Entertaining Angels Unaware
Dear Friends,
This Sunday after church, I will be heading off to Burning Man to join with about 70,000 adventuresome souls to form a temporary “city” in the heart of the Nevada Desert. It’s a community built on radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, care for the environment, radical inclusion, and the principal of immediacy, among other important defining principles. This will be my fifth experience of Burning Man, and the more years I participate, the more deeply I believe that it is this kind of community that Jesus had in mind when he gathered people together in a way that embraced their authenticity, broke down barriers of caste and convention, turned strangers into friends, and remained fully present to the moment.
In our reading from the letter to the Hebrews this week, the writer advises his readers, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” I like the idea that “entertaining strangers” might bring “angels unaware” into our lives; and this has, in many ways, been a very important part of my experience at Burning Man. Almost everyone I encounter is a “stranger” and because I’m being intentional about practicing the principle of “immediacy” I regularly find myself stopping to entertain (and be entertained by) angels whom God has delivered to my side.
It’s truly lovely that God sends us the stranger, the interruption, as gift. At least when I’m at Burning Man. But when I return home and re-enter a world that values order and predictability, living within our boundaries of time and space, working independently, and keeping a distance from disruptions, I’m not so keen on stopping what I am doing to welcome the angel disguised as a stranger. It just doesn’t “feel” as free and easy as it does when I’m out in the middle of the desert. In truth, it just doesn’t come naturally.
Have you noticed that scripture doesn’t spend a lot of time telling us how to feel as we live as a new kind of community? It simply says, "here’s what you do: entertain strangers, put yourself in their skin, walk in their shoes--people who don’t look or talk or act like you, even those who are afflicted or imprisoned by things that make you uncomfortable--the whole of joyful, suffering humanity." And it says, "don’t try this alone. Yoke yourself to God and to one another." I keep forgetting that part--that the “you” in scripture is more often plural than singular.
One thing that I’ve learned at Burning Man, and here in our community at St. John’s, is that trying to live the way that Jesus lived on our own isn’t just difficult. It’s impossible. Alone, we fumble and stumble. Alone, we overthink and overdo. It’s only in a place of “together” that we will freely, even joyfully, have the heart to meet the angels that come, whatever their disorienting disguises. Only together can we become whole.
In Christ,
Amelie+
