Jeremiah 38:4-10
Psalm 40:2-4
Hebrews 12:1-4
Luke 12:49-53
Taken together, our readings form a meditation on hospitality. This may surprise you, for Jeremiah is dropped into a pit to die. The Psalmist cries out that he sinks into mud. And Jesus promises that He will shatter the peace of even family and household. Yet, it is hospitality that is the golden thread that ties these readings together. True hospitality, not the fleeting hospitality that obliges upon dutiful people.
We at the Hermitage should read carefully today. What religious community does not hold hospitality to be a primary charism of the house? What should our hospitality be like? Should it consist in the abundant provision of food and drink? Should it engender a party mood? What sort of lodgings should we provide for our guests? What do we hope the result of our ministrations might be in the hearts and souls of those who receive it? No matter what we do, we inevitably point our guests in a certain direction with our every word and action. A certain spiritual atmosphere and temperature arise from our, or any, hospitality.
Our readings today specifically reflect on the offer (or withholding) of worldly hospitality and what we perceive Heaven's perspective might be. Jeremiah seems to be offered a hospitality turned upside down. He is received by the authority figures of his city. Instead of the comfort of a host's hearth and home, however, he is consigned to a cistern, a stone-lined pit. Instead of earthenware bowls of water with which to wash his feet and hands, he is offered mud. And rather than the presentation of food to revive and sustain his body and soul, he is given over to starvation. Jeremiah is received by the "upper class" of his community, and his own personal dossier would reveal credentials still more aristocratic: he is God's Own representative in this place.
This scene is reminiscent of the pit into which the High Priest's servants lowered the bleeding Jesus after he was flogged to within an inch of his life. I know there are those here present who visited the courtyard of Caiaphas and who went down into this pit outside Caiaphas' sumptuous quarters. It is a very deep, very dark place. It is splattered with what seems to be indelible stains of blood. Here our Lord Jesus shivered suffering from shock, having lost much of his blood and being exposed to the cold and left to die. Just outside the pit were the well-appointed quarters of the Saducees' most prestigious figure, the High Priest.
The Sadducees were the aristocratic class of first-century Jerusalem. We may be sure that they were well practiced in hospitality (always an imperative in the Middle East) and zealous to display their magnanimity as men of high degree are pleased to present their pedigrees at a dinner party with the display of their beautiful manners. Our subject here is the hospitality of great households, calling to mind in our own experience the once-a-year parties held on Christmas Eve, visiting a succession of homes where it rained food and drink, being invited to warm yourself with holiday spirits near the great fire .... though perhaps not near to a crib where a homeless child lay shivering midst the odor of ox and donkey manure. And just outside the High Priest's household lay the Lord of Life. His social-religious class might busily prepare for the arrival of a king, but not of God's Son.
Hospitality is the central virtue of the family, the animating spirit of the home. Yet, Heaven seems to have given us a word that inducts us into a mystery, a mystery that is vividly exemplified in the pit of Jeremiah or of Jesus. The root hospes points to a host who might invite people into his home, from which we get our words hospitality, hospice, hotel. Yet, it is also the root of our words hostile and host in the sense of an invading force. How could this be? Apparently, it came about with the corruption of the Latin hospes to hostis, meaning stranger, suggesting that hospitality itself is an anxious word and unsteady as a crowd's mentality on Palm Sunday. The stranger (hostis) is lodged at a hostelry, where an innkeeper knows not who he is hosting (or Who he refuses to host). This split-personality verb seems inevitable when we consider human nature such as it is. Inescapably, this is the character of the world's hospitality and the history of families who offer it in fits and starts, writing people onto guest lists and then crossing them out.
With Jeremiah and then later with Jesus, worldly hospitality makes a choice. It will throw open its doors to receive the impossibly outsized royalty of God and of His legates and ambassadors, or it will snub, even kill, them. The choice is far easier for us thousands of years later who realize that the mud of these pits are in fact engraved invitations issued from Father God Himself to attend a Heavenly banquet, .... which necessarily oblige us to refuse the vanities and overwrought appointments of the world's fashionable salons. And this is the world that the Lord Jesus would set ablaze: pitting father against son, mother against daughter, and in-laws set against each other. This unsteady world with its false welcome and fickle hosts is to be burned to the ground that we might more clearly see the light of Heaven calling us to a home that will not fail.
You know of my love of ancient languages and literatures, so I pray you will indulge me in dusting off a venerable tome this morning, an episode of Gunsmoke. It is the tale of a man and woman who build up a home and a barn and outbuildings that might stand forever as a symbol of their enduring love and, by extension, a sign of the goodness of their world and community. They minister to the people around them, so it is not surprising that the farmer should deliver food to a local "widder woman and her boy" and to offer him work. The young widow begins to learn how wealthy this old man is and begins to shower him with attention. Before very long, he has an announcement to make to his wife: he has fallen in love and wants a divorce. She reasons with him that the woman he wants to marry does not want him but rather their farm, but in his vanity he cannot believe this. He goes forward making his plans for a new and happier future.
When the farmer drives his new bride-to-be home, they arrive to find that the farmer's wife has burned down the house, the barn, and all the outbuildings. She stands by to offer her hospitality, acknowledging that there is little to share. Predictably, the affianced widow flies into a rage and heads home, warning the farmer not to darken her door with his unwanted presence. He is stunned, seeing no longer through a glass darkly but face-to-face, and deeply ashamed of himself. Meantime, his wife has turned to her iron stove, which the flames have not consumed, and busily commences to prepare whatever supper she can for them. He sits in a chair in a field. For the first time, he is able to understand true hospitality, real and enduring love, without any distraction of worldly clutter. He now grasps his wife's love for him in a pure light, free of any self-interest, which never before had been possible. "But, you helped to create all this," he stammers. "Yet, you burnt it all to the ground." She replies, "I would burn down my whole world in order not to lose your love."
We might be shocked to read that Jesus, the Eternal Word, the instrument of Creation, would consign our families to division and dissolution ... and that He would throw the world He has made into an all-consuming fire. How many mothers shepherd their families through church doors every Sunday believing that the purpose of religion is to help them raise their families? And yet long experience in this broken world of ours, and of countless families, teaches us a hard lesson: the only truly dependable love, the only hospitality that can and will comfort and sustain us without stumbling, is the never-fading love of God. And from the bottom of a pit, we are able to grasp God's pure and steady love. God does not depend upon our families and their ill-fated attempts to sustain magnanimity. No. That will not do. Indeed, He would burn down His whole world not to lose our love. He would free us of the worldly clutter that distracts us from Him, and He would put out every light in the world that we might not miss the unquenchable candles that burn brightly in the windows of the home to which He calls us.
When guests arrive to the Hermitage, we pray that they will see what we are trying to do:
to filter out the unheavenly and unwholesome from our daily lives;
to draw a circle on earth that looks up to Heaven;
to make a place where the Holy Spirit might dwell with comfort and ease.
that we might discern His teaching and leading.
Finally, we aspire
to offer hospitality,
a hospitality that seeks to breathe Heaven's air and to drink from Heaven's springs,
and to welcome all who would share these with us.
"Sir, give us this water that we might not thrist!"