Robert B. Kruschwitz
While our culture reduces “hospitality” to friendliness and private entertaining, Christian hospitality remains a public and economic reality by which God re-creates us through the places and people we are given. How do we shift gears to practice untamed hospitality?
When the Apostle Paul urged the Roman Christians to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1 ff.), he specifically instructed them to “be transformed [from the empire’s way of thinking] by the renewing of your minds,” “hate what is evil,” and “be patient in suffering”—all serious business for a persecuted little band in Nero’s capital city. Then this command: “Extend hospitality to strangers.”
What was he thinking? Today we view hospitality through the decorous images of Southern Living or Ladies’ Home Journal as “delicious dinners and polite conversation in one’s own beautiful home.” If it’s more than a private time with friends, we leave it to professionals in the “hospitality industry” of hotels, restaurants, and cruise ships. How could hospitality possibly be at the countercultural heart of early Christians’, and our, discipleship?
Christian hospitality flows from realizing we have been brought by the Holy Spirit into the very life of God. With this good news it builds communities that can welcome outcasts and strangers, and it publicly challenges the status quo of the culture.
We learn such “untamed hospitality” in public worship, for there “we do not gather ourselves; God gathers us; God invites us in,” Elizabeth Newman writes. “As divine host, God through Christ in the Spirit draws us into communion with himself and others, giving us desires we had not previously even imagined.”
We are taught to be not only guests, but also hosts in God’s Kingdom. As our worship spills over into all of life, we learn to:
When the Apostle Paul urged the Roman Christians to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1 ff.), he specifically instructed them to “be transformed [from the empire’s way of thinking] by the renewing of your minds,” “hate what is evil,” and “be patient in suffering”—all serious business for a persecuted little band in Nero’s capital city. Then this command: “Extend hospitality to strangers.”
What was he thinking? Today we view hospitality through the decorous images of Southern Living or Ladies’ Home Journal as “delicious dinners and polite conversation in one’s own beautiful home.” If it’s more than a private time with friends, we leave it to professionals in the “hospitality industry” of hotels, restaurants, and cruise ships. How could hospitality possibly be at the countercultural heart of early Christians’, and our, discipleship?
Christian hospitality flows from realizing we have been brought by the Holy Spirit into the very life of God. With this good news it builds communities that can welcome outcasts and strangers, and it publicly challenges the status quo of the culture.
We learn such “untamed hospitality” in public worship, for there “we do not gather ourselves; God gathers us; God invites us in,” Elizabeth Newman writes. “As divine host, God through Christ in the Spirit draws us into communion with himself and others, giving us desires we had not previously even imagined.”
We are taught to be not only guests, but also hosts in God’s Kingdom. As our worship spills over into all of life, we learn to:
- Share our resources in gratitude to God. “The love displayed in God’s life,” Stanley Hauerwas has written, “is not a zero-sum game but one of overflowing plentitude.” Yet we find it hard to embrace the radical abundance of Christian hospitality, Newman concludes, “because we have been so deeply formed by living in a market society…. Consumerism, competition, and individualism already shape our lives.”
- “Stay put” in commitment to others. Our culture shapes us to be ready to move for more money, a more “fulfilling” church, a less difficult marriage. We are taught “that through our choices we are our own creators, which is exactly what a market society with its relentless advertising campaign would want us to believe.” Christian hospitality “does not aim for self-fulfillment through autonomous choice…but for allowing God to re-create us” through faithful relationships.
- Honor and learn from those whom society has abandoned. Newman admires the L’Arche communities where people with handicaps live alongside those without such handicaps. Founder Jean Vanier writes, “We have discovered that we have a common spirituality of humility and presence, close to the poor and the weak; a common call to live with them, not to change them, but to welcome them and share their gifts and their beauty; to discover in them the presence of Jesus—Jesus, humble and gentle, Jesus, poor and rejected.”
Such hospitality is not an individual or even a communal achievement,” Newman emphasizes. “It is rather a gift to be received, and its faithful reception makes us part of something larger than ourselves: Christ’s own body.”