoxenia. Love of the stranger. In their chapter on the virtue of hospitality, Smith and Pattison address the difficulty in living out true hospitality that reaches welcome beyond those we know or live next to and embraces those who are quite different than us. It’s easy to open your table to people you already know. It’s another matter to break bread or take walks or worship with people new and different than us. They use this word to express just how radical the hospitality of Jesus is, which, if we choose to see it, is a great gift handed to the church. The body of Christ is bound not by common traits but common love made known through Jesus. Philoxenia, loving and welcoming the stranger, helps us remember just how strange we all are. Our call in the church has never been to gather the “normal” or those who are like us. We are called by Jesus to be a bunch of weirdos.
If we experience how much God loves strangers, including us, can this free us from xenophobia or any other fears we may have about our neighbors? Can this help resurrect the old hymn’s definition of the church, that “they will know we are Christians by our love?” It certainly won’t happen overnight. But I wonder if naming the virtue, the practice of philoxenia, stranger-love, can assist the church in being a voice for patience, care and calm in an increasingly anxious world. At the very least, maybe we can do what artist Brian Andreas envisions and decide to “know each other a long time.”
