Sabbath: Hosting God, Neighbor, and Self (Genesis 18:2-15; Lent 5 (series); April 6, 2014)

Sabbath: Hosting God, Neighbor, and Self

Genesis 18:2-15
Lent 5 (series)
April 6, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

In the Highlands of Scotland, north of the barren expanse of Rannoch Moor, lies a glen between steep heather-covered mountains, through which runs the river Coe.   Glencoe is sublimely beautiful.  It is also the site of a massacre that the Highlands have never forgotten.

Glencoe was controlled by the Glencoe MacDonalds, a small branch of the powerful Clan MacDonald of the western islands.  The surrounding territory was controlled by the equally powerful Campbell’s of Argyll and their allies, long-time enemies of the MacDonald’s.

In 1688 the Catholic King James VII and II (James VII of Scotland and James II of England) was ousted from the British throne.  He fled to France. Both the English and Scottish parliaments then invited William of Orange and his wife Anne, James’s daughter, to become the king and queen of both England and Scotland.

This did not go over well with some of the Highland clans and there was a brief “rising” in favor of James.  In Latin James is Jacobus, so James’s supporters were known as Jacobites.  This Rising of 1688 was the first of three major Jacobite risings.

Among the Jacobite clans were the Glencoe MacDonalds.  After the Rising was put down every Jacobite clan chieftain had to present a signed oath of loyalty to William and Mary before January 1, 1689.  Many of them, Alasdair MacIain, chief of the Glencoe MacDonalds among them, did not want to swear allegiance to William without James’s permission.  That permission came only just in time for Alasdair MacIain to present his signed oath of allegiance at Fort William on December 31, 1688.  But when he arrived he was told that the oath had to be presented in Inverary, some seventy miles away.  He was not able to present his oath at Inverary until January 6 but was assured that the oath was acceptable and he and his people were safely in the King’s peace.

What MacIain did not know was that William’s Secretary of State had decided to make an example of the Glencoe MacDonalds.  Accordingly, one hundred twenty foot soldiers (almost all Campbell’s)under the command of Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon were sent from Fort William and arrived in Glencoe on the first of February, there to await further orders. 

For this story to make sense, you must understand that one of the most sacred unwritten rules in the Highlands was the law of hospitality.  When Captain Campbell asked MacIain for shelter for his men it was granted, even though the MacDonald’s and Campbell’s had been enemies for centuries.  The weather was terrible, even by the standards of a Highland winter.  MacIain could hardly refuse.  For twelve days and nights the Glencoe Macdonald’s gave the members of the Argyll company food and shelter. 

Doubtless, there was more.  The winter nights are long in the Highlands.  I’m sure they passed the time with music and dancing.  The soldiers and the men of the clan swapped stories of having stolen each other’s cattle.  Doubtless more than one MacDonald lass looked a Campbell lad over carefully and liked what she saw.

On February 12, Captain Campbell finally received his orders:

You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the McDonalds of Glencoe, and put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old Fox and his sons do upon no account escape your hands, you are to secure all the avenues that no man escape.[1]

That night in the midst of a blizzard the company was mustered and began the systematic slaughter of the Glencoe MacDonalds.  Thirty-eight men, women and children were killed outright.  The blizzard helped some to escape into the mountains, but many died of exposure. 

The Highlanders were outraged, but not because people—even women and children—had been killed.  The Highlands of Scotland have a bloody history.  There is hardly a corner of it that is not the site of a battle or massacre, let alone one of the countless skirmishes between bands of cattle thieves from one clan and cattle protectors of another.  No, it wasn’t the bloodshed. 

What outraged the Highlands was that the company of Campbell’s had accepted the hospitality of the MacDonald’s and then violated it.  The MacDonald’s had taken pity on the Campbell men and that pity was used against them.  No one in the Highlands has ever forgotten this disgraceful wrong-doing, now three and a quarter centuries old, and a surprising number have not forgiven it, either.  There is still a pub in the village of Glencoe with a sign on the door that says, “No Campbell’s.”[2]  Don’t think for a moment that it is a joke.

We think of hospitality as the offer of coffee and a cookie to someone who drops by for a visit.  And, sure enough, that is hospitality of a kind.  But in its strong and older sense hospitality is a set of practices that allows enemies—or those who might become enemies—to set aside their quarrels.  Hospitality is a sort of truce.  In the Scottish Highlands hospitality was so important that, if I gave shelter to an injured enemy so that he could recover his health—and I would indeed be expected to do that—I would be required to defend him even against my friends and family.  Hospitality was vital to Highland life.

