“Entertaining Angels Unawares”
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14
September 1, 2013 [Jacksonville]
On July 6, 1942, Huey R. Lee, Jr. was arrested and confined in
jail in Barbour County, Alabama, and charged with murder in the first
degree for the slaying of his father. Word has it that, at an earlier
time, Lee, Jr. was a passenger in a vehicle driven by his drunken
father and lost a leg when the father wrecked the vehicle. The two
later got into a heated argument and Lee, Jr., knocked his father
down a flight of stairs and killed him. After he was examined by a
panel of psychiatrists at Bryce Hospital and found to be “insane now
and at the time of the killing” his case came to trial in October of
1943, and he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
It was some 30+ years later, when I was pastor of the
Presbyterian Church in Atmore, Alabama, that my path crossed with
Huey Lee’s. I received a letter with the return address being Fountain
Correctional Center – not a very pleasant place. In very fine, precise
writing, he invited me to visit him, and I did. I guess being confined
for thirty years mellows a person, and by this time he was a trustee
living outside of the general population of the prison. I visited. We
talked. He asked if we Presbyterians still used the Apostles’ Creed.
He recited it by heart. Short visits turned into longer ones as I would
check him out of prison on Sunday mornings and return him later in
the day. He would go to church with us. Church folk really didn’t like
that. He would sit at table with us. He would play with the kids. Mark
would play with his crutch. He would read to them, and I don’t think
he ever read the children’s book Don’t Talk to Strangers. We found
nothing about him to be violent, delusional or paranoid. He was a
plain, humble, gentle, caring man.
Jesus once said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
I was in prison, and you visited me.” In visiting Huey Lee, in
welcoming him into our home, could we have been “entertaining
angels without knowing it,” or “unawares” as the old Revised
Standard Version has it?
-2-
In the book of Hebrews the preacher is concluding his sermon.
To this point, the preacher has been speaking of a lofty, deep
“Christology,” or personhood and work of Jesus Christ. Now the
preacher gets down to the nitty-gritty of doing ministry in Jesus’
name. “Let mutual love continue,” says the preacher. “Do not
neglect to show hospitality to strangers. Remember those in prison
as though you were in prison with them, and those who are being
tortured as though you yourselves were being tortured.” Wow.
Dangerous, radical stuff here. It’s been a long time since I invited a
stranger into our home. With the reality of sexual predators, how do
we teach our children to still be hospitable to strangers? Have you
ever visited a prison? The clang of that cellblock door is the worst
sound I’ve ever heard. How often do we really give a second thought
to the tortured ones held at Guantanamo Bay?
The preacher then connects the injunction to showing
hospitality with a story deep in the book of Genesis, the story of
Abraham and Sarah showing hospitality to strangers by the oaks of
Mamre, strangers who turn out to be emissaries [or angels] from God
with news so unbelievably good that Sarah can only laugh [Genesis
18]. Sometimes, when we think we’re just being nice to strangers,
receiving guests, practicing hospitality, sometimes we receive God.
We catch a sight of receiving God in our gospel lesson today, in
this little story about God’s table manners. Luke has Jesus going to
the house of a Pharisee for dinner. This is a clue that we are about to
encounter conflict, considering all the occasions where Jesus locks
horns with the Pharisees. Our anticipation of the conflict is not
disappointed, for Jesus becomes a rude guest who has the gall to
challenge his host and his guest list for dinner.
After Jesus heals a man of his dropsy, he notes the oneupmanship of the guests at the table and then tells the host who
should really be invited to the dinner. The social convention of the
time has the best seats reserved for the privileged of society, but
Jesus is about to turn that convention upside down. For in a parable
-3Jesus tells the guests that they should not seek the places of honor at
the feast, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those
who humble themselves will be exalted.” Note that Jesus speaks in
the passive here. That is, they will be humbled and they will be
exalted by someone else, and surely the implication is that the
humbling and exaltation will be done by God. It is God who lifts up
the lowly and brings down the mighty, as we heard at the beginning
of Luke’s gospel in Mary’s “Magnificat.” The important thing here
about table manners is not how the guests behave. It’s about the
way God behaves, and God is going to lift up the lowly – the stranger,
the imprisoned, the tortured – and feed them at God’s table.
That’s who God really wants at table, Jesus says. Invite the
poor, the stranger, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. They will
never be able to return the invitation, but invite them anyway. Lift up
the lowly, Jesus says. In his first sermon at Nazareth, he warns us
that he has preferences for such folk. Then there is his mother’s
song in which she sings about filling the poor with good things and
sending the rich empty away. This parable shows the topsy-turvy
way of the kingdom of God.
Presbyterian preacher Tom Long says that he grew up in a
small community church in rural Georgia. One Sunday during
worship, a stranger appeared. Judging from his clothes and
appearance, he probably was one of the drifters who rode the rails.
The stranger walked in and past the preacher and the congregation.
Everyone looked at the man, and he looked back. He did not take a
seat. He was not offered a seat. He spoke not a word and not a word
was spoken to him. He simply looked out across the congregation,
paused for a few moments, and walked out the door on the opposite
side.
After church that day, the ordinary little people of this little
church gathered around the base of the big oak tree out front to talk
about what had happened. They never knew who the stranger was,
but they knew that God had put before them a kind of moral test, and
-4they had flunked. They had their opportunity to show hospitality to
the stranger, the same sort of hospitality that had been shown toward
them by God, and they failed.
Long says that no one in that little congregation had ever heard
of The Disdascalia, a very early Christian writing. It says that if a
stranger enters your worship, and the Eucharist prepared, and there
is nowhere for the stranger to sit at the table, the presiding Bishop is
to sit on the floor, so that the stranger may be welcomed in the name
of Christ. Amen.