Luke 19:1-10
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
March 5, 2023
“Chai kavu, tafadhali?” I asked with great hesitation in my voice. “May I please have strong tea?” In Nairobi that was how I had learned to ask for tea with no milk and no sugar. I had also learned it was a strange request.
I was midway through the six months I spent in Kenya visiting small rural churches in 1984. In most places, I was accompanied by someone who spoke fluent English. This church had apparently not received word about my limited language skills. I was greeted by a loving group of older women who were all fluent in more languages than I was. None of them spoke English.
They welcomed me warmly. I used my best Swahili to express my gratitude and try to have a conversation. Their laughter at my feeble attempts was kind. They communicated their caring with food. And more food. With tea. And more tea. They wanted me full and happy, feeling loved and welcomed.
You all know how much I love tea. You might not know that I don’t really care for tea with milk and sugar. That’s the way it was served in rural Kenya in the 1980’s. I did my best to drink it anyway, to receive whatever was offered with appreciation. That day, though, my stomach was a little upset, and I really longed for plain old black tea. “Chai kavu tafadhali?” I asked as politely as I could.
The women looked at me with confusion. I tried to explain. Black tea. No milk. No sugar. Puzzled, they asked for confirmation. Then they talked amongst themselves. One of them left, apparently to walk to the store.
She returned. A few minutes later, they presented me with an entire pot of the blackest liquid I had ever seen. I poured a cup and took a grateful sip—and then tried desperately not to spit it out. It was cocoa, and not the Swiss Miss kind with milk and sugar already added. Using their very limited resources, they had gone out to get the blackest, strongest drink they could find, served as requested with no milk or sugar, so their linguistically challenged guest with the strange drink preference would feel welcomed.
They were infinitely patient with me. We ultimately figured it out, with laughter and good will on both sides.
I learned so much about hospitality from that trip to Kenya. I learned how complicated it can be, as we struggled to communicate across language and cultural barriers. Even when everyone speaks the same language, there are so many things that get in the way of the host’s desire to help the guest feel at home and the guest’s desire to honor the gifts they have been given.
I learned how risky hospitality can be for both guest and host. The families who welcomed me into their homes shared what they had with great generosity, and also with considerable sacrifice of their limited time and food. They had no way of knowing if I would honor the sacredness of their home or their meals. They didn’t know if I would judge them for the things they didn’t have that I was accustomed to having.
For my part, I was letting myself be completely dependent on their kindness—for sustenance, for safety, even for someone to walk me to the outdoor toilet at night so I wouldn’t step on a snake. As a guest I had to let go of control over how my day went, what I ate and drank, when I slept and got up.
Both guest and host took a huge risk. We chose to trust in each other’s good will. We chose to trust that our shared good will would be enough to overcome the language and cultural barriers.
Hospitality is complicated. It is risky. And it is life-changing. Something happened in those awkward efforts to give and receive hospitality. God’s Spirit was with us, opening us to our human connection. God’s Spirit was with us, awakening our curiosity about each other and inspiring our wonder at the richness of each other’s lives. God’s Spirit was with us, strengthening our faith in our human capacity to understand each other, assuring us that God would help us love each other even when we could not understand. Each cup of tea—with or without milk and sugar—was Holy Communion, for Jesus was with us at the table.
A few years later, when I was back in the states in school, I was struck by a paragraph I read in Parker Palmer’s book, The Company of Strangers. His words gave me a new way to talk about the complicated, risky, life-changing nature of hospitality. Palmer, a Quaker educator, points to the origins of the word “hospitality.” It comes from the Latin hospitalitas. The root of that word is hospes, which means both host and guest. “The two are really one,” Palmer writes [p 69].
“The two are really one.” Guest and host come from the same root word. This linguistic tidbit, for me, speaks profound truth about the nature of hospitality. It is not about one person giving and the other receiving. It is not about one person who has power and another who is at their mercy. Hospitality is about a shared choice to take a risk, a shared choice to make ourselves vulnerable, a shared choice to trust another person’s good will. To be the host is to open your heart and your home, knowing that your heart and your home will never be the same. To be the guest is to open yourself to the gift the host offers, knowing that the gift will change you forever. To be the host is to let the guest give as well as receive. To be the guest is to allow yourself to receive because you trust what you offer will also be valued. Both roles require letting go of control. Both roles, at least for me, depend on trust that God is at work in our giving and our receiving.
In each of our lives, there is a rhythm of giving and receiving, times we are guest and times we are host. In our life as a community, all those individual rhythms come together, in what I envision as a sacred drum circle of hospitality, a complex movement of host and guest, giving and receiving. It’s complicated. It’s risky. And it’s life-changing.
Our gospel reading is all about hospitality. When Jesus sees Zacchaeus up in the sycamore tree, he recognizes that Zacchaeus needs help to enter that rhythm of hospitality in community. Maybe Jesus already knows Zacchaeus is a tax collector—because of his fancy clothes and the way other people glare at him. Or maybe Jesus simply sees the loneliness in his eyes. Either way, Jesus realizes that what Zacchaeus needs most is not a sermon but an opportunity to give.
Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from the tree and invites himself to Zacchaeus’s house for dinner. In our dramatization, we imagined what Zacchaeus might have been thinking. Surely he was shocked. I suspect he hadn’t invited anyone into his home for a long time, perhaps because his invitations were always rejected. I wonder if his life had become so focused on transactional giving that he wasn’t sure there was any other kind. Did he worry Jesus would come to his house and judge him? We don’t know. All we know is that he leapt out of the tree, welcomed Jesus, and was forever changed.
On this second Sunday in Lent, as we travel together toward Easter, we focus on a quality we are called to cultivate on this journey: hospitality. Just as Jesus called Zacchaeus, so Jesus calls each of us to enter the complicated, risky, and life-changing rhythm of hospitality. Maybe you, like Zacchaeus, have had so many experiences of your gifts being rejected that you are reluctant to open your home. Today, Jesus promises that he wants to receive what you have to give. Or maybe your identity is so caught up in being a giver that you are reluctant to receive. Jesus promises that it is worth the risk of allowing others to give to you.
Jesus calls each of us into this communal rhythm of hospitality–sometimes as host, sometimes as guest. Always, we are called to risk opening our hearts. We are called to listen deeply. We are called to seek understanding, and to trust in a sacred connection that is deeper than the limits of our understanding. Jesus is with us at every table we set, transforming an ordinary meal into holy communion. Thanks be to God. Amen.