Invited

When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you're inviting a person into your life.-Maya Angelou

Today I’m enjoying the subtle but significant difference between the oft-touted ideal of inclusion and the two-sided experience of invitation. Being included is great, don’t get me wrong, and the work that so many are doing to dismantle the limited and limiting systems and attitudes of exclusion is important. Beyond that goal, however, or perhaps wound up in it, there is this matter of invitation–of being sought and asked after, of being both wanted and welcome.

Inclusion can happen en masse. A policy can shift somewhere, or a switch can flip, resulting in the enfranchisement or enfolding of an entire class of people. John 3:16 is a wonderful example of inclusion–the whole world is involved and encompassed in God’s grace-filled move towards and among us. What some of my mentors called the “forensic” nature of justification makes it a like-it-or-not, and put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it matter; the declaration of God’s mercy is not a suggestion, it’s just an announcement–much like our ongoing refrain in this season of Easter: Christ is Risen. 

“Do with it, as Leif Enger’s witness in Peace Like a River declares, “what you will.” 

Perhaps that is the free and freeing invitation of Easter–to do with this all-inclusive, universe-spanning news, what we will. As we receive this invitation, as we begin to trust that all of what makes us uniquely and distinctly us is, in fact, desired by and even essential to the vision of wholeness and wonder that God has for the universe, I believe we will find that both our doing and are willing are tangled up in the reality of a relationship; God requests the pleasure of your company.   

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.-Matthew 25:34-36