A few weeks ago, I walked around a neighborhood to hang event flyers on the door handles of people’s homes. I was struck by how many of these places had smart doorbell cameras to ward off burglars and other intruders. While I understand why people would deem such vigilance necessary, I also think it reflects the fear and distrust that pervades American life.
When we host strangers, we do not know who we are welcoming into our homes. This can be daunting. For all we know, they could be dangerous—thieves, murderers, or sexual predators. What harm could they bring to us and our families? But the Biblical injunction to practice hospitality in Hebrews 13:2 appeals to another possibility: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (ESV, italics mine).
Today, we tend to assume the worst about people. We do not rely on our neighbors to watch out for us because we do not know our neighbors. We do not know our neighbors because we do not to invite them into our lives due to fear. Thus, we succumb to isolation and anxiety. We construct walls around our homes and our lives to keep evil out, but in so doing we give in to evil ourselves by failing to let our neighbors in.
We have filled and surrounded our homes with technologies that promise to protect us from evil, often unconscious of the ways these very technologies amplify our fears and further project distrust and unwelcome.
Surveillance technologies promise safety by granting us the illusion of control. The problem is, we are not in control, regardless of the measures we take. As dangerous as the world is today, shouldn’t a society so plagued by mental health struggles pursue an alternative mode of safety that, rather than projecting suspicion, welcomes strangers as friends? After all, don’t these mental health problems contribute to what makes our society so dangerous in the first place? What if we dared to defy the reign of fear by seeking to depend on a better source of safety than what our technologies can offer?
True safety is not the fruit of control; true safety is the fruit of belonging. Like a child is safe in the arms of his mother, so we are safe when we are held in the bounds of community. But in order to find such a safety, we must be willing to risk being hurt by others and invite them into our homes. Some of them will hurt us, worse than we know, because we will learn to love them and there is nothing worse than being wounded by those we love. But it is better to be wounded because we dared to love than to hide ourselves in fear of being wounded by those we never learned to love and so miss out on life altogether.1
To be clear, I am not necessarily arguing that we should get rid of our smart doorbells. I recognize that today neighborhoods where smart doorbells are not necessary are rare (and becoming more so). But I am arguing that we should aspire to be a people who make places where we live safer by nature of the belonging that we cultivate there. We should aim to be a people whose hospitality defies the stranglehold that fear and distrust have on our society.
Perhaps that will mean unplugging our surveillance devices, perhaps not. But we should be quick to question the assumptions our technologies lead us to make about what constitutes safety and take active steps to cultivate communities of belonging through the practice of hospitality.
Beyond defying fear, what makes hospitality worthwhile is the people we get to encounter whose life and presence uniquely emanates the presence and love of God. They might just be passing through, or they might choose to stay. But sometimes these individuals leave behind a blessing that changes our lives forever.
In Genesis, Abraham meets three angels disguised as men who are passing through the area. He insists that they come to his tent and serves them food. Then one of the angels tells Abraham that in a year’s time God would fulfill his promise to give Abraham a son.
What benefits we miss by failing to entertain strangers! Angels pass by unnoticed, bearing the gifts of God. I pray that I would not fail to welcome them.
For an excellent article on this, read Gregory Thompson’s “Hinges and a Lock.”
Image courtesy of WikiArt.