They are just not my kind of people!

One contemporary church (or rather a network of congregations that meet primarily in homes) that has caught my attention recently is The Crowded House located in Sheffield, UK. I am particularly impressed by one of their core values, that is, “Being an inclusive community”:

We are committed to making church accessible to unbelievers and welcoming to the socially marginalised. We want all who come to have a sense of belonging. We will not let our welcome be dependent on adherence to any cultural norms when these are not demanded by the gospel. We will not do that which might make unbelievers feel left out.

Here is a message by Chris Richardson (perhaps one of their members) that focuses on this value that is posted on their website. It is definitely worth the read:

The problem with making Eric feel welcome is that he smells. He never seems to change his clothes; he probably never washes! “I couldn’t invite him to my home! Just a few minutes talking to him here is enough. And anyway the way he looks at my children worries me!”

Everyone feels embarrassed when Scarlet is around. It’s widely known that she has lots of male visitors in the middle of the night, sometimes even during the daytime; and someone of her education and background simply shouldn’t be able to afford what she has.

The problem with Ahmed is that he’s a Muslim. “I wouldn’t know what to feed him if he came into my home. I’d be sure to offend him by putting bacon in the soup or something!” “Anyway, he makes me nervous too. I know he’s not a terrorist, but he does have very worrying political views.”

“They are just not my kind of people!”

“I do have different kinds of friends, but not people like them. It is unreasonable to expect me to reach out and welcome people like them, isn’t it? Never mind talking to them about Jesus! I mean, we all know that Friendship Evangelism is the best way isn’t it? ...And they aren’t my friends, so... case closed!”

As we think about “Being an inclusive community” we’re going to look at our Lord and our supreme example, Jesus, and how he welcomes all kinds of people. And then think about us, and how we are to respond.

You cannot fail to see inclusiveness as a characteristic of Jesus when you read any of the records of his life, particularly Luke. Jesus goes where others never went; he welcomes people who are outcasts to the religious; he eats with people hardly considered human by the respectable people of his day. In Luke 7:34 he is accused of being “a friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners’.”

How would “friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners’” translate into today’s culture? Jesus, friend of pimps and illegal immigrants? Or friend of terrorists and paedophiles? Hard to say, but it was meant to be a damning insult. Clearly they thought he mixed with the sort of people we’d never want our children to mix with... because we’d never want to mix with them!

Jesus on earth was an inclusive person? He is building an inclusive community. It will include people of every tribe and nation in the world; it will include poor people, those with disabilities, notoriously bad people will be in, and just maybe, if we’re very careful, there may even be some respectable people there too!

Let’s look at one of these events in the life of Jesus (Luke 7:36–50) to start with.

This interruption is shocking! The way Jesus deals with this interruption is outrageously shocking! The acceptance and love he shows towards this woman would have been on the front page of the Sun... outrageous and titillating.

For a banquet of this sort the door of the house is open and there are lots of comings and goings, so it would seem that she came in at the same time as Jesus or even before him (v.45 suggests “from the time Jesus entered” she was doing this).

Let’s get this clear at the start: this woman, who is almost certainly a prostitute, is not here, in Simon’s home, trying to gain forgiveness from Jesus. No, she is responding to forgiveness already announced by him earlier. That’s clear from the way Jesus explains the parable and from v.50 where he says it is her faith not her loving actions that have saved her.

Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet” (Luke 7:44-46).

There is no servant to wash Jesus feet, but she finds herself standing behind Jesus as he reclines. She is overwhelmed with joyful thankfulness and love for this righteous man who has accepted her and announced God’s forgiveness to her. She can’t hold it in and bursts into floods of tears of joy all over his feet. But there is no towel (because Simon provided no water for his feet) so what is she to do, she can’t leave him with wet feet. So she lets her hair down and wipes his feet with her hair!

It’s hard to imagine the shock of this act on those watching. A woman was forbidden to let her hair down with anyone except her husband. Otherwise it was only prostitutes who did this with their clients. And then the perfume, usually used to make her more desirable to her prospective clients, tipped out on his feet.

And she does it, here, in this respectable man’s home, among his respectable, religious guests... and this so-called prophet allows her to do it. He doesn’t even try to push her away or move out of her reach. It’s scandalous! A disgrace! A friend of prostitutes! And we all know what that means!

“Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he cancelled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” (Luke 7:41-42)

The parable Jesus tells Simon - the respectable, deeply religious Pharisee - gets to the heart of the matter.

Which one will love the most? The one who has had the biggest debt cancelled. It’s not hard to identify who’s who here, is it?

We have two debtors: a notoriously sinful woman and a meticulously religious man. Not hard to imagine who owes the most and who owes the least. Easy to guess who needs to be forgiven the most, isn’t it?

And they have two very different responses to the one who has announced the cancellation of debts. One loves much; the other loves little.

