Hospitality

I preached yesterday about hospitality--not just ordinary hospitality, but radical hospitality. How can we be radically hospitable? The answer is going beyond what society expects of us. Now, I was talking to the church, but I think this concept applies to all of us whether we attend a church regularly or rarely if ever darken the doors of a sanctuary.

I am old enough to remember a slower time, a time when you knew your neighbors. I grew up in a lot of different places, but in each place we soon got to know the people who lived close to us. We knew about the family down the street whose mother sometimes had a hard time telling her twins apart so they both acquired the nickname of "twinny". We heard the stories of the couple living across from us who had immigrated to this country from Denmark and of the things that led them to each other and to this United States. We knew the man down the way had been a widower with two grown sons when he fell in love and married a woman from a whole different part of the country and who had two young girls he took for his own. We laughed together, we spent time together and we reached out to each other sharing together in joys and in heartaches.

Somehow it seems that we, or at least many of us, have lost some of our capacity to reach out. There are lots of reasons--we are busy; the huge increase in working wives; the change in family dynamics; the fear few of us express. I am not downplaying any of these things. They are a fact of life and real issues for many people. But I mourn the fact that somehow it seems we have forgotten how to reach out, to take a chance, to go beyond what prudent people tell us we should do. So we keep our doors locked, and we quickly go from our fortresses to our cars and back again.

I wonder what it would be like if we took the time and made to effort to know the person next door, to reach out and develop a relationship with them. I know, I know. It takes courage. In our diversified society, our neighbors may be from another country, they may look or act very different from us. They may not speak English very well. In some places and with some people reaching out is not the wisest move. I understand all these things. But for every bad experience, I believe has to be at least one which will be a blessing.

I wonder what an impact this kind of radical hospitality might make on the world.

Pastor Jan