Primary Scripture: Luke 10:25–37
Supporting Scriptures: Genesis 18:1–8; Leviticus 19:33–34; Matthew 25:31–40; Hebrews 13:1–2; Luke 14:12–24

“You shall love the stranger as yourself.” — Leviticus 19:34

Introduction: What If God Comes to the Door Unrecognized?

One of religion’s favorite questions is:

Where can I find God?

We build sanctuaries.

We write theology.

We compose creeds.

We organize pilgrimages.

We search the heavens.

But Scripture repeatedly gives us a rather inconvenient answer.

Look at the stranger.

Abraham encounters mysterious travelers.

Israel is commanded to love the foreigner.

Jesus makes a Samaritan the hero of a story.

He eats with people respectable religion avoids.

And in Matthew 25, Christ identifies himself with people who are hungry, poor, imprisoned and strangers.

Perhaps we keep searching for God in heaven while God keeps appearing at the door.

And perhaps the scandal is that God rarely arrives carrying identification.

I. Abraham’s Theology Begins With Lunch

Genesis 18 tells us Abraham is sitting near his tent when three strangers appear.

Abraham does not interrogate them.

He does not ask:

“What religion are you?”

“Where were you born?”

“Do you agree with my theology?”

“Are you deserving?”

He runs toward them.

He bows.

He offers water.

Bread.

Rest.

Then he prepares a meal.

Only gradually does the story reveal that something sacred is happening.

This gives us one of Scripture’s oldest theological principles:

Hospitality sometimes precedes revelation.

Abraham welcomes strangers before he understands who they are.

That matters.

Because if we insist upon knowing who deserves welcome before offering it, we may never recognize the sacred stranger standing before us.

II. Israel Must Remember Being the Stranger

The Torah repeatedly commands Israel to care for foreigners.

Leviticus says:

“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.”

Why?

“For you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Memory becomes ethics.

Remember what exclusion felt like.

Remember vulnerability.

Remember depending upon someone else’s mercy.

And then build a society where others do not suffer what you suffered.

This is profoundly important.

Biblical faith does not merely ask:

What do you believe?

It asks:

What has your suffering taught you about how to treat others?

Pain can make us bitter.

Or pain can make us compassionate.

The biblical hope is that memory becomes mercy.

III. Jesus Makes the Wrong Person the Hero

Then Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

We know it so well that we often miss how provocative it is.

A man is attacked and left beside the road.

A priest passes.

A Levite passes.

Then comes the Samaritan.

To many Jewish hearers of Jesus’ time, Samaritans represented a rival religious community with a long history of tension with Judeans.

And Jesus chooses that person as the hero.

Theologically incorrect.

Religiously suspicious.

Ethnically other.

And yet compassionate.

Jesus asks:

“Which of these three… was a neighbor?”

The answer:

“The one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus responds:

“Go and do likewise.”

Notice what Jesus does not say.

Go and believe likewise.

Go and worship likewise.

Go and join the Samaritan’s religion.

He says:

Do likewise.

Mercy becomes the theological test.

IV. Derrida: Hospitality Is Dangerous

Jacques Derrida thought deeply about hospitality.

True hospitality contains risk because the stranger arrives before we completely understand them.

If I welcome only people whose identity, behavior and beliefs I have already approved, my hospitality is conditional.

It becomes something closer to a transaction:

You may enter if you become sufficiently like me.

Derrida pushes us toward the impossible ideal of unconditional hospitality.

Of course real communities require boundaries.

Safety matters.

Justice matters.

Hospitality does not mean allowing abuse.

But Derrida exposes something important:

We frequently call something hospitality while secretly demanding assimilation.

“You are welcome here—

provided you speak like us,

believe like us,

dress like us,

love like us,

worship like us,

and stop making us uncomfortable.”

That is not much of a welcome.

Sometimes hospitality means allowing the stranger to remain genuinely strange.

V. Caputo: God Is the Call Coming From the Stranger

Here John D. Caputo takes us even deeper.

For Caputo, God does not primarily function as a supernatural sovereign controlling events from above.

