Thank you for all the good wishes and prayers as I travelled to Utica last weekend for graduation ceremonies. I have been pursuing classes for three years now, completely online through the State University of New York. It felt very odd to visit a college that I had never seen before and arrive there only for graduation. There was a final exam, an awards dinner and some old friends living Upstate were there to participate. And it the middle of all of that, my cell phone rang.
My cell phone is smart. Most of you are in it, so if you call me, your name immediately comes up on the screen. I know its you. But when the phone has no idea, it just gives the other phone number and you have to guess. So this call was not from any of my friends with good wishes, it was one of those other phone calls. I did what any true child of the 21st century would do on their graduation weekend, I blocked the call. I drew a circle for the weekend to shut out the stranger.
In the scriptures today, God has a lot to say about the measure of our faith being how we treat strangers. While Philadelphia is called the City of Brotherly Love and Los Angeles is City of the Angels, New York is a little less friendly as the city that never sleeps.
The scripture today is about hospitality. Your beliefs about hospitality will start as soon as the service is over. Who do you go out of your way to greet? Who do you choose to spend time with after the service? It will guide your actions during the week and how you try to share your faith in God with others who need faith. And in the end, your beliefs about hospitality affect your own happiness. Some of the best friends I ever met were met by accident, sitting near someone and saying hello. I pray that the scripture today helps each of us to make our circle of friendship larger.
The apostles are surprised that Gentiles and foreigners shown unmistakable signs of God’s blessing. They simply never understood the message of salvation. God’s plan was always to reconcile everything to God. That is the great salvation plan. It has simply taken two forms. In the first, God’s people as found in the Jewish community were to draw the nations to see them as blessed, living by God’s grace with justice and peace. It was a centripetal plan to draw nations to the center at Jerusalem. God intentionally placed them geographically in a vulnerable part of the world on a major trade route with no defenses. God would be their shield. Of course, this plan never was implemented.
Now, God has changed the plan to be a centrifugal plan – to send God’s people out as ambassadors, and the apostles are willing but surprised. Their inborn distrust of foreigners was so strong, but its thrilling to see that they accepted the signs of God’s favor in the speaking in tongues. Was this a language such as many of us could produce today or a tongue that has no human counterpart? I really don’t care and I don’t think the passage tells us. Somehow, the foreigners used their mouths to offer praise in convincing ways. I tend to think that the tongue was simply their home language.
I have had the responsibility to visit several people in the last moments of life. Something I have noticed is that at such times, many of us speak in the language we learned as children. No matter how many languages we learn, the one that seems most genuine to most people is the language of childhood.
New Yorkers will understand the suspicion of strangers that was common in ancient times. Strangers who were traveling in a new region did not always find a hospitable reception in antiquity. Furthermore, many townspeople saw mysterious strangers as threats and therefore sought to shun, abuse, or eliminate these outsiders before they could harm the community. Recall, for instance, how the men of Sodom (Genesis 19:1-11) and the men of Gibeah (Judges 19:14-26) wanted to take advantage of strangers and selfishly abuse them in violent ways. Violence and sexual rape could give a town a reputation that would keep armed gangs from wandering in and creating trouble.
Other towns on trade routes were more welcoming because they feared that the stranger was an advance guard of a great army just a short march away. It was thought that a host’s abundant generosity might neutralize the potential threat while cultivating the stranger’s favor. Remember, for example, the story of Joshua’s “spies” being hosted by Rahab in Joshua 2:1-21 and 6:22-25). As a result, the leading citizens of a community often bore the primary responsibility for hosting strangers.
One of the most challenging verses for our time is Hebrews 13:1 “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it”
As a nation, we are going through a dark moment in the topic of hospitality. We have become known as the nation who tortures. Of course, torture is more common around the world than we would hope, but there was a special expectation that the American people had a higher standard. Even worse, we actively have spoken one message while doing exactly what we pretended to detest. “ I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.” President George W Bush, June 26, 2003 as part of many remarks in his address on United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
Your success as a Christian in New York will be determined more by your hospitality than by your creed. It is that ability to wonder if an angel has visited you unawares as happened to Abraham or Lot in Genesis. Are those events only stories of antiquity and God does not use angels in this virtual society? I would ask further what your relationships are online with people who may never come to church, but may be touched by your life. I have perhaps a dozen relationships around the world with people I have never met as we move into this century of new forms of communication.
We have our usual ways of categorizing people the way the world offers. This one is White. This one is Brown. This one is too old. This one is sick. This one has an accent. That one is gay. That one is too young. We should be looking for the face of Christ.
I saw one motto online for a laundry in New York that might be good for our church. "When you come here you are happy. When you leave here you are satisfied." And oh, remember that I started this sermon with a phone call? The guy was calling from an unknown number and I didn’t want strangers around on my graduation day? On Friday, I was at the doctor to get a medical report. Some of you have kindly been praying over the last two months as I had some medical tests. I saw the doctor on Friday and he said, Your tests came back and I had great news. You don’t have cancer and I wanted you to know early. I tried to call you last weekend but the call was blocked.
