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Being Hospitable to God

16th Sunday : 21 July2013  : Genesis 18: 1-10 , Colossians 1: 24-28 , Luke 10: 38-42

When I lived in Britain a friend explained to me how she managed to have cheap holidays in Poland. She booked herself into Convents along her travel routes where she could stay in the guesthouse and would only be expected to make a donation on departing. Most monastic communities after all have a policy of hospitality to strangers.

Indeed, hospitality is a Christian virtue that applies right across the denominational spectrum. A parishioner who came from a Brethren background once told me that if you turned up as a visitor at a Sunday Brethren worship assembly you would be highly likely to receive a lunch invitation from people you had never met.

As you walk into the Vicarage the first picture you see on the wall is a large icon of three angels sitting around a table. It is a copy of a famous icon of the Trinity. The icon painter Andrei Rublev had a problem in choosing an image to depict the inner life of the Trinity, since no one has ever seen them when they are, as it were, at home. So he picked a Scriptural subject drawn from this morning’s first reading, the visit of the three angels to Abraham. Without realising it, since he had no theological knowledge of the Trinity, Abraham was entertaining God himself. Yet he intuitively knew that his visitors were spiritual VIP’s, and so he really laid on the hospitality providing a scratch meal to the highest quality he could manage. And so as they leave the visitors leave behind the blessing of the promise of new life growing in the womb of Sarah his wife. Given her age this seems like something of a biological impossibility, but in a way this is a harbinger of future possibilities of a different sort of new life for all of us.

Mary and Martha are also entertaining a Divine guest who they know rather better, although the full significance of who and what he is will not become apparent until several hundred year of theological reflection have followed. Once again the red carpet is being rolled out, with two different kinds of hospitality being offered, that of attentive listening and of food preparation. Juggling the roles of entertaining the guests and of cooking the meal is always a challenge for any hostess, and it might be thought that these two have split the functions quite effectively. But what follows is an aggrieved appeal couched in worry language – "tell my sister to help me."

To understand what is going on here we need to understand that this domestic incident is paired up with last Sunday’s story about the Good Samaritan.

The Priest and the Levite who walked by on the other side of the road ignoring the obvious and urgent needs of the beaten up robbery victim had lost sight of a vital dimension of life with God – the need for love in action. Love needs to be a matter of deeds and not just words; it needs to express itself in practical action and assistance. A piety that is all prayer and worship, all contemplation and mysticism, without rolling up its sleeves to serve others obvious needs, has lost the plot. It is an unbalanced form of religious life.

This morning we see piety that has swung to the other extreme – that is so concerned with practical action, with the horizontal dimension of service of others, that it has lost sight of the importance of the vertical dimension of listening to God and of expressing heartfelt devotion to him. Mary has grasped hold of the transcendent aspect of religion. There is someone present in the house that is more important than the immediate need to get food on the table and the obligations of hospitality met. In fact attentive listening as disciple to master is the vital dimension of hospitality here.

And while Martha’s concern to do right by the guest appears to be common sense, it is in fact an example of becoming bogged down in the worries and cares of the world. Anxiety about what we shall eat and drink becomes a matter of critical comment by Jesus elsewhere in the gospel. That sense of inner peace that is always a hallmark of being truly in the presence of God, and of being in tune with his purposes, is more likely to flow from Mary’s response to this, "guess whose coming to dinner situation."

So it is a question of balance, of having both dimensions of a lively faith in creative tension that is under discussion here. Maybe we spend most of a lifetime trying to get the balance right, of trying to arrive at the intersection point of the vertical and the horizontal aspects of a healthy faith, but when we do a fuller and richer dimension of life with God opens up.

That is what Colossians was about this morning in its punch line text, "The mystery is this; Christ in you the hope of a glory to come." It is one of the best short hand summaries I know of the full depths of the Christian faith.

As our faith becomes a combination of love in action and of a heart on fire expressed in the devotion of worship and prayer then the life of God takes up residence inside us and we become reconnected to the resources of Divine life. The follow on consequence of Abraham’s hospitality shown towards the Divine visitors at the oaks of Mamre was that Sarah’s long deferred hopes of a child became realised. New life began to grow in her womb. Hope for the future in a true line of biological succession began to emerge.

This is a type of the new hope that grows in us as God looks at us with love, and compassion, and forgiveness, and expectation. We receive a new sense of identity from him bestowed as a gift, not out of a sense of reward or return for anything we did. God’s perspective on us is the fully realised dimension of our personality and character, as we will have become when the new heaven and earth comes. He sees who we are on the road to becoming. And the effect of Divine grace is to grow this sense of Christ like identity within us, to propel us towards the glory to come with all the energy that hope brings.

When we come to the aid of wounded strangers on the dangerous roads of this world, when we listen to Christ in our homes and in the house of God, then we offer him the hospitality that enables him to come and take up residence in us. These are means of being hospitable to God, and when that happens he is happy to come and stay with us and in us. A faith union is formed that lasts until we are ushered into the halls of eternity. There he will be our host forever. Here we trade in the things of this world and make him welcome by kindness shown to strangers, and by love and devotion directly expressed to him.