Month: November 2020

Inhospitality is the new Hospitality

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My column for The Antelope County News November 18,2020.

Five years ago, Mike and I bought a new table. Moving to Neligh, we were concerned if the table would fit in the parsonage. Without its leaves it seats eight but with leaves it expands and expands again to seat twenty. We love being hospitable. We love having our whole big family, our six brilliant, funny kids and their significant others and friends gathered around the table eating delicious food. We love having guests. Our guest book, currently sitting unused and lonely in the entryway after all these COVID-19 months, is filled with the names of exchange students, refugees, friends passing through town, church members and neighbors who’ve given us the great gift of their time and good company around our table over the years.

When I think of Jesus, I think of all the meals he shared. He ate with his friends, with tax collectors and “sinners,” he oversaw the feeding of 5,000 people and 4,000 people in the first-ever church “pot-luck” suppers. Jesus cooked breakfast on the lakeshore for his friends and gathered them together around the table in a meal we still remember in worship when we take communion.

Gathering for meals is holy. Gathering for meals is important. Hospitality is part of living life to its fullest.

This year, Mike’s birthday falls on Thanksgiving. Any other year, we would be gathering the whole crew, in-laws and out-laws and stragglers without somewhere else to be and we’d be hosting a whole house-full for a feast around our big table. Instead, because of how much we love all those we’d ordinarily invite to join us and all their co-workers and neighbors with whom they’ll be in contact in the days and weeks after Thanksgiving, we won’t be hosting anyone at the parsonage for dinner.  COVID-19 is running amok in Nebraska. So, Mike and I will be sitting across from each other, just the two of us at our big table, feasting on the goodness of God’s love and giving thanks for faith and friends and family far away.

Gathering for meals is holy. So is not gathering in order to preserve each other’s health. Gathering for meals is important. So is knowing it is not the season to gather. Hospitality is part of living life to its fullest. So is foregoing the parties this year so those we love are alive to be with us next year.

Jesus, out of love, gave his life for us. Sad as it will be, we too, can give, really just a little, we can give up our Thanksgiving traditions this year. This one time, the most hospitable thing we can do is to be inhospitable, limiting who sits at our feast tables even as we celebrate the unlimited goodness of God.

Another Way to Look at It

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Willie Green was driving as we headed toward the truck-stop for dinner after church. It was my first Sunday back at my Student Pastorate in rural Kentucky after being away for my wedding and honeymoon in 1983. Seeing a political poster stapled to a telephone pole, I asked Willie,

“who won the election for Governor while I was away?”

In her tobacco-thickened bluegrass drawl she grumbled, “Oh, that Martha Layne Collins, did.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.” I replied.

“I just don’t think it’s right, her being a woman and all.”

It was quiet in the car for a little while. Then Willie said,

“But then, I didn’t think it was right having you be our pastor, either.”

A little nervous, I asked, “So how’s that working out?” She laughed and said,

“It’s working out great! I guess maybe that Martha Layne won’t be too bad a Governor after all.” 

Five years or so later, I was sitting at the kitchen table back home in Omaha visiting my parents. My Dad, who had always been my champion, encouraging me every step along the way in my education and preparation for ministry was reading the World Herald and said something about “that’s the problem with the economy these days, all these women going to work.”

“Um. Dad,” I ventured. “I thought you are really proud of me and the work I do.”

Dad put down the paper. I could see the cogs turning in his brain.

“Maybe the problem,” I said, “isn’t that women are working, maybe the problem is that the economy isn’t.”

“Well, that is another way to look at it.” Said Dad.

Last week I was at the county jail where I meet with some of the women for Bible study and discussion a couple times each week. “Any results yet on the election?” someone asked. It was Friday afternoon. I told them it was still not called for either candidate, but it looked like Biden and Harris were pulling ahead. The reaction among the women was mixed. What surprised me was two of the women, one young, one older, both said they didn’t want Biden and Harris because Harris is a woman, and “women shouldn’t be doing jobs like that.” I checked my watch, hoping it would tell me what year it is.  When it didn’t, I told the women the story of me and Willie Green and the election of Martha Layne Collins in Kentucky thirty-five years ago.

It turns out the women had discussed it with a man who did some other ministry in the jail, and decided they agreed with him that women aren’t fit for leadership, that women need to know their place and stay in it. Why? Maybe because they, like so many of the women I meet at the jail, have known nothing but abuse from men for most of their lives. Instead of having the gift of parents, teachers, pastors and professors, male and female alike, who cheered them on and encouraged them to aim higher, these women have been put down and pushed around and told they don’t count. But they do. I told them they do. I told them being a woman in no way makes them less than a man, and, in my opinion, Senator Harris being a woman in no way disqualifies her from office.

