This is an edited form of my sermon notes from a talk I gave in our church’s young adult ministry on a theology of hospitality.
Our Hospitable God
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
The Bible begins with an act of hospitality. If we define hospitality as "making room", then this act and the following acts of creation, are the most hospitable acts to every occur. Because before this act, nothing apart from God himself as Father, Son, and Spirit existed. There truly was nothing apart from God himself. And so this making of all things in heaven and on earth, is the grand Making Room. It is literal making of room for others.
God's original act of hospitality is not him taking things that already exist and doing something with them that is hospitable for others. That's how we practice hospitality. We take things that already exist whether food, or time, or resources and do something with them that makes room for others. Our hospitality is never truly original.
But God's is. God literally creates the room he is making for others and he creates the others he is making the room for. God's hospitality is him thinking up and speaking into existence all that he will use to be hospitable with and even the very ones to whom he will be hospitable. God's hospitality, his making room for others, is the very bringing into existence (which its own kind of making room) the materials he will make room with and the very ones he will make room for. This is the most pure act of hospitality that all others are only faint images of. The whole act is shot through with hospitality.
And so the first thing to say about a theology of hospitality is that our God is the God who is Hospitable. The Great Maker of Room. His act of creation and every subsequent act towards that creation is hospitable action.
But it is not as though God has one great act of hospitality in creating everything and then let's things run how they will. For apart from God's sustaining of the creation and humanity he has made, it would cease to exist. God is constantly sustaining all of creation, keeping it from imploding and destroying itself. So this moment right here right now, our very existence, is an act of making room for us by God, it is God showing us hospitality. Every nanosecond moment since God spoke creation into existence has been one long act of hospitality, it has been a continuous act of making room for this creation he brought into existence.
So in a sense, God's original act of hospitality has yet to come to a close, for if he were to withdraw in any way from it for even the slightest of possible moments it would cease to exist apart from his sustaining of it. And so, God is continually hospitable by sustaining creation constantly. He has never ceased to make room for us.
But it is not only in creating and sustaining that creation that God shows himself to be hospitable.
If we define hospitality most simply as "making room for another,", then any and all acts of God toward his creation, is an act of hospitality. Any time God relates to, communicates to, does anything to or with humanity it is an act of hospitality. It is a making room for this humanity in his own life and action. So, God's hospitality is not just in his creating and sustaining of creation, it is every interaction he has with and every action he has towards it as well.
This is why we can't go to all the scripture about God's hospitality. Because if we did then we wold have to go to every action of God recorded in Scripture because every action of God in human history is a hospitable action, it is a making of room of some kind. It is a generous interaction with those who are infinitely less than; it is a kind of exchange between the Great Host of the universe and the strangers he has welcomed in to dwell within it. Unless we surveyed every verse that deals with God acting we wouldn't get to the full testimony of his hospitality in Scripture.
But some highlights are worth noting:
-He provides clothes for the shame of his guests who have utterly brought to shambles the room he had made for them
-He saves the life of humanity rather than destroying it completely in the flood
-He creates a people for himself so that all the tribes of the world would be blessed
-He redeems this people out of 400 years of slavery making a path through a sea
-He gives his people the Law which guides them into life and reveals to them their need for him
-He gifts them a land of milk and honey and defeats the people's who would get in their way from obtaining it
-He presents them a king which they ask for and sustains them through the folly of these kings
-He preserves a remnant of his people so that they are not totally destroyed by exile in other empires.
And he does all this though his people perpetually sin against him and go after other gods. Though his bride, Israel continues to cheat on him time and time and time again, he does not destroy them. He loves them and remains their God and they his people. He is utterly faithful to them though they are not to him.
This, the slimmest of snapshots of God's action in Scripture, is what we mean we say that our God is the Hospitable God hospitality. He is the one who makes room and continually makes it in all he does.
In his original act of creation he makes room by bringing into existence anything at all; he continually makes room towards that creation by sustaining it; and then he graciously interacts with this creation as we see through the entirety of the Bible and not to mention outside of it as well as God's actions are far too numerous to be contained there.
But there is one place where we see just what it entails, just what it truly means for God to be hospitable. God's hospitality could have been to create and sustain and interact with creation. That would be hospitable. But God is far and away more hospitable than we could ever imagine.
The Cross as God's Most Ultimate Display of Hospitality
If you know the biblical story, then you know that God's great demonstration of hospitality was rejected by humanity and has continued to be ever since. Adam and Eve, having received an over abundance out of God's hospitality–food, a place to live, companionship, not to mention life itself–Adam and Eve, having received all of this turn their backs on God in an attempt to become the heads of the household themselves. Having been brought into existence to begin with, and then invited into communion with the God of the universe, they (and we), usurp God's generous rule and take his throne as our own.
