Practicing Hospitality

While I sit inside my house snowed in, I am practicing hospitality. None of us knows when we will be subject to the mercy and goodness of strangers. Today, I am at the mercy and goodness of 'strangers' who will be plowing the roads, patroling the streets, staffing the ER if I experience a medical emergency, managing the use of public resources to get businesses open and people back to work. Most of these people are unknown to me but the professionalism and goodness with which they do their jobs influence my life significantly. I am practicing hospitality by recognizing the contribution, and sacrifice, these people are making on my behalf.

While we tend to think of strangers as those who we do not know in our congregations, as those who orginiate from a culture different from our own, as people so unfamiliar we need to be wary of them, strangers are actually part of our lives every day. Perhaps a story will illustrate. One Easter dawn several years ago, I was walking from the rectory to the church. No one was awake and moving about except a police officer in his patrol car. I smiled, waved, and kept walking. Later that morning at the packed Easter service was a man, attending alone, who I did not recognize. Then I noticed his uniform.

An unfamiliar face at worship may be someone who has worked extra shifts at the hospital because other medical staff did not make it through the snow. Or, a teacher connecting to this new parish community. Others have received their goodness and mercy. Practicing hospitality welcomes these 'strangers' into the life of the worshipping community that morning.

Much of our current scriptures are translated from Greek. The Greek word for stranger also means guest and host. We can treat one another as strangers, or, we can recognize that interplay between guest host. Sometimes we are the guest, subject to the mercy and goodness of another. And sometimes we are the host, offering that mercy and goodness to the guest. Practicing Hospitality is recognizing the mutality of our relationships with one another.