I hope my title has made you hungry! As we continue our autumn term journey of exploring what it means for us to ‘belong to the family of God’ (catch up here), I wanted to take a moment and ask you a very important question: “how often have you said hello do you eat spaghetti bolognaise?”
In Genesis 1 – 3 we see a God of community (“let us make man in our image” – Gen 1:26), creating man to live in community (“a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife” – Gen 2:24) and to be in community with himself (“God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” – Gen 3:8). This is how God ‘wired’ men and women to be! Yet at the fall (see Genesis 3), when Adam & Eve sinned this beautiful image of community was cataclysmically shattered. Suddenly alienation, estrangement, and loneliness invade the human experience! Look around you, the signs of loneliness are everywhere. It’s even been suggested that some of the loneliest people on planet earth are those surround by millions and millions of people in the great cities of our world. I wonder how many lonely people, those with a craving for community, do you and I walk past each day here in Great Yarmouth?
This epidemic of loneliness is one of the reasons why we as Christians, those who have been drawn into God’s new community, need to learn how to say Hello, Al Salaam a’alaykum, Barev, Bok, Dovry den, Hallo, Tere, Bonjour, Guten Tag, Kalimera, Shalom, Namaste. Saying hello to someone you don’t know is a risky business. What if they ignore me? What if we don’t have anything in common? What if they don’t respond? What if they ask me a question I wasn’t expecting? Yet community is only ever restored at a cost. Just think for a moment about the price Jesus paid so that community between us and God and one another could be restored? It cost him his life!
A few years ago, Lorna and I were back in Sheffield for the dedication of the daughter of some of our best friends. It was at the church that I went to whilst at University. Lorna and I used it as an opportunity to ‘be guests’ and see what it feels like. Sadly, it wasn’t a great experience of community. After the meeting Lorna deliberately went and stood on her own to see how long it would take for someone to come and say “hello”. Tick, tick, tick… eventually I came and rescued her! Lorna is use to church life, but just imagine if that had been her first experience of church community. Saying hello in this kind of situation could be the difference between someone leaving one of our meetings saying I want to go back because I see or hear an echo of community that I so long for or not!
Let me give you a challenge… Over the last eight months how many guests/newcomers have you said “hello” to on a Sunday morning?
However, I don’t think it stops there. One of the best ways to get to know someone is to sit and talk with them over a meal. Almost every culture in the world has this ‘table focus’. Why don’t we make it our aim to invite someone back for lunch twice a month on a Sunday? Some of these occasions could be people you don’t really know in the congregation, other times it could be guests who turn up on the day. Just imagine what it would be like if every person in the church made a fresh decision to say “hello” to guests and to regularly invite people home for Spaghetti Bolognaise… I believe it would be a very exciting community to be part of!