Think about what is going on in that. Imagine you invite someone into your home that you have cleaned and put in order for them, you feed them, you lavish the best things you have on them, you demonstrate the most perfect level of hospitality to them. And then they turn on you. Not after they leave but while they are in your house. They claim that what is yours is their own, they steal your family, your belongings and declare themselves to be the owners of the house and the head of the household. That sounds ridiculous, it's hard to even imagine. But imagine that it did. The very people you had made room for have not only rejected your kindness but have kicked you out of your own home and declared themselves kings and queens of your castle. They take everything that is yours and treat you as dead to them.
Can you even fathom the depth of betrayal you would feel? The anger, the rage that would rightfully well up in you? The vengeance you would want to take on them for doing such a thing?
This is what happens in the Garden. This is exactly what Adam and Eve do. Having received all of creation and existence itself, they turn on God and claim it all as their own. They declare themselves to be gods and commit the highest treason. And not only them. But every human to follow them. Thousands of years of outright rebellion in the very house that was built for us by God. Using the very being we have been gifted with by him to revolt against him and rule ourselves. That is how we have all responded to the hospitality of God. Not with thanks, but with treason. Not with humble gratitude but with haughty pride. Not with meek reception but with malice and rebellion.
And God, because he is the Just and Good God and therefore will not let sin be swept under a rug, has right wrath towards this rebellion. It angers him. His holiness is provoked and he will doll out the just punishment for this, the greatest act of ungratefulness ever committed.
But even in his wrath God is hospitable. Even in his anger, God makes him. Even in his punishment, God invites in.
For God will not have the perpetrators drink his Just wrath, for that would destroy them, and a good host does not destroy his guests. Instead, for those who will let him, God himself drinks bone dry the cup of his own terrible and yet totally just wrath.
To the very ones who have rejected his initial and unfathomable generosity, God once again opens his arms wide in hospitality. His hands as far apart as the East is from the West. His arms as outstretched as a Roman cross.
It is hard to wrap our minds around the first act of hospitality, the bringing into being those and that which once were not only to have us spit in his face. It stretches our minds further to imagine the grace of God to continue to display to these rebels innumerable acts of hospitality by interacting with them and sustaining the world in which they live and have falsely claimed ownership of.
But it is here, at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ where we fall silent in sight of the hospitality displayed. God takes on a human form–fragile and frail flesh, he touches lepers and heals the sick and casts out demons and spends most of his time with the lowest of the social cast of his day, he keeps his own Law perfectly never once succumbing to the snares and temptations of the enemy, he is reviled and cursed by his very people, he is falsely accused and humiliated and does not defend himself, he is abandoned by all but a few of his friends and family, he is whipped and tortured and has a crown of thorns shoved into his scalp, he climbs up onto a cross where splinters tear into the fresh wounds on his back and nails are driven into his hands and feet, he gasps for air and finds none, he takes the burden of every sin of every one of those who would believe in him onto his shoulders the gruesomeness of which makes the physical suffering seem light, and he dies–killed by the very ones he brought into existence. And as if this was not enough, he defeats death and vindicates himself and all that he promised to do by rising again.
All of this to make room for us. That we might be brought into his family. That we might have a seat at his table for eternity.
From bringing all that is into existence, to sustaining creation despite its rebellion against him, to his earthly life and death and resurrection, our God is a hospitable God. He makes room. That is simply who he is and all that he does even when that hospitality requires his death.
All of this, is what we mean when we say that our God is the Hospitable God.
We, the Hospitable God's Hospitable Bride
Our hospitality has one source, one motivation, one foundation and that is the hospitality of our God.
We don't just decide to be hospitable because it sounds like a nice thing to do. We are hospitable because God has been hospitable to us. We are the Hospitable God's hospitable Bride, receiving everything from him and turning to give it freely to the world. We are the children of the Hospitable God who want to be just like our dad when we grow up.
Our hospitality is not original, it does not originate with us. Our hospitality flows forth from us because we tributary's of the river of Divine Hospitality. His hospitality flows through us to the world. We are his body by which he continues to lavish the world with his hospitable heart.
We pursue lives of hospitality because we are the recipients of the Divine Life of Hospitality.
We make room in our lives for others because God in Jesus Christ has made room for us through his life and death and resurrection.
When we get a glimpse of this reality, that is what will produce hospitality in us. We ought to be hospitable whether we feel like it or not. But what we should want is for hospitality to become second nature for us, for it to just flow out of us, for it to just be the way we naturally operate. And this will occur not by trying harder, but by staring longer and harder at the great hospitality God has demonstrated to us in creating and sustaining us, but most ultimately in his giving of himself to make room for us in his family through His own hospitable self-sacrifice.
–zh