As I was just starting to think about this morning’s message, I heard that Dolly Parton had died. I’ve always respected her as a songwriter. She wrote more than three thousand published songs, not only her own but hits for Whitney Houston, Waylon Jennings, Tina Turner, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson. None of them are in my playlist, but if my tastes ever turn toward country, I suspect Dolly will be in that mix.
But you don’t need to love “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” or “Islands in the Stream” to appreciate both her work and the radical hospitality woven into her life. She wrote “Travelin’ Thru” for the film Transamerica, the story of a trans woman’s journey, and earned an Oscar nomination for it. When she said we’re all God’s children, using her language of reverence, she meant all of us. When people pointed out that the name of her dinner show attraction, “Dixie Stampede” carried the weight of slavery, she dropped it for “Dolly’s Stampede.” When the country argued over whether Black Lives Matter, she said, plainly, of course they do. And “9 to 5” wasn’t just a hit song. It was an anthem for women tired of being talked over and underpaid. As a freshman in high school when the movie was released, it was the first time I thought about gender pay inequity.
She said it’s not about politics. It’s decency. “I’m not smart enough to be in politics,” she once quipped when asked about her progressive views, “or maybe I’m too smart.”
She certainly opened the door wider than comfortable for many within the southern country music culture, her roots. Long before it was safe in country music to do so, she supported gay, lesbian, and transgender people without qualification. She said more than once how proud she was of her [quote] “huge gay following.” Asked about marriage equality, she answered “love is love.” In 2014 she named “judgement” as a sin, and when a Dollywood employee once pressured a lesbian guest to hide a marriage-equality shirt, Parton apologized publicly and made clear the park welcomes everyone. “Why wouldn’t I stand up for everybody?” she said.
It wasn’t a PR stunt for her, it was radical hospitality. For Parton, as well as the progressive Christians who coined the phrase “radical hospitality,” her love for all people was rooted in faith. Raised Baptist on her mother’s side and Pentecostal on her father’s, she sometimes called herself a “Bapticostal.” Conservative Baptists and Pentecostals are known for being particularly open minded, so I wondered where Parton got such strange ideas.
So I turned to the Bible. Not the questionable Bible-ish theology of the religious right, but what Christian texts actually say about love. Jesus never had anything to say about sexual orientation or gender, but he did have a few stories about the power of love in action. It just so happens that last week’s lectionary reading, the schedule of Bible texts most churches use for their weekly readings, contained the Parable of the Good Samaritan. 2.67 billion Christians in the world reading this text. I wonder how many will come away inspired to radical hospitality and love without judgement. One can only pray.
Before we get into the text, I know this is a place of discomfort for some of us. But just as we savored the Buddha’s words earlier in our meditation, I use ancient sources of inspiration to guide both my spiritual path and the teachings I use in sermons. But I want to honor that discomfort and invite you into the curiosity of religious exploration. It takes me to all sorts of places I’ve enjoyed visiting. We don’t have to stay there, but what in the world was Jesus trying to do with his listeners minds and hearts?
For me, this is especially powerful as we fight against a Christian right who would insert words of hate and division into what are, essentially, teachings about radical love, counter-cultural resistance to Empire and oppression, and tearing into hypocrisy and abuses of power.
In the story of the Good Samaritan, the first two passersby probably had good rationales to keep walking: the road between Jericho and Jerusalem was notorious for thieves. Imagine walking down Seventh Street or East Jefferson and coming across someone hurt — someone of a different race, dressed differently than you, bloody and dirty, eyes open, watching you approach. Are you uncomfortable? Frightened? Do you go to them? Do you open your wallet and pay for a meal and a room? That is exactly what the Samaritan did.
Jesus set the story this way because he knew it wasn’t what his listeners expected. One way scholars identify actual teachings of Jesus from stuff added later is this reversal of expectation. He loves to turn things upside down. So this lawyer asked Jesus the way to eternal life. Must I follow the Law to get there? he asks. Jesus answers by recasting Jewish law as a mandate to love your neighbor as passionately as you love yourself. The lawyer, wanting the formula exactly right, presses further.
“And who is my neighbor?” he asks.
