I have long felt that the job of a pastor falls into two broad categories: facilitating a congregation becoming ever more deeply connected in relationship and true community with one another, and facilitating that community’s outward-facing and -reaching work of ministry, service, and transformative justice with and for the wider world.
Sometimes what that looks like is watching for gifts and interests of individual congregation members to be revealed, and calling these forth. There are those who might have talents as lectors, teachers and group study leaders, workgroup organizers, and so forth, of which they are perhaps only dimly aware at best, and just need a word of encouragement and perhaps a small nudge or two to step forward and develop and utilize such gifts.
Hospitality is one such gift. Those of us who are more on the introverted end of the scale find fellowship, especially with larger groups of people, to some degree intimidating and exhausting. We’re much better one on one, in intimate conversation, getting to know and care for someone deeply through sustained interaction.
Others who are more extroverted thrive in larger groups. They are delighted to greet and welcome each person, whether new or familiar, and engage in conversation and sharing across a wide circle. It is these souls who are most often blessed with the gift of hospitality.
Prior to the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois, held an annual pancake breakfast fundraiser on the first Saturday of March each year. It was something that large swathes of the entire Springfield community looked forward to. The fellowship hall during the hours of Pancake Breakfast was bustling with conversation, warmth, and the smells of good food.
In my first year with the congregation, I was trying to be as helpful as possible in pulling off another successful pancake breakfast. I kept the coffeemaker brewing up fresh pots and tried to keep everyone’s cup topped up with fresh, hot coffee as they desired. As the tables filled (and with no real prior experience as a professional server), this task grew harder and harder for me to stay on top of.
I spied a lady from the congregation who was sitting with a few others and had finished her meal. I pulled her aside and asked if she would help with pouring coffee, and she explained that her strength and balance were not what they once were, and she was afraid she would hurt someone by inadvertently spilling hot coffee on them.
I did not think about this episode much beyond the day of the pancake breakfast. I don’t even remember if I found someone else to help pour coffee – I’m guessing I probably did. But recently, in a Sunday school gathering almost two and a half years later, this same lady shared the story from her perspective.
As I had learned myself in the intervening time, she had a variety of complicated health issues, both physical and mental, which placed limitations on her ability to participate in any number of different kinds of activities. But she is a lively and courageous soul who is willing to be vulnerable about her own struggles, thereby modeling and creating space for others to feel safe sharing their own. She is incredibly faithful in intercessory prayer, and will follow up to find out how those for whom she is praying are doing in the aftermath of surgery, chemotherapy, divorce, or whatever the life challenge may be.
She shared how embarrassed she had felt at not being able to help with pouring the coffee that morning. And our Sunday school leader responded by saying, “But you pour coffee without a pot.”
What does that mean?
Put simply, this is a person who has the gift of gab, who feels at ease with other people regardless of whether she’s known them for years or they have just met. She is curious about other people’s lives, gentle and caring and inquisitive, and very easy to have long conversations with. (In point of fact, it’s rather challenging to try to have a short conversation with her!)
Coffee, in our culture, is in some ways a social lubricant. Meeting for coffee is a low-pressure way to find social engagement, one on one or in small groups. We can gather around a table with our coffee and perhaps cookies or muffins, breaking bread together on a very basic level, and engage in conversations of any depth. The coffee itself isn’t really the point – meeting for coffee is not like going out to a fancy restaurant, where the quality of the food is to a great extent the focus of the experience. Rather, coffee functions as a sort of small-scale, low-cost, portable campfire around which we might connect, dream, discuss, laugh, cry, reason, and converse together.
Meeting for coffee also allows for a fluid interchange between host and guest. If we meet at a coffee shop, perhaps I’ll buy coffee for us both this time, and you will do so next time. If we are in a venue where we can help ourselves to more coffee, I might fill your cup and then my own, or vice versa. Coffee carries with it small but significant rituals and gestures of welcome, hospitality, service, and care.
Pouring coffee without a pot, then, is to find ways to create hospitable space and friendship rituals without any props. The truly welcoming and hospitable person can make others feel at home merely by their gracious presence, using eye contact, tone of voice, body posture, manners, and gestures to communicate acceptance, interest, respect, and joy in the other’s presence.
