Paul also invites the church to extend hospitality. That's a word that drives a lot of the work around this place. The hospitality which stands at the heart of the Gospel, by which we see that each person we meet is to be welcomed as Christ. There are so few places like that. Then Paul goes on to invite members of the church to bring honor to each other.
Honor is an old fashioned word, used in our church maybe most often in the wedding service.
It calls for seeking the best for another person, day in and day out. The Christian community is called to honor all people in the confidence that each is a child of God, that each bears the image of Christ. That's challenging, because this church, like any human community, has people with different ideas of how we should move forward. It's a counterculture thing to do, and the church has not fully mastered it. But we work at it, and then we ask what it would take to bring a spirit of honor to the places where our vocations unfold after we leave here.