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2010 at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, our class was seeking a graduation speaker, and we decided to choose someone deeply connected to St. John’s who had gone out and done something big in the world. We zeroed in on Warren Winiarski, class of ’52 and founder of Stag’s Leap, the first California winery to beat out the French in a blind tasting.
You might expect someone successful like Warren Winiarski to have a lot of ego. He does not. He was very humble, and very humbled by our invitation to speak at our graduation.
You might also expect the founder of Stag’s Leap to talk a lot about wine. He did not. Instead he began by sharing a story he had heard. This story took us back to our beginning at St. John’s studying Homer. He told the story of a renowned translator, Robert Fitzgerald if memory serves, working on his translation of The Odyssey.
Fitzgerald was in Greece at the time, trying to get the ambiance and cadence of his translation just right. But he was struggling. He was going through a bit of ‘translator’s block’, if you will.
Now The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus trying to return home after the Trojan War, and the Greek goddess of Wisdom, Athena, is trying to help him. And it just so happened that one night Fitzgerald, in a difficult moment, received a knock on his door. When he opened it up, a woman stood there. She said to him, “My name’s Athena.”
After that, Fitzgerald got through his translation. The point of Warren Winiarski’s story, the wisdom he was trying to impart, is to be open for those unexpected moments that may come our way.
This is an appropriate sentiment for today when our two key stories, one from Genesis and the other from Matthew, involve hospitality. They involve being open and ready to let God in, if we will allow ourselves to do it.
In both stories, we also get an example of being inhospitable, or not letting God in. Now Abraham is a gracious host to his guests, three strangers that are highly implied to be God. In fact, there is a famous icon, the Hospitality of Abraham, depicting these strangers, which is often used as a symbol of the Trinity. Sarah too does all that would have been expected of her when it came to the rules of hospitality in that day and age. Yet when she hears the strangers talking and telling Abraham that she at 90 (the age for Sarah Abraham mentions in the chapter before our reading today) will give birth to a child being well past the years of childbirth, she laughs. Not only does she laugh, she denies having done so when God asks her about it.
There are times for all of us when we’ve laughed at God. There are times for all of us when we have said to God, “Impossible”, forgetting that all things are possible with our Lord. Our hope in these times is that we can be like Sarah, who later comes to accept her foolishness in laughing and is thankful and grateful to God for what the Lord has done for her.
After today’s reading with its encounter by Abraham with the three strangers, in the following verses God reveals God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, the place where Lot, Abraham’s nephew who we saw last week, is living. The chief sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is probably different from what you think or expect. It is what Jesus is referencing in the Gospel today. As Jesus refers to Sodom and Gomorrah when it comes to inhospitality, so too was this a place whose sin was xenophobia and a lack of care for its neighbor. We see this later in Genesis with their interaction with Lot. For this reason, Sodom and Gomorrah is destroyed, though not before God saves Lot and his family for Abraham’s sake.
Jesus refers to inhospitality in the Gospel because it is the main issue His Disciples will face as He sends them out just after our reading from Matthew last week. These events take place just after the Sermon on the Mount, so they are meant to be early in Jesus’ ministry. Like with Abraham’s story with the strangers, the Disciples’ travels and the hospitality related to their journey is really about letting God in.
When the Disciples are rejected by others, it is not really them that are being rejected. The one being rejected is God, for as Jesus tells them, even the words that the Disciples speak are really coming from the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit they received a full portion of later on Pentecost, which we celebrated 3 weeks ago.
When God approaches us, will we be ready? Will we have the courage to let God in? There are some who will, and it will be well for them. The peace of God will rest on them, as Jesus tells us. Yet for those who are inhospitable, there will be dire consequences, as Jesus says.
We should also note that at this point the Disciples are just going out to the towns of Israel. It is not till the end of Matthew that Jesus will send them out to the rest of the world, even to the Gentiles. Our modern equivalent would be if the Disciples were coming out to just speak to the church today.
Jesus, in sending the Disciples to receive hospitality just from Israel, anticipates resistance. Jesus anticipates not all of God’s People will listen. The same is true for us. Not all our churches will listen. Not all will be hospitable to receiving God’s messengers. Not all in the church, even though we are supposed to, will take in what our Lord has to say.
Yet there is hope too. If we can just realize our foolishness, as Sarah did, we can move on to carry out God’s will. If, like Sarah, we can take the time to realize where we went wrong, then God will take us back in. If we can learn to follow the examples of those who came before us, like Paul who once persecuted the church, then we can enter back into the fold and receive the same hospitality we were once unwilling to provide to our Lord God.
In Paul’s words today, it is rare that one of us will die even for a righteous person. Yet God in our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to die for all of us, even though we don’t deserve His Sacrifice. That’s the level of hospitality God was willing to show us. We are called to go out and do the same.
Like Fitzgerald with Athena, we never know when to expect God to come under our roof. We need, therefore, to be ready. We need to be ready to accept God and God’s works into our hearts and lives, and within our walls even. We need to be ready to go out and do God’s work. We need to be ready to accept God’s gift of Grace in our hearts, even though we don’t deserve it.