THE HOSPITALITY OF STRANGERS

A meditation by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk

Harundale Presbyterian Church

Glen Burnie, Maryland

July 6, 2003

Text: “Wherever you enter a house, stay there.”(Mark 6:10)

First Reading: Psalm 48

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

This past week I did a service for a 61 year-old gentleman who was born with severe brain damage. He never spoke. He loved pictures and would spend his days looking in magazines and watching television. But he loved everyone he met. He was especially in love with his two great nieces and just lit up with the biggest smile whenever they entered the room. They would sit on his lap, look at magazines with him, and play all kinds of games with him, especially kid’s games, which he really enjoyed.

During the service, I mentioned all these things, but then went on to say how God occasionally sends someone into our life who’s completely different than we are, so much so that we can’t ignore them. So often in life we meet people who are just like we are and it’s so easy to judge them either better than we are or somehow not worth our time. We do it all the time. We’re constantly comparing ourselves with other people. Either we have more money than they do, better social standing; we live in a nicer house, drive a better car, earn more money than they do, or we’re envious of them because they seem to have it so much better than we do.

However, now and then God introduces us to a person who is so completely different then we are. Maybe they’re so different that they can’t be a threat to us, but also neither can we ignore them. It’s as though God sends us one of God’s angels just as a reminder that we shouldn’t puff ourselves up the way we do. We shouldn’t be about the business of judging everyone we meet according to our standards. That now and then God sends us a reminder that we are to love all of God’s creatures regardless of their status, their prestige, what they own or don’t own and their social standing.

W.D., the person whose service I had this past week, was one of those people. Here was a person completely devoid of all those characteristics. There was no way any comparison would fit. He was mentally retarded, completely dependent on his mother until she died and then lived with his sister until he died. And yet, everyone who met him fell in love with him and he returned that love tenfold and even a hundredfold. Especially the younger children loved him. Even though he couldn’t speak, the smile on his face, and the light in his eyes told them how much he loved them.

Mark’s text this morning is about strangers. You’d think that Jesus’ return to his own country would have been a victory celebration. He’s just come off a journey where he healed the woman with the twelve-year-old hemorrhage. Jairus, the president of the temple, respected his powers and pleaded with him to save his daughter, which he did. His fame must have spread about the countryside and now he was back home and yet his own people didn’t accept him. It was like he was a stranger amongst them. We’re told how he marveled at their disbelief and was unable to perform any acts of healing except a few minor cases, when he laid his hands upon a few sick people. And then comes the famous line, “Prophets are not without honor except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”

Many of us have experienced the same sort of thing in our own lives. The joke is that we can go fifteen miles from home and are respected as a leader in our chosen profession, while back at home we can teach or say the same thing and get no respect at all. But the point Mark is making is not that Jesus’ own people consider him strange, but that what they think doesn’t stop him from performing what he considers to be God’s calling. Mark tells us how he goes right on journeying from village to village teaching and performing his acts of healing.

Nowadays the church has fallen into the dangerous position of having to be politically correct in all that it says and does. If somehow someone takes offense at some position the church takes or considers the church to be out of line with the prevailing opinion the church cowers, backs down, or is threatened with decreasing support and lack of funding. Inevitably either the church backs down or ends up entangled in endless debate, which ultimately saps its energy and renders it unable or unwilling to be about the prophetic, teaching and healing task God calls it to be. It’s time the church got on with the task of being God’s stranger in the midst of the culture and showing God’s love and prophetic ministry in spite of what people think.

With that said Mark then tell us how Jesus instructs the disciples on how they’re to perform their tasks. They’re not to burden themselves with unnecessary baggage, but rather they’re to live off the hospitality of strangers. If someone doesn’t accept their teaching or healing ministry they’re to move on. In other words they’re not to sap their strength worrying about those who disregard them, but rather save their energy where it will do some good.

Which, again, points us in the direction of where the church ought to be today, not worrying about what it isn’t going to be but rather putting its energy into what and where God’s calling us to be. The church is not only called to be God’s stranger in the midst of the culture; it’s also called to concentrate its ministry amongst the hospitality of strangers in our midst. Who are they? They’re the homeless we feed on Mondays and Thursdays, those we give food to on Tuesdays, those we build homes for with Habitat for Humanity, those who bring their children to be baptized even though we’ll probably never see them again, the strangers who worship with us on an occasional Sunday.

Doing the service for the 61 year-old man who had nothing to show for his life other than the unconditional love he gave to everyone he met was a gift from God. In spite of his infirmities, in spite of his inability to perform any kind of productive work according to cultural standards, in spite of his absolute dependence on other people for the basic necessities of care, in spite of everything that seemed negative in his life, all he had to do was smile and all those negatives vanished. Here was a child of God who so disarmed the world that it took small children to know just how much he loved them. We need more of those kinds of strangers in our lives and we need to be that kind of stranger in the lives of others. Then, like Jesus and his disciples, two by two, we’ll get on with the task of doing the work God has called us to do.

Thanks be to God,

Amen