Heartbeat: Generous Hospitality (Part 5)

“His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley” (The Hobbit)

“That house was…‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.” (The Fellowship of the Ring)

One writer suggests that these paragraphs from J.R.R. Tolkien captures the essence and the ideal of the Western conception of home.

A place of food. Drink. Sleep. Work. Stories. Singing. Sitting. Being. Belonging. A place where we pray evil does not come. A place for the cure of weariness, fear, and sadness. A place of love and rest.

In many ways, that longing for home is as old as the Fall, for we’re all living “East of Eden,” longing for our true, forever home, the place of perfect peace and rest, the place where God and his people will live together forever.

Post-Introduction

Faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness—for a home we have never visited but have never stopped longing for.681

Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God

The Bible is full of this longing for home.

What was lost in the Garden of Eden was pictured anew in the Tabernacle and the Temple, where Heaven and Earth would meet together in a hot-spot of God’s glory.

Exodus 29:43 (ESV)

43 There I will meet with the people of Israel, and it shall be sanctified by my glory.

Exodus 29:45 (ESV)

45 I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God.

The Tabernacle represented home. The place where we belonged. Where God would dwell with us and we would dwell with Him.

Listen to the way the Psalmist talks about going to worship in the Tabernacle, in God’s house:

Psalm 84:1–4 (ESV)

1 How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!

2 My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

3 Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.

4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Selah

Solomon would go on to build a temple, a new permanent structure for the special presence of God, but because of Israel’s sin and betrayal, that temple was destroyed by the Babylonians as God judged his people and they were sent into Exile.

That event, by any reckoning, was deeply traumatic.

As God’s people are reeling from being forcefully displaced from their home, something God had long warned would happen, someone pens these words in Psalm 137.

Psalm 137:1–4 (ESV)

1 By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

3 For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

The story of the Bible is a story of a people longing for home. Longing for Paradise Lost to be Regained.

And so when Jesus comes onto the scene, we perk up when John says:

John 1:14 (ESV)

14 And the Word became flesh and [tabernacled] among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

And

John 2:19–21 (ESV)

19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”

21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

And we perk up when Jesus says

John 14:2–3 (ESV)

2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

And

John 14:18 (ESV)

18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

John 14:23 (ESV)

23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

And we know what we’re waiting for. The day when history will end and earth and heaven will finally be one, and we will finally be home.

Revelation 21:1–4 (ESV)

1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

In many ways, the theme of Home is a one of the major themes of the whole story of the Bible.

And the centerpiece of the story is Jesus.

And as we wait for his return to bring that to seed full bloom, we His people — His body on earth — get to experience a foretaste of that coming Home here and now.

And one of the most powerful and substantive and spiritually meaningful ways we can enact that foretaste of the coming kingdom is through Generous Hospitality, both individually and corporately as a church.

I’m arguing theologically here. If Jesus came to bring lost sinners home, then the church exists to bring lost sinners home.

And one of the most powerful ways we can do that is by giving people a small taste of what being Home with God looks like and feels like, by cultivating a mentality of generous hospitality in our lives, our homes, and our church.

Romans 15:7 (ESV)

7 Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Generous Hospitality

In the Ancient Near East, and in the Middle East today, hospitality is seen as an extremely important part of the virtuous life.

In fact, to not be hospitable is a severely dishonorable and shameful thing.

The word for hospitality in the New Testament means “loving the stranger,” which highlights the fact that in the time of the Bible, the concept of hospitality wasn’t necessarily geared toward friends and family or neighbors. It was geared toward strangers, those who were passing through or travelers or resident aliens or immigrants.

In that part of the world, much like parts of the Sonoran Desert, to be a traveler carried tremendous physical and bodily risk.

The practice of hospitality, then, wasn’t just a nice luxury, as though you could just book an AirBnB if you didn’t want to meet new people. It was critical. The social fabric was built on the necessity and urgency of hospitality.

All throughout the Old Testament, hospitality is held up as the proper way of living in response to God’s own generosity, as God reminds His people that they’re to welcome the stranger into their own homes and lives, ensuring they’re fed and clothed and have a place to sleep, since they too had been strangers in a foreign land.

In the time of Jesus and the New Testament writers, this principle operates in a similar way.

So Jesus says if you give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothes to the naked, and your presence to the imprisoned, especially to other believers, you have done it to Jesus Himself.

And we’re not only to give that kind of generous care and welcome to believers, but even to unbelievers! Anyone God gives us the opportunity to help.

