Hospitality Respects no Border
Jesus’s Bible was what we call the Old Testament (Tanakh in Hebrew). Before Paul started writing his letters and the Gospels got written, the Church’s Bible was the Old Testament. Jesus’s God is Yahweh, for which the LORD (all caps) is usually substituted for the name revealed to Moses — I AM. And the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ lurks in the story of God’s relationship with God’s chosen people of the Old Testament, as it does in today’s Old Testament reading.
Here's the history lesson behind the reading. The 12 tribes of Israel were divided into the northern kingdom of Israel, which comprised 10 of those tribes, and the southern kingdom of Judah in Jerusalem where the successors of King David continued to reign. Israel’s King Ahab made an alliance with Phoenicia to the north by marrying the Phoenician king’s daughter Jezebel. When it came to religion, Ahab wanted Both/And: Both Baal the Phoenicians’ leading god, and the LORD. The prophet Elijah insisted that it was Either/Or. And to prove the point, Elijah proclaimed that the LORD, the God of Israel had decreed a drought in the entire region regardless of what the weather god Baal thought.
But this one and only God, while the God of Israel, is God for all people. That is why in today’s reading, Elijah obeys YHWH’s command to go into the heart of enemy territory, Sidonia in Phoenicia. What he is confronted with in the faces of the Phoenician widow and her son are the faces of carnage, of drought and famine, starvation and despair — I am just gathering a stick or two to go and prepare this for myself and my son to eat, and then we shall die — their last meal.
It wouldn’t be surprising for Elijah to say — Serves you right you heathen Baal worshiper. But he has understood the word of the LORD that told him to go to Sidonia well. He enlists the Sidonian widow to join him in a liturgy — Of the little bread you’re going to make for you and your son, make an even smaller piece for me first. Elijah asks the widow for a small bit of hospitality, and promises that the LORD, the one and only God, will be hospitable to all three of them for as long as he stays even in a drought. And so, the LORD God is hospitable across national, ethnic and religious borders. And that hospitality — dare I say love — was enough for that small community.
Even in this Old Testament, the love of God that transcends all man-made divisions is revealed. Later on, God the Father and God the Son will up the ante infinitely. In that section of the Catechism in our prayer book entitled “God the Son,” the question is asked, “What do we mean when we say that Jesus is the only Son of God? We mean that Jesus is the only perfect image of the Father, and shows us the nature of God. What is the nature of God revealed in Jesus? God is love [1 John 4:8].” (BCP p. 849).
But how are we to reveal that divine love in a concrete practical way? The Old Testament is a 2,000-year-old love story of a people and their God, who for a long time was only their God. Like most long-term loving relationships, it is occasionally a hot mess, and you may wonder where God is in all that messiness. And yet, sometimes, that God who is love breaks through human messiness in a concrete practical way. And in this case, that way is hospitality.
The Holy Eucharist is, first and foremost, a meal in which the crucified and risen Christ welcomes us and feeds us all with himself, in all our diversity, and makes us one in his glorified body. And then you are sent out to be hospitable to those you meet, to feed them with the same love of Jesus with which you have been fed. And so, that love which did not respect the man-made borders of Elijah’s time does not respect the man-made borders of our time. That’s the border-crossing community of Christ’s Eucharistic body at St. Monica and St. James that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit has created.