Hospitality, especially to strangers, is one of the major themes in the bible. Jesus tells the story of a man who is robbed and beaten and left to die at the side of the road. He is eventually shown hospitality by a stranger, who shows compassion by taking the man to a place to get healed. Leviticus, the great book of the Law, states in chapter 19 verses 33-34, “When immigrants live in your land with you, you must not cheat them. Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”
We have embarked on a journey this Lent. On Ash Wednesday we sought to find those relationships in our lives which we need to be reconciled. Those relationships included that with Jesus, others, and ourselves.
The first Sunday of Lent we looked at how we sometimes put conditions on those relationships. Sometimes we tell God we’ll love God more when we find more time to come to church or do our devotionals. Sometimes we put conditions on our relationships with others by expecting them to do something for us before we offer our love to them. We even took a look at how we put conditions on ourselves by requiring a change in how we look, or how much we have, or if we fit in to the expectations of society before we can love the person we are.
Love has no conditions.
Last week we took a look at our relationship with our self. We saw how we are all given a gift from God and we are called by God to develop that gift to our best abilities in order for us to use that gift to make the kingdom of God a better place for all. It didn’t matter what that gift was; cooking and baking, labor, administration, organization. The idea was that once we know we have something to offer, we begin to accept who we are: God’s child, whom God loves without hesitation.
When asked why she took in Michael Oher, Leigh Ann Tuohy said, “"I just think Michael needed somebody, and it was so evident that there was nobody in his life. It just broke my heart."
In case you don’t recognize the names, these two are the people whose story is told in the movie “Blind Side.” Michael grew up with a mother who was a drug addict and a father who was never around. Because of the complete lack of support Michael received at home, he was often undisciplined and disruptive, especially in school. He repeated both 1st and 2nd grade, and found himself attending 9 different schools before the 8th grade.
When Michael was 7 years old he was placed into the Foster Care system, where until high school, he would find himself alternating between living in Foster homes and being homeless. During his freshmen year at a public high school he tried out for the football team at the urging of the Foster “father” he was living with at the time. This man recognized a raw talent, where if given the chance to be cultivated, could change this young man’s life.
An application for a Christian school was turned in, but because of Michael’s academic past he wasn’t accepted. Instead, he was asked to take an at-home course to bring his grades up. According to the story, the headmaster of the school had a change of heart after a few months and admitted Michael Oher into the school. Michael found himself learning and understanding the game of football to the point where he began winning awards and accolades.
For almost 2 years after getting into Briarcrest High School, Michael was still hopping from one home to another. That is until the Tuohy family became involved. Their daughter, Collins, began talking about the “quiet, new guy” in school. Her stories intrigued her father, Sean, enough so that Sean found a way to build a relationship with Michael.
Not too much after that relationship was built, Leigh Ann came across a chance meeting on the side of the road on Thanksgiving Day. Leigh Ann made Michael get into the car and drove him to her family’s home to share in the family’s meal.
Leigh Ann took an immediate liking to Michael. So much so that she applied to take Michael in as their Foster son and brother. It took 4 months, but eventually he was an official part of a family, a true family who treated him as one of their own. Michael is quoted as saying, “When I moved in with Leigh Anne and Sean, I felt loved, like part of a family. In the other houses I didn't feel like part of the family. I didn't feel like they wanted me there.”
That’s really what today’s passage is saying: before people are given up on, let’s try one more time to bring them back to into a life of knowing they are loved unconditionally.
We start today’s passage with 2 stories that do not have any other mention in the bible or other historical writings of the time. This is not say these things did not happen, only that the stories only appear here in Luke’s Gospel.
We are told 2 stories about horrible ways of dying. One involves the killing of Galileans as they were performing their duty of offering sacrifices at the temple. The other is of 18 people who were killed building a tower in the city of Siloam, presumably for the Roman Empire.
For some reason the implication made is that these deaths happen because of the fault of those who were killed. I’m going to be extremely honest here: There is very little that makes me mad, but blaming God for senseless death will get me very close. Hurricanes do not destroy homes and lives because those people were sinners. Buildings do not have airplanes fly into them because the sinners deserved it. People do not die from disease because they angered God in some way.
Things happen, bad things happen, very bad things happen, and God is never the one who makes it happen. It is my opinion that God is incapable of such hatred.
Jesus then tells a parable. “A man owned a fig tree planted in his vineyard. He came looking for fruit on it and found none. He said to his gardener, ‘Look, I’ve come looking for fruit on this fig tree for the past three years, and I’ve never found any. Cut it down! Why should it continue depleting the soil’s nutrients?’ The gardener responded, ‘Lord, give it one more year, and I will dig around it and give it fertilizer. Maybe it will produce fruit next year; if not, then you can cut it down.’”
This parable got me thinking, “How often do we give up on people before they’ve had an honest chance at being cultivated?” More to the point, “When was the last time we cultivated someone else’s life to give them a better chance at living the full and fruitful life God intended for them?”
We are called by God to be the gardeners of God’s Kingdom. We are asked to seek out those who have been pushed to the fringes of society and do what we can to soften and replace the soil in which they find themselves, to give them nutrients which will help them grow, and in time watch as they begin to bear fruit.
Mother Teresa heard this same calling. For 15 years she was a teacher in an all-girl’s school in Calcutta. One day she heard the call to go into the streets of that city to work among the poor and destitute. Mother Teresa found a special place in her heart for what were described as the “dying poor”, people who had absolutely nothing and were on the verge of dying because of starvation or exposure to the elements.
When someone who was dying made the journey to see Mother Teresa she was met with unconditional love. When someone who was clinging to the edge of life, Mother Teresa took him in as though he was part of the family. Regardless of their disease – leprosy, hepatitis AIDS – people were met and treated as those who were healthy. Those who came to Sister Theresa or her Sisters were washed, given clean clothes and medicine, and—most important—someone who could hold their hand, listen to their stories, stroke their foreheads, and comfort them with love in their last days.
Notice she doesn’t say with each other; she says to each other. I belong to you as much as you belong to her as much as you belong to him as much as you belong to me. We are inseparable as a people. None of us live outside the body of the One. If one of us hurts, we all hurt. If one of us experiences joy, we all experience joy. If one of us tries to break the bond with which God has forged us together, we all feel the separation.
We can’t all be Mother Teresa, nor can we be Leigh Ann Tuohy. However, we all possess what is necessary to reconcile others into the bond of love, that bond which God created us all to live within. In this time of Lent, search for that which God has placed in your grasp and use that gift to cultivate and grow the fruitful lives of those around us.
God is with us always. Amen.
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