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Citation: Harris, Dale. “A Stranger Love: Hospitality as a Response to Homosexuality 
in the Church.” Paper presented at the Annual Wesley Studies Symposium, Tyndale University 
College & Seminary, Toronto, Ontario, April 25, 2018. (MPEG-3, 29:07 min.)

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Very pleased to have Dale Harris with us. He's a pastor in the Free Methodist Church, a church called Freeway in Oshawa. Dale, I think he's known within Free Methodist service someone who's very thoughtful and theologically wired. And he serves on the study commission on doctrine within the Free Methodist Church. He's presented here before two or three years ago. I can't remember when it was three years ago, maybe. Anyways, he's doing Doctor of Ministry work on this question of sexuality and local church ministry. And so I know a very important topic that all of us, I am sure, are wrestling with. So let's welcome Dale as he prepares to speak to us.

It's nice we saved a really light topic for the very end to wrap up. Thank you. And thank you, James, for organizing this day. It's been a blessing to be here. Can we pray? May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight. So Lord, you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen. So a few years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a friend of his who happened to be a practicing Orthodox Jew. Over the course of an evening together, we had this really rich conversation about the parallels between my work as a pastor and his work in the local synagogue. And as I was leaving, he said to me, if you ever want to get a Jewish perspective on something that you're studying, feel free to give me a call. And so about a week later, I was working on a sermon on Deuteronomy 20 417 to 22, which, if you don't recall, is that passage where God tells his people that if they are harvesting their crops and they miss something in the field, they're supposed to leave it there for, and I quote for the foreigner, the orphan or the widow.

Now, the driving force of this passage, of course, is God's compassion for those three groups of vulnerable people in ancient Israelite society. In particular, Deuteronomy 20 5-7 puts it like this do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. That's the NIV translation. The NESV puts it like this you shall not pervert the justice, do an alien or an orphan, nor take a widow's garment in pledge. Or if you have a lingering penchant for the King James Version, we might say, thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor the fatherless, nor take a widow's raiment in pledge. Now, I'm surveying all the various translations for a reason because as I was working away on my sermon, my new Jewish friend's invitation was sort of still ringing in my ears and I was curious about his take on this passage in question. And so I sent him an email to take him up on his offer. And he replied very kindly with a number of observations from the talmud and so on. But at the start of his email, he said, let me give you the standard Jewish translation into English of that text.

Now, all of the Christian translations of the passage I cited above describe that first of the three groups of vulnerable people with some word or other that means the stranger, the alien, the foreigner, the outsider, and so on. If you know the passage, you might know that the specific Hebrew word in question is ger. It's connected to the verb gur, which, according to Brown Drivers Briggs, means to sojourn somewhere or to be a newcomer. Genesis 23, verse four uses it to describe Abram when he was a sojourner in the Promised Land. And Exodus 23 nine uses it to describe Israel when they were captives in Egypt. But this is where things got really interesting for me, because the English translation that my new Jewish friend sent me translated gur not as the stranger but as the convert. In other words, it's not just any old stranger whom you should let gather the leftover grain in your field, but specifically the non Jew who has converted to Yahwehism. Now, we exchanged a bunch of emails back and forth about why our translations might be so different, and he suggested that if an outsider was meant specifically, the term Goi would be used.

And out of curiosity, I looked up the Septuagints translation of the same verse, and they use in the Septuagint Greek, they use prosely utos, a Greek word that means roughly, the convert as well. And to be sure, the only biblical example we have of this passage being put into practice is the Book of Ruth, right, where Ruth the Moabitis is very clearly a convert to Yahwehism besides simply just being a foreigner. And so I'm not here to say that convert is necessarily a mistranslation of ger. I have my opinions, but I'm going to leave the linguistic question settled for a minute. The only reason I'm starting here this afternoon is because it seems to me there are profound ethical and theological implications implications for what we do with the Gur in Deuteronomy 24. The question, as I see it, boils down to this does God call us to welcome the other because they are other and regardless of whether or not they have made a profession of commitment to our community of faith? Or is conversion a necessary requisite for inclusion and for the hospitable helping that inclusion entails? To put it more simply, and in a way that sets up the real topic we're here to talk about today.

