Angels Unaware

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost - July 20, 2025

Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.

St. Columba's Episcopal Church

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Genesis 18:1-10a + Psalm 15 + Colossians 1:15-28 + Luke 10:38-42

Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you today in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.

Among the most cited and memorable verses from the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews is found in its final chapter 13:1-3, which reads:

Let brotherly love continue. ²Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for in doing so some have entertained angels unaware. ³Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

In reminding the reader to offer hospitality to strangers, the author of Hebrews undoubtedly has in mind the story of Abraham and Sarah we heard in Genesis this morning. The couple, indeed visited by angels unaware, welcome the strangers into their midst: offering rest, refreshment, and nourishment, thereby exemplifying par excellence the ancient Israelite code of hospitality. A spiritual and ethical code seared into the heart of ancient Israel, forged in the fires of their own oppression while themselves strangers in the land of Egypt as we are reminded in Exodus 22:21 and following:   

²¹You shall not mistreat or oppress a resident alien, for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt….²³If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry; ²⁴my wrath will burn, and I will certainly hear them…” 

What profound offense, what utter mockery our nation has made of this moral admonition in these latter days, in the erection of a detention center in the middle of the Florida everglades, cruelly and gleefully dubbed, “Alligator Alcatraz,” but called by its many detractors, “Alligator Auschwitz.” 

While the motivation for extending hospitality shifts in the Letter to Hebrews – the injunction to be welcoming, hospitable, and kind to the resident alien, the stranger in our midst remains a moral imperative. Whether our hospitality is born of remembering our own immigrant status of the past, or because being welcoming is itself a blessing, a virtue, matters little.

In its original Greek, the first two verses in Hebrews 13 are as inextricable as they are difficult to interpret into English. Verse 1 reads: Let brotherly love continue. And verse 2: Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels unaware.

Brotherly love comes from the compound Greek words, Phil (one of the several Greek word for “love” and Delphia (meaning, brother). Fair enough. But, the word used in vs. 2 for “hospitality” is the Greek compound, “philo-xenia” where again phil means “love” and xenia means both hospitality and stranger. Strangely, this is where we get the word xenophobia, fear of strangers or really “fear of being hospitable to strangers” as it were. [Garreth Lee Cockerill, NICNT, Hebrews, 680.]

What makes this difficult the translate yet profoundly poignant is that it is impossible for us to hear the word xenia as both ‘stranger’ and ‘hospitality’ simultaneously as they would have in Greek. But a close (even if awkward) English approximation might render these two verses: “Love of brother, let it continue. Love of ‘stranger-hospitality’ do not forget.” Thus, in this context the one word, xenia mean not only stranger or hospitality but “stranger-hospitality” – that unique and morally obligatory injunction to show hospitality especially to the stranger, the foreigner, the resident alien.

Yet the Letter to Hebrews tethers this teaching to another admonishment in the very next verse:

³Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

By “remembering” those in prison, the author of Hebrews intends for his readers to actually minister to them. Not merely to ‘call them to mind’ but to live as though they themselves are in prison, so to muster the same kind of urgency that would ultimately secure their release. Likewise, he admonishes them to live as though “you yourselves were being tortured” so as to prompt an urgent response on behalf of those who are tortured and imprisoned.

Our current administration would deny that those ‘resident aliens’ being held at “Alligator Alcatraz” are being tortured or imprisoned but I encourage us to look at what we already know. “Alligator Alcatraz” is the geographically remote state-run immigration detention facility located at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Florida Everglades, where its 11,000-foot runway was transformed into a make-shift tent-city in just over a week (8 days). The region, chosen for its dense population of alligators and pythons (to deter escapees no less than to remain far from the watchful eye of the media), was established by the Trump administration to address increased detention capacity needs, in the wake of his immigration crackdown.

Chain-link cages are housed within soft sided tents, each cage holding 32 grown men with only three available toilets among them. The current facility can hold 3,000 migrants with the capacity to expand its occupancy up to 5,000 as needed. Among the roughly 900 migrants currently held there, which the public was told would be reserved for the “worst of the worst” foreign criminals, some 250 detainees are being held merely for immigration violations alone with no criminal charges or convictions. Hundreds more have pending charges but have not yet been convicted.

