Hospitality 2010
Luke 11:5-8
The NRSV follows Luke’s apparent intention and puts under the heading
of “The Lord’s Prayer” Luke’s
anecdote of the friend at midnight along with the “Ask, seek, knock”
and “Good gifts” aphorisms. Conventionally, these passages have
been considered to be a treatise on prayer. If you pray as Jesus
did, God will provide, just as you would if your next-door neighbor
came to you to borrow a cup of sugar at some inconvenient time.
You might resent the timing, but you would nevertheless provide the
sugar out of pious duty. If you pray as Jesus did, God will
answer, just as you would if your own child asked for an egg. You
would not substitute a scorpion.
But suppose this series of sayings was not a related sequence at
all? Taken as an independent quotation, out of Luke’s context, we
can readily see that the “friend at midnight” was not about how God
answers prayer; it was about hospitality. The 21st Century world
has largely forgotten that “hospitality” was a matter of life and death
to 1st Century people. Welcoming the stranger into your tribal
enclave for a night, or until the stand storm ended was a matter of
honor on both sides. The host asked no questions about whether
the stranger was an innocent traveler or a fugitive from law. The
guest did not rob or otherwise violate the sanctity of the host.
This code assured some degree of safety for everyone in a dangerous
world.
In addition, 1st Century Palestine was an “honor/shame” culture.
In Luke’s story, the host taken by surprise by unexpected guests may
have run the risk of “shame” for not being able to properly care for
them, but far more likely is the “shame” the sleepy neighbor would have
experienced if he had not responded. He and his family would have
been socially ostracized. The Jesus Seminar scholars
point out that the original Greek that Luke used in the last sentence
of the story can be translated either as “you will get up and give the
other whatever is needed because
you’d be ashamed not to;” or “because the other is not ashamed to ask.”
(The Five Gospels,
p. 327-328). The surprised neighbor is not ashamed to ask for
help in supplying hospitality to the unexpected guests.
We cannot know why Luke did what he did with this snippet of oral
tradition. It seems to fit better with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke
interprets the parable in terms of the law that says “love your
neighbor as yourself.” A discussion about the unexpected need to
help a neighbor seems to be a further illustration of the reliance of
neighbors upon one another. The Good Samaritan unexpectedly
extends hospitality beyond what a reluctant neighbor might be shamed
into offering.
Citizens of these United States pride ourselves on the fact that we can
rely on our neighbors for help in time of need. In fact, we are
so proud of that fact that 20% of us think the government
should have nothing to do with providing disaster relief , health care,
education, or social security. But as the people of New Orleans
and the Gulf Coast learned after Hurricane Katrina, relying on our
neighbors is nothing more than a romantic notion. The hurricane
happened in 2005. Assistance in recovery was not forthcoming from
the federal government. Five years later, volunteer efforts on
the part of corporations and non-profits have not been able to complete
the task.
But what best illustrates the 21st Century failure to live up to
Jesus’s 1st Century expectation of hospitality in Luke 11:5-9 is our
treatment of immigrants – specifically, people who risk their lives to
cross the Mexico-U.S. border. Our friends on the Christian Right
insist that we are a Christian nation, yet we offer travelers nothing
and lock our doors against them. We refuse to allow them food,
clothing, shelter, education, and medical care. Even when the
worst of humanitarian violations force the disintegration of
“undocumented” immigrant families, we are unashamed.
The Elves who put together the Revised Common Lectionary do not
get to Luke’s series on prayer until late July this year (Proper 12, Year C). The
tradition has followed Luke’s lead and ignored the more likely (and
troublesome) subject of hospitality. The accompanying Old
Testament RCL readings are Hosea 1:2-10 and
Genesis 18:20-32. The
prophet Hosea is condemning the land and people of Israel for forsaking
God. The story in Genesis is the preamble to the story of the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both readings support the idea
of God’s judgment and God’s answer to persistent prayer. When God
threatens to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham convinces God to spare
the cities for the sake of 10 righteous men. What is never read
if the Revised Common Lectionary is
followed is Genesis 19:1-29. But it is
the full story of what happened to Lot in Sodom that goes to the heart
of Jesus’s teaching about the friend at midnight.
The two angels sent by God to search out 10 righteous men arrive in
Sodom in the evening. Lot sees them, and greets them with
respect, and invites them into his house to wash their feet and spend
the night. The angels decline, saying they will be fine spending
the night in the village square. But Lot insists. They come
into his house, and Lot prepares a feast. But then, before they
retire for the night, the men of the city surround Lot’s house and
demand that he throw the guests out so that the men can “know
them.” The intent of the village men is clear. When Lot
reminds them that the visitors have “come under the shelter of my roof”
and offers them his daughters instead, the men of the village are
outraged. But they are not outraged because of the offer of the
daughters. That is a historical-cultural artifact that turns the
story into a feminist “text of terror,” and can easily distract 21st
century minds from the point. The men of Sodom are outraged
because “this fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the
judge!” In other words, the immigrant has the nerve to shame the
citizens for their failure to offer safe haven to the strangers.
(If this were an academic paper, the next comment would be in a
footnote: One has to wonder how the story of the destruction of
Sodom became so well known, given that the Elves have skipped it
altogether for purposes of Sunday morning preaching at least as long as
the Common Lectionary has been in use. Surely such a story of
violence and unexplained custom is hardly suitable for children's
Sunday School lessons.)
The ancient rule of hospitality was broken at the risk not only of
shame, but of one’s own future security. In a world dependent
upon the most primitive of communications, once the word was out that
your tribal lands or your household did not honor the rule, you could
find yourself denied assistance or shelter. The angels warn Lot
that because of this sin – this failure of the men of Sodom to follow
the most basic rule for human survival – God is going to destroy the
city. Lot had better leave with the angels and bring along
sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone else that belongs to him.
Post-modern minds have drifted away from hospitality as an expression
of distributive justice-compassion, where the stranger is given shelter
– even feasted and entertained – for a night, with no questions
asked. The post-modern form of the failure to honor the rule of
hospitality plays out on a daily basis along the United States/Mexico
border. It can also be clearly seen in the wall the Israelis
constructed along the West Bank of the Jordan.
The ancient rule of hospitality still stands. God’s judgment – or
the consequences for acting unjustly – does not apply only to people
perceived as enemies. Throughout the Bible, God is just as likely
to favor the enemy and condemn God’s own people because God cares only
about justice-compassion. See,
e.g., The Healing of Naaman, 2 Kings 5. We
rightly reject the idea that God’s judgment for violating hospitality
or ignoring God’s demand for justice takes the form of volcanos,
hurricanes, or plagues. But we are mistaken if we think there is
no judgment. God’s judgment in a post-modern world is expressed
in political and environmental consequences. Politically, we now
have the so-called Arizona “papers” law, which requires that Hispanics
in Arizona now must carry proof of U.S. citizenship at all times or run
the risk of arrest and deportation. Some may think that is no
problem for citizens with blue eyes and blond hair. The
implications of such naivety for human rights should be clear.
Environmentally, adding insult to injury in the Gulf of Mexico, now
comes the mother of all oil leaks whose magnitude defies
description. Again, government assistance is nowhere to be found;
corporations are pointing fingers at one another; and class-action
trial lawyers are on the prowl as BP offers pre-emptive $5,000
settlements to devastated families and businesses. Apparently all
we can muster for our neighbors are internet campaigns to collect used pantyhose and dog hair.
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