True Hospitality
It’s so interesting that the theme of hospitality is returning to us this Labor Day weekend – a theme we also heard in our readings on Memorial Day weekend, and toward the end of July too. We had the stories of Lydia hosting Paul and the other missionaries in the book of Acts, Abraham and Mary and Martha and their different kinds of hospitality, and today, Jesus’s explicit teachings about social events. Our summer is bookended and threaded through with scriptures on hospitality. Perhaps there’s something the Holy Spirit is trying to get through to us. Get out the nice dishes, because someone’s coming over!
It feels apt for summertime. Summer is often traveling time, when we give and receive hospitality. Our family has often spent part of our summer as guests in someone else’s home, whether that be a lakeside cabin or our parents’ houses, and we’ve often hosted others in our home too (particularly in New York, where if you’re lucky enough to have a guest room, you are suddenly on everybody’s friend list when they come to town). As guests, we’ve been fed and driven and pampered and cared for, and in return, we’ve brought gifts, tidied up after ourselves, and tried not to take too much time in the bathroom. As hosts, we’ve changed sheets, made meals, and drawn maps for our friends as they set out to explore the city. We have cooked and eaten others’ cooking; cleaned and enjoyed not cleaning; planned outings and happily gone along on others’ plans. All in the wonderful spirit of hospitality, something we get to practice more in the summer than any other time. I like to think of it as the chance to try on each others’ lives a little bit and maybe learn something new.
Many years ago I stayed with a group of friends in someone’s grandparents’ chalet in the Vosges mountains in France. On proposing the trip, my French friend told the rest of us that staying somewhere together would deepen our friendship: when people see each other with ‘de petits yeux’ in the morning – literally ‘little eyes,’ eyes puffed up from sleep – they come to know each other in a different way. The expression has stayed with me ever since, because it says something true about sharing hospitality. Instead of seeing each other with our public faces on, we enter into a more private space. We get to know each other in a new way.
I think it is this kind of hospitality today’s scriptures are referring to. Jesus gives a set of instructions about hosting and being hosted, issues of great importance in that time and culture. Instead of focusing on status and honor, he says, set all that aside. Just be together, with all kinds of people. Hospitality is not an opportunity to show off your status or increase it to advantage; nor is it an opportunity to engage in quid pro quo. Hospitality is a time for intimacy, breaking bread together, seeing each other with different eyes. Not the carefully curated Facebook self, but the real self, with petits yeux, rumpled hair, and all. And as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, by doing so, some have entertained angels without knowing it.
Now, I should acknowledge that much of what Jesus says about status and positions of honor may seem to relate better to 1st century Hellenistic society than to us today. That absolute structure of hierarchy and cultural symbolism feels foreign to us. Though as one commentator pointed out, if we don’t think seating arrangements still matter, just try to take someone’s accustomed pew on a Sunday morning. In my first parish, there was a couple who would literally stare down any baffled newcomer who chanced to sit in their pew. And of course the calculation of invitations and gift-giving is still a part of our society – calculating the value of a gift so we give one of equal value in return, keeping a mental ledger for who bought whom lunch, inviting someone to the birthday party because they invited you to theirs. We all do it.
But Jesus talks about hospitality without regard to any of that. Hospitality even to the poor and the lame, those who would never be able to repay the favor. Hospitality that might be a little risky: inviting others into our homes and lives who might be a little challenging to host. Inviting without worrying over how it looks, or what will come of it.
Nearly ten years ago the NY Times did a story on a refugee sponsorship program in Canada. It was at a time when many refugees were fleeing Syria after its long and terrible war, and the government set up a program for ordinary citizens to help. So many Canadians signed up that the demand outstripped the supply of available refugees. Book groups, church groups, and random groupings of neighbors signed on to do everything from finding apartments, schools, and mosques to teaching families how to skate and canoe. Days after refugees arrive in Canada, their sponsors appeared, picking them up from the hotel they were temporarily housed in and taking them off to settle in their new home.
The story told of the vast differences the sponsors and refugees encountered – language and culture, gender roles, the unfathomable trauma the refugees were coming out of – but also told of ways they came to know each other, finding ways to truly help and be helped. The refugees were bewildered and impoverished, and the sponsors supported them financially and spiritually. On the other side, the sponsors were well-meaning but sometimes ignorant, so the refugees taught them their culture and shared some of the tragedy in their lives. And in the process, both began to see one another with different eyes – not their best public selves, but their real selves, in all the glory and flaws. Unlikely combinations of people, seeing each other with their petits yeux.
It was risky hospitality. It feels now like a story of a bygone era, in the current climate. But this kind of riskiness is, I think, what Jesus calls us into. Rather than stay in our rigid structures of status and quid pro quo, invite anyone and everyone. Rather than hunker down in our fear of others, tap into our more generous selves. There is no absolute guarantee of how the other will respond, just as there was no guarantee for either the sponsors or the refugees in the Canadian program. But that’s what human relationship demands: both sides entering into the arrangement, willing to take the risk. Willing to know and be known, and to be changed.
The hospitality that Jesus is teaching extends beyond the dinner table. The practice of hospitality happens throughout our lives: the hospitality of listening to another’s story, the hospitality of letting someone into our life to hear our story. The hospitality of caring beyond ourselves, working to make the world a better place for others, whether it’s in our neighborhood or internationally. Hospitality is at its root making room for the other and providing for their needs, something that can and should happen in every sphere of our lives. And as Christians, our hospitality ultimately is to God, allowing God into our hearts and lives. And God is the One who shows us ultimate hospitality, inviting us in and feeding us when we most need it and least deserve it.
In other words, hospitality is where love is shown and received. And to show and receive love is not simply a set of good deeds to win God’s favor; it is participating in God’s very being. As the hymn says, ‘God is love, and where true love is, God himself is there.’ Jesus calls us to a life that is in God, ultimately, living in the love that is God, and open to all of God’s children and God’s creation. May God help us all to be so hospitable to love.