The religious Simon is outrageously rude to Jesus. By not kissing him when he entered his house, by not providing water for him to wash his feet or oil for his head, Simon is failing in all his cultural responsibilities as a host in that culture. These things were not reserved for the special people; this was normal courtesy for any guest. Simon may even feel that to show Jesus these courtesies would be to defile himself by touching this “friend of sinners” (v.34).

The love towards Jesus is shown here in the way each of them welcomes him. And as readers, we’re clearly meant to see that only people who admit they are in debt to God will be willing to accept God’s offer of forgiveness. And those people will respond to that forgiveness in real, costly love. These things characterise Christians!

So Christians are good, respectable people then? No! Christians are people who love because we have first been loved beyond our wildest hopes, and way beyond what we deserve.

But we can tell a Christian community by how that group of people love and welcome. Do we love as Jesus loves? Do we welcome and include the kind of people Jesus includes in his kingdom? He is the great welcomer. He welcomes the worst of people. He shows that even such a bad person as this woman is not beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness in Christ.

This is what his kingdom is like, and whom his kingdom is for. And so he gives us, as his people, an example of how to welcome all kinds of people.

Now how do we at Sharrowvale do here? I’m not going to give us marks out of ten! I’d like all of us to prayerfully consider this question. To help us do that, I want us to look at two aspects of what it means to be an inclusive community:

1. Being an inclusive community when “outsiders” come in.
2. Being an inclusive community where “insiders” go out.

When outsiders come in, do they experience a welcome like Jesus would welcome them? Or do we expect people to become like us before we will accept them in?

About 25 years ago, the pastor of a church in Buenos Aires in Argentina was approached by a new Christian in his congregation. This young man had come to trust in Jesus Christ from a lifestyle that included being part of a drug culture in the city. He asked the church leader that day if he would mind if he brought some of his old drug-taking friends to church with him. He said they needed to hear about Jesus and he thought some of them would come.

The pastor said straightaway, “Of course. Bring them.”

From the following week, there was something approaching chaos in the weekly meetings. Half a dozen to a dozen young adults many still high on drink and drugs started coming along and shouting during the sermons, bumping into people and generally causing a nuisance.

Several long-standing church members came to the leaders and said that something had to be done. They didn’t want their children mixing with people like that. They were going to withhold their giving to the church and if nothing were done to stop it they would leave. They were the largest givers to the church.

The church leaders responded by saying that Jesus welcomed such people and so must they, and that if they didn’t want to be where Jesus would be, then sadly they would have to leave the church. And in fact over the next few months some of the most respectable and wealthiest members of the church did leave.

15 years later, which was when I heard the story, the church had seen dozens if not hundreds of drug addicts reached for Christ and by then half the leaders of the church had once been addicts themselves.

Churches can be tough to feel you belong to, can’t they?

When I was growing up I believed God existed, but I certainly never felt included by any church. Mind you, we rarely went to any church so it wasn’t entirely the church’s fault!

But it never occurred to me that church was a community where I might belong - no one talked to us! (Now my father didn’t want anyone to talk to us, so that may have been why no one did.)

And yet most people there were from similar backgrounds to me. I wasn’t being actively excluded because of the kind of background I came from; I just wasn’t being actively included.

Surely the kind of atmosphere we want to have here is one that shows that we have been welcomed undeservedly by Jesus into his family, so we go out of our way to welcome with equal respect and dignity anyone, whoever they are, and whatever our society thinks of them.

When we meet together as God’s people we are not here to get our own personal fix for the week! If we were, then we could be justified in being irritated that some outsider came in and made it harder for us to have our personal time with God.

But that’s not what we’re meant to be doing as we meet together. We can do that at home, and I do hope we are doing it at home, and that time with God is central to our personal and family lives.

But when we meet together, whether on Sundays or during the week, we are to be loving one another, giving each other courage to stand for Christ in the whole of our lives, and we are to be overflowing in welcome to any outsiders because Jesus welcomes outsiders.

So when someone a bit different comes into the middle of our meeting and looks around, what do you do? Look away and hope she goes away, or that someone else will sort her out? Or break off in the middle of singing and go and welcome her and sit with her?

What about foreigners? “I don’t know what to say to them?” “I can’t understand them?” “I have nothing in common with them?”

So?!?! That may be true, but what’s that got to do with it? That’s how our society so often thinks. That’s not a Christian response at all. Jesus sent his Holy Spirit to empower his church to cross cultural boundaries, to reach the foreigners.

“But it’s just not me!” some people say, “I just can’t relate to strangers.” Well, let me tell you about the only time I met John Stott. If you’ve never met him, imagine an elderly upper-class gentleman, a stiff upper lip, public school Englishman (which incidentally I find one of the hardest cultural groups in the world to relate to!!) He was about to speak at a CU meeting in Durham and I was chatting to him, when a young African man came up to us to speak to John Stott. This elder statesman graciously excused himself from our conversation and turned to greet this African who he had never met before. I think, like me, you would probably have expected him to extend his formal English hand to shake it, with a “How do you do?” No way! He opened his arms and gave the astonished young man a great hug!