Galatians 6:10 (ESV)

10 So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

Certainly, there is a priority given to those who are in the family of faith, the church. But our generosity should extend outward to anyone in our orbit that we have the opportunity to serve.

Think about the Parable of the Good Samaritan through the lens of Ancient Hospitality.

Luke 10:29–37 (ESV)

29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.

31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.

32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

34 He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

35 And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’

36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”

37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

Those last words of the parable remind us that Jesus’ main objective with this parable is to give us a moral example to follow. “Go and do likewise!”

Jesus changes the question from “Who is my neighbor,” to “Will you be a neighbor?”

And in the parable, the one who his hearers would have had the most prejudice toward — the Samaritan — actually embodied God’s ideal of generous hospitality more than the religious people, the Priest and the Levite.

Illustration

Rosaria Butterfield tells the story of when she first met Ken and Floy Smith.

We don’t have time for the full story but I’d highly encourage you to give it a listen.

In her story, Rosaria talks about how she was a committed leftist lesbian professor of women’s studies and English. She was fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. She strove to stand with the dis-empowered. And she was deeply and diametrically opposed to Christianity.

She writes:

“I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full. My partner and I shared many vital interests: aids activism, children's health and literacy, Golden Retriever rescue, our Unitarian Universalist church, to name a few. . . It was hard to argue that my partner and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers. The GLBT community values hospitality and applies it with skill, sacrifice, and integrity.”

Rosaria began working on a research project aimed at the Religious Right, and she wrote an article in the newspaper that generated lots of responses: lots of hate mail and lots of fan mail.

But one letter stood out, and Rosaria didn’t know what to do with it.

She says

One letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn't argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it.

In the letter, Ken did not mock her. He wasn’t brash or rude. He engaged. And at the end of the letter, he invited Rosaria to get together for dinner, something that eventually, Rosaria accepted, thinking it would be a good connection for her research project.

But then, she writes:

Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken's God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.

She talks elsewhere of the fact that inviting people to church isn’t itself a bad thing. It’s a good thing. But in her case, Ken and Floy didn’t view her as a project to check off a list. They wanted to invest in a long-term relationship with her if God gave the opportunity.

The goal was genuine friendship. Authentic relationship. Not just church attendance.

It had a dramatic impact on Rosaria.

She writes:

We became genuine friends. When I wouldn’t answer an email or didn’t show up, or they hadn’t heard from me in a month, Ken would come over, or Floy would drop off a loaf of bread. We had many things in common—Floy and I both love to bake bread, and we like the same literature, which was astounding. And because I was a researcher, I started to read the Bible.

For her research, Ken suggested that Rosaria begin reading the Bible in large sections in multiple translations.

As a trained English professor, she was good at that! In a two year period, she read the Bible cover to cover 7 times. And all throughout that time, Ken and Floy’s genuine love and friendship with her, usually around the dinner table, began to work on her heart and mind.

After a time, she began attending the church, usually leaving very angry, but somehow coming back again.

And the rest, here, is a quote from one of her articles:

I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from the bed of my lesbian lover, and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. Conspicuous with my butch haircut, I reminded myself that I came to meet God, not fit in. The image that came in like waves, of me and everyone I loved suffering in hell, vomited into my consciousness and gripped me in its teeth.

I fought with everything I had.

I did not want this.

I did not ask for this.

I counted the costs. And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.

But God's promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world. One Lord's Day, Ken preached on John 7:17: "If anyone wills to do [God's] will, he shall know concerning the doctrine" (NKJV). This verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. I expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And I wanted God to show me, on my terms, why homosexuality was a sin. I wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.

But the verse promised understanding after obedience. I wrestled with the question: Did I really want to understand homosexuality from God's point of view, or did I just want to argue with him? I prayed that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood. I prayed long into the unfolding of day. When I looked in the mirror, I looked the same. But when I looked into my heart through the lens of the Bible, I wondered, Am I a lesbian, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide marrow from soul, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?

Then, one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked. In this war of worldviews, Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me "wife" and many call me "mother."

I have not forgotten the blood Jesus surrendered for this life.

And my former life lurks in the edges of my heart, shiny and still like a knife.

Rosaria talks about how one of the most attractive things she learned from her lesbian community was a commitment to hospitality, welcoming people to the table. Caring for them. Hearing their story. Tending to their needs.

Later, after her “trainwreck conversion” (her words) she saw how the LGBT community was trying to recreate and embody the generous hospitality that the church of Jesus Christ has been called to extend.

