When I used to teach the Iliad and Odyssey to freshmen at a Christian college, we would read rich accounts of ancient hospitality: a beleaguered stranger would knock at the door late at night, and the host would offer swift welcome. A basin of warm water to wash his feet, a warm cloak, the best food in the house. And only then would the stranger be asked to give his name and an account of what brought him to that door. He’d sleep in a snug bed, and perhaps remain in the house for days, months, or even years, before departing with a rich gift from his host. We’d compare this pattern of welcome to what we found in the Bible, for example, in Genesis 18, when Abraham welcomes three visitors with a lavish feast.
“Why don’t we do this anymore?” I would ask my students. “If someone showed up at your house at 10pm, seeking food and shelter for the night, would you offer this kind of welcome? Why not?”
The answer, year after year, was the same: “Well, Dr. Bear, that was a long time ago, and people just weren’t as wicked back then. It wasn’t so dangerous to let people in…”
Bless their hearts. The myth of the golden age had overshadowed what they should have known from years of Sunday school: that the ancient world was pretty brutal, with murder, theft, and all manner of evil abounding. Different perils, perhaps, from those we face, but not because people are fundamentally any different.
Nevertheless, we can’t blame those freshmen for being a little overwhelmed by the question. Even if we pull back from the expectation that we kill a fatted calf for a guest (way to set the bar high, Abraham….), there are plenty of reasons that hospitality can feel hard, even impossible.
Last week I offered some working definitions of biblical hospitality, all of which focus on making intentional choices to draw strangers into the life of your home:
Hospitality builds its home with the stranger in mind: intentionally, spiritually and physically making room for others to join the life of the household.
Hospitality sees every stranger as Christ in disguise, and diligently seeks to make a way to invite him into the life of the home.
Hospitality uses the riches of the home—meals, companionship, bedrooms, celebrations, gardens, and more—as resources for creating good for the stranger.
Hospitality hungers to enlarge the home, and seeks to draw the lost, the lonely, and the strange into the life of the household.
It’s exciting to write these definitions, but let’s be honest: it’s hard to know where we would even begin to make these definitions realties in our owns. However, I’ve always believed that making a thorough list is the first step to solving any problem, so that what I want to spend the remainder of my time today doing. Let’s make a list of all the reasons its hard to practice hospitality. I’m going to offer mine, but I’d love to hear your additions. In future essays I want to tackle all of these, so let’s make it a worthy challenge.
Hospitality is hard because…
our lives are so full of cares. Between the demands of work and family, we’re barely staying on top of the needs of our own people, and it feels like we have no emotional energy left to give anyone else.
we’re so busy! We’d love to draw more people into our homes, but we’re just not there very often. Church, work, and school fill the hours every day of the week, and when we do get home, we just want to collapse on the couch, not be “on” for a guest.
we don’t have much physical space. We eat at a tiny kitchen table and barely have room for a couch. We could never have any sleep over.
someone in our household has complex medical or emotional needs that make bringing others into the home really tricky.
we have young children, and our home feels like chaos all the time. I’m doing well if I can keep everyone fed and in clean clothes, but there are toys everywhere and I can’t remember the last time I scrubbed the bathtub. I’d be so embarrassed to bring anyone into my home!
I’m not sure how “strange” you mean when you talk about strangers. A new family in the neighborhood? Sure. But that verse from Isaiah about bringing the homeless poor into my house? Have you seriously thought about how complicated that would be? How long would they stay? What if they posed a danger to the family?
I can’t even find a stranger to welcome. No one ever knocks on my door needing anything. Everyone I live, worship, and work with is pretty much like me. Where am I supposed to find these strangers?
That’s my list for now. Some of these my resonate with you more than others — tell me why. Or perhaps you have your own additions to the list. Drop them in the comments and then the fun begins: we can start praying and imagining what it might mean for the Holy Spirit to begin breaking through those obstacles. Bless our hearts.
My home is my haven from the rest of the world. It is a space of quiet solitude that I seek to escape the day to day responsibilities outside of the home. Work, family duties, church activities, errands that never end etc. leave me beyond tired and often emotionally “spent.” I grew up in a home that was an example of the hospitality you speak of. My parents were amazing hosts and invited everyone they knew to “come visit us. We’d love to have you over”. But I witnessed firsthand the amount of physical work and energy those visits took out of them. I just don’t know that I have that in me.
Hospitality can be hard because it feels like lack of stability and predictability in how you spend your social and emotional energy and your time. If your house is open, or if different people are living in it at different times especially, that means constant paradigm shifts as you try to relate to each person in ways that are personal to them. Similarly, it means constant reconfigurations of priorities about space/stuff/household duties/boundaries. Most people want to help keep a house tidy, for instance, but what that means for everyone varies widely! Each addition to your house, even if it's only for a few hours or days, means you have to recognize and then participate in someone else's paradigm while still holding the "frame" in which that negotiation can happen.