The answer isn’t “someone who lives near you” or “someone who looks like you.” Jesus’ answer probably made everyone in that gathering uncomfortable. He chose a Samaritan because Samaritans were, by Jewish standards, ritually unclean. Samaritans were Jewish by faith, they believed in the God of Abraham, but they didn’t follow Jewish purity codes or the Temple priests, who said God could only exist in their Temple. Samaritans only followed the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, not the other 19—as they were organized then. This ancient grudge began some 700 years before this story, when the Assyrian Empire conquered Northern Israel and carted off most of its residence during the first exile. Those who were left wound up intermarrying with other conquered nationalities, mainly pagans. Samaritans, after 700 years of working on their intercultural competency, weren’t just different, they were all the more threatening because they still considered themselves Jewish. Jesus could not have picked a more despised group for his audience.
And he casts them into the mold of radical hospitality — more so than the priest or the Levite, the usual models of first-century piety. The Samaritan himself had more reason to be afraid, more reason to carry a grudge, more reason to walk on by. This isn’t a story about helping others in general. It’s about helping someone you fear and who fears you — someone not just a stranger, but strange.
Hospitality in the Bible is defined by the Greek word philoxenia, which literally means “love of the stranger.” The second part of this word, xenia has three meanings: stranger or foreigner, guest, and host. It suggests we are all strangers. We are all hosts. In the book Practicing Our Faith, theologian Ana Pineda writes that this single word holds the essential mutuality at the heart of hospitality. “No one is strange except in relation to someone else,” she writes. “We make one another guests and hosts by how we treat one another.”
Stranger, guest, host — all the same word, depending on where you stand. Everyone here today is xenos. First time or fortieth year, this place is equally yours. That’s a fairly radical idea in our society of transactional ownership. The only question is how we live into these living roles of guest and host. If this is your first visit, how do you know this place is yours — that we’ll make room for the change you bring? If it’s your thousandth visit, how do you know it will stay yours, through all the change a living community goes through?
The term radical hospitality, near as I can tell, comes from the book by that name, written by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt. For them, radical hospitality means connecting the churched with the non-churched in ways that are true and inclusive. They write:
“When we speak of hospitality we are always addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Each of us makes choices about who will and will not be included in our lives…. Hospitality has an inescapable moral dimension…. All our talk about hospitable openness doesn’t mean anything as long as some people continue to be tossed aside…. [Hospitality] is a spiritual practice — a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice, and a path to a deeper spirituality.”
Showing up is part of hospitality. If you make a connection with someone new one Sunday, then take the next three off, who greets them on their second or third visits? Who greets the friend you’ve known for years when you’re not here? We tend to calculate the value and frequency of church attendance by how much we need to see our friends. I wonder what would open up if we reframe this calculus and ask, who needs you more than you need them? A wise friend once told me, “Never underestimate your power to gladden the life of others.” Your presence here is a gift.
Theologian Matthew Fox calls hospitality that shows up for others not radical, but cosmic. Holiness, he says, is hospitality. “Creation has spread out for our delight a banquet that was twenty billion years in the making.” He calls us to answer that banquet — its lakes and mountains, its grasses and flowers — by recreating that same hospitality in our own lives, for others. “Hospitality is about relationship; one cannot be hospitable without guests,” he says. We say thank you to creation
- when we give of ourselves,
- when we let ourselves be uncomfortable in the process of connection,
- when we let ourselves be vulnerable and invite new people in.
We love the intimacy of an inner circle — that’s natural. It’s also the trap of intimacy, because a closed circle eventually withers. “Cosmic hospitality requires a deeper and deeper reverence for all that is and all that might be,” Fox concludes. “It will therefore require substantial preparation, as all true hospitality does.”
It is, then, our gift to creation to foster radical hospitality — cosmic hospitality — in our institutions and our lives, until we are all guests and all hosts, until we see our connectedness, until we are all in the place we were meant to be. As you have discovered here. As more will discover next week, next month, next year, and long after we are gone.
Dolly never used words like “cosmic hospitality.” She probably would have called it one of those “$10 words.” She didn’t need to call it something fancy. It’s something she practiced. Every time she opened the gate a little wider — to a stranger, a skeptic, a scared kid who didn’t yet know if the world had room for them — she was practicing it.
Stranger, guest, host, neighbor: to her, to us, they are all the same. That’s the whole sermon, really, in one Tennessee accent: love everybody, don’t judge, and leave the gate open. Blessed be and amen.