sermons

Radical Hospitality

Can We Be a Friend to All the Parts of Ourselves?

Steve Watson

Jan 19, 2025

Hi friends, it’s good to be with you today. In many ways, it’s been a particularly rich week in my life as a pastor in this community. I don’t take for granted the ways that you welcome me into important parts of your lives, even listening to me now as I try to help us connect our old sacred texts with the stories and concerns of our lives today. So thank you again, from my heart, for the privilege of our relationship. 

I’m aware that it’s inauguration weekend, but I won’t be talking about that day. One, it’s not where my attention is this weekend. Life’s too short, and I have my own people and stories going on that have nothing to do with Washington D.C. Two, the public life that matters to me is our celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We haven’t organized our service around the holiday this year. Our inclusive liturgy committee this fall decided to celebrate Lunar New Year, Juneteenth, and Pride as our three specially themed services in the first half of this year.

But I will be at Cambridge’s Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration tomorrow as one of the community readers. You’re welcome as well if you have the time. One of my colleagues in Cambridge, Rev. Jeremy Battle, will be speaking. Friday night I was at Temple Israel – one of our fellow GBIO congregations – for their annual justice service and we prayed these words as part of the service. We prayed

“And let us dress ourselves in the garments of God – compassion for those in need, embrace of the stranger – and then spread the canopy of peace over all the world.” 

I thought this was a beautiful prayer. And in many ways that’s what we are talking about in this whole radical hospitality series this winter – playing the long game in the context of our world right now, seeing if things can form in us and in our community which will be of radical good in this season. And today in particular, committing to the profound compassion of God and seeking to mirror that compassion more ourselves, starting right at home. 

So, if you will, pray those words with me again.

Our loving God, help us dress ourselves in your clothing –

Compassion for all in need and embrace of the stranger – 

And then may we together spread the canopy of peace over all the world. 

Amen.

Friends, my big new year change in life is that I’m singing with a choir again.

There was a time when I was young when that was a lot of what I did. School choirs, community choirs, gospel choir, semi-professional choirs, little paid singing gigs in restaurants and churches and commercials. I’d been a mediocre sports-playing kid who discovered I could sing and loved doing it. Until in my early 20s, I stopped, cold. And other than singing here or singing to my kids, singing in the shower, it was gone.

Long story why I made that choice, but mostly it was rigid thinking, different forms of fundamentalism – religious and not – that made me think that the part of me that loves to sing needed cutting off and shutting down. Singing felt like a waste of my time, not valuable, not spiritual or mission-driven – so it had to go. 

Over the years, I’ve regretted that. I’ve missed making music. Sometimes I’ve felt like I lost a part of myself. Now and then, I thought about getting back into it, but it always felt like there wasn’t time. Professional life was too full. Raising our children didn’t leave room for another night out. So I mostly made peace with letting go.

Until a couple years ago, when I was preparing for my sabbatical and writing a grant that asked me:

what makes your heart sing?

Because the premise of the grant was that when your heart can keep singing, you do your best work better and longer. And I thought:

funny that you phrase the question that way, since singing makes my heart sing.

And then finally this winter, in the few days off after Christmas, the time felt right.

I spent a bunch of time online looking for the perfect local choir for me – music I’d like, rehearsal times and location that would work, right level, right vibe, concerts I could actually attend, and eventually I found one – just one that seemed right, and I auditioned and they have welcomed me in. 

After my first rehearsal, I came home glowing. I am still to tell you the truth, so happy. Because it feels like I’ve got a part of myself back again. It’s hard to put a word to it, but if I could, I might say:

Complete, or Happy, or just YES!

So I want to share my joy with you, and I want to tell you today how this experience is connected to radical hospitality. 

If you’ve missed it, for January and February, that’s what we’re teaching on. 

We’re exploring the central roots of hospitality deep in the heart of our faith. 

We’re remembering that hospitality isn’t just “women’s work,” or the special gifting of people who own houses or people who are good cooks or people who are nicer or more extroverted than me or you. It’s a way of more abundant life for us all.

We’re seeing if our Sundays here can become yet more warmly hospitable, in part through recommitting to our three minute rule. That’s a commitment to spending the first three minutes when the service ends getting to know someone – just a little bit – that you don’t know already. 

