“Well,” I said to
myself the other morning, “that relationship was straightforward.” In reading various
Old Testament passages that has been initiated by pastor’s last series of Sunday messages on hospitality, I'm realizing afresh that the men and women of Israel 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. Just
the opposite. The vertical relationship between God and Israel had very clear
implications for horizontal relationships with their neighbors. Hospitality was
written into the very consciousness of the people of Israel. I see this
particularly in Genesis 28:17, where
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. It was, no doubt, in understanding the feast that God had
set before her that the woman of Shunem urged 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. Second Kings 4 says; “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.’”
I think it to be a
bit odd if hospitality included the physical building of new rooms onto either of my houses. Even though we have a quest suite in both. Still, I think the image is one that will have some long term staying
power for me. I wonder; how is hospitality really defined in this world where the view is global and yet the
concept of neighbor seems an increasingly distant nicety? I’m thinking for me
as a believer, as was for ancient Israel, is particularly affronted (new use of word) by the question, for how often it seems I find God asking me to do the very things that He has done for me? Like, in John 14 where Jesus says: “In my
Father’s house are many rooms, 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.” I have begun to understand that hospitality is a
command I am given because I have been given a home. I need to welcome others
because I have been welcomed. I need to begin building more rooms in my life
for strangers, outcasts, and neighbors because I, too, was once a stranger when
the Son prepared me a room.
I’m also beginning to
be convicted that I need also to build rooms simply because my neighbors need
them. I discovered awhile back that in Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous sermon on the Good Samaritan, he
distinguished 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?” I’m reasoning today 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?
I think I’m also
discovering that God not only is encouraging hospitality for the sake
of someone who would receive it, but also for the sake of the world that sees
it. I don’t think I will soon forget that article in a 2008 article in the New
York Times, 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 continues, “In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo,
I found starving children, raped widows, and shell shocked survivors. And there
was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.”
From what can tell, genuine
hospitality is one of the very powerful means that Christ’s arms are seen
reaching out in this old world. On multiple levels, it seems to me, anyone who
builds a room for a neighbor is painting a picture, and just may be the only
description of the good news and those who recognize the build, will ever see.
Father, God, thank you
for Your relating to me the story of Elisha and the Shunammite woman, and how I
am really living in none other than Your house.
Thank You for the conviction of countercultural scenes of hospitality in
Bill’s world be met with the surprise of Jacob, “Surely the LORD is in this
place, and I was not aware of it.” Amen
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