Practising Hospitality

Pre-Reading Introduction

I remember being on a mission team in Papua New Guinea almost 20 years ago. The strange smells, the red mouths and tongues of the men, from chewing some sort of drug. The tropical warmth and humidity. The mosquitoes. The bumpy roads. The huge bats. The palm trees. I remember our team preaching the gospel in little huts and under a tree. PNG was in fact the place where I first began preaching. But most of all I remember the meals we had after the services. Food cooked in a hole in the earth. Wrapped up in banana leaves, placed on read hot stones, buried with earth to slow cook. I remember the sweet potatoes and the chicken. I remember the fresh coconuts, pineapples and sugar cane. In fact often there would be a pile of fresh fruit and vegetables about 5 foot high and 3 foot wide, given as gifts most places we went. And above all else I remember finding out towards the end of that mission that the people didn’t usually eat chicken. They were too poor for that. But everywhere we went we’d eaten chicken! In other words, everywhere we went people had gone out of their way to give us the best. I began to eat that chicken more appreciatively.

In India I remember a destitute widow serving us her last cup on rice, and insisting we eat it. A local believer pointed out to us quietly that she had no other food or money left.

In South Korea I remember the constant invitations to dine out with the Korean believers. We were ministering in many churches. But the Korean Christians were feeding us up and sending us home with bags full of presents.

And I could tell you a hundred stories about the Muslims we met on our travels, who opened their homes, fed us, protected and hosted us.

I’m grateful for what God is teaching me about hospitality. But I still have a long, long way to go. I’ll be honest and say that we as British people have got a long way to go. Things have changed. We’ve become a nation of individualists who tend not to find communal living very natural any more. This is a cultural characteristic we must be aware of. On certain points the values of the kingdom of God are radically different to the values of the United Kingdom!

Reading: Psalm 23

Psalm 23 is not just a psalm about the Lord my Shepherd. But it is also a psalm about the Lord my Host. About an hospitable God. A God who invites us in. Who prepares a feast for us. A safe place. A God who invites us into his house forever! To join in the feast with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

It is not for nothing that the Bible urges God’s people to practice hospitality. All theology flows from and starts with who God is. And God is a welcoming God. A host.

So our topic tonight is Hospitality. Our title: Practising Hospitality.

First, I would like us to define that word and look at where it is found in the New Testament. Then I’d like us to see what hospitality might practically mean for us as a church.

I bring this word to us this evening because I believe,

There is no church without hospitality

(the church is not programmes it is people);

There is, is a sense, no holiness without hospitality

(in Leviticus 19, the holiness chapter, hospitality to visitors is part of what it means to ‘be holy as God is holy’)

There is no leadership without hospitality (as we shall see, hospitality is one of the key qualifications of leadership in the church).

Briefly, we could say much about Jesus and his experience and teaching on hospitality...

Jesus constantly received hospitality. Martha and Mary, Luke 10:38, for example.

Jesus regards the giving of hospitality to him and his followers as a sign of whether or not a person has received the Gospel. If they won’t welcome you in, shake the dust off your sandals!

And at the final judgment Jesus will say to the righteous,

I was a stranger and you invited me in! Whatever you did to the least of these you did to me!

So some definitions...

The Greek word is found in 2 forms: philoxenos and philoxenia.

philo means fond of or a lover of.

xenos means strangers, foreigners.

So philoxenos means fond of/lover of strangers and/or lover of hospitality

The other form of the word is philoxenia which means entertaining strangers.

The word is found in five places in the New Testament.

1. Hospitality is commanded

Two incidences of the command...

Romans 12:13 “Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.”