[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, August 28, 2022]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
We hear a lot about hospitality. We talk about its etiquette, its impact, how various cultures practice it, its cost, and then event planners get hold of the word and turn it into a word of enormous cost and cynical posturing. Deals worth millions of dollars or more ride on the quality an event’s hospitality. When State Departments intervene, hospitality becomes a behemoth requiring dozens of staffers and then lives can ride on it.
Even Holy Scripture has opinions about hospitality. Take for instance from our Epistle today:
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”[1]
Or this, from our Gospel reading:
“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”[2]
We should take some time to define hospitality because here secular sense contradicts Holy Scripture. I consulted four different dictionaries[3] to synthesize a definition, namely, that hospitality is the extension of welcome, friendliness, and protection to invited guests and chance acquaintances in any setting whereby the extender of hospitality can offer a tangible and/or explicit manifestation of these benefits. In our fallen and corrupt age, then and now, hospitality expects reciprocation, as Our Lord points out in our reading today.[4] Secular hospitality comes with strings attached. People deliberately seek out specific guests because they have something highly coveted to offer in return. Our Lord Jesus Christ however describes a different hospitality, a holy hospitality, a hospitality which we can see integrated into our baptismal covenant:
“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayer…Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself?”[5]
Holy hospitality has much in common with the hospitality of the Ancient and Modern Middle East. If we look at the Scriptures, we can find examples such as the account of Abraham and Sarah entertaining the angels at the Oak of Mamre,[6] or Manoah and his wife entertaining an angel just prior to the conception of Samson.[7] In both cases, they offered hospitality to these visitors who dropped by unannounced. There were no engraved invitations printed on heavy linen-cotton paper stock, and there were no background checks either. Both households without really stopping to think about it offered their visitors shelter, food, drink, and other comforts, without knowing they were angels. The visitors were most definitely able to bestow marvelous things of great value, but this hospitality was offered and given without knowing who the visitors really were and in no hope of anything in return. Frankly, Abraham, Sarah, Manoah, and Manoah’s wife (it is really a pity we don’t have her name because in the account in Judges she’s clearly the brighter of the two) did not know the visitors from Adam, and I am reasonably sure travelers in the Bronze Age tended to look a bit worn around the edges, so there was no real clue whether they were important or not. They simply gave, even thrust hospitality upon the visitors.
Our Lord further develops this concept of expectation-free hospitality given to anyone regardless of station. He tells His followers, tells us, to seek out the poor and the disadvantaged and not those who can do something for us in return. His expectations are that unlike secular expectation we attach zero strings to our hospitality and to ensure we include those who are in no position to pay us back. Our Lord’s expects us not to stint on our hospitality regardless of the recipient’s station. To reinforce this point in the Gospel, St. James pulls out his apostolic brass knuckles to drive the point home through our thick skulls:
“For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?”[8]
Those are strong words, “Judges with evil thoughts.” The expectations are clear for followers of Jesus, we offer hospitality regardless of recipient and in equal measure without discrimination.
Now, it is one thing to hammer one over the head with the demand without offering the explanation of why Jesus demands this of us. Our Lord’s main mission on earth was to fix, even obliterate, the Fall. Humanity had spun off from God and as a result took on physical and spiritual mortality. Jesus came among us to rebuild our human nature so that we might reunite with our loving creator. Part of that fixing of our nature was to take the tarnish off the Imago Dei, the Image of God in which God created us. God created human nature to be an image, an icon, a representation of the Divine nature, and so in rebuilding it this new nature takes on, in representative fashion, certain Divine traits, first and foremost love and selflessness. Our goal as Christians is to actualize and to realize this calling of growing into the Image of God, a process we call sanctification or θέωσις, a process that was our original intent before we as a species left the path, as illustrated in this line from Psalm 82:
“You are gods,[9] children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless you shall die like mortals.”[10]
As Christians, we not only take on the restored Image of God in our Baptism, as these Images of God we must recognize and honour the Image of God in others, no matter how tarnished. After all, before taking on the new nature in our Baptism, we too carried this rusted and corrupt version of the Image of God, and it is this ramshackle Image that God loved so much he came to us in the Person of Jesus Christ to redeem us from that state.[11] No matter how weak or ineffectual, our behaviour is to reflect God’s love for others for whom Our Lord died.[12] To withhold hospitality is in effect to say we hate the one we deprive, and no one who hates one’s brother and sister can really say they are holding true to the Image of God in themselves.[13] Because not only are they their own persons, because they bear the Image of God, what we do to them we do, in Jesus’ own words, we do to Him:
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”[14]
Now, before we go wide-eyed and panicky thinking, “Oh God, where do I start?” let us take a deep breath and look around us. Here in this sacred space are others bearing the Image of God, brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. Is someone hurting? Provide an ear to bend or a shoulder to cry on. Is there a visitor by you looking really confused how to navigate High Mass? Help them navigate through the rite. Do you see someone you have not yet traded two words with? Step out beyond introverted shyness and introduce yourself. Do you see someone you absolutely cannot stand in a pew near you? Pass them the peace, anyway, recognizing that they too bear the Image of God. Outside these walls opportunity abounds from the dirty and malnourished beggars on street corners to battered spouses to the poor working three jobs and still trying to decide whether to eat or make the rent. These people truly appreciate when we personally approach them and give them a kind word and true material assistance, they will remember you in thanksgiving, and make no mistake, God hears the prayers of the poor.[15] Regardless, of whether there is recompense or not, we are here to proclaim the Good News, to proclaim in word and deed that death and corruption are not the last word, that a purely Darwinian existence is not our lot, that every action we take should embody holy hospitality to those around us and model the selfless love of God.
St. Catherine of Siena spent three years locked in her room of her own accord getting to know God, but then He pushed her out the door, saying that now she got to know Him, it was time to love Him by loving those bearing His image. A living faith[16] means that we exercise holy hospitality, that we show God’s love tangibly to the world around us to anyone in need, regardless of condition. As we bear the Image of God, let us reach out and affirm in others that they too bear the Image of God, and as we love and honour them, we love and honour God.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Heb. 13.2 [2] Lk. 14.12-14 [3] Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, and Collins [4] Lk. 14.12 [5] The Book of Common Prayer, Holy Baptism, New York, Church Publishing Company, 1979, pp. 304-305. See Morris, Clayton L., Holy Hospitality: Worship and the Baptismal Covenant, New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 2005, for a detailed treatment of this theme. [6] Gen. 18.1-15. [7] Jg. 13.2-23. [8] Jas. 2.2-4 [9] Ps. 82.6, Jn. 10.34 [10] Ps. 82.6-7 [11] Jn. 3.16-17 [12] Rom. 14.15, 1 Cor. 8.11 [13] 1 Jn. 3.11-18 [14] Mt. 25.40. [15] Ps. 69.33, 102.17 [16] Jas. 2.18-26