We’re hoping we can all try on a spiritually hospitable daily practice, through “praying for our 6” each day – short prayers of blessing for 6 people, half of whom we aren’t close to already.

With structure and support, we’re wondering if a few of us will consider opening our homes to vulnerable strangers. So that many of us can also support those few with our time and funds and help. If you think this might be for you, please let Ivy or Lydia or me know.

And lastly, we hope we’ll have deeper faith in, deeper experience of God’s profound hospitality for all of us. And that’s what we’ll keep exploring in today’s sermon. How much God really loves and knows and affectionately cares for all the parts of ourselves, and how much that love for our own selves can be more of our lived experience.  

We’ll look at three short scriptures and I’ll share a little bit about my experience with a framework called Internal Family Systems, which provides some great language and helps for living the truth of these big ideas.

First the scriptures. 

From the very beginning, 

Genesis 1:26-27 (Common English Bible)

26 Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”

27 God created humanity in God’s own image,
        in the divine image God created them,
            male and female God created them.

So the key here isn’t a gender binary culture war thing. Nature and experience teach us that with most binaries, there are exceptions and gradients in between. The point here is that all people – regardless of sexual or gender identity – are made in God’s image. Unlike other near eastern creation stories, this one tells us that people aren’t aren’t accidental byproducts of conflict, people aren’t slaves of the gods, people – you, me, all of us – look a little bit like God. We are God’s representatives, God’s co-creators, here to enjoy and love and take care of the earth in God’s name. All of us alike in this great dignity and worth, and yet each of us in our own very different way.

I’ve been reading a book called Judaism is Love, by Shai Held. He shares what the mishnah – the ancient Jewish oral commentary on the scriptures – teaches about this passage. 

“‘Adam was created singly to proclaim the greatness of the Blessed Holy One, for a human being stamps many coins with one die and they are all alike one with the other, but the King of the kings of kings, the Blessed Holy One, has stamped all of humanity with the die of the first man, and yet not one of them is like his fellow.’ The mishnah’s message is startlingly powerful: never before in the history of the cosmos has there ever been, and never again in the history of the cosmos will there ever be another human being just like you. (names….) And that simple fact testifies to the glory of God.” (Judaism is About Love. Shai Held, 29)

And then here is how that mishnah ends:

“Therefore, each and every person is obligated to say, ‘For my sake was the world created.’” (Held, 30)

Woah! Not only “my sake.” But not not my sake either. For my sake was the world created. 

Talk about hospitality. To invest in each person as a work of art not just with your best craftsmanship, but with the best parts of your very self. And to create a whole world for each person in which it is possible for them to flourish. Not guaranteed, but possible. That is radical hospitality from God.

Second scripture, from the fifth book of the Bible, near the end of the Torah.

Deuteronomy 10:12 (Common English Bible)

12 Now in light of all that, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, by loving him, by serving the Lord your God with all your heart and being.”

In light of all creation, in light of all the story of history, all the story of God and the story of us, what does God want for humanity, for each of us? 

Rabbi Held again:

“Notice the pattern of verbs in this verse: (revere or) fear, which is an emotion; walk, which is an action; love, which is an emotion, and serve, which again is an action.” It’s an interweaving of emotion and action. Here’s what that suggests. “God asks both of our inner life and our outward deeds, for our feelings as well as our actions. Our aspiration, even if it can never be fully realized in this lifetime, is the full integration of who we are on the inside and of what we do on the outside.” (Held, 226)

God wants us to be fully integrated people – the outside shaping the inside, the fully connected inside shaping the outside, the same whole person wherever we go, caught up in cycles of belovedness. What do I mean by that? Each of us:

• Celebrating that the whole world was created for me, 
• Increasingly aware that all of me is entirely a child of God, the one who loves me, who likes me, who sees Godself in me,
• Each of us: Increasing in love and gratitude for God and for life itself, and 
• Learning more and more in our own way to imitate God by loving all of creation, including all our fellow image bearers – our family, friends, strangers, enemies – all of them. 

What a rich and stunning vision for human purpose and meaning? Integration, worth, and love. 

Final scripture. Brother Paul, who wrote a number of our New Testament letters, praying that all of this will take hold in us. 