Do you have to become like me before I can extend the hospitality of the Lord Jesus? Or do I have an obligation as a follower of the Lord Jesus to extend you hospitality even when maybe especially when you're not like me? I'm asking it in those terms because for the last two years or so, I've been working on this demon at Northeastern Seminary asking this specific research question. This is my question in what ways can a church with a biblical sexual ethic minister effectively to men and women who are homosexual, same sex attracted in the Canadian context? And for about three years or so before that, I served on the Free Methodist Church in Canada's Study Commission on Doctrine, where I had a number of opportunities to work on that very same question. In that setting, how can churches with a biblical sexual ethic and we only have 25 minutes today. So let me humbly request that you allow me to use that phrase biblical sexual ethic to include, roughly speaking, a non affirming position on same sex sexual intimacy, with the caveat that I recognize. It is not nearly so simple as that. It's just that if I spent the hours it would take to unpack all of the reasons why I believe that the Bible does not affirm homosexual sex, we wouldn't have any time to talk about what I really want to talk about today, which is just this.

Given that starting point, given this sexual ethic for churches starting from this place, I mean, what does it look like to minister? Well, in some ways, these last five years have felt a bit to me like the quest for the Philosopher's Stone. I will be honest, I have yet to discover that elusive something or other that will magically reconcile the lead of the evangelical position on homosexuality with the gold of gospel inclusion. But after five years, I am at least ready to say that however we answer this question, the starting point for our answer is going to be found in a robust rediscovery of the verdant theological theme that runs through the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, the theme of biblical hospitality. Churches that wish to minister well to men and women who are homosexual, whatever else they do, they will become communities of biblical hospitality. This much I know, as my exchange with my Jewish friend illustrates, what hospitality really entails, who it is for and what it is really about, that is a profoundly difficult thing to define, let alone to practice. But for the sake of the gay men and women in our communities whom Jesus loves and for whom Jesus died, it is crucial that we do this.

And Deuteronomy 20 4-7 aside, the call to practice hospitality is very, very clear. In the Scriptures, Hebrews 13 two, for instance, exhorts the church not to neglect hospitality, reminding us that, and I quote, some people have shown hospitality even to angels without knowing it. Now, the implications here are often lost on modern readers like you and I, for whom the phrase hospitality, it tends to conjure up all of these Martha stewardsque images, right, of a well set dinner table that's just there for a pleasant evening, entertaining friends. But as a lot of scholars have noted, hospitality in the ancient world had nothing to do with entertaining your friends. It was about helping the outsider. The Greek word in Hebrews 13. Two, of course, is philodezena, which literally is love, philos for the stranger xenos and as scholar Christine Pole reminds us, in the ancient world, philodenia was about welcoming strangers into one's home and offering them food and shelter and protection. As she describes it, this stranger love had a rich, complex moral dimension in ancient society. It was, and I quote her, it was a pillar on which morality rested. She argues. It. Philip xenia.

It encompassed the good. In Entertaining Angels, Andrew Atterbury illustrates how the earliest Christian communities shared this ancient understanding of hospitality. In particular, Atterby presents a close reading of the theme of hospitality as it appears in Luke and Acts to show that, and I quote Luke was well acquainted with the social conventions of ancient hospitality, and he often referred to it using traditional Mediterranean terminology through a careful analysis of key scenes in Luke and Acts. Like, for instance, Peter's Hospitable welcome of Cornelius in acts nine or Lydia's Hospitable welcome of Paul in Acts 16. He argues that the early audiences of these texts would have easily recognized the emphasis that Luke places on hospitality as a means of spreading the gospel and fulfilling the mission of the church. But there's actually more we can say about the role of hospitality in the ministry of the church than simply that it obliges us to embrace the stranger and so extend the church's mission. In Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, Hans Bursma proposes the biblical theme of hospitality as the main paradigm for understanding the meaning of the cross itself that God displayed the ultimate act of hospitality when he embraced sinners in the death of his son.

Quote on the cross and in the resurrection, God has shown himself to be a God of hospitality, and this divine hospitality underwrites all human acts of hospitality. Christian hospitality is only possible because of the cross that has reconciled us to God. But insomuch as the cross has reconciled us to God, christian hospitality is now a necessary response to the gospel, a means by which we express the hospitality of God himself in the world. To quote Hans Bursma, only to the degree only to the degree that the church is a community of hospitality can she also play a role in opening the doors to the kingdom of God. This brings us back to my Jewish friend and the question of the ger in Deuteronomy. Does someone have to become like me before I can extend the hospitality of Jesus to them? A Christian would answer that question by asking this one did God insist that we become like him before he opened Hospitable arms to receive us? That's a rhetorical question, but it highlights one of the key theological pieces of our study of biblical hospitality and its relevance for the question of homosexual inclusion, namely, what I'm going to call the guest host reciprocity guest host reprosat.

