Home Abroad

Advent Vespers, Week Three

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is something deeply holy about hospitality. Something earthy, yet otherworldly.

I first noticed this in the books that I read. My mind kept coming back to scenes of preternatural hospitality: the hobbits in the house of Tom Bombadil, for instance, or the Hempstock homestead in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It’s not that I hadn’t known hospitality. For Heaven’s sake, my Mother treats children and guests like royalty. But I suppose one takes it for granted from one’s parents.

It’s no secret that Christmas used to be far more raucous a holiday than it is today. Sticks-in-the-mud throughout history have attempted to ban it or to tame it. We find ourselves thinking, “What sort of Grinch would want to cancel Christmas?” And the answer, frankly, is anyone who’s had their fill of public drunkenness, debauchery, and destruction of property. The whole holiday season was pretty rough around the edges back in the day.

Three authors are credited with domesticating Christmas. The first is Clement Moore, with his ubiquitous Visit from St Nicholas, better known today as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. He made Santa synonymous with Yuletide cheer. The second is Charles Dickens, who perfected the tradition of the Victorian Christmas ghost story in his beloved novella, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge and all.

The third, however, rarely gets the credit he deserves. Washington Irving is famous for Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but it was his Knickerbocker’s History of New York which effectively invented Santa Claus. And it was his classic story Old Christmas which ironically made Christmas new.

Old Christmas is a wonderful tale, of a young traveler who happens upon an old friend in a tavern, only to be invited to spend the holiday at the familial estate of his friend’s father. There he is treated to all the humors and joys and peculiarities of an old English country Christmas, replete with songs, games, poems, libations, feasts, ghost stories, budding romance, masquerade, and even a sermon or two.

It is simply delightful, and eminently quotable. There is no plot to speak of, mind you: just noble, generous, superabundant hospitality showered freely upon one and all. You can’t make a movie of it, for there’s neither complication nor climax. But once you do read it, I promise you, you’ll wish you could spend every Christmas at the idealized country estate flowing from Irving’s pen.

Hospitality, the real deal, isn’t simply convention. Nor is it just being polite. There’s a real sense in which hospitality is participation in the work and the being of God—that it is, in a word, holy, something very much grounded in the intimate and earthly, yet reflecting a heavenly reality that transcends mere human need. Hospitality is love in action, pouring out oneself, opening one’s home, promising food and drink and warmth and laughter, a hot bath, a clean bed, and respite from the cares and worries of a frantic world, if only for an evening, only for a night.

To find hospitality is to find home abroad, and to rest secure beneath the loving goodwill of another. This truly is what God provides for us, and so when we provide hospitality to others, or when we receive it with a gracious thankful heart, we find ourselves reflecting the love and joy and gifts of God into a world still very much in need of them. This is why Christmas itself—or at least our celebration of it—has found new birth as a holiday for hearth and home, friends and family, joyous hospitality and the love of God that can only be expressed in our love of neighbor.

Let us remember this when our Christmas preparations prove a bit too much to bear: when the dishes pile up and the bills come due and the airplanes run late and Uncle Walt drives us crazy with his utter lack of basic human courtesy. Remember what it’s all for: that we are involved in a sacred undertaking; that hospitality is universally cherished as something very human while also very holy.

It’s not easy being little Christs for our neighbors, let alone for those we love. But then, since when is holiness supposed to be easy? Nothing worthwhile ever is. Pick up your cross and follow Me, sayeth the Lord, and you will do greater things than these. A little death, a little resurrection, every day. To love is to give. To give is to hurt. And so Christ builds His Kingdom in us, bit by bit, and brick by brick, until at last He makes us new. At last He make us Him.

One last thing deserving of note: we need not be the hosts in order to show hospitality. Guests can be amongst the most hospitable souls of all. I shall never forget the witness of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, the protagonist in Amor Towles’ novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. It’s a glorious work, about a Russian nobleman sentenced by the Communists to live out his entire life within the confines of a hotel. If he leaves, he will be shot.

And so the Count dedicates his life not simply to being an exemplary guest, but to model hospitality for all the varied denizens of the city and the hotel. He is unfailingly respectful, polite, helpful, selfless, dignified, generous, and loving. He makes that hotel a home, not only for himself and his adopted daughter, but for everyone he meets, all with whom he works, all for whom he serves. And so this too is a book of sacred hospitality. And I find myself returning to it time and time again.

Be Christ for each other. Love the neighbor, welcome the stranger, forgive your family. And may this holiday be one of holy hospitality for us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.