lifeasmission

Being Hospitable vs. Offering Hospitality

February 14, 2007

I have a crazy smart, beautiful, awesome, and cool girlfriend (and that doesn’t even have anything to do with the fact that Valentine’s Day is tomorrow!). We have the greatest conversations and she constantly challenges me in ways that make me stronger.

Today, we had a brief, but good, conversation about hospitality. This was something I wrote a final paper on in seminary, but today I realized something that I hadn’t really thought about before.

There is a lot of talk today in the emerging and missional church movements about the recovery of hospitality as a vital Christian practice and I couldn’t be happier about that. But often it seems that our understanding of hospitality is limited to what we offer – whether it be meals, clothes, housing, service, or anything else, the emphasis is on offering hospitality – and this is a great thing. But I think there is another dimension of hospitality we need to consider and it has to do more with being than with doing.

Jesus was a hospitable person, but let’s face it, it’s not because he had people over all the time (he had no where to lay his head) and it wasn’t because he could offer people much materially speaking (women who were with Jesus supported him and the disciples out of their own means). I say that Jesus was a hospitable person because he welcomed others just as they were. No matter their problems, pitfalls, or peccadillos, Jesus welcomed and loved people just as they were. This is what I think it means to “be” truly hospitable – to be the sort of person (and people) who don’t make people feel as though they need to act a certain way, speak a certain way, or be a certain way just because they are with you.

Perhaps I should qualify this by saying that I don’t take this to be an “anything-goes” way of being. Jesus certainly wasn’t ok with the disciples when they lacked faith or betrayed him, that is to say, the longer people were with Jesus, the higher his expectations were of them, though he never ceased loving people no matter what. But the fact of the matter is, people didin’t have to put on any sort of act, or be any certain way in order to have Jesus welcome and embrace them.

I have been spoiled rotten with friends from back home who have been hospitable to me in this way. I love them as friends because I can just be who I am with them. It isn’t always that easy and I have to learn that I can’t simply expect this sort of hospitality from everyone, but man is it like a breath of fresh air when it comes along.

God, help me to forever be moving toward a way of being hospitable toward others which reflects the life of Jesus.

Posted in: Jesus, friends