Regular readers, if there are any, will note an occasional reference to a friend who is writing a commentary on a portion of Luke. I’m a little vague about what I say about that since his daily drafts are intended to end up as an edited whole ready for publication one of these days. But I’m going to borrow one of his sentences from this morning’s draft because it speaks directly to a couple of previous posts about radical welcome.
“At the root of anticipatory welcome is confidence in God’s gratuitous generosity.”
Anticipatory welcome is the feeling, or at least hope, that I will be warmly welcomed by the people I am about to meet, perhaps for the first time, in the place I am about to enter, perhaps for the first time. Anticipatory welcome is hard to come by. The more likely expectation is of anticipatory rejection. “I don’t really know this place; I don’t really know these people; I know I was invited but I don’t know the local rules of the place, it’s culture, it’s practices; What if they don’t like me?
Anticipatory welcome, as least in terms of the radical welcome I believe is the primary tool of evangelism, is all about confidence in God’s gratuitous love. But that confidence has to come from somewhere. Congregations and individual Christians need to be bold in talking about that gratuitous love when the opportunity arises, and develop habits of being that reflect it in some way, so that when that hopeful, but skeptical, person finally decides to find out if it might be available to him or her, she or he will find an abundance of it during worship and fellowship. But let’s be clear about it, an abundance of God’s gratuitous love as expressed by you, me, or our congregations is not the same thing as fawning, smothering, and obviously phony welcome that many of us have experieinced. It is the genuine willingness to touched by the stranger who is a sinner as by our brother or sister. There’s more, but I’d like to hear your take on it.