Untamed Hospitality

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Romans 12:1-2

Introduction: While our culture reduces “hospitality” to friendliness and private entertaining, Christian hospitality remains a public and economic reality by which God re-creates us through the places and people we are given.

How do we shift gears to practice untamed hospitality?

Reflection:  When the Apostle Paul urged the Roman Christians to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans12:1), he specifically instructed them to “be transformed [from the empire’s way of thinking] by the renewing of your minds,” “hate what is evil,” and “be patient in suffering” a real challenge for a persecuted little community in Nero’s capital city. Then this command: “Extend hospitality to strangers.” What a challenge?

What was Paul thinking? Today we view hospitality through the images of countless UK magazines – where in the glossy pages of these magazines hospitality is described as “delicious dinners and polite conversation in one’s own beautiful home.” Or If hospitality is more than a private time with friends, we leave it to professionals in the “hospitality industry” of hotels, restaurants, and cruise ships and the like. How could hospitality possibly be at the counter-cultural heart of early Christians life and ministry.

Lets think  a bit deeper.

We learn such “untamed hospitality” in the good news of Jesus.”  Through his life in the gospels and through the life of the first church communities we are taught to be not only guests, but also hosts in God’s Kingdom. In the good news of Jesus hospitality builds communities that can welcome outcasts and strangers, and it publicly challenges the status quo of the culture and customs of any community, town and city.

The untamed hospitable love displayed in the life of Jesus and in the early church is one of overflow. Yet we still find it difficult to embrace this way of living because we have been so deeply formed by living in a market society…. Consumerism, Competition, and Individualism already shape our lives and because of these things we are shaped and programmed to be ready to move for more money, a more “fulfilling” church, a less difficult marriage. We are taught that through our choices we are the creators of our own destiny, which is exactly what a market society with its relentless advertising campaign would want us to believe.

Untamed hospitality does not aim for self-fulfillment …but aims at allowing God to re-create us through faithful relationships, through sharing in community, through living in discipleship and through service to others. And by doing so accomplishes the challenge of the great commission.

We can learn this by careful study of the life of Christ in the gospels, and through this learn and honour those whom society has abandoned.

One example of this is found in the L’Arche communities where people with handicaps live alongside those without such handicaps. Founder Jean Vanier writes, “We have discovered that we have a common spirituality of humility and presence, close to the poor and the weak; a common call to live with them, not to change them, but to welcome them and share their gifts and their beauty; to discover in them the presence of Jesus—Jesus, humble and gentle, Jesus, poor and rejected.”

Such untamed hospitality is not held up as an individual or even a community achievement,” It’s a following of the untamed life of Jesus and of the earliest Christian community, it is his way, his ethos, it’s the fundamental basis of the good news. We must make it our way too!

Conclusion: Perhaps it is time according to Romans 12:1 that we had transformed minds and got on with the task at hand!