What’s so radical about hospitality? Well, hospitality is the way that we meet God. It’s the way we are told as Christians to foster mutual love. It’s the way God receives us and saves us.
You can see all of this in the Bible. In the book of Genesis, Abraham welcomes three strangers to his tent and they turn out to be God. They also bless Abraham and tell him that he is going to have a child in his old age, something that Sarah, his wife, finds so amusing that she laughs out loud while eavesdropping from behind a tent flap. By giving and receiving hospitality, Abraham and Sarah met God.
In the gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, Jesus tells the story of a Great Judgment at the end of time when people will be separated like sheep and goats and judged according to the standard of how well they have met the needs of others. “Whenever you visit the prisoner, feed the hungry or welcome the stranger,” the king in the story says, “whatever you do for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do these things for me.” By showing hospitality, the story suggests, we find our own salvation.
In the book of Hebrews, the writer starts the list of things the people should do by telling them not to neglect hospitality because through it some have entertained angels unawares. They would come into contact with the holy in the person of the stranger. By not neglecting hospitality, they would discover God’s love.
So what does hospitality look like and how should we talk about it? For that we may have to go to a movie. Finding Nemo.
There’s a scene in the middle of this movie when a clownfish named Marlin is taken in by a group of migrating sea turtles. Marlin is travelling to Sydney, Australia to try and find his son, Nemo. [Hence the name – Finding Nemo.] Along the way he’s been befriended by a blue fish named Dory who has terrible short-term memory loss. They have been told to find the East Australian Current because it will take them to Sydney.
In this scene they have just come through a huge group of jellyfish that have stung them into a stupor. Marlin has gotten separated from Dory and he wakes up to find himself in this huge community of sea turtles.
It’s the sea turtles who exhibit the kind of radical hospitality that I want to explore. They take in these two wounded travelers and welcome them as if they had always been part of the community. They even give them nicknames. They have a place for outsiders and a special love for children. They allow for an environment of creativity and even risk within the context of a nurturing community. And, most importantly, they are in the current that Marlin and Dory have been looking for. They know the stream that leads them forward and they trust it to take them where they need to go. And they welcome others to take the journey with them.[i]
Most of us learn the value of hospitality, not when we’re the hosts, but when we’re the guests. About fifteen years ago I went on a mission trip to southern Mexico. We were going down to help a small Methodist congregation build a sanctuary.
It was a long day of travel. We flew to Mexico City and then we got on a bus that took us south to the city of Puebla. It was the first time I had been to the interior of Mexico and everything was new. First, to see the sprawling megalopolis of Mexico City and then to go over the mountains past a volcano that was smoking.
By the time we got to Puebla it was getting dark. But there was still more travelling ahead. We got off of the public bus and got on a smaller charter bus with the missions coordinator from the church for that region. We went on two more hours through the desert to a small little place called Ahuatapec. Dirt streets around a central plaza. About 5,000 people were supposed to live there, but since there was hardly any work in the village, most of the men left for the week and came back on the weekends. It seemed like a ghost town.
At the end of this long day we were taken into a small house that had one long room. The families of the church had taken all the dining furniture they had and put it in this room. There were tables down the center loaded with warm tortillas and black beans. They sat us down and set warm bowls of soup in front of us.
It was crowded in that room. The whole church had gathered there. It was awkward, too. Many of them stood along the walls to allow us to sit at the table. And not many of us spoke Spanish so we communicated mostly with facial gestures and hand signals. But it was clear that these people had changed their whole schedule for that week to be hosts to us. Later many of them gave up their beds so that we could sleep in the best rooms in the house. When we left the children gave us small stuffed toys to take back to our children.
We had come to give them our time and our resources and our labor. But the overwhelming feeling we had that whole week was that we were receiving radical hospitality. We were being welcomed and made to feel at home.
On another occasion I was in Mexico shortly after the attacks of 9/11. I was worshipping in a small Methodist church and the pastor asked his church members to sit next to a North American, as he called us. Then he asked them to form small groups around us and to pray for us and for our country, recognizing the pain our country was going through. I didn’t understand all that was being said, but I knew that it was the first time since that tragedy that I had been able to cry. Here was a people who welcomed me and knew what I needed more than even I did.
The Mexicans have a saying, “Mi casa, su casa.” “My house is your house.” We say it a little differently. “Make yourself at home,” we say to our guests. But there’s always something a little awkward about that. Most of us don’t literally act the way we do at home when we’re guests at someone else’s house. We feel a little funny about raiding the fridge in the middle of the night.
There’s a little bit of tension in the host-guest relationship, isn’t there? It’s why there is that old saying about fish and welcome guests – after three days both start to be unwelcome. The tension is right in the word “hospitality.” It comes from a root word hospes which means guest and from which we get words like “hospital” and “hospice” – both places that offer a place of comfort and care. But that word is built on two older words – one of which means stranger – hostis – but that’s also the word we get “hostile” from – which means that there’s some suspicion built into the notion of a stranger. We’re never sure about strangers. They may be enemies. And the second part of the word “hospitality” has its roots in potes a word for power. Historian Gary Gutting looks at this and says that “there is an etymological sense in which welcoming a guest means having power over, (or, perhaps, giving power to) an enemy.”[ii]
This is what is radical about Christian hospitality. The Bible pushes us to move past our resistance to truly welcoming the stranger. In Deuteronomy God tells the people of Israel to make room for the stranger because “you were strangers in the land of Egypt” [Deuteronomy 10:19].
Jesus tells the story of a man who goes to almost foolish lengths in order to create space for a wayward son. It’s usually called the story of the Prodigal Son and in this story the son asks his father for the half of his inheritance that will be his and the father gives it to him! Foolish! Who would grant such a foolish request to a son who is likely to blow it all?
