It is easy to lament the loss of hospitality in our own time, especially to the stranger. Whether it's the controversial laws in Arizona or the broader anti-immigrant sentiment that always seems to materialize during hard times; or the natural suspicion we all feel when someone different or unknown appears in a place familiar to us. How easily we find the stranger dangerous, threatening, upsetting. As human beings, we must be reminded repeatedly just as our spiritual ancestors were that hospitality to the stranger is not a luxury or a choice when convenient, but a necessity.

Jesus offers up examples of the priest and the Levite -- among the keepers of righteousness of his day. It is not that the priest and the Levite are mean people for passing by on the other side of the road. What they are doing as good ethical people is quite natural: They have responsibilities, obligations, and rituals to uphold. The man was left for dead -- touching a potentially dead body or even the blood of the injured would have likely rendered any priest or Levite ritually unclean and unable to attend to their socially sanctioned duties for a time. So busy were they in attending to their good, ethical righteous tasks that they had no time to stop for an errand of mercy.

But what do we mean by "God bless America?" Is it just a patriotic sound bite or something more? This is where the history takes a back seat and the sermon begins for me this morning, and where we come face-to-face with our ancient Scriptural texts written in anything but a democratic milieu. They have something profound to tell us about why we invoke a divine blessing on our country this day - and it may not be for the reasons we think.

We wrestle, as followers of Christ, with the same things Jesus' would-be followers wrestled with. We have obligations - obligations to family, to tradition, to institution, to the pressing needs and concerns of our worldly lives. We spook easily at change, we blanch at difference, we resist the challenge those outside our doors pose to us, we seek safety in what we know and fear what we don't. Jesus deliberately shakes up his hearers and us, shocks us out of our comfort and into a vulnerable, itinerate place - the place of ongoing journey, the fragility of raw humanity on a dusty road, even staring into the face of darkness, death, and dissolution. Only in that way will we "get" - both literally and figuratively - the Gospel. Only in that way, he reminds us, will we fully find God.