Radical Hospitality

Church communities have lost their welcoming spirit.  Parish dinners have become fundraisers instead of just a time to reach out to each other and to the neighbourhood.  But there are glimmers of hope. 

By DEBRA FIEGUTH

THERE'S A SCENE on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that illustrates so perfectly how Jesus embodied hospitality. It’s after the resurrection: he’s just been through the worst ordeal on Earth – betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, torture and crucifixion -- and has been lying dead for two days in the tomb, and now he’s just got a few weeks to finish what he's started with his disciples before he ascends into heaven.

They are trying to cope but not doing very well. Several of them have been fishing all night, unsuccessfully. They are exhausted and likely frustrated.

So what does Jesus do? He asks them to have faith one more time and fish from the other side of the boat. They do, pulling in exactly 153 fish. But it doesn’t end there: Jesus has already built a fire on the beach, and he invites his disciples to have breakfast with him. It is at that morning meal that Jesus reminds his disciples, especially Peter, to feed his sheep, not just with physical food but with spiritual food – something that is more substantial and long-lasting. Jesus, of course, is the Bread of Life, and he is the Living Water. Hospitality doesn’t get more basic or more profound than that.

The moment is significant in the history of Christian hospitality because as a host, Jesus had everything going against him. He was homeless, for starters. But that didn’t stop him from showing hospitality, either in the home of another, or outside, on the beach or on the hillside at Capernaum where he fed 5,000 people. He didn’t have a wife to do the cooking and cleaning for him, but that didn’t slow him down. And he had just suffered persecution and rejection. Yet that didn’t prevent him from giving a second chance to his disciples, one of whom had flatly denied ever knowing him.

Rooted as it was in Middle Eastern culture, the Early Church placed great importance on hospitality. Christians hosted pilgrims and missionaries. Strangers were welcome. Food was shared.

So much of that has been lost in the last few decades. Several years ago when my husband and I were hosting a dinner in Winnipeg, a friend, visiting from Toronto, lamented that people there never entered each other’s homes anymore. They kept their home lives private and, if they wanted to get together, went to a restaurant.

Church communities, too, have lost their welcoming spirit. Parish dinners become fundraisers instead of just a time to reach out to each other and to the neighbourhood.

But there are glimmers of hope. A small movement is afoot to recover the practice of hospitality. And there are some people who never lost the art in the first place.

“I used to talk about entertaining,” says Eileen Jones, who inhabits a large limestone house in Kingston, Ontario. “Now I talk about hospitality.” The difference, she explains, is “entertaining was for me. Hospitality is me giving myself for others.”

In her younger years, Mrs. Jones was a prominent socialite who attended balls and banquets and threw huge dinner parties with her husband. She loved her life, but when she lost her son tragically she began questioning her values, eagerly read the Bible and became a Christian. Her life was transformed. Now a widow in her 80s and an active member of St. James’ Anglican Church, Mrs. Jones takes in students from Queen’s University and regularly hosts luncheons, dinners and parties, opening her home for a range of ministry needs--this despite suffering from chronic headaches and other ailments.

“I have every reason not to be hospitable, because I feel so lousy all the time,” she laughs. “But I know that this is God’s gift for me, and I want to do it.”

International students love coming to her home – considered a mansion by most of their standards – for dinners and tea parties. Without blinking an eye she hauls out stacks of fine china – she has about a hundred place settings – and sets a beautiful table with candles and flowers. “I like to honour the Lord with the best I’ve got,” she explains. In all her years of hosting hundreds of people, not a single dish has ever been broken or chipped.

Showing hospitality to international students is a way of reaching out to them with Christian love. Many are lonely; huge numbers spend three or more years in Canada without ever visiting a Canadian home. Yet often the home setting is the place where the love of Jesus is best shown. My husband and I host a dinner and Bible study for international students every Friday night, and getting to know them and seeing how they learn, little by little, about what it means to be a Christian, is one of the highlights of our week.

When I’m in Toronto I often stay with a friend who models hospitality with good cheer, no matter how busy she is in her work as a writer. She sees hospitality not as a gift but a calling. “But I think we all have a calling to do it,” she says. For her that means everything from hosting nine Vietnamese refugees for eight months, while pregnant and caring for three young children, as she did in 1979, to taking in her now grown children’s friends for months at a time.

“Extreme hospitality” goes far beyond the dinner table or backyard barbecues with friends, family and neighbours. It means reaching out to the homeless, the sick, the refugee, the people who are on the fringes of society. It shows up in the churches that host the Out of the Cold program for homeless people on winter nights, and the street missions who feed people before they preach to them (or instead of), not the other way around.

Out of 30 Anglican dioceses in Canada, 18 hold sponsorship agreements with the federal government, which allows them to privately sponsor refugees. It means providing for refugees and their families for their first year in Canada, through financial support as well as in practical ways. The most important part of refugee sponsorship is friendship – making the newcomer feel welcome in our country, our community and our homes.

Despite the hard work this entails and the hundreds of volunteer hours, refugee sponsorship is always rewarding. Vocational deacon Peter Schaub, who volunteers through St. Peter's, Collins Bay in the Diocese of Ontario, speaks of the great joy returned through befriending a Karen family. They had originally fled ethnic and political persecution in Burma and spent many years in a refugee camp in Thailand before arriving in Canada. Schaub has become like a father to the young dad, and a grandpa to his ten-year-old daughter. Though the mandatory one-year commitment ends in August, the bond that has developed will last for years.

So many of the world’s cultures seem naturally hospitable; they put North Americans to shame. Immigrants are often more hospitable to us than we are to them. We have so much to learn from them.

Bishop James Tengatenga from southern Malawi made it clear how important hospitality is when he spoke at an Anglican missions conference in England a couple of years ago. “It is a gospel imperative to offer hospitality, and as such there is no choice but to do it,” he said. “It’s an expected characteristic of the Christian community.”

Mission, he explained, is all about hospitality. The “same God who hosts us in this world” wants us to invite others to the “grand banquet” that will be hosted by God. It is both literal and figurative.

And that comes back to the breakfast barbecue on the beach. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter, the one who had denied him.

“Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” Peter replies.

Three times Jesus asks Peter the question; three times Peter insists that he loves Jesus; and three times Jesus says “feed my sheep” or, in some translations, “tend my lambs.” The fish and bread the disciples are eating with Jesus on the beach become a metaphor for something much deeper.

Ultimately, the hospitality we show to our family, our friends and especially to outcasts and strangers, must be that wonderful balance of physical and spiritual nourishment. That’s what Jesus himself calls us to do and it’s an amazing adventure. 

Debra Fieguth, who is a freelance writer in Kingston, Ont., is working on a book about models of Christian hospitality. She also works for the Diocese of Ontario as Social Action Ministries Coordinator.