Long ago human eyes watched clear nights unfold on a beautifully velvet dark canvas, so filled with stars and planets that it is beyond our imagining. Those same eyes observed a landscape which provided everything necessary for acquiring food, shelter, clothing, tools and medicine. Those eye also saw things that made them laugh, fear, cry, and dream.

Those humans were the Neanderthal and Denisovan people who emerged over half a million years ago. They have long been regarded as a separate line of human creatures who died out because of their adaptive limitations. We are Homo sapiens – literally wise, or rational humans – whose record begins around 300,000 years ago. We encountered and outcompeted them with our advanced bodies and brains, and never materially engaged with them.

Or so we thought until very recently. As in a few decades. Now DNA and protein analysis has proven those conclusions wrong. Our respective populations lived side by side for generations and became intimate. We carry their DNA in our bodies.

With better, less biased science, it’s now evident that they comprehended and responded intelligently to everything around them. The cultural record of their lives shows complex inter-relationships and mutual care. Less tangibly, they were people who could think symbolically.

In terms of the physical world, we now look back and appreciate our deepest ancestors in new ways. Their wisdom, ingenuity and resilience. How they live on in us.

We might also wonder about their spirituality. And how it lives on, or doesn’t. One of the oldest records of their rituals is the burial of a woman at Mount Carmel in Israel some 130,000 years ago. With her bones were grave goods: possibly offerings, or to help her in another existence.

Compared to what the ancient burial tells us, the story of Abraham and Saran in Genesis is very recent although much of Genesis belong to pre-history, meaning that it cannot be placed into a specific time. Israel’s tradition had existed in oral form for unknown centuries. This story was preserved in writing for the first time around 950 BC (BCE).

What does the story tell us about this early spirituality? That the people interacted with an entity they called El. In the root of Semitic languages El implies something apart and greater than anything human.

When three men appeared in the heat of the day, Abraham immediately gave them hospitality. It was part of the desert code, to care for travelers whether friend, stranger or even foe. It was also a form of offering, a spiritual act.

Abraham and Sarah perceived that the men, though physically human, were also somehow a visitation of El. This did not trouble them. In their experience El was always present in some sense.

Abraham’s invitation also suggests that El’s nature was ambiguous. He addressed the three men in singular form saying, “My Lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.”  Other places in Genesis, God is referred to as Elohim, which is plural.

The comings and goings of El in their world didn’t trouble them. Whether El was present or absent was a matter of their awareness of El sharpening and dimming as they went about their activities. They did not read divine judgment into it.

Abraham was respectful, yet confident in the presence of El. He was not at all perturbed when one of the men enigmatically announced that his return would result in Sarah’s pregnancy, and the arrival of a longed-for son and heir. Dare we say it, an utterly inconceivable hope for the elderly couple.

We learn from this story that Abraham and Sarah knew El as guiding, benevolent, and pervasive. They lived in a pre-covenant world, never knowing fear of El’s disapproval. They belonged to El as completely and naturally as they belonged to the physical world.

We’ve come a long way from that ancient spirituality. And though we consider ourselves modern and advanced, in truth it seems that we could learn some things from our predecessors. What spiritual perceptions have we lost, that our so-called primitive ancestors took for granted?

The letter to the Christians in Colossae tries to convey just such a spiritual world. God present and active. God expansively in every particle of the cosmos and intimately within humans. God in Jesus acting through indiscriminate love, confronting injustice and inequity. God in the fullness of life and God in the final breath of death. God mending the distance that we have convinced ourselves must exist between things unseen and seen, things holy or profane.

According to this letter God’s presence is mysterious. Even so, it is something to be welcomed and explored. When we can embrace it with comfort and confidence it has a notably positive transformative effect. This is Christ’s activity in us.

Even so, Jesus’s visit to Martha’s village home exposed a rift between her and her sister Mary. Like Abraham and Sarah, Martha’s natural inclination was hospitality. It was her home and she cared deeply that her guests, including Jesus should be comfortable and well cared-for.

Jesus seems to have appreciated that. His response was warm and gentle. Perhaps even teasing. He acknowledged that she had many responsibilities. No wonder she was anxious and panicking.

Jesus did not say that Martha should drop her mop and join Mary. He said that only one thing was necessary. Which, we may assume, must mean hospitality toward God and one another. Mary’s part, the hospitality of listening, was the better thing for her.

Our ancient ancestors have long been catalogued as superstitious. And their spirituality called primitive compared with our advanced religious philosophies. But a cosmic, awe-inspiring, benevolent, guiding, and deeply intimate presence that defies all our boxes and calls us to practice mutual hospitality? It seems like what Jesus was always calling holy and good.