The Wonderful Risk of Hospitality

It seems we have settled on fear as the default setting of our time. Fear of the stranger, the news cycle and fear of one another. And the Church, which was called to be a community of radical welcome, has too often caught the fear bug.

Our collective fear means the church struggles to close the gap between knowing and doing. Jesus said in Matthew 25, "I was a stranger and you welcomed me." The Letter to the Hebrews urges hospitality to strangers, reminding us that some have entertained angels without knowing it. The Law of Moses commanded Israel repeatedly, "You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21). Romans 12 reads, "Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality."

We have read these words. We have heard them preached and even put them on t-shirts. We know that hospitality means welcoming the stranger and seeing in the unfamiliar face someone made in the image of God. We know it is a practice of faith in exactly the same sense that prayer, fasting, and giving to the poor are practices of faith. It requires effort, intention, and discipline. But we still battle fear.

In the Roman world, meals were performances of social status. You ate with your class. Yet the early disciples did something Romans found scandalous. They ate together. Wealthy patrons shared tables with former slaves. Jews and Gentiles broke bread together. It was not a social experiment but a theological statement. As the Letter of James warned, to show partiality at the table is to become "judges with evil thoughts" (James 2:4). Paul makes the same point in Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.” The unity of the church is not merely spiritual but enacted, at the table, in the flesh.

We should be honest about why hospitality has become so difficult.

Modern life has been arranged around privacy and separation. We move from attached garages to our offices without ever encountering an unfamiliar face. Places where strangers once naturally met like the town square and the front porch have disappeared and nothing has replaced them. Fear is profitable. Media built on advertising revenue needs outrage and alarm to keep our attention. The loss of trust is not simply culture. It is a managed outcome.

The Church is not innocent. Our communities have sometimes been places of harm rather than healing. Faithful hospitality in this moment requires humility. We cannot proclaim the open door while ignoring the times we have slammed it on people who came to us in need.

And yet the stranger is still at the gate, and Christ is still in the stranger.

One thing we do is learn names. There is nothing more foundational to welcome than knowing what to call someone. A community where nobody knows your name is not a welcoming community, whatever else it may be.

It is not accidental that the Church's central act of worship takes the form of a meal. The Eucharist is hospitality enacted. And in another way so is the food pantry, the sack lunch program and Breakfast on Broadway. We do a lot around here to feed the hungry, but I wonder how often we walk up to people at church we do not know and extend the invitation to lunch or dinner. All of it is the Gospel with an apron on.

We must allow ourselves to be a little uncomfortable. Genuine hospitality cannot stop at welcoming people who are just like us. It requires sitting across from people whose politics, backgrounds, and life experiences are genuinely different from our own. This is not a demand to abandon convictions. It is a demand to insist that our shared humanity and our shared standing before God matters more than our differences.

Lastly, we can make room for grief and mess. The stranger does not always arrive in good circumstances. A community serious about hospitality must have the pastoral depth to sit with difficulty, to be present without needing things to be tidy.

There is no version of hospitality without vulnerability. The host always takes a risk. To open the door is to accept that something unpredictable may come through it. This is not a design flaw. It is the practice.

At the center of Christian faith is the claim that God opened the door of creation and stepped into our broken humanity and not from a safe distance, but in a manger. Before it was over, God set a table knowing that one of the guests would betray him and the rest would flee. The Eucharist is the enacted memory of that night when trust was broken, and love held the table anyway.

I am NOT saying we should ignore genuine danger or abandon prudence. But we must resist the slow suffocation of the closed door, the well-armored heart, the community protecting itself from any surprise.

So set a place at the table you weren't planning to set. Learn one name you didn't know before. Open the door and see who walks through it. The stranger bearing the image of God might surprise you. They might make you laugh, might change your mind, might become someone you can't imagine not knowing. That is not a risk to be managed. That is the whole point. Christ’s table is large enough.

See you in Church!

Fr Tom +