Setting Tables of Compassion in a Divided World
I’ve always pictured Abraham like my Grandpa Elmer – short, wiry, eager (maybe a little overeager) and always busy.
I wish you could have met my grandpa Elmer. Elmer was one of 9 children, 7 of which were boys (my great grandmother had automatic sainthood upon arrival in heaven!) He was a short, wiry, powerhouse of a man who rarely stopped moving. He was always up early, worked all day and fell asleep in his chair at night. Grandpa ran a dairy farm and the family business. He was born and raised in Lodi and you couldn’t go anywhere in town without running into one of his friends.
Like, Abraham, Grandpa was always eager to invite in friends, new and old alike. Aside from our many family dinners, at which he would preside at the end of the table with a short but beautiful prayer and unlimited refills of wine, he was always extending hospitality to others. I remember two workers on his house being invited to have cold beer at the end of that day He would make breakfastfor us every morning e stayed at his house – eggs cooked in bacon grease. The bacon was from our family’s business. White Wonder bread toast with thin slices of butter and grandma’s strawberry refrigerator jelly. The table was always open and there was always room for one more. He would go out into the fields of Lodiafter the pickers had come through and pick the fields clean, sharing the bounty with friends and family all over town and always sending me home with a box full of produce. Hospitality was more than an act for him – it was a way of life, the only way he knew how to be in the world.
Hospitality is defined by Catholic priest, Henri Nouwen this way: “Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.”
In a world marked with division, I believe hospitality is the primary call of those who follow in Jesus’ way of love.It is God’s preferred method of change and it is what we are all called to.
While hospitality may sound sweet and easy, it is not. It is particularly hard for those of us who are trained to troubleshoot and fix problems, which is what most of us with education and privilege have been trained in. We want to get things moving. We want to solve the problem and find the solution. The world seems to work best in spreadsheets and analysis, not the messiness of sitting at a table.
I confess that I am as likely to fall into this as anyone else. I often put more faith in the power of my to-do list than I do in the power of sitting at a table or a long, slow conversation.
Bottom lines and efficiency have become our preferred methods of change. But God invites us to hospitality.
This is a wonderful, weird and mysterious text. Abraham hears the voice of God and then sees three men approaching his tent. Who are these 3 men? We can’t tell exactly. They are strangers of some sort. They seem to have some sort of divine status assigned to them because at one point, they speak in the voice of the Capital L – LORD. But we don’t know exactly who they are.
And yet, Abraham rushes to welcome them and provide them with a generous meal. The text goes in great detail about what is in the meal and how it was served. And then, what was impossible becomes a promise – that Abraham and Sarah will have a son. It says earlier in Genesis that Abraham was 99 years old and Sarah wasn’t far behind.
In this text, I see 3 movements of hospitality in it.
The first movement is a surprise. Abraham offers hospitality to God.
“The LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground.”
As the Christian tradition has wrestled with this text, they’ve often seen these three men as some sort of a manifestation of the Trinity. The text swerves from calling them lord with a capital L to a small L and the writer hints at divinity.
It’s my experience that God rarely barges into our lives. God is willing to let us go on, running around with our to do lists and agendas. God prefers, like the rest of us, to be welcomed. And yet, God is appearing to us all the time, waiting to be invited into the space of our consciousness. When was the last time you just sat at the entrance to your tent/home in the heat of the day long enough to notice God? Are we slowed down enough to see God?
I was listening to a recent podcast with the screen writer Paul Shrader and he was asked why he goes to church. His response was that he goes to church to be bored! I’m hesitant to bring this up. And I want to assure you that I do my very best to NOT make church boring. But I also keep thinking about what he said. He said that when he goes to church, he forces himself to sit quietly so that he can be bored enough to hear something deeper, to organize his week and feel his soul rising up. And honestly, for most of us in America, the entrance to that kind of space IS boredom because we are so good at keeping ourselves busy.
Offering hospitality to God may require a few moments of boredom, sitting at the entrance to our tents in the heat of the day so we that God has a minute to sit down at the table of our soul.
Offering hospitality to God is a common theme in the Bible and it’s not only our private relationship with God. Usually, Scripture says over and over that when we offer hospitality to the stranger, we offering hospitality to God. So this brings us to the second movement.
Abraham offers hospitality to the stranger.
One of the books that we are recommending to you this summer is Barking to the Choir by Gregory Boyle. Fr. Boyle began Homeboy Industries in 1988 and is now the largest and most successful gang intervention, rehab and reentry program in the world.Former gang members are trained and given work and given the tools they need to live life outside of their gangs. Fr. Greg has more stories in a day than most of us have in a lifetime and he shares those stories in this book – how over and over, these homies find hope and a future because of the radical love they receive from Homeboy Industries.
One distinguishing factor of Homeboy Industries’ work is the firm belief that what changes people is not efforts to rescue or save but kinship.When I heard Fr Greg speak at the Priory earlier this year, he said, “The measure of our compassion is our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with others.” Kinship is the basic requirement for hospitality. We don’t invite others in if we see them as completely separate from ourselves.
Kinship is what Homeboy Industries has found is the hope for change in what many would label a hopeless situation.
Fr. Greg tells the story of a person who asked him the secret of how Homeboy Industries was “reaching” the gang members. Fr. Greg responded, “Don’t try to reach them. Let them reach you.”
Abraham allows himself to be reached by his visitors. He finds kinship with them.
When kinship is our modality and hospitality is our practice, it changes what is possible. As inefficient and inconvenient and vulnerable as hospitality to the stranger is, I believe it is the most powerful force in the universe.
Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul 2 once wrote this: “The evil of our times consists in the degradation, indeed in a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each person.” We must risk seeing each other.
Imagine what might be possible if we looked through the lens of kinship at the beautiful creationthat we so easily desecrate.
Imagine what might be possible if we looked through the lens of kinship at the person we find hardest to love.
Imagine what might be possible if we looked through the lens of kinship at the immigrants crossing our border.
Fr. Greg says it clearly: “No kinship, no peace. No kinship, no justice. No kinship, no equality.”
Abraham models for us a way of kinship by setting a table for the stranger and in that action, he not only offers compassion and kindness, the future is changed.
And here is the third movement of hospitality in this passage.
In offering hospitality to others, a new future becomes possible.
Remember what Nouwen says: “Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.”
The strangers bring a message to Abraham and Sarah: you will bear a child. In the chapter before, it says that Abraham is 99 years old and here that “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.”
Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality opened up a new and unimaginable future for them. They found what they had been longing for. And this is what is hospitality does. It opens up a new future. Sarah laughs because it seems so impossible, yet her laughter of disbelief becomes the laughter of joy when her son Isaac, a name which means “laughter” is born.
When we risk seeing the world through the lens of hospitality, we are all changed together. No one stays the same. There is no longer a distinction between the rescuer and the rescued, the host and the guest – we’re all sitting at the table.
Our Habitat team yesterday learned a new word: gusset. A gusset is anything that is brought into a structure or a garment in order to strengthen it. It holds two things together to make it stronger. This is what hospitality does. It gussets us together and makes us stronger.