What is Hospitality?

Hospitality. So...what IS it?

Ask a room full of people and you'll get a room full of answers...

"Entertaining people so they want to come back again and again"

"Feeding people excellent food"

"Hard work"

And I guess there's an element of truth there...well with the last one.

The Bible gets the word from the Greek language. This is because the places where it's written in the Bible, were originally written in Greek, and then translated, many years later, into other languages like English.

The Greek word is Xenia and it literally means "To Love Strangers"

The Bible is littered with hospitality (much like my living room is with socks at the end of the day). 

The Old Testament doesn't have the Greek word (mainly cos that bit was written in another language again - Hebrew) but it does have A LOT of examples of people actually doing hospitality.

The New Testament actually gives it the name we know and dread, and the instruction to do it.

So what about welcoming those strange people?

I feel we can break this down into 2 types of people;

Firstly, actual strangers:

People we have never met. Or who we have just met. And we invite them into our home and show them love by welcoming them into our family. They may be Christians, they may not be.

Now this is hard. And risky.

So many times when I've talked to people about this, the response has been "But what if they rob you?" or "What if they hurt your children?". These are valid points. And so when we welcome total strangers into our home, we do treat them a little differently to people we've known all our lives.

We're not asking them to move in with us, we're asking them to have a cuppa.

We don't leave them alone with our kids.

We don't really leave them alone (I mean they can pee alone, but that's about it)

And we don't have anything to steal. We do keep our wallets and handbags (mine not the husbands) out of sight, but that's something we do all the time, we don't run around hiding the valuables before strangers cross the threshold.

Secondly, people who would be strangers if it weren't for the gospel:

These people are our brothers and sisters in Christ. People we know and love and are our Christian family. They are strangers to us in the sense that we have no earthly obligation to them. We don't HAVE to have them round by the worlds standards. They don't come over because we have SOOOOOOO much in common it's like we were separated at birth. We have them over cos, despite the fact they may be a bit odd, we are now adopted into the same family. There is a unique gospel bond stronger than any blood bond or personality traits.

This is also hard. And risky. But for different reasons than the ones above. We have to face these people again and again. And they know all our failures and pitfalls.

Much of what I said above still stands...

Our wallets and handbags are already kept away.

And we still don't have anything to steal.

But we might ask them to babysit (I mean not when we've just invited them over for tea...)

And we may ask them to move in with us.

In either category practising hospitality is loving strangers. Put another way, its bringing people who are not your family, into your family. Whoever they are.