The Stranger at the Door
On recognizing more than just ourselves in the 'least among us.'
Candles are lit and the table is set. I’m in a neighboring state where some of my family are gathered. The spread is ample but not too fancy. People still bring more food.
Our tradition includes a long table and people come now from far-flung lives to be together. Food, hospitality and sharing those things are themes across years, across faiths and cultures.
We gather as generations, from different lands and backgrounds. With varied or no faiths, political alignments, abilities, and needs - accommodating our diversity has become familiar. We celebrate with food and by welcoming friends and families, and we seek to extend that good will to others we meet, who somehow find us or that we happen upon.
There is a test here, whether we admit it. When Ebeneezer Scrooge’s heart opened, he sent out to provision a feast. Jesus reminded us - in no uncertain terms - that when we neglect the stranger and the hungry we are neglecting Him directly, with severe moral consequences.
When gods walked among us, they sometimes came as strangers hungry, seeking hospitality. Zeus and Hermes wandered the world as beggars, testing mortals. Odin was sometimes simply called Gestr— “Guest.” Those who refused to grant kindness were met with a harsh fate.
Hunger is a moral failure—not by those who lack. It is we that have fallen short: our inhospitality is morally offensive. As the world is fraught with tension and trauma, the call here is not simply to gather ourselves, but to lengthen our tables.
All the Abrahamic traditions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - find a common purpose in hospitality and sharing food. When three strangers came to Abraham, he provided water, rest, and a feast - before discovering that they were divine messengers.
Jesus made it more explicit: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. …Just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” Those who neglect to care for the ‘least’ as if they are Jesus Himself are damned.
An unlikely stranger—a migrant or ‘beggar’—may be an angel unaware. So, as the Old Testament and Jewish scriptures remind us: when “strangers sojourn with you in your land, you shall do them no wrong, [they] shall be to you as natives among you, and you love them as yourself…”
Another time when challenged by religious authorities, Jesus said that the whole of the Law was to love God and to love each other. Perhaps it was not two separate commandments but two corollaries of one. We love God by loving each other. Our welcoming table welcomes God.
Two thousand years later Gandhi said “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Hunger is a moral failure because scarcity is manufactured—more political and economic than material, a choice societies make.
For Gandhi it was a moral force that drove a need for political change since hunger and inhospitality are practical and social failures - and forces - as well. He saw the need to shift some power and wealth from the few that horde to the many who are unable to meet needs.
Many other leaders, philosophers, poets, historians and sages have all staked social stability on people being content with their needs met.
Nelson Mandela said “While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” Creating a longer table – sharing wealth more fairly – has a social and political purpose that smart leaders recognize.
In the Tao Te Ching, wise leaders rule by “emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.” This suggests that social harmony follows from meeting the needs of people, not from a ruler’s decrees, heavy-handed interventions, or angry posts.
Yet despite the practical need to address hunger and poverty, our actual political and social structures are often at odds with this broadly situated advice. This leads to instability, injustice and turmoil - as many deposed leaders have learned.
Karl Marx said it’s often the workers who go hungry—producing abundance they cannot afford to consume, creating unrest. Bob Marley wrote “Them belly-full, but we hungry. A hungry mob is an angry mob.”
The Tao Te Ching says, “The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give to those who do not have enough. Man’s way is different. He takes from those who do not have enough and gives to those who already have too much” - while in another verse those who amass too much at the expense of others “lie ill at ease.”
Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized the political failure clearly: “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind… The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”
Poets, prophets, and philosophers may recognize hunger as a political creation, and they too find value in sharing food as social ritual. But that universality does not remove the moral question posed to each of us. Nor does it excuse our refusal to meet the test when ‘the least’ shows up at the door.
And it may be that the social, ethical and practical purposes behind hospitality, nourishment, and fairness express something older—buried deeper in humanity’s hidden past. Long before myths, sages and scripture, perhaps even before we were fully human. Other primates share food as ritual. Sharing food, then, is not merely ethical; it may be ancestral, wired into our social survival.
And while Dr. King understood poverty as a political condition that needed to be addressed, he never let it remain abstract; it always came with a call for each of us to act. “I want you to say that day,” he said, “that I did try to feed the hungry… that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked… to visit those who were in prison… that I tried to love and serve humanity.”
Our own gathering is a bit smaller this year, family that could not make it, and other plans. But it is a warm feeling as they resettle in the living room, and I take some dishes back to the kitchen. I appreciate this moment.
At this time of year we are reminded to consider the less fortunate and to count our own blessings. And I do. Both kindness and gratitude are a recognition of the value of others, or at least of our connections to and dependence upon them.
Community, the container we grow inside, and that we each ourselves must help to maintain: Maybe these are not separate things but parts of a single function — two corollaries of the same rule.
We are called to recognize the stranger as oneself, who “but for the grace of God go I.” But not only as. The test is to see in these others divinity itself. The ‘beggar,’ ‘the least,’ the immigrant and stranger—may be angels unaware or even gods testing us.
You can help fight hunger where you live by supporting organizations and community efforts to address it directly.
In Colorado support these organizations, to-
Increase nutrition security in Colorado by diverting locally grown and nutrient-dense surplus produce into the state’s hunger-relief system - UpRoot Colorado
Work with network of supporters, partners, and staff to ensure that every person on the Western Slope has food to thrive - Food Bank of the Rockies - Western Slope
Engage in policy advocacy for systemic change, manage innovative programs, and develop community partnerships and grassroots networks to rebalance the food system and create healthy food environments - Nourish Colorado