Hospitable to friends and strangers

"The movement from hostility to hospitality is hard and full of difficulties."

Hospitable to friends and strangers was the title of my sermon for this Sunday.

I remember a few years ago when we ran our first Alpha course. It involved us having a great time taking about Jesus whilst eating and drinking with friends. I began to ask the question why are those seeking to know Jesus having a great time around a meal, when those who join the church end up attending religious meeting in a house with coffee and a biscuit? I also reflected on the accusation loyal attenders of church meetings sometimes had (maybe about me!): ‘Those people only attend when there is food’, as if it were a very shallow reason.

As I began to study the life of Jesus and the early church, I began to realise that eating together and with the lost was a massively important part of their life.
NT Wright says in his book, Jesus and the Victory of God: ‘Most writers now agree that eating with sinners was one off the most characteristic and striking marks of Jesus’ regular activity’. I will unpack this more when we look more closely at the Gospels. In this opening blog, I want to bring out one of many very good reasons why this is such an important theme. I want to use a quote of Henri J.M Nouwen.

‘In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbours, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can found. Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.

‘The movement from hostility to hospitality is hard and full of difficulties. Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy to suddenly appear, intrude and do harm.

‘But still our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brother hood and sister hood can be formed and fully experienced.’

As I meditate on this I think of all the lonely and fearful people I pass as I walk along the streets in Manchester. Most houses alarmed, communities falling apart and yet we as the church have this amazing (and so enjoyable) activity of eating and drinking together with an open hand to those we meet along the way.

Hospitable to friends and strangers

Hospitable to friends and strangers was the title of my sermon for this Sunday.