Radical Hospitality

"When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." -Leviticus 19: 33 [NRSV] "Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?" -Ancient Monastic Greeting of a Stranger

Within the Christian tradition, Palm Sunday marks Jesus’ triumphant if humble entrance into Jerusalem and the beginning of his public ministry there. He came, we remember, riding upon a donkey, palm fronds spread along his way. Hardly a royal entrance.

We know that Jesus’ ministry was not welcomed by the authorities then, and I suspect that it would not be particularly welcome now.

Many scholars argue that the heart of his teaching was a new and radical form of hospitality.

Hospitality, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers, with liberality and goodwill." Needless to say, this is not the reception that Jesus ultimately received.

The new and radical form of hospitality which Jesus advocated was a circumvention of the purity regulations which impacted nearly every aspect of Jewish life in Jesus’ time. Called by some "table communion," this new form of hospitality included touching and sharing meals with people who were considered at that time to be "impure": the sick and dying, menstruating women and women in general, people who had disabilities like blindness or paralysis, and even people in unpopular or "unclean" occupations. We know that Jesus did all of these things, and we suspect that it is one of the things that led to his unpopularity with the authorities and probably to his eventual arrest, trial, and execution.

In advocating for this new and radical form of hospitality, Jesus was simply attempting to live out the ancient mandate of his own Jewish religious tradition. That mandate is found most powerfully and clearly stated in a passage in the biblical book of Leviticus, where Jewish (and subsequently Christian) practitioners are instructed,

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

For the later Christian community, the Leviticus passage reflected symbolically that community’s sense of being a people set apart, and more broadly the recognition that we are all, in fact, strangers in a strange land. All of us are aliens searching for a home, spiritual or otherwise. The passage also reflected the communal memory that Christ himself had been as a stranger among us and had had "no place to lay his head" during his sojourn here on earth. It was a reminder that people had rejected Christ once, and had better take every precaution never to do so again.

The conviction of human alienation or strangeness is reflected in many familiar Christian hymns and gospel tunes, such as the old gospel song, "Wayfaring Stranger":

I am a poor, wayfaring stranger,
Wandering through this world of woe;
And there’s no sickness, toil or danger,
In that bright land to which I go.

It’s a challenging commandment, but it isn’t the least bit ambiguous: "Go and do likewise."

In later Christian tradition, Jesus’ own radical hospitality was reflected especially in the monastic tradition, where monks were instructed to greet visitors at the monastery gate as if they were Christ himself: "Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?" But it was also reflected from the 4th century onward in the founding of "hospitals" by the monastic orders. Unlike today’s hospitals which serve only the sick in body and mind, those early hospitals were of different types to meet different social problems, including those of orphans, the aged, and not least, the poor. The word "hospitality" originates here.

Religious writer Kathleen Norris writes in The Cloister Walk that ". . . hospitality is still at the center of it all" in monastic life. She continues,

In a world in which we are so easily labeled and polarized by our differences--man/woman, Protestant/Catholic, gay/straight, feminist/ chauvinist--monastic hospitality is a model of the kind of openness that we need if we are going to see and hear each other at all.

Unstated in this practice is the question, "What if we truly treated everyone as if he or she was the Messiah or Christ?"

In an earlier book [Dakota: A Spiritual Geography], Norris writes that "True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person." This definition echoes the first principle of our own Unitarian Universalist Association: the belief in "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." But how do we put that belief into practice?

Norris quotes one Benedictine monk as saying that "‘The classic sign of [our] acceptance of God’s mystery is welcoming and making room’ for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the unlooked for and unwanted. It means learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it." "Hospitality," she writes, "can’t help but change" us. Are we willing to be changed?

All of this brings me to the challenge which radical hospitality poses to religious communities--to this particular religious community--as well as to the sometimes mean-spirited debate over immigration which has lately been taking place in the United States Congress.

For if Jesus is to have any real meaning at all for us, it seems to me, we need to begin taking him and his teaching more seriously. Especially in these xenophobic times in which we now live, when fear of the stranger in our midst is at a fever pitch, we need to begin taking his message of radical hospitality more seriously. For all we hear about Jesus in the halls of government these days, I see very little evidence that we are taking that message of hospitality seriously at all.

Believe me, I know first hand how difficult it can be to practice it. As the person often standing on the front line of this community’s religious response to those whom the inscription on the Statue of Liberty calls

. . . your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
. . . the homeless, tempest-tost . . . ,

As a society, as a religious community, as religious people, we need to do a whole lot better at dealing with these issues than we are presently doing. We desperately need a deeper sense of the kind of radical hospitality that was modeled by Jesus and which is chiseled on the Statue of Liberty.

It’s going to take a whole lot more than "faith-based initiatives," I can tell you that, to solve our problems. It needs a society-wide commitment of our human and material resources if we are to make a real difference. Right now, I see little evidence of that kind of commitment.

Indeed, as the current debate about illegal immigration strongly suggests, we are deeply conflicted about just how hospitable, just how generous, just how cordial we, as a country, ought to be.

Personally--I don’t know about you--I don’t want to live inside an armed camp. I don’t want to become a much larger version of the nation of Israel, walling out our neighbors and our supposed or even real enemies. I don’t want to live in a prison of my own devising, or of anyone else’s. I steadfastly refuse to live in fear of the other, or of the stranger in our midst. And besides, I do not believe that we will succeed in preventing those who are coming here in search of better lives from coming, anyway. To my mind, it would be far better to be generous now, than have to fight to keep what we have later.

For the reality, I believe, is that ultimately, and one way or another, we are going to have to share our unprecedented wealth. Because it is a question of justice. And because it is a question of human need. That need, as the human population continues to grow, is only going to increase in the years to come.

I actually believe that we stand to gain much more than we are going to lose by welcoming these strangers in our midst with "liberality and goodwill." I believe that rather than being weakened, we will find ourselves strengthened and enriched by being generous and openhearted toward them. And indeed, most of those we are speaking of are not really strangers, anyway. Many of them are already our neighbors and our friends.

As we celebrate Palm Sunday this year, it is my hope that whatever immigration legislation eventually issues from Congress will be a closer approximation to Jesus’ practice of radical hospitality. I hope that rather than building walls, we will decide that it is much better to build bridges and the goodwill they imply and embody. I hope that the mean-spiritedness of this debate will be replaced by a spirit of generosity, and that we will welcome rather than seek to exclude those who are only seeking after what so many of us already have: a sense of security and a reasonable standard of living for our families and ourselves. I hope that I and we will learn to have more understanding and acceptance of those in our very midst who look to us for help in their troubles and personal failures.

For all of us are wayfaring strangers along the dark journey of life. What better way to honor Jesus’ memory, teaching, and example on this Palm Sunday than by attempting for once to practice what we preach?

May we all strive to practice radical hospitality in our lives, always reaching out toward the other, even toward the difficult other, with as much love and acceptance as we can muster, and may we find ourselves growing into those better and more generous people I know that we long to be. That is my hope for all of us, on this day, and in the days to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock