Hospitality – 30 June 2017

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me… (Matthew 10:40)

I think it comes as something of a surprise to some life-long church goers that hospitality is actually central in Christian scriptures and in Christian faith.  Israel was never allowed to forget that they were once homeless and wandering.  It’s a salutary memory.  It became an article of faith and life that they were to welcome the widow, the stranger and the orphan.  The prototype was Abraham who welcomed angels unawares.  Failure in hospitality was an affront never to be forgotten.  The Rule of St Benedict states that the monastery will never be without guests… each guest is to be welcomed as Christ (RB 53:1). 

But the word gets devalued in our culture.  The “hospitality industry” runs hotels and cruise ships, pubs and bars from the salubrious to the Aussie boozer, and massage parlours.  More often on our lips the word means having friends to stay or in to dinner, with nice food and ambience.  The church has what it technically calls eucharistic hospitality, which refers to who is welcome (and therefore who is not) at Holy Communion. 

You can think of contemplative prayer, our silence and stillness, as a form of hospitality.  God is present to us, we are present to God… as (I think it was) Thomas Merton put it quaintly:  In us God is completely at home.  Hospitality is recognising that God is the unseen guest at the barbecue.  It may be as a needy person, someone who is not coping, someone frail or dying…  It may indeed be simply in the delight of our friends, old friends, and all our shared memories…  It may be in children, and parenthood, or grandparenthood, in good times and bad – indeed, what we call family life may be seen as a deep and committed form of hospitality. 

Hospitality goes inevitably with freedom.  There can be no hospitality where there is any agenda of possession or control, lies or manipulation.  Jesus, in hosting us at his Table, we may assume, is not deceived by our dressing-up or the masks we wear – in his hospitality it is not only that we are free to be as we are, but essential.  It is the way we are seen, and welcomed.

So hospitality is a meeting of hearts.  It depends on being unafraid of truth.  It is an aspect of love, which as St Paul wrote, bears all, believes all, hopes all, endures all (I Cor 13:7). 

So, as ancient Israel understood, it is indeed difficult to refuse hospitality… so long as we ourselves are the beneficiaries of God’s limitless hospitality, rather than God’s exclusion or condemnation.  We are part of the generosity of creation, made and sustained in love.  We are in no position to shut the door on anyone, let alone someone needing rest and peace, if they come in good faith.  Of course it has dangers.  In our discipline of prayer, as we become less defensive of ourselves, we become also less afraid and more hospitable.