Ephesians 3:14-19 (Common English Bible)

14 This is why I kneel before the Father.

15 Every ethnic group in heaven or on earth is recognized by him.

16 I ask that he will strengthen you in your inner selves from the riches of his glory through the Spirit.

17 I ask that Christ will live in your hearts through faith. As a result of having strong roots in love,

18 I ask that you’ll have the power to grasp love’s width and length, height and depth, together with all believers.

19 I ask that you’ll know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that you will be filled entirely with the fullness of God.

I love this prayer. I love to pray it for you, friends and for me, and for anyone. 

So many of us have come to think that God loves the idea of us, like God loves our best self, or God loves who God can see us becoming someday. Or theologically, God loves us in Christ, like when God squints carefully and thinks of his favorite person, which is his son Jesus Christ, then God can imagine that we too are like that (even if we really aren’t.)

This is not love, though. Imagine if I said to my kid – I will really love you when – game lost already, right? But I will really love you when you stop sabotaging your life with your stupid habits. Or I will really love you, kid, when you grow up and stop acting so immaturely. Or kid, I love this side of you – the good side – but the rest of you kind of pisses me off. Large parts of you mostly disappoint me. 

I know some of us had parents that whether they said those words or not, they gave some of that vibe to us. To the extent that is you, I am so, so sorry. 

This is not what love looks like. We are all worth more than this. 

And yet, it’s often how we view our own selves, isn’t it? 

The ancient Torah’s word on God, though, is better than this. As expressed here in the good news of Jesus about God, listen to the immense hospitality of God’s love. 

• All the ethnic groups – even the ones you all don’t know about, the ones yet to come – I recognize them all. I honor them all, they have their roots in God. 
• What do I want for you, God wonders? I want for you strength, strength in your inner self.
• How can you have it? The riches of my glory are in there – in your soul, in your self, I am with you through my Spirit.
• Where does God live? Amongst other places, God lives in your heart, through your faith. Right in your very own self. When my Sunday school teacher told me Jesus will live in my heart if I want him too, it wasn’t the whole story, but it was not wrong. 
• And what are your roots, human? Love. You come from love. And tap into love and it will grow – wider, higher, deeper, longer than you can imagine, as you become increasingly filled, entirely filled with the fullness of God? 
• How big is God’s fullness? Beyond knowledge. Infinite. 
• But how small is God’s fullness? It can fit inside of you and me. All of God, with all of us. 

This is mystical. It’s big, deep, hard to measure. But it’s not meant to be aspirational or abstract. Our birthright as children of God is to live in this profound, regular awareness of our immense belovedness and our immense internal power.

Do you walk around knowing all this? 

Probably not. 

Maybe you’re like me. You think: this part of me that’s really important to me, maybe it’s just stupid, a waste of time. Cut it out.

Or maybe you feel alone a lot of the time, forgotten, unrecognized. Or maybe there are unloving things that have been said about you that you’ve internalized – you’re too sensitive. Or you’re too short, too messy, too weird, too whatever. 

Or maybe there are parts of you that you do not understand – like why you shut down inside when someone’s upset, or why you’re so defensive or angry, or why it’s hard to let people get close to you, or why you work so hard all the time. Or whatever.

How do we move from our dis-integrated ourselves toward being more at home in our own lives, our own bodies, our histories? 

And how do we move from our reactivity, or our emotional dysregulation, or our dis-ease with our lives toward this beautiful vision of the deep strength of all that love inside, toward being full of all the fullness of God. 

I don’t have a three step process for that. Not sure anyone does. But I have benefited from a psychological theory and a mode of therapeutic practice called Internal Family Systems. It’s a set of insights that many of us think aligns pretty well with this teaching on God’s great hospitality toward all the parts of our lives and God’s tremendous love for our whole selves.

Internal Family Systems – people call it IFS – is a complex theory. I’m not the right one to teach it all and we don’t have time for that either. But it has two big starter insights that can really help us here.

One is that all of us are made up of many parts. Just like family systems have lots of people that play lots of roles, so we have different parts of ourselves that have picked up different roles they play over the years. Walt Whitman was right about all of us when he said:

I contain multitudes. 

The second big insight that IFS has is that the best way for us to be integrated and healthy, for all the parts of ourselves to best function and thrive is for us to befriend all the parts of ourselves, to be a friend to all the parts of our inner life. And that friendship starts with two habits, which are curiosity and connection. 

