Sermon: Hospitality

Tonight quite simply I want to charge those of you who are to be admitted as APAs to be people of hospitality.

Hospitality is I fear more than a little misunderstood. It has come to mean large firms giving free champagne and strawberries to business clients at Wimbledon

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Hospitality has come to mean for some people – a bit like Hyacinth Bucket - inviting their best friends – the ones they like and trust most or want to impress, into their homes

But when I charge you to be people of hospitality this is not an instruction to go out and buy new coffee mugs or stack up your supplies of fair-trade coffee. It is something very different indeed.

The call to be a person of hospitality is a call to open your heart to the stranger. It is about receiving each person as if you are receiving Christ

It goes back to the famous passage in Matthew where Jesus says “in so much as you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters you did it to me” And of course it is echoed in the rule of St Benedict who says: All guests who arrive should be received as if they were Christ, for He himself is going to say: ‘I came as a stranger, and you received Me’; and let due honour be shown to all, …..

It is interesting is it not that normally we fail to follow Jesus by what we do – we get angry, we steal, we get our sexual relationships wrong, we say unkind things but in hospitality the problem is normally what we do not do.

Most of us make choices – far more choices than we realise – about who will and will not be included in our lives. We make choices about those to whom we will and will not open our hearts. The challenge of Christian hospitality is not about making cups of tea but about conversion.

I am struck by some of those stories which come out of the Holocaust. Where people of good will offered shelter to Jewish families fleeing from persecution. Often they gave them a room or in some cases constructed rooms deep inside their own homes to provide shelter. They carved out space for those who needed it and for me that is a lovely image of what hospitality is about – it is about carving out a space in our hearts for those we meet and especially for the stranger.

Undoubtedly what often stops us being hospitable is fear.

I come back time and time again to that passage in his Epistle where St John says that perfect love casts out fear.

And yet what is remarkable is that when we open our hearts to the stranger we discover how little there is to fear.

When we open our hearts to the immigrant or asylum seeker we discover somebody just like us.  Somebody with the same anxieties, the same family concerns, the same joys, the same sorrows.

When we open our hearts and get alongside the rather unusually dressed young person, we discover somebody who is perhaps not really very dissimilar from how we were at that age, even if we were dressed slightly differently.

When we open our hearts to somebody who thinks differently from us, somebody who is gay or anti-gay, somebody who is for the leadership of Women in Church, or somebody who is against it, when we open our hearts to those people we discover again that they are people just like us with the same fears, the same anxieties, the same longing to be understood.

Our Church desperately needs people in institutions that are truly hospitable.

Last week I was lucky enough to find myself spending time in 3 different primary schools.  All of them were in areas where life is really quite difficult for children and their parents, and here in these schools I saw how these children and their parents were being offered hospitality.  They were being welcomed and accepted and cared for in a way which perhaps they had not experienced anywhere else at all.

When people receive hospitality they know that they are not alone. That is the work of God that people should not be alone. That is why Jesus says to his disciples “I will not leave you orphaned

“I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Because I live you also will live”

And is that not what a large part of pastoral ministry is about – helping people to live – to be alive in the glory that God has for them

And that means that your pastoral ministry needs to be intentionally about bringing life; bringing life to others by opening your hearts to them. It is about becoming ever more aware of what stops us opening our hearts to the stranger. And perhaps part of the role of those who are APAs is to help us all open our hearts more.

At the end of the day this is probably less about what we do and more about the sort of people we are meant to be becoming

We become hospitable by practicing it. As we practise being hospitable we may eventually discover, by the grace of God that it becomes second nature.

Hospitality is not about your best tea cups but about, for all of us, a conversion of the heart.