Hilton Head Island, SC – August 21, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Deuteronomy 10:12-13,17-22; Matthew 25:31-40
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’” – Matthew 25:40
Weeks ago I decided on the title for this sermon. It was to be Is Hospitality a Religious Necessity? When I started writing the sermon last Tuesday, I concluded that isn’t truly the question I wanted to ask. Instead, what I really want for all of us to think about is this: Is Hospitality a Religious Obligation? In other words, is there a moral imperative in extending hospitality? If we want to try to be Christians, ought we to extend hospitality?
To begin with, the Bible often refers to hospitality, although it doesn’t use that word very often. Instead, it talks about “the stranger” or “strangers” or “foreigners.” According to my trusty formerly-Tarheel-blue copy of Cruden’s Complete Concordance, which now is held together by worn tape because it has been picked up and opened so many hundreds of times and doesn’t look very blue anymore, there are four usages of the word “hospitality,” all of them in the New Testament. Twice Paul tells his readers in two declaratory words, “Practice hospitality.” But the Hebrew Bible frequently tells the Israelites how they were to treat strangers or foreigners; they were to open their homes and their hearts to them.
When the Bible was being written, especially the Hebrew Bible, there were no Holiday Inns or Red Roof Inns for travelers or wayfarers to stay in overnight. They didn’t even have 16X16 tourist cabins. Nearly everyone here is old enough to remember those. You were driving along a two-lane highway and you came to a cluster of four or five little brown cubicles, with a sign by the road saying, “Tourist Court.” Motels had not yet been invented. So you would pull your ’39 Chevie or your ’50 Chevie into the driveway, hoping there was still a cabin for your family of six (if your family was like our family on the way to Grandma’s in Ingersoll, Ontario, in 1945 or so).
By Jesus’ time apparently inns for travelers had become an occasional sight in the landscape, because his Parable of the Good Samaritan refers to one. Furthermore, we are told about Jesus’ birth that “there was no room for them in the inn,” although that may be a mistranslation of the Greek word. But even then, accommodations for strangers or foreigners passing through were fairly rare, or else there would be no injunctions for the people of God to practice hospitality, which meant, literally, to allow travelers to come into your home and sleep with you if they stopped and asked for your hospitality.
I have never been anywhere else in the world where hospitality is so vital a part of the culture as it is in the Middle East. Many times I and my family have been invited into Middle Eastern or even European homes and we were treated like royalty. There was good food and outstanding conversation, and a warm and comfortable bed provided if we had not arranged overnight accommodations elsewhere.
Fifty-two years ago my first wife and I took a five-day tour through a small slice of the Emerald Isle. We had arrived in Scotland two weeks earlier, and before Nancy started teaching in the Infant Department at a local public school (meaning what we would call kindergartners) and I started taking classes at the Faculty of Divinity at Glasgow University, we decided to take an unescorted trip around Ireland, seeing what we could see in the five days we had to do it. Furthermore, we decided to hitchhike in order to save money. We took a public bus to the edge of Belfast and headed south to Dublin. After three rides of five to ten miles each, we wondered whether that was a good decision. But on our last extended-thumb attempt, a man stopped for us. He was a traveling salesman from Belfast, and he asked where we were going. We said to we hoped to go to Dublin, Killarney, Cork, and to be back to Belfast by the following Friday. “Well,” he said, “I hope you like me, because that’s exactly where I’m going. But first,” he said, “you should know that I always stop at a pub thirty miles from here, and at another pub thirty miles from Dublin, and at another pub thirty miles from Killarney.” We began to have some serious doubts, he being a traveling salesman and all, and warning us about all the pub stops, which were only for business, he said (which, as it turned out, was true). Well, you only live once, we each silently reasoned to ourselves. And he did seem like a very fine and trustworthy man, which he was. So we turned out to have an escorted tour of Ireland after all, and it was wonderful. His Irish hospitality even insisted on buying us lunch in two of his favorite pubs, as I recall.
In the next year we spent two months traveling in Europe. In Switzerland, because the Swiss railway was so expensive, we tried hitchhiking again (which was very common in Europe those days, but not in these days). On our way from Lausanne to Geneva a man gave us a ride, and took us to his home in Geneva for dinner and to stay overnight. He didn’t even alert his poor unsuspecting spouse to the fact that he was bringing two American strangers home with him. But she and their children seemed delighted to have a pair of visitors, who might have been axe-murderers for all they knew, breaking bread with them (it was actually fondue; in Switzerland what else?), and it was one of the most happily serendipitous travel experiences we ever had.
In biblical times, being a traveler going from anyplace to anyplace, and especially being a member of a foreign ethnic group passing through someone else’s ethnic territory, was a very risky venture. People did it only when it was absolutely necessary. There were no tourists then, no sightseers. But the Bible clearly instructed its readers that they were obligated to show hospitality to strangers and foreigners. And Israelites particularly were told to do this, because, God reminded them on numerous occasions, “You were strangers and foreigners in Egypt.”
In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses says of God, “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.” Then, speaking as God to the Israelites, Moses said, “Love the sojourner therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18-19).
