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There is in Scripture a mandate to practice hospitality. When many of us think of hospitality today we think entertaining. Our society has created an entire industry devoted to hospitality; hotels and restaurant chains, party planners, event coordinators and chief in charge among all of them is Martha Stewart. When we think hospitality today we think o Pinterest parties and celebrity chefs. Extravagant, elaborate, elegant. Biblical hospitality offers a different flare; a different flavor altogether.
The heart of biblical hospitality is not simply about entertaining but rather it is creating a space for someone to feel loved and seen and heard. Biblical hospitality isn’t about creating a perfect place, but rather a place to become and to belong. It is the art of making someone feel at home in your presence. Biblical hospitality is making yourself available to the other, the way God makes himself available to you. It is using your God given gifts as an extension of God’s radical welcome. Hospitality for Jesus' sake is serving the stranger and finding out along the way that you have entertained angels without even knowing it.
As believers we must reclaim the practice of biblical hospitality in our daily life as an expressed core value of the community of faith. We cannot continue to dig deeper the divide among us. I feel it. You feel it. There is a divide that exists between people that was not there in the beginning when God created. A chasm between the insiders and the outsiders, the winners and the losers, the have and the have nots. It seems to me that we spend a lot of our time, effort and energy aligning ourselves with people on our side of the divide and we forget that the strange stranger among us is a child of God too. Biblical hospitality calls us to reach out a hand of welcome and move toward the other the way God in Christ moved toward you and me coming down from Heaven to Earth.
It is the hope of God that when we draw closer to Jesus in our relationship with him, we will begin to see the stranger through his eyes and care for the wounds of this world as if we were caring for the wounds of Christ himself. “For I tell you the truth, whatever you do for one of the least of these, you do for me,” Jesus said. Let us not forget to practice hospitality nor grow weary in doing what is good for all people. May we create space, and be a safe place to entertain the angels of God.
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