How to be an (Un)kind Christian ~ Hebrews 13:1-3

Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. ² Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. ³ Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. ~ Hebrews 13:1-3

The word is “inconceivable.” The movie? The popular 80s film, The Princess Bride. 

The context is a buffoonish trio of kidnappers (a giant, a swordsman, and a genius) who

 kidnap Princess Buttercup. As they flee with the princess in tow they find themselves 

unexpectedly pursued by a masked man. Have a look at a few clips:

Click here to watch a brief clip 

“You keep using that word,” Inigo Montoya says. “I do not think it means what you think it means.” That can happen a lot with words – twisted, forgotten, overused, underappreciated, altered, etc. I definitely believe that happens when we use the word “hospitality” and imagine white dollies, hotel lobbies, waiters or concierges, or perhaps a really good restaurant. This Lenten season we will be exploring the theme of hospitality and welcome and their meaning and mission in the Christian life. What does “hospitality” mean? What does it call us to do? What kind of word is it?

          1.    It’s a curious word.

Right off the bat, we must confront the oddity of the word in the Biblical context. The word in the New Testament is φιλοξενίας - a compound word meaning “love of strangers.” Its opposite actually maintains its Greek origins “xenophobia” – fear of strangers. And curiously, this love is not differentiated from the “Love of brother” (and sister) of vs. 1 that those in the church are to have for one another. The Greek construction illustrates this well with a noticeable parallelism that can be lost in our English translations: 

Ἡ φιλαδελφία                              μενέτω

Love of brother (and sister)   let it continue;

τῆς φιλοξενίας                             μὴ ἐπιλανθάνεσθε

love of stranger [hospitality]         do not forget. 

Hospitality, according to the writer of Hebrews isn’t only hanging out with friends (philadelphia) but also loving strangers in the same way. Vs. 3 tells us that this means being led to places you don’t want to go, like prison, or to experiences you’d rather not want to learn about, like torture. For Christians, brothers & sisters, strangers & prisoners, the tortured, are all part and parcel of the same group.

So “hospitality” is a strange word and an odd practice. It demands a certain curiosity and inquisitiveness, a willingness to empathize that requires investigation and commitment. It reflects a love that explores and inspects. It’s a missional word that should have you on the move finding out about people and their plight. If we are going to offer a welcome well, we will need to develop a curious empathy. An ability to remember or explore people’s pain – the prisoner and the tortured. The problem is that many of us have chosen to be careful rather than curious. We’ve decided to be safe rather than adventurous. We’ve determined to erect walls rather than offer an embrace. And yet Hebrews and other texts remind us that we need to be on the lookout because God and angels are wild and show up in different disguises and in unlikely places. In the slightly irreverent book, God got a dog, Cynthia Rylant plays with this concept of God’s

incarnational presence in the form of the stranger. In the book, God appears as a little black girl in a boat, an Asian man who opens a nail salon, or shows up in a tattooed “guy disguise.” The book, however, captures an important point for practitioners of Biblical hospitality: angels and the divine are curious and show up in unlikely guises and curious places.

Now, I’m not saying that boundaries aren’t important or that all strangers are good. I’m here to tell you, however, that

if firm boundaries are where you wish to begin you will never be hospitable in a Christian way because boundaries block curiosity. If you want to be safe you will rarely meet any angels. You will meet them only if you’re curious.

So we’re going to have tear down some walls. Yet, the prisons we build are more than physical. The bars that often separate us begin as psychological realities constructed by an uncomfortableness that tempts us to narrow our attention and affections to a smaller group of people. Curiously, that’s why we must understand that Biblical hospitality is more than curious, it’s also “unkind”.

          2.    It’s an unkind word.

What’s the very first thing you think of when you arrive at a gathering? I suspect that most of us would say, “Are my friends here?” That’s the question we recognize automatically and unconsciously whenever we arrive at some event or party. It’s the question we ask when we walk into church or as we scan the stands at our kid’s soccer game. The psychologist Richard Beck says that this is the number-one problem with extending hospitality and the number one reason why we don’t do it the way the writer of Hebrews says we should. I’m not saying you’re a bad person when you look first for your friends. It’s normal and natural but there is an inherent danger. What do I mean?

To describe how people are carved up into different groups: us vs. them, friend, vs. foe, family vs. stranger, the ethicist

Peter Singer uses an idea he calls “the moral circle.” A moral circle is created by a simple two-step process. First, we identity our tribe. We make a distinction between people. We locate and label our family, friends, BFFs, and peeps. Everyone in this group is inside my moral circle. Everyone else is a stranger. So that’s step one: make a distinction between friend and stranger, between insider and outsider. The second step is this: extend kindness only toward those on the inside of your moral circle. The roots of the word “kindness” are important: kin and kind. Kindness becomes affection reserved only for my kin and those people who are the same kind of people as me.

But we have already seen that we are challenged to love strangers as brothers and sisters. To do that will demand more than warm feelings. It means standing against a narrowing of our affections. Here’s the deal about that stranger. That person is created by God and somebody’s friend, somebody’s sister, someone’s daughter. That person is inside someone’s moral circle. Somebody loves her – even if we don’t. This is why looking for our friends is the number-one problem we face in extending gospel welcome. When we look for and only notice our friends, we reduce the territory of our kindness. And it doesn’t take many moves to from there to dehumanize others, to make them “less than human.”

People are rarely tortured – “less-than-people” are tortured. Brothers aren’t enslaved – “not-quite-brothers” are enslaved. How do you know if you are heading down the road of dehumanization? You know if you lessen someone’s humanity or refer to them in the 3^rd person plural. But this is more than a humanitarian concern. It’s also a gospel one. In

our other reading from Galatians 2 we find Peter wanting to differentiate and remove himself from people who were not like him for religious reasons. This receives a firm rebuke from the Apostle Paul, who understands that when our moral circle closes, the gospel is at stake. The gospel is an unkind welcome. But hospitality is more than simply a curious and unkind word.

          3.    It’s an ignorant word.

It’s interesting to realize, according to our passage, that one may never know they if they’ve welcomed an angel or not – why might that matter? Shall we play “Find the angel!”?

Look at this picture, can you spot the angel? 

No? That’s because there is no pattern to consider, nothing to look for, you can’t pick ahead of time – male or female, adult or child, black or white, wings, no wings, quiet, rude, rowdy, tattooed, or imprisoned. Truly gracious hospitality demands a self-conscious “not knowing,” an acknowledged ignorance.

An open invitation to the strangers is very difficult to accept for people whose whole attitude is toward mastering and controlling the world. We want to plan the party, pick the right people, and steer the conversation. To hospitably “not know,” to truly welcome the secret angels among us, is to allow the guest to speak on her own, to listen to the voice of God in the words of others, in the life experiences of men and women from other places. To entertain angels is to realize that we never know where God might strike, who God might use, what gift they might bring. Our task then is not to find the angel or make someone an angel but to realize that we might never know.

Our hospitality is not to convert bad people into good people but to create gracious space where we as the body of Christ continues Jesus’ ministry of dining with strangers who turn into brothers and sisters, welcoming enemies who become friends, so that they are known. Jesus is the one who converts. My wife taught me a great question when I’m confronted by the stranger or the person who acts strangely – “What don’t I know?”

So the best hospitality, the most proper posture, is not to confront others with prefab answers but to ask questions because you understand that there is much you don’t know.  One of the original meanings of “entertain” was to hold something lightly, ponder it carefully, give consideration. What or who do you need to entertain this Lenten season?