I practiced that word. It's a tough one. Reciprocity that is inherent in the dynamic of hospitality. If it is true that Christian communities are called to be communities of hospitality when it comes to the gay men and women in their midst, there is a necessary guest host dynamic that must be maintained in order for hospitality to remain. Hospitable. Jessica Roblesky discusses this at length in her book The Limits of Hospitality. She suggests that hospitality exists in the tension between wanting to offer an unconditional welcome, on the one hand, and recognizing the limiting conditions that make a particular welcome possible, on the other. To put it simply, if I welcome you to the table only on the condition that you become like me, I have ceased to become your host, and you are no longer my guest, that the relationship is no longer defined by hospitality, but by something different, maybe conformity or oppression or something like that. But, and this is really important, the reverse is also true if you insist that I must be like you before you will sit down at my table, then you have ceased to be my guest and I am no longer your host.

In this case, the relationship is no longer defined by hospitality, but something different, maybe intrusion. Biblical hospitality insists both that the host set boundaries on the extent of their welcome and also that the guest accept boundaries on the extent of their reception. We don't have time to unpack all the relevant texts, but we see this dynamic play out in passages like two John verses ten to eleven. Quote if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not welcome them. Which is classic ancient hospitality language or Jude twelve some men are blemishes on your love feast, eating with you without the slightest qualm. I don't want to get into the application of those texts, but I'm bringing them up to illustrate this idea of the limits of hospitality. Both of these passages set clear limits on the practice of hospitality in a way that allows the Christian community to maintain integrity, the integrity of the guest host dynamic, and so remain authentically. Hospitable. Now, this observation illuminates our present question by reminding us that non affirming churches, if they are non affirming, must find ways of welcoming gay men and women into their fellowship without compromising their commitment to a particular sexual ethic.

Were they to do so, they would cease to be hosts and they'd become something different. So I'm a pastor first and foremost, and I know the questions. I would be thinking if I was sitting where you are and you were standing where I am, this is well and good as far as it goes. I would be thinking, but how far does it go? I'm going to suggest it goes a lot farther than any of us are prepared to draw the line at, and we can unpack that later. These are the questions I'd be asking does the call of Christian hospitality mean we ought freely to include the so called practicing homosexual, which is a term, by the way, that I find kind of distasteful, and I think it's next to useless. But we only have 25 minutes, so I can't unpack all the language. But does it mean that does the obligation to limit hospitality so that it remains truly hospitable, mean it's okay, maybe even necessary for churches to exclude practicing homosexuals from leadership roles in the church, let's say? Or what about baptism, maybe, or eucharist or church membership? I do not know how to answer all of these questions in 25 minutes.

I do know that I have found answers and am finding answers to them for my own ministry by taking the biblical call to hospitality seriously. And I humbly suggest to you that this is the place to answer them by asking what does a hospitable response look like in each one of these situations? But while we all mull that over, let me suggest some slightly different terrain that the theme of hospitality can help us to navigate in the rapidly changing landscape of Canadian Moors. Because hospitality is not only a grace that Christians extend to the other, hospitality is also an appeal that Christians make to them. The church that says be my guest to the gay men and women in their midst is also saying in the very same breath, let me be your host. And that is to say, also let's together respect the guest host dynamic that makes hospitality possible. Let me illustrate what I mean with another story from my ministry. And I think this is the kind of story that's going to become more and more common in the coming years as the roughly 80% of Canadians who said they believe society should accept homosexuality in a Pew Research poll back of 2013 as that number becomes 85%, 89%, 90% or more in the years to come.

And churches that adhere to a biblical sexual ethic look increasingly benighted in secular Canadian society. Here's the story. A few years ago, our church was trying to develop a meaningful presence in our neighborhood. And we got connected with a community leader who runs some events in the neighborhood, park around the corner, and she does some special Christmas Day celebrations and a big Canada Day event and stuff like that. And so we contacted her to ask if our church could help out at some of these activities. The Canada Day party was just coming up and we were going to do some songs with the kids and some face painting and that sort of thing. Just simple, harmless ways to get involved in the community. And we met with this lady for the first time one evening in May. And that's when the proverbial headlights hit these deer right in the eyes. Because we sat down and she sat down with us. And before she said anything else, she said, look, I'm willing to have your church participate in my Canada Day event, but I need to say right now that I am only interested in having groups participate who are affirming of homosexuality.

