What Is Set Before You

Galatians 6: 1-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

When I fly, I carry on. I make sure that my entire trip will fit in an overhead-compliant wheelie suitcase, and in a backpack under the seat in front of me, and I will not let those possessions out of my hands or my sight the whole trip.

This has nothing to do with checked bag fees. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than the airlines decided it was good business practice to nickel and dime the living daylights out of the traveling public. No, I strategize and lift heavy burdens and cling to my bag because I’m afraid the airline is going to lose it. And then I will be wherever I go without My Stuff.

It feels like it’s about independence for me. Not having to rely on strangers, being in control of my own destiny, and my own shampoo.

So Jesus’ instructions to his disciples today haunt me. “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals….”

No luggage, and no wallet to purchase an extra shirt when the airline loses your bag.

It’s not like Jesus doesn’t know this is terrifying.  He’s right up front about sending these disciples out “as sheep in the midst of wolves.” Everything about this is a conscious, deliberate, act of vulnerability.

Oh, ick.

I mean, vulnerability is what we’re taught to avoid. It’s what politicians campaign against. (Successful politicians, anyway.) Let’s make our country safer. Let’s guarantee jobs. Elect me and nothing bad will ever happen to you (only to the other people).

It doesn’t actually work.

No politician seems to have been able to protect us the way we want to be protected. The beautiful young parents, the loving generous souls killed in the midst of their work and recreation in Istanbul, and Orlando, and so many other places tell us that.

Every economic crisis, from the Great Depression to the Housing Bubble to the Brexit market mess tell us that.

But we try, and we act as if we believe it, anyway.

When we go out into foreign territory, we’re warned to lock our car doors and roll up the windows, to hide our wallets, not to trust. Protect yourself. (If you don’t you can’t help others,) we’re told.

Vulnerability is hard, and hard to desire, even if you’ve been taught that it’s a spiritual virtue.

And it is.

Jesus is all over it. Jesus is dramatically vulnerable.

Not just in the crucifixion, but over and over – spending all his time on the road, risking the wrath of the religious authorities at every turn, risking having the crowd turn on him at any time,

risking hospitality all the time. Pretty much every time we see Jesus in Luke’s gospel, he’s eating someone else’s food at someone else’s house. Just as he tells his disciples to do today:

“Eat what is set before you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide…. Do not move about from house to house.”

You can’t go looking for something better, and you don’t get to leave until your hosts are ready for you to leave.

For me it triggers the same kind of anxieties as losing my luggage.

What if I don’t like the food? How will I take care of myself if they don’t do it right?

What if I don’t like the people? How can I depend on anyone that much?

One commentator I read this week talked about feeling similar things, reading this story, until she heard from a young man who’d grown up on the principle of “eat what is set before you,” not just in his own home, but in the many meals his father’s congregation had put before him.
This was a rural congregation, where many people had to rely on whatever they could kill or catch to put food on the table, even for company.  It wasn’t a question of whether you liked spinach, but of not even quite knowing what you were eating.

I’m a picky eater, though I’ve tried not to be.  And this viscerally reminds me that receiving hospitality can be as much of a challenge, as full of vulnerability, as offering it. Sometimes more.

Now, I know Jesus isn’t telling people with celiac disease or serious food allergies to eat things that can kill them, but he is telling, say, vegetarians to eat meat as a good guest and gospel messenger, or middle-class Americans to eat squirrel and snake. 

His disciples are being sent out into foreign territory, where some of their hosts will know nothing about the “right”, holy and faithful ways to plan and prepare food.  They’ll have to give up their lifelong personal – even religiously mandated – morality and expectations about food lest it get in the way of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ instructions, and that young man’s story, remind me that receiving hospitality can actually be a gift from the guest to the host, that although we may – subconsciously at least - think of hospitality and welcome as things that the established, comfortable, and secure can offer to those who have less, we can and should receive hospitality from those who are more vulnerable than we feel, or who are our enemies.

And we can give the gift of peace – a gift that grows and deepens – by accepting that hospitality.

Paul makes the other side of that case in his letter to the church in Galatia, telling the Jewish Christians – who are the “hosts” of the community, welcoming Gentiles into their faith – that they don’t get to choose the terms on which they offer welcome.  That in Christ, in the Kingdom of God, you have to accept and welcome things that challenge our sense of righteousness, of rightness, and learn to see them as godly, too.

Paul insists that freedom is not being able to do whatever we want – or get other people to do what we want – but that freedom is a mutual interdependence:

the freedom to rely on one another,

the freedom to be vulnerable,

the freedom to lose our image of ourselves, in favor of sharing in the image of God with people who are not like us and will change us in ways we can’t plan for.

As we pray for and celebrate our nation this weekend, what would it be like to apply these principles to our sense of nation, patriotism, self?

To think of ourselves as the Galatians, welcoming people who definitely do not do this thing right, and who might even be dangerous to our comfort and identity, and who are certainly going to change our community if we let them in – and trusting God and one another that the new nation, the new community of grace, that arises will be stronger, freer, and more worthy of trust.

Our own founding national story, after all, is about how strangers came to this land, bringing dramatic and even dangerous differences to the inhabitants, and how from that disruption a nation that that inspires freedom around the world was born.

Or how would it be, now, to imagine ourselves as always receiving hospitality, from our nation, from the land itself, from one another, from the folks who post strange things on Facebook or who disagree with us on the right path for our country?

How would it be if, accepting what is set before us, we learn to trust that what is strange to us will not only nourish our bodies, but form the strong bonds of table fellowship that build strangers into family.

It’s a failure of that imagination that seems to have lead to Brexit, to Orlando, to so many other painful and divisive experiences in our world.

But still, that vulnerable hospitality and guest-ship keeps popping up, too – stories of Muslims inviting a local LGBT community to a Ramadan meal, of people opening their homes and hearts to strangers in the midst of loss and grief and division.

Stories about how even now, the Kingdom of God comes near.

And it’s worth remembering, too, that even when Jesus instructs his disciples to wipe the merest dust of a place from their feet, when their mission of peace, hospitality, mutuality, vulnerability, and trust fails, they are still to remind that town – themselves, us – that the Kingdom of God has come near.

It’s worth remembering that when we open the door – even when we fail, even in spite of us – the Kingdom of God has come near.