I learned from someone else later that he knew how to greet people in dozens of different cultures and he always used the culturally appropriate way. Do you think someone from his background feels comfortable doing this? No way! But he knows that it isn’t about how comfortable I feel, but how welcome I can make the other person feel.

Now we often have international students here, sometimes other kinds of non-locals. Some of the church here regularly come to speak to these guests, many don’t. Some invite them into their homes. I think the general impression I hear from ISs is of a fairly welcoming bunch of people in this church, which is great. But could we be more so? We hope to make the Crossing Cultures Day on 6th May very helpful, whether you’re on the Manor or bumping into immigrants or ISs. Let’s make this a church-equipping day so that from now on we’ll be a more inclusive community.

Perhaps another example, if we believe this stuff then we will do whatever we can to give people who are not able-bodied equal access to our buildings. Not spending money on allowing people with disabilities access may be a symptom of a serious disease and may show up our lack of inclusiveness as a community.

Now I think in some ways we are welcoming people who turn up here or at MG or HO. I’m sure we can still improve this considerably, but we are not bad at “Being an inclusive community” when “outsiders” come in.

But in some ways this is quite easy, isn’t it? We’re on our territory, we’re welcoming people into our space. The outsider has had to make the huge step in the first place of coming into a strange building, or the home of someone they don’t know.

For many this is a step too far. So they’ll never see us being an inclusive community unless we are being an inclusive community where “insiders” go out.

Now I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. Normally we make friends with people like us. So to do what Jesus told his servant to do in the parable read earlier is hard:

“‘Go out to the roads and country lanes... and make them come in so that my house will be full’” (Luke 14:21,23).

To go out and cross normal barriers of comfortableness and go to where the outsiders and the socially marginalised are at home, which by definition means that these are places where we are not at home – to cross those barriers and then to show a warm welcome to them, to give them dignity when others despise them, to make clear that God is offering to cancel their debts, just as he has cancelled ours.

Do you find that hard? I certainly do.

Maybe like me, most of the time, you haven’t really found it that hard, because you’ve hardly ever done it!

When Jesus was in Simon’s home, who do you think normally would have felt the most unwelcome? The woman obviously. Yet who is it that is made to feel so welcome that her love overflows?

Jesus turns the tables and becomes the welcoming host when Simon fails to do it. That is the church’s role in society. If our neighbours or the media or the government or whoever turn on a section of the population and treat them as second class, Jesus would be right there showing them that he accepts them, and calling them to follow him. That’s where his church should be too.

And we are doing this to some extent too, aren’t we? Those of you on the Manor, taking a gospel community over there, and welcoming people in. This is crossing cultures. How can you develop that? Making sure that people don’t have to change into respectable middle class people to feel they belong.

There are many older people in the community round here, who are lonely, and many are ill or losing their sight or struggle to get around very easily. How can we help? How can we take our gospel community out to them? Could young and old in our congregation work together on that? We’ve done gardening, how else could we develop taking this community of Jesus-people out to those who are not coming in?

You may have other kinds of people or other ways to serve on your hearts; ways we can take our wonderful gospel community out into this needy world. Well, talk to God and talk to each other here, and let’s see if God will help you to get two or three of us together to do it. Let’s just get on with it.

Don’t we need to be constantly encouraging each other as a community of God’s people to be going where Jesus would be, to the people Jesus went to: the poor, the marginalised, the rejected and the stranger. All of them could be defined as “the people who are not like us”.

But what about those who are respectable or those who are like us, are we supposed to ignore them? No. Jesus, after all, accepted the invitation to Simon’s home, didn’t he? But he didn’t seem to work very hard to make Simon feel comfortable did he? Jesus welcomed the respectable if they were willing to associate themselves with the ragbag group who make up the community of Jesus, as Luke demonstrates in his book. But Jesus goes out of his way to welcome the poor, the marginalised and the needy, and he expects us to do the same.

When a congregation fails to be as inclusive as Jesus, the heart of the problem, as ever, is the problem of the heart.

There are two kinds of sin and two kinds of sinners, lived out in Luke 7 as Simon and the woman. Simon sins within what is culturally acceptable, the woman sins outside what is culturally acceptable.

Sinners like the woman, then and today, often know they are sinners; sinners like Simon, then and today, often don’t. Because of this it is often much harder for the respectable churchgoer to admit they cannot pay their debt to God, and that they need to turn back to follow Jesus and accept his forgiveness. Respectable hearts can be very hard hearts. If this diagnosis rings any bells with you, then will you please take action. Even if you think your debt to God is quite small, realise that you have no way to pay him back. We are all spiritually bankrupt. We all need the humility to accept his cancelling our debt through the death of Jesus. Please trust him to do it.

But when a church is full of people who know their unpayable debts have been cancelled through the death of Jesus, that church is characterised by an overwhelming love for God and for others – all kinds of others.