Hospitality

Recently I’ve been thinking about how I can become more hospitable in my everyday life. In "I Was a Stranger: A Christian Theology of Hospitality", Arthur Sutherland reminds us of the passage of the goats and the sheep and points out that this passage underlines the importance of Christian hospitality: that we are to be judged not necessarily on our good and bad deeds but on whether we demonstrated hospitality in our lives; whether we welcomed the disenfranchised and the stranger by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. In the conclusion Sutherland shows how Jesus’ own way of demonstrating hospitality was entirely unplanned and spontaneous: he saw people’s pain and responded to it in the way he knew how; by talking to them, healing them and forgiving them their sins. He points out that the Church has not always followed this example – that we may practice a form of hospitality through meetings and gatherings and weekly events etc, but that Jesus’ hospitality was remarkable for its casualness – his ability to ‘see’ people’s needs and respond to them there and then. He was welcoming whenever and wherever he encountered the stranger.

I was particularly inspired by this discussion by Sutherland as it triggers a memory of a shift in my thinking that coincided with my withdrawal from a formalised church system. I had started to realise that I was uncomfortable with how hard the Church works to drag “the unsaved” to endless events, meetings and conferences within church buildings and premises, while seemingly unable to visit, welcome or encounter people in their own settings and premises. It seemed to me that though I was happy for church buildings to be used for those who felt at ease and welcomed in them, I was increasingly less happy with the Church emphasis on trying to persuade everyone that they were obliged to become part of the Christian system in order to encounter Jesus-like hospitality. I felt that there had to be some other way for Christians to welcome people and show them this kind of generous hospitality.

But not only did reading Sutherland’s book on the importance of hospitality remind me of that particular shift in my thinking. It also made me think about whether I now needed to take hospitality a little more seriously, and whether I might have unwittingly committed the error of throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. The question is if I’m not going to work away on services to bring people into Church, how am I going to work to welcome people where they are? It’s all very well sanctimoniously looking down my nose at Christian events, meetings and conferences that are aimed at “reaching out” to people, but there has to be a way I practice hospitality in my everyday life (albeit in a different way) or I’ve missed the point of the lesson entirely. I lose one of the most important aspects of Jesus’ life and – dare I say it – reasons for being. He welcomed the disenfranchised and the stranger… wherever and whenever he found them. He fed the hungry and clothed the naked. He healed and forgave; he talked to those who begged for his attention. There’s no way I could manage that all the time but I want to try to do that at least some of the time for at least a few people, wherever and I find myself and whenever the opportunity may arise.