Genesis 18:1-15 Once my mother forgot that she invited a guest for dinner. We were midway through our meal at the kitchen table when the doorbell rang. There he was, all dressed up and smiling, prepared to be a dinner guest. My mother was acutely embarrassed, as well as panicked. But she reacted quickly. She immediately gathered us all together to go out to a nearby restaurant with our guest, as though she had planned it that way all along. For the first and only time in my life I was encouraged to eat a second dinner – a special treat. My mother was a delightful hostess all through the meal, and all was well. I always found it remarkable that she was able to recover so well and turn a near crisis into a very enjoyable evening. This was an unusual experience, but actually, hospitality was an ordinary everyday […]
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Advent 2: A Place at the Table
Baruch 5: 1-5 Philippians 1:3-11 When I was a child, we lived in a crowded house. I had three sisters, and my grandmother lived with us for much of my childhood, as well. And there was about a year when we had someone else living with us too. My mother brought a young woman into our home who was struggling with grief. I was too young to understand the circumstances; I just knew that Marie was broken, fragile. Still, she was a beloved big sister to me and my sisters. I remember, too, gaggles of young Filipina women in our house. Back in the 1960s the U.S. opened immigration and many nurses came into the country from the Philippines, to meet the need at the time. The hospital where my mother worked hired a lot of them. When my mother looked at these nurses she saw girls who were lonely […]
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