Women, like men, can and should do all that God has given them the gifts to do. God created all of us in God’s image, and God said, “that’s good.”

The day after I was at the jail, on Saturday, the election was called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I wasn’t particularly a Harris fan through the primaries, but when she spoke on Saturday as the Vice-President elect of our nation I broke down and sobbed great big, racking unexpected sobs. I think it’s right. I think it’s just right, her being a woman and all. And I suspect on Saturday afternoon God said something like, “it’s about time!” before saying, “now that’s really, really good.”

Doing Old Good Things New Good Ways

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My column for The Elgin Review November 4, 2020

The smell of turkey roasting wafted up from the basement as I ran from there up the three flights of stairs to the top floor on the far end of my sprawling dorm, Clay Hall. My room was the only place I had access to a telephone in those dark ages before limitless long distance and phones that weren’t wired into the walls. It was on three south. Breathlessly, I dialed the number I’d memorized before heading to kindergarten, (402) 453-2384. Mother answered and when I said, “Mom,” she called out, “Marshall, it’s Becky again, get on the extension.” (In the dark ages there were no speaker phones). Daddy picked up the phone in their bedroom. They both laughed when I gasped and then asked my question, gave me a quick answer, told me they loved me and I flew back down the stairs.

When I learned I was the Resident Assistant with dorm duty for the Thanksgiving weekend, I was sad. I’d never missed a Thanksgiving Dinner with my family. The tv tuned to football, grandpa breaking dried bread into pieces in the big stainless bowl that only came out for stuffing, Mother sautéing celery and onion, perfect pumpkin pies baking in the oven upstairs, while the turkey roasted in Grandma’s old apartment downstairs, and me preparing a relish tray and setting the table with a pretty lace cloth, the once-a-year china and silverware I’d polished the week before.

Here I was, twenty-one years old, in Oklahoma, far away from Omaha preparing Thanksgiving Dinner in the little apartment of the Dorm Mother who’d gotten to go home. The guests would be the stragglers; foreign students and those who had no way to get home or no friends to go home with for the holiday. And I, whose prior culinary skills were mostly mac-n-cheese, beanie-weenies and chocolate chip cookies was cooking the kind of dinner my mother, an exquisite cook, always prepared for Thanksgiving. Two weeks earlier her letter arrived along with recipe cards for dressing, cranberry ice and pumpkin pie. In it she detailed, “Becky dear, for the dressing you will want to start two days ahead by setting the bread out to dry…”

My father laughed so hard he cried when on one of my forty-eleven breathless phone calls home I asked what to do with that weird little bag of stuff I pulled out of the turkey along with the dressing. “What? Mother asked, giggling. “You were supposed to take that out before you stuffed and roasted the turkey!” “What do I do with it?” I insisted. They told me to throw it out and promised never to tell anyone what I’d done.

My parents and I laughed through that day. Though I wasn’t home, it is one of my all-time favorite holiday memories. I still have the letter my mother wrote to me, the recipe cards she sent, and my notes from those phone calls home scrawled on little lime-green squares of paper from a note cube that sat on my dormitory desk. I’ll be pulling out the recipes and age-stained instructions in Mother’s beautiful script three weeks from now as I prepare a meal this year for Mike and me.

This year loving our families and our neighbors at Thanksgiving means not getting together unless we can all quarantine for two full weeks before and then for another two weeks after Thanksgiving. It feels terrible thinking about it.

We’re not traveling to share the holiday in Minneapolis with cousins and our Minnesota kids. Our Lincoln, NYC and Pittsburgh offspring aren’t heading here, either. Instead, we’ll be calling each other on the phone or “Zooming,” comparing cooking notes, laughing and giving thanks for the technology that allows us to be together even as this pandemic keeps us apart. We’ll share cooking tips, and laugh at cooking disasters, rejoice in our good fortune, and look forward to being together next year when COVID-19 has run its course and scientists have had time to develop a vaccine. If it’s warm enough to eat outside, who knows? Maybe local friends can safely join us for a feast on our patio.

I hope you are beginning to make your plans for how you will keep each other and our community safe this Thanksgiving. God will certainly be happy to receive our gratitude whether we’re together or apart. Who knows? Years from now, our memories of the year the pandemic upended our holiday traditions may be among our fondest.

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You are always welcome to join us for worship at Park Congregational United Church of Christ, ten miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south. Worship is at 9:15 am and available on Zoom. I love to hear from you. beckyzmcneil@gmail.com.