Strangers in a strange land...

"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." (Hebrews 13.2)

Who are strangers to us? It's not just people we've never met before, it's those who are different - strange-ers.

We are all so comfortable in our ways of classifying and categorising people. We look at someone's car, at their clothes or their home, and we feel safe deciding that they are - or aren't - "our kind of people..." We know that someone has an equivalent kind of a profession to ours - they're a head teacher, and we're a solicitor, maybe, or a chartered accountant. That's OK. We fit in. We can make the same general assumptions about each other; we play by the same rules.

Or maybe we meet someone quite different: a worker from the water board, maybe, or a mechanic at the local garage. We're safe there, too. We feel we can make reasonable assumptions about their values, their lifestyle - not the same as ours, to be sure, but nicely predictable, warmly reassuring. God's in his Heaven, and all's right with the social order.

But God didn't stay in his Heaven. He came down to earth, and was born of woman. Very inconvenient that turned out to be, too.

Young Jesus was born fulfilling more Messianic prophecies than you could shake a stick at; when he got the chance to preach in the local synagogue, he laid claim to them (Luke 4.16ff). Yet he was a peculiar kind of King, and he made some peculiar friends - lepers, tax collectors, whores.

He didn't play by the rules. Right to the last he broke them, one by one. No King should allow himself to be arrested, put on trial, slapped around. Still less should he put up with being executed like the worst kind of criminal - and if he did, surely he should at leave have had the common decency to remain dead...

But of course he didn't. And when he did depart - in a most unusual fashion - back into Heaven, he did one of the oddest things. He didn't leave his disciples to work it out for themselves, he sent "the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him" to be with them forever (John 14.16-17).

That same Spirit is with us, still. We cannot go on making those assumptions, judging our fellow men and women by their value in social currency.

I had the great good fortune to be born the son of a painter and sculptor, a rather reclusive woman who was divorced from my RAF father while I was still very young. We lived, as I grew up, outside of ordinary social expectations and categories. We were flat broke one month, rather comfortable the next. We lived in rented accommodation, always - Mother never had a reliable enough income to buy anywhere.

Probably as a consequence, I have never been able to feel comfortable in any social compartment, and none of the jobs I have done have really fitted that. Maybe the ten years before my farm accident were the nearest, but even then, dairy herdsmen aren't the easiest people to fit into any but rural society, and I was a herdsman who had once taught creative writing in a university. Odd, to say the least.

Now Jan and I are living in enforced retirement, neither of us in very good health, largely on State benefits (though I do have a very small private pension), we still don't fit people's categories very well. We live in a house rented from a Housing Association, and it often amuses me to notice the kind of assumptions people make about those who live in what's called "social housing." We don't fit those, either!

Now I'm not saying all this as a kind of inverse snobbery. At least I hope I'm not. I'm saying it because it makes me understand that being outside the ordinary social categories is a strange place to be. We are, to many people, strange-ers, like the people Jesus made friends with. It doesn't always feel comfortable for us; and I dare say it doesn't always feel all that comfortable for some of the folks we meet, who do fit those categories, and whose friends and acquaintances fit neatly too. But there's not a lot we can do about that now. The accidents of our lives and our different but strangely parallel upbringings have made us who we are, put us where we are, and there isn't a great deal we can do in our present state of health and financial situation to change it.

That's the point. Strange-ers in Jesus' sense can't do a lot about who they are. The prostitutes were probably divorcees, or widows without an inheritance, or orphans, in a society that made no provision for their support. They had little choice but to go on the street. The cripples were crippled, the blind, blind. The lepers were, literally, falling to bits, and the tax collectors were trapped in a system they couldn't control, and once in, couldn't escape. Even Nicodemus, as a member of the Sanhedrin, a powerful, educated man, had to come to see Jesus at night in case his fellow councillors found him out (John 3.1-21).

As Christians, ones who follow Jesus, we are called not only to "entertain," to care for, meet with, strange-ers, but to be them. We are called to be strange, to be in the world, but not of it (John 17.6-19). We do not belong to the world, just as Jesus did not belong to the world (John 17.16).

I know it's uncomfortable sometimes. I thank God for my strange situation, because I don't know how brave I'd be at being "strange" in a comfortable, socially acceptable role. Maybe I'd be like Nicodemus, and try, as long as possible, to keep it all under wraps. But we must, if we are to follow Jesus, to be like him (Luke 6.40), be prepared not only to be strange, but to love our strange neighbours. We must be prepared to be friends, and to be seen to be friends, with the most unlikely and unsuitable people. We really must it seems be prepared to give up all that we have, socially - as well as quite possibly materially - to follow our Lord, by whose endless mercy we have been "ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven." We don't belong anywhere, any more. We only belong to him.