The Impact of Her Testimony

I heard Rosaria’s story when I was a student at Liberty University. She came and spoke to our convocation. After she spoke I ordered the memoir of her conversion, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, and I was blown away.

I was amazed at how ordinary Ken and Floy’s life was. They just welcomed people into their home. They made people feel welcomed, loved, cared about, included. But they didn’t shy away from having real, meaningful conversations. Conversations about God and people. Heaven and hell. Culture and ideas.

I was also blown away that Rosaria read the Bible cover to cover 7 times, before she became a Christian.

Maybe you’re here and you’ve wrestling with Christianity. You’ve been wrestling with the idea of the Bible, and from the little bit that you know, you think its socially regressive and destructive and represents basically everything bad in the world.

Have you done the work? Have you actually ever sat down and read it? Cover to cover?

Maybe not even that, have you even read the Gospels, the biographies about Jesus?

How can you be so confident to reject someone you haven’t taken the time to learn about?

When I learned about Rosaria’s conversion experience, it resonated very deeply with me.

I’m Basically a Hobbit

As long as I can remember, I just get all weepy when I hear that section from the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring:

If you’ve ever read the Hobbit, all throughout the book, Bilbo Baggins who has been thrust into this big adventure away from home bursts out into these little refrains, “Oh I wish I was back home,” sitting in my chair by the fireplace, all warm and cozy and safe, etc. etc.

Tatum and I are basically hobbits. We love our hobbit hole, our home.

When Tatum and I were dating, this is one of the ways that we really believe God has wired us both. We love having people into our home and making our home a safe, welcoming, low-stress, comfortable, cozy place to spend time.

I’ll brag on Tatum for a bit here. Tatum loves baking. And she’s really good at it. The cinnamon rolls are next level. She loves cottage-core design style. Which I didn’t even know was a thing.

[She has a standing list of all kinds of different miniature food-themed ear-rings that she’s requested for her birthday and Christmas gifts. Just fyi, if you give her something like that she’ll love you forever.]

But we love having people into our home and spending time together. Usually with food and coffee!

We’ve both been deeply impacted by people who have opened their homes and their hearts and lives to us, to give each of us the time and attention our hearts need.

Hospitality as a Command

It’s not just that hospitality or loving the stranger is a good idea.

It’s a command:

(1) Elder/Pastor: One of the requirements to be an Elder or a Pastor in a church is be hospitable, 1 Timothy 3:2.

(2) All Believers, it was a regular part of the expectation of living out the Christian faith

Romans 12:13 (ESV)

13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

1 Peter 4:9 (ESV)

9 Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.

The reason its a command is because when we practice generous hospitality, serving others, especially when we don’t get a return, we are modeling God’s grace in the gospel.

Luke 14:12–14 (ESV)

12 He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.

13 But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,

14 and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

1 Corinthians 1:27–29 (ESV)

27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;

28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,

29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

Application

I think is one of the realities of our faith that we really need to lean into in our increasingly post-Christian world in Gilbert, AZ.

It’s going to be really important that we relearn the art of a kind of first-century hospitality.

We’re ready to learn and grow in that, too.

[Engage]: Do you know anyone who, right now, unless something changes, will basically never step foot into a church? Ok, but how many of those same people would be willing to come over for a BBQ or Pizza and games?

Or let’s think about hospitality at the church-level.

When we have guests that come to church, are we a welcoming church? Do people who come here feel like they’re loved and valued and cared for and safe and at home, not for what they can do here but just because of who they are?

All my interior design friends. Designing beautiful, cozy, welcoming spaces matters!

Have you ever stepped foot into a brand new house or apartment and wondered, how on earth is this going to feel like home?

You gotta get some paint out and choose an aesthetic and get some furniture and work on getting some artwork and decor up

The way we design and maintain beautiful spaces in our church communicates something to our community! The way we take care of our facilities and our property. The design and purpose and function of future building spaces matters! We’ll communicate something that feels welcoming, or we won’t.

Here’s Another Category: Digital Hospitality.

I don’t remember where I heard that phrase, I didn’t come up with it.

But the way we design and maintain our digital footprint matters! Website. Social Media. Sermon archive. Livestream.

We want our digital footprint to serve other people. We want our church to be easy to find. We want things organized and beautiful and well-put together.

All of that falls under this category of Generous Hospitality.

Romans 15:7 (ESV)

7 Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Conclusion

Since Christ has welcomed us, let’s welcome one another — both in the church and in our community — for the glory of God.

Come back next week for the last sermon in my Heartbeat series on Christlike Humility.