Keeping the Doors Open

I serve a United Methodist congregation as the senior pastor. As United Methodists, we have a wonderful phrase that is often used to describe what we hope experience when they walk through our doors: “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”.Through our doors, every person can enter into the presence of the living God. Through our doors, every person can discover the greatest gift ever given. Through our doors, every person can embrace unlimited possibilities for their life. Through our doors, all the dead ends that seem to get in the way come crashing to an end.But we must consider first things first. What enables these doors to stand in place? What are the two things that keep these door from crashing down? Yes! The hinges on the doors are the two things (we have very traditional doors); each hinge is located in a different place along the frame of the door. Each hinge is essential, but each one is incomplete without the other.What are the two hinges that anchor our doorway into God’s compassion and mercy? I would like to suggest to you that the two hinges are 1) the love of God; and 2) the love of neighbor.There is a story that speaks of the power of this love which comes from our nation’s history, and it is about an 18th-century American Quaker named John Woolman. Woolman was one of the most courageous and effective practitioners of tough love who ever lived.After discovering that he could not bear to assist his employer in the sale of a slave, Woolman traveled to Quaker meetings all across the colonies, and talked with people one by one about the evils of slavery. “My heart was tender and often contrite,” he wrote, “and universal love to my fellow creatures increased in me.”This was not an easy sales job, especially since many Quakers in the colonies were slave owners in the mid-1700s. But Woolman succeeded through quiet one-on-one conversations, visiting his fellow Quakers individually, on farm after farm, for most of the two decades of his adult life. He didn’t criticize people or anger them, but was clear and consistent in his message, and by the year 1770 — almost a century before the Civil War — there was not a single Quaker in the colonies who owned a slave.You might say that the American anti-slavery movement began when John Woolman discovered, and started to practice, the commandment of Jesus to “love your neighbor as yourself” (22:39). And if there had been a John Woolman in every religious denomination, the institution of slavery could possibly have been eliminated without the Civil War.Woolman understood the importance of “these hinges” of our faith that opened the door into God’s heart. May each one of us consider how we might play an important part in opening the doors of faith to all persons.