To be Hospitable is to be Blessed

Hospitality feels like a lost art in the United States at times. Though there are pockets of peoples and cultures in our country that still do hospitality quite well, it’s also true that this practice is no longer part of the overall and organic part of our society.

Christine Pohl, in an interview about her book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, talks about fragmented hospitality within US culture. She says, “When people stopped talking about it, or took it for granted, or became too busy for it, the whole practice began to change. You can make an argument that many of the pieces of the practice of hospitality have endured historically but that it has stopped being a coherent whole—that we’ve lost the sense of the practice being located in a larger narrative.”

Sufficive to say, hospitality in our country is spotty at best. Perhaps some of us have never experienced true hospitality. In fact, and if many of us are being honest, we don’t even know what hospitality looks like.

Are Evangelicals Inhospitable?

Truth be told, it’s hard for most people to be hospitable. In a recent Barna study, statistics showed that “the splintering and polarization of American culture has made it more difficult than ever to have a good conversation… a majority of Americans would struggle to have a conversation with a Muslim (73%), a Mormon (60%), an atheist (56%), an evangelical (55%), or someone from the LGBT community (52%).” It’s safe to say that, if the American people can’t even have conversations with others, they’re certainly not welcoming them into their homes.

Sadly, though, this same study revealed that “evangelicals seem to have a particularly difficult time talking to those outside their group. They report higher tensions than any other group when it comes to having conversations with those who are different from them.”

Many people talk about mutuality and vulnerability being hindrances to true hospitality, and these factors are certainly true – if we’re middle class and have resources, we don’t need to be dependent on the help and care of outsiders.

However, what this data tells me is that issues of power and privilege are also at work. Why are so many Christians, including evangelicals, hesitant to be hospitable towards the LGBT community, refugees, immigrants or even people of another political party? It’s because we see them as threats as opposed to people to love. At the very least, we think that if we’re hospitable to someone different from ourselves, we are implicitly supporting their lifestyle or sharing their worldview, and heaven forbid we ever go down that slippery slope.

Defining Biblical Hospitality

I don’t think this is the model that Jesus used for hospitality.

In Making Room, Christine Pohl writes, “Jesus calls us to a particular kind of hospitality that welcomes those who often, on the face of it, don’t seem to have as much to offer. When Jesus says in Matthew 25 that in welcoming the stranger or the needy person we might be welcoming him, and when he says in Luke 14 that when we give dinner parties, to invite not friends and family but the poor and the lame, he’s talking about inviting people who are usually excluded and seeing them as an important part of our lives and our communities. That’s a distinctive understanding of hospitality.”

This month at The Art of Taleh, we will be exploring biblical hospitality, especially considering the model of Jesus as a guide to our own practices today.

For now, though, it’s important to lay a general foundation for biblical hospitality.

I like Pohl’s definition. She says, “Hospitality by definition involves welcoming people into a space that’s lived in.”

This definition, however, extends far beyond simply inviting someone over for a meal and playing host. Pohl highlights the deep, spiritual meaning behind true, biblical hospitality:

“Hospitality is connected in some way to blessing and to God. Hospitality is certainly foundational in the Christian tradition, but it is decidedly also spiritual in its connection to mystery—to the presence of God or angels—so it’s very much a spiritual tradition that is often linked to blessing. In the stories involving hospitality in the Old Testament, blessing is very frequently present. Strangers turn out to be angels, or guests bring good news, or they offer the promise of a longed-for child. Ultimately hospitality is very much both a cultural and a spiritual practice.”

Hospitality is not about duty. It’s about a blessing for everyone involved, both host and guest, and there is an expectation that God will be present.

Being A Blessing

The idea of being a blessing is where we want to linger.

This month, you’ll read a wide variety of posts on hospitality from a wonderful group of writers. We will look at ancient forms of hospitality; we will study passages on hospitality from the Bible, including Matthew 14 and the story of Mary and Martha, among others; we will talk about cross-cultural hospitality as well as highlight recent books on hospitality that we recommend and more!

We would love to have you join us in this conversation and dialogue with us about how we can practice hospitality more, not as a duty, but to be a blessing and to be blessed.