The Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions share the story of three strangers arriving at the home of Abraham in the heat of the day. Abraham greeted them with a gesture of respect and invited the three to rest in the shade.  He brought them water to wash their wearied feet and food to satiate their hunger. According to the Hebrew Scriptures, he prepared a choice calf and served it to the strangers with fresh milk, cheese, and Sarah's warm bread cakes. Abraham's family custom was to offer extravagant hospitality to strangers, because one never knows when a stranger will turn out to be a messenger of God. These three strangers announced the good news that Sarah would indeed give birth to a child. And the child was named "laughter."

According to tradition, Abraham's tent was open in all four directions, so that travelers could be welcomed in, no matter the direction from which they came. [1] This is the rich hospitality the people of God were called to offer to the stranger, a spiritual practice drowned out by the din of today’s American culture. Consumerism and fear breed a toxic environment for strangers, foreigners, immigrants, and refugees, regardless of the lessons they bring to us about a welcoming God.

Our culture believes that the kind of hospitality that Abraham practiced renders us vulnerable to those who prey on generosity. America's history bears this out. In 1492, the Arawak people discovered Christopher Columbus on their shores. Like Abraham, they greeted this stranger and his men with gestures of respect and gifts of food and water. Columbus later wrote in his journal, "They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance...they would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." [2] He later wrote to the Queen and King of Spain, "The Indians are so naïve and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." [3]  

Clearly Christopher Columbus would call me naïve, but these are the very values I hope to instill in my child, in defiance of the drumbeat of fear and consumerism that runs rampant in our culture. Though practicing hospitality can indeed open the door to those who prey on generosity, the alternative renders us far more vulnerable. Israel's practice of hospitality emerged from lived experience. Abraham's nomadic tribe knew that to deny a stranger hospitality was to risk being denied hospitality in a time of great need. Sometimes we are the host, sometimes we are the stranger. 

Could it be that God created us all to live together on this one, shared earth? As theologian Howard Thurman once observed, we have now unlocked the secret of the atom, but we have not yet learned to walk the earth with simple reverence and grace, in fellowship with one another. [4] Practicing peaceable hospitality in the nuclear age, however, may be our only option. WAND's own Sayre Sheldon comments, "Survival depends on understanding and arresting the impulse to destroy, which today--as never before in history--is capable of extinguishing humanity altogether." [5]

Perhaps you heard that Paul Tibbets died this month. A brigadier general in the United States Air Force, he was best known for piloting the Enola Gay, an aircraft named for his mother that dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare over Hiroshima. An op-ed in the New York Times on Veterans Day noted, "he claimed never to have lost a night’s sleep after the mission" because he believed it had ended the war and saved soldiers' lives. [6] He believed this in spite of the fact that the U.S. firebombed 67 Japanese cities before the atomic bombs were dropped. He believed this in spite of the fact that an Allied commander named Eisenhower claimed the Japanese were ready to surrender. Did Tibbets' mission save soldiers' lives? We may never know. We do know that 140,000 civilians of Hiroshima perished instead. Children yet to be born were scarred by this bomb. The notion that nuclear weapons save lives is a dangerous myth.

We live in a culture fixated on security. And yet, all the weapons we have manufactured and stockpiled to save us simply make us more vulnerable. Hidden behind our treasure trove of arms lies a profound inability to reason with other nations, to seek reconciliation in the face of deep conflict, to beat our swords into plowshares. We invest too much in weapons. We invest too little in character and relationships.

I want my child's generation to grow up in a safe world, but I want to teach him that safety and prosperity are not always the highest values. Those saints, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa who have loved God’s world with exuberant joy and aching lament did not escape suffering. And yet they lived extraordinary lives.  They practiced truth. They gave thanks for each moment, not knowing what the next day would bring. This is the way that I want to teach my child to live, a life that welcomes the stranger.

This year, as we gather around tables heavy with a harvest of good food, surrounded by families who have traveled great distances, may we give thanks for the moment. May we practice the extravagant hospitality of Abraham's tribe. May our tent be open to all four corners of the earth, so that we can welcome even the stranger, no matter the direction from which they come.

---