God insists.

God calls.

God makes a demand without coercive power.

And where might that call be heard?

Often in the stranger.

The stranger says:

Make room.

The hungry person says:

Feed me.

The refugee says:

Shelter me.

The rejected person says:

See me.

The wounded person says:

Do not pass by.

The call cannot force us.

The Samaritan could have continued walking.

Abraham could have stayed inside his tent.

We can always refuse.

That is the weakness of God.

Love has no police force.

Hospitality possesses no army.

Mercy does not compel.

God insists.

We decide whether the call will exist in flesh.

VI. God May Need Our Table

This leads to a startling possibility.

What if God needs a table?

Not because a supernatural deity becomes hungry.

But because hospitality cannot happen abstractly.

Hospitality requires somewhere to happen.

A chair.

A doorway.

A meal.

A community.

Someone willing to say:

Sit here.

We can pray endlessly:

“God, welcome the rejected.”

And perhaps the divine response is:

Move over.

Make room.

We ask:

“God, where are you?”

Perhaps God answers:

At the edge of your table, waiting for a chair.

VII. Francis and the Leper

Francis of Assisi understood this through one of the defining experiences of his spiritual life.

Francis had been repulsed by people with leprosy.

They represented everything he feared.

Disease.

Poverty.

Social exclusion.

Then something changed.

Francis began serving them.

The people he once avoided became teachers.

His conversion did not occur merely because he acquired better theological information.

His relationships changed.

The stranger became kin.

Francis later remembered that what had seemed bitter became sweetness.

That is conversion.

Not merely changing doctrines.

Changing who we are willing to embrace.

VIII. Clare and Radical Belonging

Clare of Assisi likewise rejected the status structures of her world.

She chose a community organized around simplicity, mutuality and shared life rather than aristocratic privilege.

Franciscan and Clarean spirituality asks us to see kinship everywhere.

Brother Sun.

Sister Moon.

Sister Water.

Brother Fire.

Even Sister Death.

Creation becomes family.

Once that imagination takes hold, the category stranger begins collapsing.

Perhaps there are no absolute strangers.

Only relatives we have not learned to recognize.

IX. Matthew 25: The Terrifying Disguise of Christ

Then Jesus says something astonishing:

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

People ask:

When?

Jesus answers:

“Just as you did it to one of the least of these… you did it to me.”

Think carefully about this.

Jesus does not say:

“I was pretending to be the stranger.”

He identifies himself with them.

This creates an extraordinary sacramental theology.

The stranger becomes a kind of sacrament.

The hungry body becomes sacred.

The imprisoned body becomes sacred.

The sick body becomes sacred.

The rejected body becomes sacred.

We search for Christ in bread and wine.

Jesus says:

Also look at the person nobody wants sitting beside them.

X. Religious Pluralism Begins at the Table

This has enormous implications for interfaith life.

Religious pluralism does not require pretending every religion teaches the same thing.

They don’t.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, atheists and others possess genuinely different understandings of reality.

Good.

A table where everyone must say exactly the same thing is not a community.

It is an echo chamber.

Hospitality allows difference without requiring domination.

We can say:

Tell me what you see from where you stand.

And perhaps discover something sacred.

A Christian may learn compassion from a Buddhist.

A Christian may learn devotion from a Muslim.

A Christian may learn argument and sacred wrestling from Jewish tradition.

A Christian may learn reverence for Earth from Indigenous traditions.

A believer may learn moral courage from an atheist.

And perhaps everyone leaves the table larger than when they arrived.

XI. The Church Should Be a Table, Not a Border Checkpoint

Too often churches behave like immigration offices for the Kingdom of God.

Documents, please.

Correct doctrine?

Correct sexuality?

Correct politics?

Correct baptism?

Correct theology?

Correct lifestyle?

Then perhaps you may enter.

But Jesus’ table behaved differently.

Tax collectors appeared.

Sexual outsiders appeared.

Poor people appeared.

Religious outsiders appeared.

People with questionable reputations appeared.

The disciples themselves were hardly models of theological consistency.

