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July 1, 2007
Hospitality as Righteousness
2 Kings 5:1-14
William Willimon, Chaplain at Duke University Chapel and a regular on the guest lecturer circuit throughout the country, writes that he was once asked to speak on the subject, “loving others.” In preparation for the sermon, he says that he came to realize that the toughest part of loving others is that “the others are so, well, other.” The otherness of the other is frightening, for the pure and simple and very natural reason that we are more comfortable with our own kind, people who are just like us. 1
As we prepare to celebrate the 231 st anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of this nation, it occurs to me that among all the things which makes this “experiment in Democracy,” as Alexis de Tocqueville called the young United States, is that this is a nation comprised of and made strong by being a nation of “others.” Many of us may lay a claim to being descended from among the first to arrive here, the Mayflower Society still keeps records of those who are descended from that original ship load of weary travelers, but in fact from the start all of us, save those who are descended from the Native American peoples, are the progeny of guests to this land.
When the Immigration and Naturalization Service opened up a computer link which would make possible the tracing of relatives who arrived in the U.S. through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, it received the largest number of hits...that is, inquiries...in the shortest amount of time, as any web site launch in the short history of such phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of people tried to click into the records on that first day to find out more about their antecedents' arrival at that weigh station at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Although it often takes time for the pot to melt...and neighbors to meld into communities, wave after wave of immigrants have found a home and a place because of the notion of hospitality which has been one of the sacred principals of who we are as the United States of America.
Unique and wonderful is the fact that while the Middle East seethes with violence as ancient neighbors make claim and counter claim to various pieces of real estate in the most ancient of human dwelling places, the fertile crescent, and while tribal groups in Northern Africa continue to rise up against each other with extraordinary ferociousness in order to settle generations old enmity, representatives of all these groups may easily find themselves peacefully sharing the same car on the El in Chicago, or in the same check-out lane at Target on a Saturday afternoon.
I had the opportunity to make a whirl-wind trip to the Chicago area Friday and Saturday this week. I had CUBS tickets for Saturday, when the weather was perfect, Wrigley Field was beautiful, and CUBS played lousy and lost by 13 to 4. The trip was not all baseball. Sally and I had a few hours to walk around Evanston, our old home…where the sign-board out in front of the Baptist Church across the park from my former church had the sermon title for this morning listed: “Is the Statue of Liberty Waving Good Bye?” There is an extraordinary amount of rhetoric on immigration these days. Much of the energy behind the slings and arrows of talk radio and TV are due to an attempt by the Congress to pass an immigration reform bill. I just wonder, if Emma Lazaras who coined the beautiful words found on the Statue of Liberty – “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” were to come back today, would she perhaps ask just that question: “Is the Statue of Liberty waving goodbye?”
Any act of hospitality, as William Willimon noted in the article cited earlier, requires courage. “To reach across our cherished boundaries, to open our door to stranger, to welcome into the inner sanctum of the home someone who is an outsider, this is not easy. Certainly in 1 st Century Palestine as Jesus began his ministry, the culture of the day was rife with prejudice against the presence of the foreign occupation of Rome and the legions of the Empire which were dotted around the ancient land of Israel. The story of Naaman, a general from the Syrian Army, who is healed by Elisha, the prophet of Israel, is filled with twists and turns, as they all are. But as a whole, it is a story about hospitality…
· A slave girl in Syria brags about her God, back home in Israel. Although a captive – in her new world she seeks to offer healing help to her master.
· The King of Israel, aware of the demands of custom, rips his clothing when he hears that this foreigner is petitioning for some help – “Who knows what these people are going to ask for next?”
· The Prophet offers help to an august visitor which seems too simple, at first, for the visitor to accept – “is this an insult?” he wonders, when told that all he need do is strip down and bathe in the river.
· The prophet refuses payment because he only wants people to understand that “there is a God in Israel” – wants the world to know of God's mercy which extends beyond borders and nationalities and even religions.
Most compelling to me is the fact that Israel understood the nature of human prejudices – and this story among all the seemingly thousands that circulated about prophetic powers and the like, is one of those that stays in the canon – or the collection of scripture. Generation after generation, Syrians have been the enemies of Israel (still are), yet here is a cherished story about a Prophet of Israel healing a General from Syria! Let us remember the story seems to say, “Who is our neighbor? How shall we welcome them?”
It is tough to be hospitable- and tougher still to rise above the sense of “OUR PEOPLE” or “My Kind of People” to embrace all people as God's own loved. In Life Together , his last published work before being incarcerated by the Nazi's during World War II, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent some time examining the ways in which the act of hospitality not only strengthens a family and a community, it also strengthens faith. To be isolated and surrounded only by those who are exactly like oneself, is to live in a dream world, Bonhoeffer postulates. 2
Life would be easier if we were all alike. Although we might aspire to a belief...a grand illusion, that there is one norm for belief and behavior, but there is not. Bonhoeffer wrote, “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight....The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.”
Although Bonhoeffer's discussion was centered on the church and the presenting issues related to the conflict which split the Germany Evangelical Churches as National Socialism sought to make the State Church a Nazi Church in the prelude to World War II, his argument can be extended to a more global analysis of human community and nations. There are times when we lose patience with the process and when conflicts between people and groups of people become severe, but I think what has made this U.S. nation of immigrants strong has been our willingness for the most part over the years, to welcome changes...to be hospitable to the newness of a vision about who we are which is always evolving. Hospitality, welcoming of the stranger into our homes and our lives, is what continues to make us strong as a people and nation in a unique and very divided world.
God came to Abraham and Sarah as a stranger, their welcome provoked the blessing of a child and the birth of the people of God...Jesus came to those whom the world and the culture might have not deemed worthy...tax collectors, sinners of every size and shape and history. The commander of an enemy army seeks healing in the midst of the people whose children his armies have enslaved – and the Lord grants it through the prophet.
As we reflect upon our life together as a people of faith, hospitality becomes for us a paradigm for all our interactions. As Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest who has penned so many wonderful reflections on the life of faith, says, “When hostility is converted into hospitality then fearful strangers can become guests revealing to their hosts the promise they are carrying with them. Then in fact, the distinction between host and guest proves to be artificial and evaporates in the recognition of the new-found unity.”
As we celebrate our nation's birthday this week, we do so, as we have always done, with a spirit of hope for the continuing growth of our national family. We do so with prayers for peace in a world so riddled with terror and violence. We also do so, as we have always done, as a nation and a culture seeking to represent new hope and new possibilities for the world with aspirations to be welcoming and hospitable even in the most difficult of times. It is a challenge to which we the people of the United States of America have always sought to aspire:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she with silent lips.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden shore.” 3
That which makes us strong as a nation, is also that which is at the heart and soul of who we are as people of God. Grace is in the promise that God will continue to visit us the in the person of strangers and guests. A child is presented for baptism as a sign of her parents hopes and of God's grace already extended. A stranger seeks a place among us and ours is but to welcome ...and in welcoming, in turn, we receive a blessing. Amen.
1William Willimon, “Practice Hospitality”, Pulpit Resource, July-September, 2001. Page 16. Go Back
2Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, (English translation of Gemiensames Leben ) Harper and Row 1954 Go Back
3 Emma Lazarus – from the plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty Go Back
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