Homeless ...

What does it mean to be truly hospitable? This is one of the things I'm thinking about at the moment. Last week I had two primary inputs on the subject - the first was the following passage, read aloud at church on Tuesday:

Matthew 22:1 - 14

Parable of the Great Feast

Jesus also told them other parables. He said, 2 “The Kingdom of Heaven can be illustrated by the story of a king who prepared a great wedding feast for his son. 3 When the banquet was ready, he sent his servants to notify those who were invited. But they all refused to come!

4 “So he sent other servants to tell them, ‘The feast has been prepared. The bulls and fattened cattle have been killed, and everything is ready. Come to the banquet!’ 5 But the guests he had invited ignored them and went their own way, one to his farm, another to his business. 6 Others seized his messengers and insulted them and killed them.

7 “The king was furious, and he sent out his army to destroy the murderers and burn their town. 8 And he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, and the guests I invited aren’t worthy of the honor. 9 Now go out to the street corners and invite everyone you see.’ 10 So the servants brought in everyone they could find, good and bad alike, and the banquet hall was filled with guests.

11 “But when the king came in to meet the guests, he noticed a man who wasn’t wearing the proper clothes for a wedding. 12 ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how is it that you are here without wedding clothes?’ But the man had no reply. 13 Then the king said to his aides, ‘Bind his hands and feet and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

The second input was on Friday morning when I met these two gentlemen on a frosty morning in Cambridge:

They are homeless. One was still quite drunk. The other may or may not have been at the time. They were both cold. They were both hungry. Neither was doing a heck of a lot to make their situations any better. A warm "full english" in a local cafe isn't much of an improvement, but it probably helped some. If I had had the guts to sit with them and eat with them, and if I had had the networked connections to be able to plug them into something useful, and if I lived in Cambridge and would see them again, maybe it would have been of a bit more use. But I didn't, and I couldn't, and I won't. The point is - this Kingdom business is both a lot simpler and a lot more complicated than we let on at our Sunday morning services ...