The hospitality of letting go

It’s always a little unclear to me how to mark the seasons here in sunny California – we don’t really have four seasons even though we try to pretend we do sometimes. But with the summer solstice this last week, I think we can officially say that summer has begun. So happy summer! Among other things, summer is a time of both traveling and welcoming travelers to our homes, time when the guest room gets used more often. There is nothing quite like the gift of arriving late after long travel to a home where you are offered a glass of cool water or a cup of tea, a meal, and a comfortable bed. Living with lots of guest rooms in New York City, we found ourselves often hosting people, good friends and friends-of-friends (and some complete strangers). But we also got to be guests a lot, people offering us their vacation homes to stay in as a chance to get away from it all. Hospitality done well is good for the body, giving us the rest and the nourishment we need, but it is even more so good for the soul – on the receiving end, good hospitality allays our anxieties about being in a strange place and about doing the right thing in someone else’s home. On the giving end, hospitality lets us put out the special plates, clean the place up a little, sit around the dinner table with good conversation and company. Hospitality is a wonderful thing when practiced well.

Genuine hospitality builds relationships and friendships and smoothes social connections. But it can also be a spiritual discipline. Opening our home or our dinner table to another is a way of allowing others into our lives. Come in, we say – make yourself at home here. We literally drop the walls so that others can come in; we let go of our own control as we move in another’s space. And hospitality can extend beyond human interactions too: opening our hearts and souls to God is also hospitality, allowing God to come in and make himself at home. And we receive hospitality from God as well, making our home in God, trusting the welcome that is there. There’s a vulnerability in all of this, a willingness to give and to receive without worrying about the balance sheet. It’s not a bargaining move – I’ll trade you this for that – but simply a gift. 

Which is perhaps why it is so hard to do sometimes. You have to go out of your way to be hospitable. You have to drop what you’re doing and your plans for things and provide for the other. And you have to do the same as a guest, allowing the rules of the house you stay in to be the rules you live by. In order to practice genuine hospitality, you have to let go a little. And when that hospitality extends to God, you sometimes have to let go of a lot.

Jesus talks about hospitality in that bit of the gospel we heard, telling us to welcome others in his name. His was a culture where hospitality really mattered – social life revolved around giving and receiving hospitality, a remnant from the desert days when hospitality meant survival in a harsh, tribal land. But hospitality wasn’t simply an exchange between individuals. When you welcomed someone into your home, you welcomed the group they belonged to as well. You welcomed them in the name of that larger family or tribe they were a part of, honoring that whole group by honoring the one. And your welcoming symbolized the welcome given by your whole tribe. And likewise, the way your guests received your hospitality symbolized their tribe’s graciousness to yours. So Jesus was saying, whoever welcomed these little ones – his followers and disciples – in the name of Jesus, were honoring Jesus himself. And to the little ones – the followers of Jesus, which includes us, those new to the faith and those more seasoned – Jesus is saying, be good guests. Receive what you are given and be thankful. It is given to honor me.

Hospitality takes work when it happens between people. With God, there’s even more to it. When God comes in, he doesn’t usually just tiptoe politely around our piles of stuff. God asks a lot when we open our doors to him.

And so we have to talk about that Genesis reading, the sacrifice of Isaac – not a story we can let float by. It is told in chilling detail, the tension mounting by the line, and even when everything works out ok in the end, we’re not relieved. Because what does it say about God, this horrific command to Abraham to sacrifice his only child? Is this God cruel, or just capricious? And almost as chilling is how silently Abraham obeys the command, getting all the tools together and leading his son up the mountain to sacrifice. 

Isaac is not just Abraham’s only and beloved son – he is also the symbol of the promise God gave to Abraham, that he would be the ancestor of many and a blessing to the world. Without Isaac, there’s no way for this to happen – at least, not so far as Abraham can tell. I wonder what he thinks as he trudges up the mountain. But you notice, the one answer Abraham gives to Isaac as they make their way to the sacrifice is that God will provide – and when Isaac is spared and a ram is sacrificed in his place, Abraham names the site just that: ‘God will provide.’ Somehow, despite his own understanding of God’s promise and how it should work out, Abraham is able to trust God even when it seems that he is being asked to let go of the promise itself. And God does provide, and Isaac lives, and the promise is fulfilled. God already knows that Abraham has ultimate faith and trust in him; now Abraham himself knows it too. No matter what this God demands, he will follow. It’s a hardball way of showing this to Abraham – but I’d be lying if I said God never plays hardball. God is more than the gentle and loving picture we make him out to be. But that’s a whole ‘nother sermon in itself. 

These two scripture passages aren’t necessarily intended to go together, but something does emerge from the two of them read in tandem. Abraham has to let go of God’s promise – has to let go of his own son and his love for him – in order to realize how fully he trusts God, to see how true it is that God will provide. He has to drop what he is holding dear in order to open himself completely to God’s desires for him, God’s fierce and uncompromising love. To be hospitable to God, Abraham has to turn himself and Isaac over to God’s care, completely – to trust completely in God’s hospitality, God’s providing for them. Maybe it’s only then that God’s promise is really fully able to come true – only then are Abraham’s doors wide open to God’s presence and call. As the psalmist says (Psalm 31), Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit – and everything else besides.

Real hospitality demands this. We have to let go in order to truly welcome another, whether that other is God or human being. It’s not genuine hospitality, after all, to expect the guest to do things exactly our way, to conform to our spoken and unspoken codes of conduct. Nor is it being a good guest to expect the household to shape itself around us. In hospitality, we seek the good of the other person – not acting with the hope of reward or return, but simply because to do so is to welcome God. And to welcome God is itself our reward – the reward of full and complete love, the trust that God will provide, that all the things we worry about and fear for and hold fast are in the end false gods. 

Abraham’s lesson is a harsh one. To be clear, it’s not a demand God makes to each of us, to sacrifice our dearest love to prove our trust. It’s a powerful, terrifying story. But intermingled with the terror of the story, we hear the message of God’s providence, the assurance that each one of is given that God truly can be trusted, no matter how bleak the situation. With that kind of trust, we can let go – truly let go, receive another person as who they are, allow ourselves to be received for who we are. It is the best kind of hospitality we can offer – to those who come our way in these weeks of summer, to those we reach out to at St Francis and our surrounding areas, to those we know and those who are strangers. May we each be given the power to let go, and to receive. Amen.