Thus biblical hospitality had nothing to do with reading up on what Emily Post or Miss Manners had to say about hospitality. It was about kindly giving assistance to at-risk people because it is the right thing to do. Hospitality is still important in entire cultures which are far more at risk than 21st-century America. In the Middle East, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all tell their adherents to be kind to strangers primarily because they are strangers. People who are unknown to anybody need kindness from everybody. Welcome then in. Go out of your way to assist them. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, simply because when you’re a stranger, you are very grateful to anyone who treats you like a friend and welcomes you into their home or village or town or city or country. It changes the world for you and it changes your world. I am who I am in part because I have been welcomed into the homes and lives of people I didn’t even know before, and the same is true for you. How does God “execute justice for the fatherless and widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (10:18)? Through us, Christian people, through us. In this world God does almost nothing Himself, but every day He does literally billions of good deeds by inspiring the only species on earth capable of knowing Him, namely, human beings.
Biblical hospitality is not about serving the right kind of snacks (or hors d’oeuvres if you prefer). It isn’t about how many forks or spoons to use, and where to place them, nor is it about what kind of wine to serve with what kind of entrée. It’s about treating people like people, like friends rather than potential enemies, like beloved family members rather than like suspicious and potentially dangerous interlopers.
Right now in Louisiana, I would postulate there are hundreds or thousands of homes which have been opened to those who have lost everything in of the terrible floods. When people know that other people are in serious straits, and that something must be done to assist them, they will overcome their caution and welcome complete strangers into their lives. That is an example of biblical hospitality in a totally different context from the biblical setting.
After World War II, thousands of European refugees came to the United States. Remember them? They were “the DPs”: the Displaced Persons. We had two DPs in our high school class. Following the war they both came from Germany with their families to the United States. Because they would have been six years old or so when they arrived here, they quickly picked up English, and by the time they arrived at West High School in Madison, Wisconsin, they sounded like they had been born on Madison’s West Side. Both of them went on to get PhDs. One became a professor of history, and lived a fairly normal academic life. The other was first a scientific researcher at Johns Hopkins, and then a public health expert for the World Health Organization. Then he taught public health courses in universities in a dozen countries in Europe and Asia. Toward the end of his peripatetic career, he became the Dean of the Faculty at the American University in Yerevan, Armenia. What would have become of Manfred Jankowski and George Jakab if hospitality had not been shown to their families when they were refugees from the war which snuffed out more lives and displaced more people than any other war in history?
One of Jesus’ most famous parables was the last parable he ever uttered. He told it a couple of days before he was crucified. Some people call it the parable of the sheep and the goats, and others call it the parable of the last judgment. It opens by referring cryptically to the Second Coming of Christ. This is a concept which always has been a mystery to me. I am not going to attempt to explain it, because I frankly do not understand it. Nor do I want to address the thorny question implied by Jesus about how, at the end of the world, all of us shall be separated as either sheep (those who are faithful in their behavior) or goats (the blindly uncompassionate).
Instead, I want to refer to what Jesus said about the sheep, the faithful followers. You have heard these words many times before, but they always bear repeating. Speaking not really about himself but about anybody in need, Jesus said, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Mt. 25:35-36). So the sheep (the faithful followers) asked the King (Jesus) when it was they had done those things. In Jesus’ parable the King (Jesus) answered, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” Later, to the goats (the not-so-faithful) he said, “And when you did none of these good things to those in need, you were unfaithful to me as well.”
It has been claimed there are more refugees in the world today than at any other time in history, including after World War II. We have all seen the pictures of the small crowded boats carrying people across the Aegean Sea or the Mediterranean from the Middle East or North Africa. Wars and battles are going on in several African and Middle Eastern countries, and millions of people have been killed, while other millions have seen their homes destroyed. They have been forced to leave behind everyone and everything they have ever known. Germany alone has welcomed a million such refugees. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Lutheran pastor’s daughter, has led this effort, and at considerable political cost to herself and her party.
The situation in Syria is currently the most devastating. A few million Syrians have died in a vicious war among several competing forces: the Syrian government, which is an autocratic regime; forces opposed to the Assad government; the Islamic State or ISIS or ISIL, the Russians, the Turks, and other states which are supplying arms to the various factions. Millions of other Syrian refugees are in camps in Jordan and Turkey, and hundreds of thousands of others have left Syria for Europe via Turkey, Greece and the Balkans.
There is an understandable fear that some of those refugees either are or might become Islamist terrorists once they get to the West. It is a possibility. Whether that is likely is debatable. But the fact remains that millions of homeless people are streaming toward the West, most of them going to Europe, but some also to the United States.
Originally our government said we would accept 10,000 Syrians. That is ten thousand out of millions. Then we said we would raise the quota to 30,000. However, apparently it takes two full years to put these refugees through the arduous process which seeks to determine whether they represent any threat to our country. Two years! More hundreds of thousands flee Syria every year, and we have potentially opened our doors to thirty thousand, but it may take up to six years for that number to be approved. America, the world’s great melting pot, should be ashamed.
She is not just a statue, and a very large statue at that; she is the Statue of Liberty. And she says, “Give me your tired, your poor/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ the wretched refuse of your teeming shore/ send these, the tempest-tossed to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
“Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in Egypt.” “I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me; I was naked, and you clothed me.” “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked and fail to respond?” “As you did not do it to one of the least important in the human race, you did not do it to me.”
“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” If we found ourselves strangers in a strange land, wouldn’t we be forever grateful to anyone who gave us assistance in starting a new life? The world is a complicated place, to be sure, and there are risks associated with giving help to people we don’t know.
Nonetheless, as the old spiritual says, “If (we) can help somebody along the way, then (our) living will not be in vain.” When we do anything for the most needy of these, our sisters and brothers, we will have done it for the one who told the parable. Hospitality is not simply a Christian virtue. It is a Christian obligation.