Come on up to the house

January 11, 2025 - February 15, 2026

Epiphany is a season of revelation: God reveals God’s hopes for all creation, and for the human co-conspirators with God’s dream. In what seems like a particularly unwelcoming season in our public and political life, we’ll explore the ethic of hospitality in the Bible, including God’s hospitality to us and our respondent hospitality to each other and everybody else.

Sodom, Gomorrah, and the ancient Near Eastern ethic of hospitality. The story of Sodom-n- Gomorrah’s destruction deserves theological rehabilitation, so that the intra-biblical witness to those cities’ sin can be heard. Ezekiel 16:49 and Jesus’s sending of the apostles in Matthew 10 both point to Sodom’s inhospitality (a failure to welcome and care for traveling strangers) as the reason for God’s displeasure and punishment. Here we learn that God prioritizes our care for the stranger as the natural (God-given) way of human being.