That’s just what happens. The son goes off to a far country – squanders the inheritance on loose living and ends up in poverty. He screws up his courage to go back and beg for a position – any position in his father’s service and we look forward to the groveling because that would only be just.
But the father is waiting for the son to return. He sees him from far off and runs to meet him. And before the son can get out his whole sorry apology – before the groveling can begin – the father is welcoming him back. Returning the signs of his status in the family to him. Killing the fatted calf for heaven’s sake! It’s no wonder that the older brother is upset. The father is as profligate as a drunken sailor. He will welcome anybody back.
God will welcome anybody back. And God shows us this in the most powerful way possible by coming to be our guest. When the world had forgotten itself…when people despised the love that God offered them…when Israel strayed from its calling…when brokenness and sin and malice were rampant on the earth…when the world was dark and God could have turned God’s back on the people and rejected them…God instead decided to be their guest.
First, God found hospitality in the womb of a young Jewish mother named Mary, who made room for God at the risk of her life. Sitting by a well, Jesus received water from a Samaritan woman whom he had no business talking to. Reclining at a table, he received the perfume and tears of a woman who gave what she had. At the tables of the Pharisees and tax collectors he was the guest. In the homes of Peter and Lazarus, he was the guest. On a Roman cross, Jesus received the hospitality the world had to give to a divine stranger. And in that moment when Jesus died, he became the host – making room in the heart of God for people who needed the forgiveness, the love, and the reconciliation that only God could give.
In his book Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Bishop Robert Schnase tells the story of a man he met while working in a clergy-training program in a hospital. The man had come in with his wife who had had a heart attack while they were eating in a restaurant. Schnase was with the man when the doctor came to tell him that his wife had died.
Schnase offered to call the man’s pastor, but the man didn’t attend a church. Schnase asked if there were family members he could call, but there were no family members living close by. There were also no co-workers since the man was retired and had moved away from the place he had worked. There were also no close neighbors because the man and his wife did not even know the name of their neighbors. Schnase did what he could to help the man through the day, but in the end the man left alone.
“Life is not meant to be that way,” Schnase says in his book. “God intends for people to live their lives interlaced by the grace of God with others, to know the gift and task of community from birth to death, to have the interpretive structures of faith to sustain them through times of joy and periods of desperate agony, to have the perspective of eternity, and to ‘take hold of the life that really is life’” to quote 1 Timothy 6:19. And yet, Schnase says, 40 to 60 percent of the people around us have no church relationship to speak of.[iii]
A church that offers radical hospitality recognizes that it is there for the 40 to 60 percent. It will go into the world and set up camp in the places where the world makes space. It will get to know the community it is a part of and it will care about the people who are feeling disconnected and lost and beat up and wounded. The people who don’t know if God cares about them anymore and who don’t know if they care about God.
Radical hospitality will also cause churches to make room for the stranger in the church. Not just in a passive way. Most churches will say, “I believe we are a warm and welcoming congregation.” But the longer we stay in a church and the more comfortable we feel in it, the harder it is for us to see it through the eyes of people who are new to it – especially those who may be from a different economic status or family situation or race or generation.
Churches that are radically hospitable actively seek to be welcoming – to be on the lookout for opportunities to make people feel at home from the first time that they walk through the door. They wear name tags so that, even though 90 percent of the people they encounter already know their name, the other 10 percent who don’t will have an opportunity to learn it. They seek out new faces – even though they may be people from the other service – and try to make sure they have a place to go. They point out where the nursery and the bathrooms are and where you can find coffee and fruit during fellowship time.
Radical hospitality means that everyone becomes involved in the hospitality mission of the church – not just the folks who are designated for this area on the Council of Ministries. Every Sunday School class and every small group thinks about ways it can reach out and welcome newcomers. Every person acts as if Franktown is her home or his home and every newcomer is Christ come to be our guest once more.
Recently some of our young adults were visiting in the Amish country in Pennsylvania and they went to worship with an Amish congregation. We might think of the Amish as a very closed group. But what our Franktown folks discovered was a level of hospitality that took them back.
They were not only welcomed in worship, but they were asked to go share lunch in an Amish household. And it was not just a lunch it was a feast. And they were not just there as guests, they were welcomed as family. It was obviously a powerful experience for them.
We are people who know how to be kind and warm. But what’s radical about Christian hospitality is that it pushes through the tensions we feel about strangers to find new ways to welcome them. It pushes through how limited we feel about how much time and money and resources we have to say, “You have enough of all of these things and you can make space for the stranger.”
The amazing thing about hospitality is that we have experienced it. It is how we got here. At some point, someone welcomed you into this place and helped you to see the wonders of God’s amazing love. It’s time to pay it forward.
Katherine Duck, who is a member of an Episcopal Church in Indiana says, “For a world gone mad with the need for power and control over every aspect of life, hospitality provides a graceful entrance into the garden of the sheer delight of knowing and caring for persons different from ourselves. Practicing Christian hospitality will allow us to live into a reality over which God’s Holy Spirit, not humankind, presides.”[iv] Hospitality is a fruitful practice that allows us to give up our sense that we have nothing to learn and nothing to gain from the person at the door. But when we open the door, we can experience a world made new. That’s radical. Thanks be to God.
Hebrews 13:1-2
Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect hospitality, because through it some have entertained angels without knowing it.
[i] I am indebted to Dori Baker for introducing me to this clip at the Fund For Theological Education Calling Congregations event, October 2008.
[ii] Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, [Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001], p. 309.
[iii] Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, [Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2007], p. 19.
[iv] Katherine Duck, “Review of Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl”, Spiritrestoration.org.
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