Hospitality: Important To Me Anymore?

I’ve noticed that with each gathered year of life, my desire for inviting people into my home for hospitality sake has become less and less. Of late I’ve been thinking about that.  Why over the years the seeming disinterest when I used to be hyper-desirous of “inviting people into my home?”  I think the desire sprang up in my childhood. My parents' home was one, not unlike most, that an open invitation to “come on over,” was ever present.  Many a Sunday, after worship was spent sharing a pot roast or casarole, either at our home or someone else’s.  I think that’s about time the “crock pot” came on the market.  Then over the years it became easier to meet at a restaurant, I suppose.  And slowly but surely after Bettyann and I established our home, it became a sort of cloistered dwelling. We used it with particularly, guarded intention. It was only on very special, scheduled,  thought out, planned out, occasions used for hospitality.

 

 Well, in ruminating, reading and praying on the past and present aspects of my personal hospitality, I’ve been more and more convicted about my role in providing spontaneous hospitality as I realize that Israel’s people were called to be God’s people and God alone was to be their God, but this identity was far from one that gave them permission to stave off every neighbor and keep every foreigner at bay.  Hospitality was written into the very consciousness of the people of Israel.  They saw that they were living in "none other than the house of God" and as such their very lives were to signify the master of the house.

As I read the story in 2 Kings 4 I wonder if this didn’t play into the woman of Shunem thought in entreating the traveling Elisha to stay for a meal.  Later realizing that her guest was a servant of God, she took hospitality to all new heights.  “She said to her husband, ‘Look, I am sure that this man who regularly passes our way is a holy man of God.  Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us.’”  

Though the hospitality I offer may not include the physical building a new room onto my house, the image is difficult to forget.  And yes, I have given it thought of building more guest accommodations here at Quiet Rest if it were not for limited resources.  As I mature in my love for God, I often find God asking me to do the very things that God has done for me: “In my Father's house are many rooms,” said Jesus. “If it were not so, I would have told you.  I am going there to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am" John 14:1-3.  I’m thinking, hospitality is a command I am given because I have been given a home.  I welcome others because I have been welcomed.  Not only in my physical home but in my person! I build rooms in my life for strangers, outcasts, and neighbors because I, too, was once a stranger when the Son prepared me a room.

I also think I ought to also build rooms simply because my neighbors need them.  In Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous sermon on the Good Samaritan, he distinguishes between asking “What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?” and “What will happen to him if I don’t?”  King then asks himself, "What will happen to humanity if I don't help?  What will happen to the Civil Rights movement if I don't participate?  What will happen to my city if I don't vote?  What will happen to the sick if I don't visit them?" So, I understand a bit more that choosing to do nothing in terms of hospitality, service, and justice is still very definitely making a choice.  What will happen to my neighbor if I refuse to see his need for the room in my life I can offer? 

Further, I'm also beginning to discover that God not only encourages my hospitality for the sake of the one who might receive it, but also for the sake of others that will see it. I ran across an old 2008 article in The New York Times, on line, where Nicholas Kristof makes the observation that in certain countries where danger and instability are constant threats, “you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians.”  He continued in the article, “In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows, and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.” Just last week I saw and listened to a Catholic priest who refuses to leave his congregation in a city of Iraq where terrorist are about to occupy. 

More than ever, at age seventy one, genuine hospitality is perhaps one of my most effective means of being the salt and light Christ has called me to be.  On multiple levels, by building a room for a neighbor is preaching a sermon, and it may well be the only description of the good news those who behold the act will ever hear.

 

Father, God, with Elisha and the Shunammite woman, I want to live out the rest of my life in nothing other than the house of God.  Might the people with whom I come in contact respond to my hospitality with the surprise of Jacob, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it."