Even for wartime criminals, which the detainees are not, the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols explicitly prohibit “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of individuals.” This includes holding people in sub-human conditions and prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” 

At this so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” all the detainees are held is close, even suffocating confines, subject to soaring heat well into the 90’s Fahrenheit, subject to frequent storm systems, unrelenting mosquito’s, along with the diseases they bear. It should come as no surprise that many officials who have visited the area have been denied access to those portions of the facility in which detainees are currently being held. Yet, the facility has been unambiguously denounced as inhumane by politicians, world leaders; more close to home, the Episcopal Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe; along with many Roman Catholic bishops – perhaps those most especially in the diocese of Miami, particularly Archbishop Thomas Wenski who posted on his website that the Catholic church “unequivocally condemns ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ as “unbecoming of public officials" and "corrosive of the common good.”

In his public repudiation, Archbishop Wenski goes on to insist that, “to mock these people [who] are detained here is to forget, that they…have parents, mothers, fathers, children, brothers and sister that are very distressed [about their being] detained, “and furthermore, [that] there is an arbitrary cruelty “in this push to deport people [who] who have been here, [and who have] put in sweat-equity in order to stay here.”

Given the recent Supreme Court decision to allow churches to endorse or criticize political candidates without threat to their tax-exempt status let me take this opportunity to insist that the church cannot not flinch from a bold, unabashed, and outright condemnation of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Vice President J.D. Vance for their reprehensible collusion in this national atrocity. No matter what side of the political aisle you stand there is nothing – absolutely nothing – which justifies this detention center in light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Full stop. 

And I challenge any Christian to show me anywhere in the Gospel justification for this egregious breach in our civil and moral duty to act with compassion to the stranger. Show me any passage in the Gospel that reveals a Christ who would walk into “Alligator Alcatraz” and say, “Yep, I’m good with this…this reflects everything I taught you on the Sermon on the Mount…this models the kind of love by which the world will know you belong to me…this is what I had in mind when I preached of the coming Kingdom…this is what the author of Hebrews meant when he wrote “Love of brother, let it continue. Love of ‘stranger” do not forget.” For God’s sake, if Christians (both Democrat and Republican) cannot agree on that much, the church has lost her soul along with our nation.

Now, I am not naïve to the fact, that this country has an ongoing national crisis about how to manage our boarders in a way that is both humane and nationally sustainable. But for Christians, any and all immigration reform must respect the dignity of the human person – of every human person. And as such “Alligator Alcatraz” can hardly constitute an ethically viable Christian response to our immigration crisis. Because first and foremost, for the Christian, anything short of a national policy on immigration reform that does not respect the inalienable dignity of every human person is a sin against God and against humanity – plain and simple. And therefore, let the church be neither silent nor tepid in its moral assessment of this current administration and any of its political collaborators who support or who remain silent in the face of this human rights abuse: All of them, frankly, stand condemned by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And what is required of them then – of all of them – is repentance and reform. 

Furthermore, the vicious fabrication that undocumented citizens are “rapists and murders” is as abhorrent as it is dangerous. We need only ask ourselves how many so-called “illegal immigrants” we have known over the course of our collective lifetimes and then ask how many among them turned out to be “rapists and murders.” Anyone? Exactly!

As Archbishop Wenski rightly observed, the vast majority of undocumented immigrants, although lacking permanent legal status, do enjoy some form of status, such as Temporary Protective Status, parole, or a pending asylum application, for instance. There are many Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans, for example, who initially came with special humanitarian visas that expired after two years. However, conditions in their home countries have yet to improve and thus for many, sending them back now could be a death sentence or a lifetime imprisonment for opposing an oppressive regime in their own home land. Others came legally as students or visitors and fell out of status. The Dreamers were brought by their parents, and while the government has afforded them ‘deferred departure,’ they have, as yet, no path to legal permanent residence. Yet this is the only country any of them [the Dreamers] have ever called ‘home.’

As Christians what we are called to recognize is that each of these people has a story. Each of them a history, each of them fears, and hopes, and dreams. We cannot establish an immigration policy based only on the masses. The Gospel insists we see persons, individuals, each with an inalienable dignity. The invisibility behind which detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz” are hidden from our view must not prevent us from seeing them with the eyes of our hearts.

I want to urge you then to support the political, ecumenical, and inter-religious efforts to protest this cruel treatment against the dignity of these human persons – to remember them as if you, yourself were imprisoned, as if you, yourself were tortured by the cruel conditions in which they are being held. Let your voice be heard, in your own way, in your own time, in your own place. For we too are decedents of immigrants, who themselves were once strangers in this strange land. But remember not only the masses, but the undocumented persons, the neighbors in our midst, who may in fact no longer be strangers, but whom we have come to know and love as very angels in our midst.

+ Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.