Think about Jesus’s meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well. Imagine that you were sitting opposite these two figures, on the other side of the town square, observing but not participating in their conversation, and perhaps not even close enough to overhear what they were saying. Imagine further that you too are a stranger in town, and don’t know who belongs (and to what extent), and who is merely passing through. Would you conclude, based on what you observed, that Jesus, or the Samaritan woman, was the one at home in this space, offering welcome and hospitality to the other?
In fact, the whole conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman centers around hospitality and welcome. Jesus’s first words to this woman are those of a guest. He asks her to give him a drink. But she is not prepared, mentally or emotionally, to play the host to this man. As she made her way to the well, she saw him, identified him as a Jew, and assumed that they would have nothing to say to each other. Each belonged to a group that saw all members of the other group as Other – people with whom they would not willingly interact or engage.
But Jesus has no stake or interest in upholding the social conventions of othering. He is a visitor to this woman’s town, making her ostensibly the host in this interaction, and he is thirsty; she has the equipment for drawing water. He asks her for a drink.
And she is taken aback. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The woman understands herself to be doubly Other in the eyes of any Jewish man. Not only was she Samaritan, but she was also female, and Jewish men by custom did not even address their own wives in public, let alone women who were complete strangers.
Fascinatingly, Jesus seems much more willing to disclose his identity to this woman than he has been to many others with whom he has interacted, often telling those who have witnessed a healing, for example, to tell no one of it. And so Jesus gently begins to reveal himself as the Host, the One who gives of himself completely for all of humanity. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
Talk about pouring coffee without a pot! Jesus is a stranger in town. He is a man and a Jew, and by the local conventions of social propriety therefore fully expected to completely ignore any Samaritan or any woman, and especially someone who is both. He has no vessel with which to draw water. And yet, not only is he speaking, respectfully, to a person not of his gender or ethnoreligious group, he is offering to give her water that will cause her to never be thirsty again.
Jesus’s remarkable, unprecedented hospitality in this interaction leads, as the best hospitality always does, to deep and intimate sharing. He and the Samaritan woman have a theological conversation and begin to learn about one another’s lives. Finally, the woman is so amazed by what she has experienced that she runs off to invite her neighbors to come and meet this incredible stranger.
One of the speakers at Kreston Lipscomb’s memorial service told a story about how Kres had a gift for the kind of hospitality I’m referring to as “pouring coffee without a pot.” Kres and his friends had three tickets to a St. Paul Saints game – one seat by itself on the field, and two together a number of rows further back. The three friends agreed that Kres would take the field seat initially, and the man and his wife the two seats together, and then they would switch around so that each could have both the advantages and disadvantages of each seat.
But as the couple observed Kres sitting below them, they saw him inviting the strangers on his left and his right into conversation and community. As the innings went on, it became increasingly clear that the three would be staying in their original seats, so that Kres could continue befriending the strangers around him. Another person who had known Kres and viewed the service via Livestream shared with me that this story in particular really resonated with her because it so captured the essence of who Kres was.
Our world is no less divided into in and out-groups than the world of Jesus’s time. We, too, have sorted ourselves into, if not Samaritan and Jew, Republican and Democrat, rural and urban, formally and informally educated, Northerners and Southerners, whites and people of color, rich and poor, LGBTQIA and straight. Often, those in one group are suspicious of, even hateful toward, those in the other in each of those binaries. We bemoan our separation and dividedness, but what can we do about it?
Perhaps it is time to sit at the Master’s feet and learn from him how to pour coffee without a pot. For as much as we have factors that differentiate us, there is so much more we have in common. Human beings, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, etc., are social creatures, in need of love, support, engagement, and interaction. We are storytellers who seek to find meaning in the raw material of our life experiences, and we all resonate with a good story. We all have struggles and challenges, experiences that have scarred and hurt us, trials and tribulations that we have survived. We all seek to be in relationship, to find connections of family and community. We resonate with beauty in nature, enjoyment of good food, celebration of accomplishments and triumphs. We all like a good party now and then, and find meaning in rituals and rites of passage.
What if, even within our denomination, we set aside concerns about who is progressive and who is conservative and got to know one another as people? If at the next district or Annual Conference, every person present took each mealtime and coffee break as an opportunity to sit with someone we didn’t yet know, and ask them to tell us about: their childhood, meeting their spouse, finding their life’s work, their travels, their children? What would happen if we came to discover that we have much more in common than we have that separates us? Would we find ourselves more truly able to “passionately live and share the radical transformation and holistic peace of Jesus Christ,” peaceably, simply, and together?
