July 22, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

The following article,
which because it appeared in the Washington Post must be true (!)
was in the paper this past week:

Washington. A grand feast of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp was winding down, and a group of friends was sitting on the back patio of a Capitol Hill home on June 16, sipping red wine. Suddenly, a hooded man slid in through an open gate and put the barrel of a handgun to the head of a 14-year-old guest.

“Give me your money, or I’ll start shooting,” he demanded, according to Washington police and witness accounts.

The five other guests, including the girls’ parents, froze – and then one spoke.

“We were just finishing dinner, Christina “Cha Cha” Rowan, 43, blurted out. “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us?”

The intruder took a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupery and said, “Damn, that’s good wine.”

The girls’ father, Michael Rabdau, 51, who described the evening in an interview, told the intruder to take the whole glass. Rowan offered him the bottle. The would-be robber, his hood now down, took another sip and had a bite of Camembert cheese that was on the table. Then he tucked the gun into the pocket of his sweatpants.

“I think I may have come to the wrong house,” he said, looking around the patio.

“I’m sorry,” he told the group. “Can I get a hug?”

Rowan, who lives in Falls Church and works part time at her children’s school, stood up and wrapped her arms around him. Then it was Rabdau’s turn. Then his wife’s. The other two guests complied.

“That was really good wine,” the man said, taking another sip.

He had a final request: “Can we have a group hug?”

The five adults surrounded him, arms out.

With that, the man walked out with a crystal wine glass in hand, filled with Chateau Malescot. No one was hurt, and nothing was stolen.

After the intruder left, the guests walked inside the house, locked the door and stared at each other. They didn’t say a word. Rabdau dailed 911. Police arrived quickly and took a report. They also dusted for fingerprints, so far to no avail.

In the alley behind the home, investigators found the intruder’s empty crystal wine glass on the ground, unbroken.¹
_____________

Now, if that isn’t the strangest story of the week, I don’t know what is.
Except maybe the story from Genesis
about the three visitors who came down the road
and were received by Abraham and Sarah with a sumptuous meal –
freshly-made bread, a fatted calf with milk and curds,
and who returned to them a blessing –
not a group hug, apparently,
but the prophecy that Sarah, old, old Sarah,
would bear a child in due season.
And so, of course, it was,
fulfilling God’s promise that Abraham would be the father
of a great and blessed nation.
We have a habit in reading the Bible of leaping to connections –
so we think of Mary,
receiving the angel Gabriel’s unexpected visit,
and finding that she would bear the Son of God into the world.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, Abraham and Sarah,
and Mary and Martha who receive Jesus into their home in today’s Gospel –
all of them had a choice of course –
whether to open themselves to the strangers that appeared –
and whether to allow their lives to be changed.
I suspect this is true too for the Washingtonians on their patio,
maybe especially Cristina Rowan who bears Christ’s name in her own,
but I doubt we’ll ever know the next chapter of their stories,
or the story of the robber with a taste for fine wine.

The rule of St. Benedict, the 6th-century monastic,
expects that his monks will receive strangers “as Christ” because they just might be.
Perhaps you’ve seen that moving drawing
of a queue of bedraggled people waiting to be served at a soup kitchen.
Look closely and you see a man with a hooded halo....
...it is Christ who’ll be given a bowl of soup.

One Benedictine who writes these days says that
hospitality is “the way we come out of ourselves.”²
Maybe out of our fears?
Out of the narrowness of our expectations of what is possible in this world?
Sarah didn’t expect a child at her old age.
What could Mary have expected from Gabriel’s visit?

“The Benedictine heart is to be a place without boundaries,” the writer continues.
And our task is to receive all without prejudice or favor.
But our purpose is not only the care of the stranger or the sojourner.
It is our own transformation.
“Whatever happens to the heart is the beginning of revolution.
When I let strange people and strange ideas into my heart,
I am beginning to shape a new world.”³

The word “hospitality” makes me think
of being received at a guest house as if I were family.
Sometimes the privilege of being a host is so obvious –
when we ready our homes for family visitors or a special party.
Hospitality reaches out one arms-length further
when we look to receiving people we don’t know, but expect to like.
Grace Church is putting the final touches
on our plans to receive Robin Whitehead and David DeVerny,
priests from the Church of England who’ll live in Riverview for two weeks.
We know we’ll find them easy to love.

But there’s another hospitality that involves radically accepting
those who are unknown quantities,
those we expect to be alien and who quite honestly might clobber us.
There’s a hospitality that allows the alien to change us.
One image of Creation I find especially moving
suggests that God, who originally filled the whole universe,
made a space inside God’s self
to tenderly hold something that was not God.
The parting of the waters, if you will,
or as one theologian has suggested,
a kind of Godly womb to hold the growing “other” inside,
the “other” that is of the mother,
but also experienced as something with a life and identity of its own.
God did not have to show hospitality to this not-God living thing,
this living universe,
but out of his abundant generosity
and willingness to be in relationship with
and to be changed by humanity,
God did this.⁴

In all the myths and religions of the world,
even in fairy tales and movie screenplays,
there are stories of heroes and heroines who encounter the fearsome “other,”
who journey into unknown danger and even risk death,
but press on nevertheless, for the sake of – what?
Enlightenment?
True love?
Mystical union with God?
Beauty embraces the beast,
Persephone descends to the underworld,
psychoanalysis summons up the unconscious,
and Christ stretches out his arms on the cross
to bring all the world into his saving embrace,
including not only sinners and non-believers,
but people of God only knows what evil intent.

Hospitality does mean offering a hot meal to a hungry person.
But it may also mean making a space within ourselves
to welcome in what is frightening,
but what offers new life and transformation only at the risk of importunity or harm.
We may need to open our doors, metaphorically,
to what will steal the contents of our house.
Only then will the miracle occur.

People in grief may find it impossible to open the door for hope.
Materialists may have no room for the spiritual.
The wealthy may fear poverty
while others refuse to embrace success.
Those over a certain age think they’ll never dance again,
and thousands believe virtue can never come from politics.
God only knows how many of us believe we must live in fear.

I am quite sure that hospitality is a concrete duty –
that Christians, and for that matter just decent human beings,
owe to those who are in need.
We need to fill that red wagon in the parish hall with food for the hungry,
and we need to welcome not only the English priests
and the wandering tourists in Yorktown, and the newcomer that sits in our pews,
and even those young people who are dating our sons and daughters.

But I believe God also calls us to be as bold as Abraham,
who ran down the road to invite three strangers into his home for fatted calf.
To be as bold as Mary who told the angel YES! she’d do it!
To be as bold as Christina in Washington,
who gave a robber a glass of good wine and a hug.

God calls us to embrace the strange intrusion and the impossible hope,
the finest imagination and the holiest promise.
But God reminds us always...........
it is only after the embrace of the other that the miracle occurs. Amen.

_____________

Back to the index of Connie's Sermons