Faithful in Hospitality

Acts 16: 9-15

“If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” -Lydia, Acts 16:15

I’ve been thinking a lot about hospitality this week, thinking about all the different experiences I could share about times that I have been welcomed into someone else’s home or city or state or country. I thought about travel seminars I went on, while in seminary: one to Rome, Italy, and another to Korea and China. I thought about the time I spent in Switzerland visiting with my first year seminary roommate. I thought about my recent trips to visit with my mom’s family in Salisbury, North Carolina, and my brother and his husband in New York. I thought about all the food that was eaten, wine that was drunk, shows that were seen, songs that were sung...how wonderful it feels to be welcomed, well-fed, and treated to shelter, safety, and stories, to be entertained by friends and family. All of us have memorable experiences of hospitality. So I thought I’d try something different in my sermon...and by “I”, I mean “we”...and by “we”, I mean if you want to, I’d like to invite you to turn to your neighbors, 3 or 4 people sitting around you, and take a few minutes to remember and share your fondest memories of “receiving hospitality.” I’m going to stay up here and chat with the choir.

What are some of the common themes you’ve noticed as you’ve shared your stories about receiving hospitality?

It feels wonderful to be welcomed, cared for, accepted, sheltered, safe...loved.

Okay...you thought you were done, but I’m going to ask you to share one more time. What about those times where hospitality has been lacking? I’m sure you’ve got those stories, too. Take a few moments, again, to share.

It feels awful to be refused hospitality, to be treated as an outsider, unwelcomed, unsafe, unwanted.

William Willimon suggests that Lydia “demonstrates her conversion through hospitality.” (Willimon, 137) “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home,” she urges Timothy, Silas, and Paul after she has been baptized by them. Did any of you, in sharing stories about times you have received incredible hospitality share stories about your baptisms or receiving communion at the Lord’s Table? God’s grace is perhaps the most tremendous hospitality any of us could and have ever been shown. Through these waters and at this table we are welcomed, cared for, accepted, sheltered, safe, and loved. And we who have been given grace have also been called to share it. Lydia is so moved by her conversion and baptism that she has to respond to it. Grace and gospel have to do with receiving and sharing God’s hospitality.

How to show hospitality and to whom comprises a large portion of Old Testament scriptures. Jesus’ ministry is full of examples of showing hospitality to the sick, the poor, the hungry, the broken, the blind, the outcast, the unclean, the suffering...challenging conventional and traditional understandings of what faithful hospitality looked like. But Jesus and his disciples also depended on receiving hospitality. He sent them out on missions to preach and teach carrying nothing but the clothes on their back, he asked the woman at the well to draw a drink of water for him, he allowed his feet to be washed by the tears and hair of Mary. It occurs to me that we never hear of Jesus buying things or spending money, yet we don’t think of him as a mooch or a freeloader. I wonder if he ever had that kind of a reputation? What kind of stories were told about Jesus behind his back that didn’t make it into our Scriptures?

There are people to whom it is hard to show hospitality. People who are violent and dangerous we have a hard time welcoming into our home, and justifiably so. But sometimes we use that same justification to avoid showing hospitality to people we assume might be dangerous. We tell dehumanizing stories about those to whom we’d like to avoid showing hospitality. I imagine that the path to the cross was paved with such stories about Jesus. I’d like to briefly return to last week’s Scripture from Acts 10, about Peter’s visit with Cornelius, the Gentile soldier. Gentiles were different, they worshiped differently, they ate differently, they lived differently, and this made them a threat to the health and purity of the church. It was justifiable to avoid them, and to exclude them from the hospitality of the church. Justifiable, that is, until God spoke up to Peter in a vision: “Don’t profane what I have made clean.”

Just yesterday I was out at Bryan Park running a disc golf event, we play a doubles format, but your partner is randomly selected. I got to talking with one of the regulars after the round. He was visibly upset by an interaction he’d had with the guy who had been randomly chosen to be his partner that morning. When we were at hole 16, throwing across the water, this guy started grumbling to my friend about how he’d been playing a round the other day and there had been a mother and her son standing on the edge of the lake feeding the ducks and geese. They were standing on the edge of the lake in front of the disc golf tee pad, so he couldn’t throw, and just when he thought they were done feeding the ducks, they pulled out another bag of bird food. “Well,” my friend asked, “did you ask them to move?” And this guy responds, “Nah, they were black, so it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

Now, about this friend of mine whose partner had just made this comment...he’s white, but his wife is black. This comment made his blood boil. What kind of story is this guy telling himself about black people to be able to justify making a comment like that? My friend continued to talk about how he doesn’t like to go out and play disc golf with the group that meets up on Sunday anymore because there are so many people who show up who use homophobic slurs, and he has a gay brother. What sort of story are they telling themselves about gay people that makes them think it’s okay to dehumanize them? The stories that support racism and homophobia to this day are the same as the stories that many members of the early Christian church told themselves about Gentiles: they’re dangerous, unclean, impure, a threat to our society. This is a story told by fear, and it paves the path to hate. Faith tells a different story. “Do not profane what I have made clean.” Samaritans can be good, tax collectors can be saved, sinners can be redeemed, prodigals can find hospitality in their father’s arms.

***It was pointed out to me that this was poorly worded, perhaps implying that black people or gay people were "dirty", but God can make them clean. This is the false story, and it is a filthy story by which racism and homophobia profane the human heart and fill it with hatred.***

It’s hard to show hospitality to people who dehumanize other people. It’s hard to show hospitality to people who refuse to show hospitality to others. When faced with these challenges, do we listen to the story told by fear, or the story told by faith? Are we following the path of hate or the way of love?

In the 25th chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells a famous parable about sheep and goats, it’s a tale about those who show hospitality and those who don’t. “The hospitality you show to the least of these, who are God’s beloved, is the hospitality you show to me.” How would it change the way we show hospitality if we recognized that doing so was simultaneously demonstrating faithfulness to the commands to love God and love our neighbor? God became human in order to serve and save the ones that the world had deemed unworthy of hospitality...and because of this, the world deemed God unworthy of their hospitality, too. We don’t like to think of Jesus as being hard to welcome, but, long story short the cross is not a demonstration of hospitality. It hurts to confess that I have failed to give God and neighbor the hospitality of my heart. And this pain makes it very difficult to receive the hospitality of God’s grace. The cross is simultaneously an expression of tremendous human failure in hospitality and the tremendous victory of God’s grace.

Think of grace as the blood that flows through the body of Christ while guilt and shame block up the arteries. God’s hospitality to us on the cross is a major medical procedure for the body of Christ: to remove the guilt and shame of sin so that grace might flow freely to the hands and feet which are called to serve the world with hospitality. The font and table are “routine check-ups.” Just like any doctors’ visit, sometimes there's bad news, but there's always good news, and usually we’ll be asked to change our lifestyle a bit. The new life we have in Christ is a lifestyle of constantly receiving and responding to God’s hospitality. Sometimes it will be easy, sometimes it will be tough; sometimes we’ll be good at it, other times not so much. Becoming human and dying for our sins is the most hospitable thing that God could have done...do you think that was easy? “My Father, if possible let this cup pass away from me,” Jesus prayed. God chose hospitality over hate, may we who love and serve this God never forget that. We who have been given grace are also called to share it. May we demonstrate faithfulness in hospitality.