And somehow Jesus kept serving dinner.

The Church should probably be less confident about deciding whom God would refuse to sit beside.

XII. Hospitality Does Not Mean No Boundaries

We should say something important.

Radical hospitality does not require tolerating harm.

A person experiencing abuse does not owe their abuser access to them.

A community must protect vulnerable people.

Boundaries can be expressions of love.

Jesus himself sometimes withdrew.

Sometimes confronted.

Sometimes said no.

Hospitality without justice becomes permissiveness.

Justice without hospitality becomes punishment.

We need both.

The goal is not:

Everyone gets unlimited access to everyone.

The goal is:

Nobody loses their human dignity.

Even boundaries can be drawn without hatred.

XIII. Žižek and the Neighbor Who Annoys Us

Slavoj Žižek frequently reminds us, in his characteristically uncomfortable way, that the neighbor is not merely a pleasant person waiting for our charity.

The neighbor can be strange.

Difficult.

Unsettling.

Other.

This prevents us from turning “love your neighbor” into sentimental greeting-card religion.

Real neighbors snore.

Vote differently.

Practice strange religions.

Play music too loudly.

Have complicated histories.

Disagree with us.

Hospitality becomes real precisely when difference stops being theoretical.

Love is easy when everyone behaves according to our expectations.

The Gospel begins getting interesting when they don’t.

XIV. The Stranger Changes the Host

Here is the secret of hospitality.

We imagine hospitality means we possess something and graciously give it to them.

Our table.

Our food.

Our community.

Our wisdom.

But biblical hospitality repeatedly reverses the relationship.

Abraham welcomes strangers—

and receives a promise.

The Samaritan helps the wounded man—

and becomes Jesus’ teacher about neighbor-love.

The disciples welcome a stranger on the Emmaus road—

and discover Christ.

Hospitality transforms the host.

The stranger may bring something we desperately need.

A question.

A story.

A perspective.

A challenge.

A blessing.

Perhaps that is why religious communities afraid of change are often afraid of strangers.

The stranger might rearrange the furniture.

Theologically speaking, sometimes the furniture needs rearranging.

Conclusion: Leave an Empty Chair

Hebrews gives us this beautiful instruction:

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Without knowing it.

That may be the key.

We rarely recognize the sacred in advance.

Abraham did not receive a heavenly notification:

Three angels arriving at noon. Prepare lunch.

The stranger simply appeared.

And Abraham opened his life.

So perhaps every spiritual community should symbolically leave an empty chair.

Not merely for the person we already expect.

For whoever comes.

The doubter.

The refugee.

The queer teenager.

The Muslim neighbor.

The atheist.

The person leaving fundamentalism.

The person with no religious language at all.

The person whose theology makes us uncomfortable.

The person who has been told there is no seat for them.

Leave a chair.

Because God may arrive as someone whose name you do not know.

And perhaps this is the mystery:

God does not stand behind the stranger demanding that we welcome them.

God happens in the welcome itself.

When the door opens—

God happens.

When bread is shared—

God happens.

When dignity is restored—

God happens.

When enemies sit at the same table—

God happens.

When someone who expected rejection hears:

“There is room for you here,”

the promise becomes flesh.

This is the event.

This is the call.

This is the insistence of God.

And it cannot force us.

The door remains in our hands.

So when the stranger knocks,

may we remember Abraham.

May we remember the Samaritan.

May we remember Francis embracing the person he once feared.

May we remember Clare creating another kind of community.

And above all, may we remember Jesus saying:

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Perhaps the future of Christianity will not be decided by how fiercely we defend our borders.

Perhaps it will be decided by how courageously we expand our tables.

A fuller life for everyone requires room for everyone.

So open the door when wisdom allows.

Set another place.

Listen before judging.

Protect the vulnerable.

Welcome difference.

Expect to be changed.

And leave one chair empty.

Because you never know who might arrive.

The stranger may become a neighbor.

The neighbor may become a friend.

And somewhere in that encounter,

without thunder,

without supernatural spectacle,

without anyone even noticing at first—

God may happen.

Amen.