My dear Parishioners, At the time of writing this letter, I am eagerly looking forward to going back to Adelaide for several weeks and it will be good to see my mother again who will be pleased to see me but sadly in her frailty she no longer understands what ‘England’, ‘Higham Ferrers’ or ‘overseas’ means. She is well cared for in her nursing home but is unable any longer to entertain family and friends for she, alas, no longer understands the concept of ‘entertaining’ or of hospitality.
Most of us enjoy having friends around, to have a drink or a bite to eat, to watch a video, or just simply to have a chin-wag. Friendship is vitally important to each of us but retaining friends is a skill which can easily be eroded. I personally look forward to meeting up with all of my friends and family in Adelaide every couple of years when I can travel back to Australia. Their hospitality is warm and welcoming and the intervening years since I was last in my home city seem to disappear and, like the Bedesmen on the 21st December each year, we talk of old times and what happened many years ago.
Hospitality is a concept well known throughout the Scriptures. In the Patriarchal period i.e. the time of Abraham, Jacob & Joseph, in a culture where people were largely nomadic, it was important that hospitality was widely practised. Public inns were a rarity and every stranger a potential enemy. So guests were treated with respect and honour and were provided with food for the animals, water to wash the feet, rest and a feast. Apparently such guests could enjoy protection, even if they were an enemy, for three days and thirty-six hours after eating with the host (the time the guests would be sustained by the host’s food!).
Even when the itinerant Jews became a settled community and after Jerusalem had become their major city, hospitality remained a sign of righteousness and true godliness.
There is a lovely story in Genesis 18 where Abraham and his wife Sarah entertain three travellers who arrive outside their tent. Indeed it was thought that by entertaining others it was possible to practise hospitality even towards God. Hence the Scriptural account assumes that these guests are indeed God or at least his angels (you can easily understand why the early Christians saw in these three divine persons a reference to the Holy Trinity). And because Abraham and Sarah, even though they are well advanced in age, have provided hospitality to God’s messengers, they are promised that which they earnestly desire, a son, who naturally continues the patriarchal line and so begins to fulfil the promise made by God to Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
The Early Church continued to practise hospitality too. No doubt in times of possible persecution this was a necessity but it was also due to the nature of Jesus’ own ministry. He travelled around Judea and Galilee and was dependent upon the hospitality of others. The write of the Letter to the Hebrews urged his readers to practise hospitality to strangers ‘for by doing that, some have entertained angels without knowing it,’ an obvious reference to the Abraham story. Hebrews 131 I am saddened that in our society today, hospitality to others is on the wane. Through the perceived threat of being ‘taken for a ride’, we have lost the art of giving strangers some hospitality. Many of you know that the Full Gospel Church in Rushden has a small 4-bed unit for ‘travellers’; the Night Shelter is a form of Biblical hospitality and it was good that St Mary’s was able to send half of its Harvest Thanksgiving Festival foodstuffs this year to this Rushden Night Shelter to help in its work of hospitality. It is surely a way of seeing Christ in others even if we sometimes think that they are undeserving or unkempt or scroungers. Everyone of us is made ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 127) and perhaps if we were able to recognise Christ in other people, we would not be so ready to judge or to hate or even just to dislike. We certainly need to do this within the Christian Church today!
There is a Celtic poem which expresses this idea most beautifully:
I saw a stranger yestere’en
I put food in the eating place,
drink in the drinking place,
music in the listening place
and in the sacred name of the Triune
he blessed myself and my house,
my cattle and my dear ones,
and the lark said in her song
often, often, often,
goes the Christ in a stranger’s guise.
So begin to see Christ in others and who knows who you may entertain one day!
With every Blessing,
Your Parish Priest,
Fr. Grant