So at the most basic level, this means that we act like we matter. Our lives matter. Remember the great dignity with which we are created. Because you matter to God, you are allowed to matter to yourself. So, for instance, what makes your heart sing matters. Maybe you need that. Maybe we all need that.

For me right now, this means welcoming back the musical me, the singing in me. This still may or may not be strategic. Me singing Renaissance choral music in a little choir for a few hours every week is not going to save the world or do anything else strategic or heroic. But it’s helping me be more fully integrated, more fully myself, more joyful and alive. And turns out, that does matter. 

So level one, you matter to God. And in God’s great hospitality to you – welcoming all the parts of yourself, you can to join God and act like you matter two.

And then level two, we can try to start practicing more curiosity and compassion for the more befuddling and difficult parts of ourselves too. I was talking with one of our members, Stephanie Choo, this week. She’s studied and practiced the connections of Internal Family Systems theory and spirituality more than me and helps guide people in these insights. 

And she reminded me of the different ways many parts of ourselves are affected by the burdens we carry. 

There are our personal burdens – all that has happened to us individually. 

There are our legacy burdens – what comes down to us through our family lines.

And there are our cultural burdens – things like racism, patriarchy, individualism, and materialism for instance. These harmful forces in our society that Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have so powerfully named and resisted but which shape us all still. 

These three kids of burdens – personal, legacy, cultural – are often intertwined in our experience and shape many parts of ourselves. 

Ways we are chronically sad or lonely or angry or anxious or impulsive or many other things we wish we weren’t so much. 

A lot of the time we don’t know what to do with these burdens so we push them down or try to forget about them and move on. But they are still there.

IFS teaches us that to be a healthy, integrated self, we are invited to be a friend to all the parts of ourselves – and friendship starts with curiosity – I want to know you and with compassion – I want to love you. It’s a way of living out that beautiful prayer for us in Ephesians. God is so glad to know us that God accompanies us in all things, lives with us as deeply within as we will welcome and allow. And God loves us so thoroughly, so completely, so intensely, that the scriptures insist that the more we know that love within, the more powerful we will be. 

So when hard feelings or hard habits or hard behaviors are surfacing again, we can try to get curious, just slow down for a moment without judging ourselves and ask:

I wonder what is going on here. Where does this come from?

And then, whether we understand it or not, we can try to choose compassion – to say there’s a reason I’m doing this. I probably come by these feelings or these ways I’m asking honestly. I’m not some broken or messed up person – I’m this way for a reason.

And a funny thing happens when we befriend ourselves, when we get curious and compassionate about all the parts of our lives. If we’re trying to live a good life, to be a positive and loving and responsible person, when we pay more attention to ourselves and our kinder to ourselves, we don’t need to just indulge all our instincts anymore. Curiosity and compassion for ourselves often produces more internal freedom to choose how we’d like to move forward. 

Put it differently, when we know our own worth, when we can say – I too am the image of God, this world was made for me – we have more security to make choices about our way forward in any situation.

When we are more integrated – all the parts of ourselves – we have an easier time aligning our emotions with actions we think will lead to a better life and a better world. 

Sometimes that means giving more space to parts ourselves we’ve shut down or abandoned. I’m singing again, partly because I can, and partly because singing came into my life to do some really good things for me, and I’m welcoming that back. I’m worth it. And a more integrated, more joyful, playful, creative me makes me a better friend and husband and father and pastor – even if it takes some time. 

And sometimes this means letting parts of ourselves have smaller spaces, like helping them stop grabbing the steering wheel and taking control of our lives. Like when we get curious and compassionate about why we’re so angry all the time, or why we’re always escaping into sexual fantasy, or why we’re always trying to fix everything, then those parts of us can learn to chill out and let go a little. 

Upshot for today, friends, if there are parts of you that aren’t working very well, then God isn’t disgusted with you, or pissed off, or needing you to be a person that you are not. God still loves all the parts of you. But God might want you to learn to befriend yourself as God does, not to indulge every little dysfunctional whim you might have. That’s not friendship.

But to learn to join God in God’s hospitality to your whole self. To learn that there are no bad parts of you, just parts that aren’t integrated, or parts that aren’t in their right place. Parts that with enough curiosity and compassion can realign so you can be stronger, more full of love and all the rest of God’s fullness within.