It was vital to life in the ancient Middle East, as well.  When Abraham was sitting in the mid-day shade of the oaks of Mamre and saw three strangers approaching, he had a problem.  Who are strangers, after all?  They might prove to be friends.  They might just as easily prove to be enemies.  The encounter with a stranger is full of danger.  Abraham could not count on the people of Mamre for help or protection: he was not related to any of them.

Practices of hospitality avert the risk that a stranger will become an enemy.  Hospitality lies on the border of hostility.  They are notions that are wrapped up in each other.  In fact, the very words hospitality and hostility come from the same Indo-European root.[3]

Abraham’s hospitality would help insure that these strangers left him with a blessing instead of a curse.  So Abraham begged the three strangers to accept his hospitality.  And Abraham’s household sprang into action: bread was baked, a calf was slaughtered, butchered and prepared, and milk and curds were brought as appetizers while the rest was being prepared.  The strangers accepted Abraham’s hospitality and left their blessing behind: Sarah would have a son.  Abraham would have an heir.  From that heir came Jesus, many, many generations later.  This act of hospitality was important not simply to Abraham in the short term, but to us as well.

Now it may seem strange to you that in a series on Sabbath, I would focus on an almost feverish act of hospitality.  It is strange, but I have done it for a reason.  Hospitality offers a truce to hostile or potentially hostile parties.  It offers a space within which gestures toward trust may be given and received.  It offers a sample of the possibility of peace, when a truce becomes a permanent way of life.

One of the worst features of life under the regime of the beast is the way that it has surrounded us with enemies or potential enemies.  In a world that worships market values, how can we regard God as anything other than a great Keeper of Accounts, a Banker who has signed a mortgage that we can never, ever repay.  Our spiritual lives become an effort to get God to recognize the value of our payments and to cajole God into looking the other way on our indebtedness.  We treat God as a nosy IRS agent who wants more of our assets than we are willing to give.  We treat God as an enemy or a potential enemy.  We need a hospitality that will allow us to set aside our quarrels or potential quarrels with God, a hospitality that allows us simply to be in each other’s presence without expectations, a hospitality that lays the foundation for peace.

From the outside, a world determined by market values looks as though it has a great abundance of everything.  But from the inside that world is one of scarcity and anxiety.  Enough is never enough.  And even what we have is insecure.  Our neighbors become competitors for scarce goods.  Our children, from Kindergarten on, must live in the world as if it were a competition and their friends were rival claimants for scarce rewards.  The poor are no longer our neighbors; they are “takers” who want our scarce resources.  We need a hospitality that will call a truce to our scramble for scarce goods, a hospitality that will allow us to be neighborly to our neighbors.

Under the regime of the beast we have become alienated from ourselves.  We eat badly.  We do not rest enough.  We spend too much time at work.  We turn a walk through our neighborhood into a cardio workout.  We lose ourselves in the never-ending orgy of production and consumption.  We have become our own enemies.  We need a hospitality that calls a truce in the war we are waging on ourselves.  We need a hospitality that will give us the space to recover our sanity.

Sabbath—whether we can observe it for a whole day or find a day’s worth in intervals throughout the week—is the space within which we can practice that hospitality.  When the Sabbath begins—whether at sundown on Friday night, or dawn on Sunday, or at the beginning of an evening or afternoon during the week—we turn off the cell phones, the computers, the iPads and tablets.  We turn down the noise of our lives.  When the noise stops we can hear a sound that had been drowned out.  It’s a knocking at our door.  When we open the door we find on our doorstep a wounded God who needs our care, a wounded neighbor who needs our welcome, and even our wounded self that needs a space to recover.  They might not look like God, neighbor and self.  They may even look like a Campbell or a MacDonald, but trust me it is God, neighbor and self who need our hospitality.  And Sabbath, above all, is a time for it.

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[1] “British Library - The Massacre of Glencoe.” Cited 4 April 2014. Online: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/unioncrownsparliaments/massacreofglencoe/.

[2] To be sure, the anti-Campbell animus should be a little more discriminating.  The death toll seems rather small under the circumstances.  With a blizzard raging, shots would not have been heard and there would have been little time for the MacDonalds to warn each other.  The low death toll, I believe, is best accounted for by assuming that there was widespread refusal to follow the orders.  If that is the case, many, perhaps even most, of the company risked the firing squad rather than break the rule of hospitality.

[3] ghos-ti-, “someone with whom one has duties of reciprocal hospitality,” Watkins, Calvert, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), 23.