Be our Guest. Christians and hospitality

I enjoy being a guest.  It is the nature of my vocation that I enter into the homes of other people.  I love to visit people. I like to be received.  It is good to be on someone else's home turf.  Often, I am the recipient of some gesture of welcome---a cup of coffee, a piece of cake, a comfy chair.  When I came here five years ago, my wife and I intentionally welcomed the congregation into our home.  We invited people over for dinner.  We had an open house in the summer time.  With rare exception, our openness to others was not reciprocated.  We go out to eat with a few couples from the church annually. When our second and third children were born, people brought food to us.  We enjoyed many wonderful home-cooked meals that way.  But nobody came to eat with us.  And rarely have we been invited to another home.
There have been occasions when we sought to get people together around a meal for fellowship and discipleship.  But people have been reluctant to take part.  People are closed off, private, afraid of getting to know others.

Culturally, when we think of hospitality, we think of the restaurant and hotel industries.  We think of Disney World--the epitome of hospitality.  We think of Martha Stewart Living and the kind of over-the-top home decorating and entertaining that she embodies in her multi-million dollar business. We think like consumers--hospitality means to get what we want when we want it the exact way we want it.  It means to order up self-indulgent creature comforts, sparing no expense or detail.  Hospitality means to be served, so that I can scratch my itch or fill my insatiable appetite.  Hospitality is big business.
But Christian hospitality come from another place.  It does not emerge out of the consumer marketplace.  It comes out of an encounter.
I am reading about Benedictine Hospitality.  St. Benedict's rule demanded openness to the stranger, the sojourner, the needy.  In the book "Radical Hospitality" by Father Daniel Homan, we get a primer on Benedictine hospitality for the 21st century church.  I believe that the first step in becoming a missional church is to rediscover the nature of Christian hospitality.
Father Homan wrote, "Benedictine hospitality does not allow us to turn people into a profit-making venture, nor are goodness and graciousness deemed suitable only for the cozy small world of our private homes and feminine natures.  Benedict finds God in people.  You can't ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you.  In the tiresome, the invalid, the rebellious, we are faced with God.  It is our own failures to love that we have to deal with when we talk of hospitality.
Finding God in people.  In an uncivil age, an age of cruelty and terror, an age of deep suspicion and prejudice toward others, we fail to see God in the faces of strangers.  In a world where east is meeting west (Arab and Asian world meets American/European culture and vice versa),  and north is confronting south (American awareness of survival in Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, and parts of southeast Asia) we cannot isolate and avoid suffering. Lutheran pastor and writer Edmund Steimle said, "A Christian cannot ever stand by and be a mere spectator to human suffering and misery without becoming more than a spectator, without entering in some degree into the misery and suffering himself and doing whatever may be done at the moment to alleviate some of it."
Christian hospitality is about creating space for human dignity and for relief from suffering. Hospitality provides shelter and retreat, so that people can live.
Monasteries are becoming popular destinations because people are longing to be received, welcomed, and spiritually nurtured.  People want to have space to seek holy meaning for their lives.  They want to be reminded that God is near them.
Christian hospitality, however, is not about having an open building or house for people to enter.  It is about having an open heart.  "It is possible to serve meals in a nursing home, to cook in a homeless shelters, or read stories t children at an inner-city library and never let others into your heart.  It is possible to do the good things and end up feeling satisfied with yourself and even just a bit superior.  Hospitality includes cooking the meal, and reading to the kid, but it demands that you let the people you are serving into your heart.  Only in opening yourself wide to another are you transformed by the power of love."--Father Homan, "Radical Hospitality".
So, how do we practice?  How do we do this?  We needn't rush to action.  We must find out where our hearts are first.  Are we walking through the mall of life, dsconnected from the others walking around us?  Are we texting and surfing and calling and facebooking, but not relating with anyone?
This week, meet someone new.  Ask them to tell you their story.  That's it.  Start by learning how to connect, how to relate, how to empathize.  Start by paying attention to someone else.  See if you can do that without letting yourself get in the way.  Can you put away the beeping phone, turn off your own stomach long enough to see God in someone else's eyes?
Tune in for more thoughts on Christian hospitality...