Family, friends, and food. When they mix...all the better. Having been home in Canada for five weeks, these elements have had their fair share mixing with many shared meals, coffee conversations, over-night stays, and, for the specially appointed, over-week stays. My thanks to each of you who have been in and provided the means for this mix.
Hospitality is an interesting deal. It can be simple, elaborate, exhausting, trying, unwelcome, encouraging, blessed, dirty, inconvenient, noisy, expensive, necessary, wanted, appreciated, abused, life-giving, or life-taking. Hospitality is an interesting deal.
As I jot these thoughts I also have my nose in a new book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Pohl, Christine D. Eerdmans, 1999). Looking at hospitality through historical, theological, and social frames I appreciate the way in which this book has informed and deepened my understanding of hospitality. Looking at hospitality in the New Testament and Early Church setting, Pohl writes:
"Households remain the most important location for hospitality in the New Testament Period. Fellowship and growth in the earliest churches depended on household-based hospitality among believers. For Greeks and Jews, the household (Greek: oikos; Hebrew: bayith) was very important and served as a basis for social, political, and religious identity and cohesion. For the early Christians, rooted in both Hebrew and Greek traditions, the church as the household of God was a powerful theological and social reality. The church was made up of family households, but it was more than the sum of those individual households. The church was a new household, God's household, and believers became family to one another.
Early Christian hospitality was offered from within this overlap of household and church. A homelike setting provided a natural environment for expressing personal qualities of hospitality. The church as a gathered community required the most immediate connection to God's character and expectations - behaviors suitable to the household of God.
This expanded and transformed household was responsible for imitating God's hospitable and gracious character. God's household represented the welcome of Gentiles into the inheritance together with Israel (Eph. 2:19) and relations within this new household explicitly transcended ethnic boundaries.. Worship, care, and hospitality in early Christian households included believers from different political, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and early congregations developed a translocal and transethnic identity.
Local Christian communities shared meals together as part of their regular church practice - an important location for hospitality. These agape meals provided a setting for communal response to the needs of the poor while simultaneously reinforcing a distinct Christian identity. They were distinguished from the contemporary practice of offering elaborate banquets that reinforced status boundaries. Although ethnic and socioeconomic differences sometimes surfaced in the context of eating together, these meals were intended to reflect the transformed relationships in which the worldly status distinctions were transcended, if not disregarded, and formerly alienated persons could view themselves as brothers and sisters at God's table."
The ultimate expresser of hospitality is Jesus. The ultimate expression of hospitality is his death on the cross. He came to serve. To give everything to restore broken relationships between the Father and His Creation. His invitation to new life in Him is for all. He is making all things new - restoring shalom - preparing a place for people of faith for whom Jesus is Savior and Lord.
Pohl continues, "In Romans 15:7, Paul urges believers to 'welcome one another' as Christ has welcomed them. Jesus' gracious and sacrificial hospitality - expressed in His life, minsitry, and death - undergirds the hospitality of his followers. Jesus gave His life so that persons could be welcomed into the Kingdom and in doing so linked hospitality, grace, and sacrifice in the deepest and most personal way imaginable.
In the church, the household of God, hospitality is a fitting, requisite, and meaning-filled practice. Hospitality is important symbolically in its reflection and reenactment of God's hospitality and important practically in human needs and in forging human relations. Though part of everyday life, hospitality is never far removed from its divine connections."
As we practice (live) hospitality we indeed enact the hospitality of the Triune God. The Triune God is our model, our means, and our end. The Trinity defines both the content and the process of hospitality. Made in the image of the Triune God we too can - in fact must - enact hospitality. And in that way of life we can embrace the words of Matthew 25: 34-36. Reading from the Message, we see/hear:
"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Enter, you who are blessed by my Father! Take what's coming to you in this kingdom. It's been ready for your since the world's foundation. And here's why: I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room, I was shivering and you gave me clothes, I was sick and you stopped to visit, I was in prison and you came to me."
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