And if your church is not, then we can end this conversation right now. And I was suddenly aware of every eye in the room looking at me because nobody else wanted to field that question. And so I tried to explain, as graciously as I could, that our church believes that all people are to be treated with love and respect. And that even though our understanding of the scriptures leads us to believe that homosexual intimacy is not the Creator's plan for us, we recognize that our view is a minority view and we respect people's rights to disagree with us. And at any rate, we'd hardly feel it was necessary to argue our views about homosexuality while we were singing children's song on Canada Day. And man, it sure would be a shame if we had to be excluded from this event because of a position of conscience that we took. So my answer put her at ease enough that the meeting went on and we actually did get to sing some songs at Canada Day. But the reason I'm mentioning it here is because underlying my response that day was an appeal to our guest to let us be hospitable, to let us host her by not insisting that we become like her before she would sit down at table with us.

I think that in the coming years, this posture, the posture of the host, will become increasingly crucial for churches with a traditional sexual ethic to adopt as their sexual ethic becomes more and more a minority view. And churches that wish to adopt the role of the host in this way, I think, will increasingly find themselves appealing to the fact appealing to the fact that their sexual ethic is a minority view and a position of conscience, a marginalized opinion. And they'll be okay with that because they will recognize that this difference between them and the broader Canadian society is just one of those things that allows them genuinely to practice hospitality. But that's only a corollary of my main point, and maybe James can invite me back another day to unpack that more. My main point is just that churches who want to answer the LGBTQ question well will take a helpful step forward by becoming communities of hospitality. And the pastor in me is still asking the theorist in me, yeah, but what does that really look like? And maybe you're asking those questions too. The question is far too complicated for me to answer today.

But to appease the pastor in me, let me offer you something very concrete here in closing. This is a simple tool I have developed in my work as a pastor on this topic, and I have found it helpful and useful for navigating conversations around the question of homosexuality in our church, and I can share it with you very easily in the three minutes we have remaining. Simply draw a horizontal line. This line represents one's commitment to the authority of Scripture. And to head off any objections, let me say yes. Authority of Scripture for two reasons. One, because it reminds us that our sexual ethic flows out of our understanding of Scripture and not the other way around. Churches that are non affirming. The best of them at least, they hold this position not because of any opinion about homosexuality they may or may not have per se, but because they have sincerely looked at the biblical data. They honestly believe that that's what the Word has to say on the matter, and they are committed to the authority of Scripture. But two, it reminds us that if a convincing and consistent case can be made that we have misunderstood God's word on this matter, our commitment to the authority of Scripture compels us to change.

But at any rate, draw a horizontal line representing one's commitment to the authority of scripture with a low commitment to scripture on the left and a high commitment to scripture on the right, and then draw a vertical line through the middle of that, which represents what I call the amount of anxiety one feels around issues related to homosexuality. The question of homosexual inclusion, on the one hand, discussions of the practice of same sex sex on the other, the gay pride parade that takes over your street every July maybe, or the fact that there's a speaker about homosexuality on the docket of the Wesleyan Symposium. I don't know what it is, but how anxious are you when it comes to these two things? Now, two intersecting lines, of course, create four quadrants. Right? Quadrant one, for instance, represents people who are not at all anxious when it comes to homosexuality, but they have little or no regard for the authority of Scripture. Quadrant three, by contrast, represents people who have a high view of the authority of Scripture, but at the same time, they experience a high degree of anxiety when it comes to this question.

And Quadrant Four is for people who do not experience anxiety when it comes to LGBTQ stuff. Like when the community leader corners you in a meeting and asks you if you are affirming of homosexuality before you can participate in the Canada Day event. That does not make them anxious, but at the same time, they are firmly committed to the authority of Scripture. Hopefully, you see where this is going. I have found it very, very helpful in pastoral settings when the question of homosexuality comes up, regardless of who is raising it and why, just to sit down and draw out this four quadrant diagram and then just to have a meaningful conversation about where are you on this map? What is your view of the authority of Scripture? Are you anxious about this issue? And if you are, why? What quadrant are you in? And really, what quadrant would Jesus have you to be in? Does this conversation answer all of the questions without remainder? Hardly. Not even close. But I was honest at the outset that I did not have a philosopher's stone on answer right or on offer here this morning. You heard me say that what I do have on offer here is the belief that churches who want genuinely to minister well to gay men and women will be communities of hospitality.

They will do the hard work of figuring out what the practice of hospitality looks like in their particular context, and they will remain committed to that, even when it gets messy. And I would humbly suggest that quadrant four churches that's low on anxiety and high on commitment to the authority of Scripture, quadrant four churches probably have the best chance of getting this right. It is not much, admittedly, it's not much, but it's all I have this morning or this afternoon. It's what I have, and I offer it in the simple but sincere hope that Jesus's people will learn how to lead the way when it comes to hosting gay men and women well and genuinely with his love.


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