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The New Testament book we know as “Hebrews” is kind of a mystery. It used to be commonplace to introduce a reading from it with the form, “The Letter of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews.” But now scholars generally agree that: First, it wasn’t written by Paul. Second, there’s no known group that would’ve been called “the Hebrews.” Was it the Jewish converts to Christianity in some city, possibly Rome? Maybe. There’s a lot in it about Temple worship, that makes it seem very “Jewish.” But many 1st c. Christians would’ve learned about all that as the precursor to the arrival of Jesus. So not necessarily a Jewish audience.
Finally, it’s not really a letter. It’s more of a sermon, with a little personal bit sort of tacked on at the end, where a bunch of exhortations come at the reader like popcorn. This is the part we heard from this morning, and of all that advice, I want to focus on one bit:
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Or, as some more familiar versions have it, “some have entertained angels unawares.”
So today I want to talk about angels: who they are, what they’re about, and what it might mean to “entertain them unawares.”
Let’s start with the question, What are they? Our post-Enlightenment minds might struggle to believe in them at all. Is it really plausible that there are beings in the world that we can’t see, and that they interact with and influence us in some ways? This is church, though. Haven’t most of us gotten past that objection? The question for us isn’t so much whether angels exist as what do we know about them? And how can we know anything, given that we can’t see them or talk with them?
We do meet them in the Bible, though. For example, three angels bring the news to Abraham and Sarah that after all these years, they will have a son. Later, the angel Gabriel gives Mary the news that she is going to miraculously conceive the Messiah. And it takes an angel to convince Joseph that it really did happen that way. Much later, in a very funny scene in Acts 12, an angel appears to bust Peter out of jail. He shows up at headquarters and they’re all so astonished they forget to let him in and leave him out on the street, knocking at the door.
Angels have been a common theme in art, for example the beautiful Annunciation by Fra Angelico. And then, there are the countless “putti” in Renaissance and Baroque art: those chubby-cheeked, winged infants who look sweet and slightly mischievous as they hover over human activities. We even have angels in TV: Who remembers that show from the ‘90s Touched By an Angel? The protagonist was an angel named Monica, played by Roma Downey who’s from Northern Ireland. She’d spend most of every episode trying to help some troubled human, and in the last few minutes she’d reveal that she’d been an angel all along. They’d light up her hair, and she’d say, “God loves you…” It was simultaneously horrible and adorable.
And in the movies: remember It’s a Wonderful Life, where Clarence Oddbody has been dead a couple hundred years and is still trying to earn his wings?
Just as an aside, there’s nothing in the scriptures to suggest that humans become angels when we die, any more than we become golden retrievers. The psalmist says God made humans “a little lower than the angels” (Ps. 8:5), and this is quoted earlier in Hebrews (2:7). So we’re obviously way lower than golden retrievers. But the point is, we’re a different kind of being.
We have this notion of angels as sweetly benign: our guardian angels keep us from stepping in front of a bus, and so on. But have you ever noticed how often in the scriptures the first thing an angel says is “Don’t be afraid”? “Fear not,” and we think of A Charlie Brown Christmas, but it’s probably more like “Don’t panic!”
Given what we’ve seen in paintings and films, this seems like a strange and perhaps unnecessary opening. But read the description of angels in the first chapter of Ezekiel: they have four faces like different animals, and four wings, feet like calves’ hooves, they glow like burning coals, and they’re surrounded by wheels within wheels, covered with eyes. I’m pretty sure I would have to be told not to panic.
I don’t think I could entertain something like that without noticing it. “Wow, you seem so different from the rest of our guests.” (All those eyes!) But we see multiple places within Scripture where angels assume the form of humans: the three who visited Abraham and Sarah; the two who went to Sodom with Lot (whose human form was quite attractive, which proved to be unfortunate as the men of Sodom tried to assault them), and the two who asked the women at Jesus’ tomb, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
So when the author of Hebrews warns us we might encounter angels “unawares,” the assumption seems to be that they can take all sorts of human forms. And we are told, “Don’t neglect to show hospitality to strangers, because you never know.”
I remember a time when I met someone who could have been an angel. I was working in Rome, and I came upon a lady who was on the street panhandling. I stopped to chat for a moment, and she said to me, “We’re invisible. People don’t even see us.” I told her I’d heard the same thing at home. And I wondered: how often do the angels who show up for us have that same complaint, that they’re invisible? Maybe they aren’t required to be invisible, but we make them invisible, because we aren’t paying attention. And we certainly don’t show them hospitality.
In the Ancient Near East, hospitality was a sacred duty. Travelers didn’t have giant vehicles they could pack with their every need. If a stranger turned up needing water, you didn’t ask for letters of recommendation; you gave them water or they could die. Soon. And whoever they were, you didn’t want that on your conscience.
I’m pretty sure the men of Sodom didn’t realize the visitors they were trying to assault were angels. But the point is: they shouldn’t have had to. Because they shouldn’t have been dishing out that kind of treatment to anyone.
One of the things angels in the Bible do is bring messages from God. So anyone we meet, angel or human, might play an angelic role, might bring us a message from God, a lesson from God—if we’re paying attention. If we can learn to recognize “angelic behavior.”
But we often don’t. There’s a lot of hostility in our country towards “strangers” these days, and a lot of lies told about them. For instance, the idea that immigrants are crime-prone has been shown false by the data. Immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, and it’s not until their children become thoroughly Americanized that their crime participation increases. In our political rhetoric today, there are lots of “Christians” who are definitely not showing hospitality to strangers.
And Hebrews tells us that’s dangerous, because you never know who they are. But we can take it a step further: that’s actually true of everyone. I don’t even know who my best friends are, because I can’t see into their hearts the way God can. I’m convinced that at least some of them are either angels or saints.
As for strangers? We never know. And that’s why Jesus teaches us to treat everyone we meet with love, just as we would treat him, and why we promise at our baptism to “respect the dignity of every human being.” Considering the grace and mercy I’ve received in my own life, how dare I not extend grace and mercy, loving hospitality, to others, including strangers?
The sin of Sodom was not what people think; it was failing to show hospitality to strangers. Now, countries have a right to determine whom they welcome in and on what terms. But we as followers of Christ? We have no such right. So let’s make a practice of looking at strangers through this lens: They might be an angel. Or they might not be. The one thing we know for sure is that to us, they are Christ. So does it really matter?
Let me leave you with this quotation from the late and wonderful Thomas Merton:
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”