July 24, 2016

Been thinking a lot about hospitality in the last few weeks since I’ve been traveling and have been the recipient of many people’s definition of hospitality. There have been hotels where staff was kind and helpful, and campgrounds where the kids got yelled at for not having Dreamer on a leash, and campgrounds where our neighbors talked with us about their lives and travels. There was Betty, from Texas, the clerk at the store in Two Medicine at Glacier National Park, who has been on the road for 18 years living in an RV and moving from place to place, working when she wants to. She called herself a full-time RVer, a term new to me. And in the Grand Tetons we met a cashier from Maine, and at Crater Lake one from China, all practicing hospitality to strangers traveling in a strange land. In Berkeley, there was Cara, who rented us an apartment, but whom we never met, yet her home was the epitome of hospitality with its well-stocked kitchen, clean sheets and towels, and a place to do our laundry. In San Francisco I am renting a room in a home that is again very hospitable.

What does it mean to be hospitable? Is it welcoming the stranger? Abraham and Sara welcomed three strangers into their tent who turn out to be angels come with an incredible, unbelievable, life-giving message (Sara laughed). Jesus welcomed the hemorrhaging women, a stranger afraid to speak to Jesus because she was ostracized from her community due to her chronic bleeding, who touched his garment and was healed. I am a stranger and I have been welcomed into someone’s home, but it wasn’t for free, so does that count as hospitality? For the last two Fridays I have been welcomed as a volunteer into Saint Gregory’s Food Pantry, where I experience an incredible sense of hospitality—I am welcomed for the simple and profound reason that I am a human being. This feels very different than me being welcomed because I have the ability to pay or because I am white and middle-class or because I have/or don’t have the “right” education or because I am nonthreatening, etc., etc. I am welcomed at the Food Pantry just because I am.

This morning, at the early service at St. Gregory of Nyssa, I watched hospitality in action. Keri, Paul, Sara, Mark, Cheryl, Brian, and others pulled in a visitor to read, a child to distribute Eucharist, another child to lift a chalice, me to do a reading at morning prayer, and they invited other to participate in the many tasks that needed to be done during the liturgy. Liturgy means the work of the people and they made sure people were working to make the liturgy happen. Is part of hospitality to help the other find their role; to help the other live out a Christ-filled life by inviting them into the work of Christ? I’ve been reading John Caputo’s book The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida Religion without Religion in which he describes Derrida talking of love as the ultimate way we allow tout autre est tout autre (the other is fully/always other) to manifest itself. Derrida says this love is hospitality—allowing the other to be the other without our agenda for what we want or need from the other, without our agenda of changing the other, and without need for acceptance from the other (page 47). I’ve never made the connection between love and hospitality before and have tended to view hospitality as a giving to the other not an allowing of the other—allowing the other to fully be himself/herself.

Jess, a member of the choir, read the Sodom and Gomorrah Old Testament reading that describes inhospitality and ill-treatment of the stranger and Abraham’s plea to God to save the city even for just one righteous soul. My humble interpretation of this passage is that my denial of the stranger or my cruelty towards the stranger is serious cause for alienation from God (sin), and (that is a big AND) I must try to practice hospitality, I must call others out when they are not practicing hospitality, and I must recognize those times my inhospitality is causing harm to others. So does that mean that hospitality in its truest sense is a gift with no expectation of reciprocity? Yes, probably, yet how to make this happen is another story. I need to add that as Jess, originally from the south, read this passage slowly with a hint of his southern drawl, it was funny and we laughed and it felt like we were there to share our stories (Scripture included). This laughter, I realized, allowed a certain comfort to settle among the participants, and was a form of participation that gave us all the chance to engage in the work of the liturgy by offering a gift—our laughter. Jess was practicing hospitality, most likely without knowing it, by inviting us to be fully ourselves, a true gift.