Maybe it sounds simplistic, but I’m inclined to think (and to hope) that it could be a richly valuable endeavor. This is what the delegate tables are designed to do, but perhaps what is needed is more unstructured conversation, more simple rituals of host and guest, more breaking of bread and sharing of stories and pouring coffee – with or without a pot.
As the disciples journeyed with Jesus, learning from and listening to him and one another, as well as those they encountered, the language Jesus used to describe them shifted. They began as “disciples” – students. As the journey toward the cross grew nearer, Jesus began to refer to them as “friends.” And finally, he acknowledged them as family – brothers and sisters.
How many meals, snacks, and informal conversations amongst this group went unrecorded in the gospels? And yet, perhaps these unrecorded moments were incredibly important to their cohesiveness as a group, their courage after the resurrection and ascension to go forth and share the good news. Maybe Nathaniel and Bartholomew became best friends after a late-night heart-to-heart where they learned that they had both lost a child in infancy. Perhaps Peter and James confided in one another that neither of them really liked fishing, but that was the family business and they did what they had to do. Maybe Philip and Thomas discovered that they both loved fish cooked with caramelized onions. Whatever the substance of these conversations, they molded this group of folks into a band of brothers whose lives were transformed by following Jesus together.
Many people find that making friends in adulthood is significantly more challenging than it is for children and teenagers. Not only that, many of us find that the time constraints of adult living – working a full-time job and raising a family – leave little time for making and strengthening friendships. The artist Georgia O’Keeffe was once asked why she painted so many flowers. She responded, “No one sees a flower, really; it is so small. And to see takes time. Like to have a friend takes time.”
Within our Christian and Brethren context, many of us are acquainted with, perhaps intimately, the concept of sacrificial giving of our financial resources – and often find that when we are willing to be faithfully responsive to calls to sacrificial giving, that we are blessed in ways we did not expect and perhaps could not have imagined. What if we thought about our time in this same way – sacrificial sharing of time to meet and befriend new people different from ourselves, and to deepen and strengthen existing friendships?
At our 2021 Annual Conference, we discovered that we could set aside nearly all business and simply focus on whether we might agree on a compelling vision to guide our work together as a church going forward. Maybe we can learn from this that there is room for Annual Conference to be about something other than business – that perhaps we might consider scheduling a certain amount of unstructured time where no one is obligated to be anywhere but rather is encouraged to make some new friends and get to know them as people? What might we learn about ourselves and one another, and what new and fruitful ways might we discover of being church together, if we spent less time on business and formal learning sessions and more time just being people together?
One of the foundational gospel passages that teaches us that love of God must be coupled with service on behalf of neighbor is Matthew 25:31-46. Jesus explains to those listening that God will decide who belongs on the right hand and who on the left of the heavenly throne based on who has, and who has not, cared for those in need. Those on the right hand will have provided food for the hungry, water for the thirsty, clothing for the naked, shelter for the unhoused. They will have visited the sick and those in prison and welcomed the stranger.
Sometimes we become strange to one another when we begin to see not people, but political positions. It’s very hard to welcome someone when we cannot look past their politics or theology to the beating human heart within. Yet welcoming one another is one of the key ways in which we live out the gospel message. Our salvation is bound up with that of those who need our compassion and openness – even and especially those from whom we are different in what can feel like insuperable ways. The folks on Jesus’s left hand will be those who could not let the love of Christ sufficiently permeate their hearts in order to offer true welcome to those who were strangers – by whatever definition of “stranger” we might use.
Likewise, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 15 verse 7, the apostle instructs the Jewish and Gentile members of the Christian churches in Rome to “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” In both the gospel and the epistolary teachings, we are called to be moved by the love and welcome Christ has given us to offer that same love and welcome to others, to see Christ in them and be Christ to them. And again, neither Paul nor Jesus has any asterisks or exceptions to this teaching. If we truly have Christ’s love in us, we will be welcoming and hospitable to all we meet, pouring coffee – or water, or juice, or tea, without pitcher or pot, making those with whom we come into contact feel included and at home. Amen.
- All scripture references are to the New Revised Standard Version
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.