Gourmet Hotdogs...God's Design for Hospitality?

“There is no such thing!” As I sat listening to the announcements at my church recently about an event our young adults wanted to bless the church community with, I’m thinking, “It’s a non-sequitur – you simply can’t put gourmet and hotdogs in the same sentence!”  I’ll come back to this thought sequence in my concluding comments.

Some members of the school community know that I am the oldest of eight children; for the first 22 years of my life, for all the years I can remember during this period, I only ate meals with less than five people on VERY rare occasions.  I am very, very used to meals with lots of people and LOTS OF ACTION.  

When I was an undergraduate at university, if one of my uni friends rang my home phone during our evening meal, I was often asked, “Where’s the party, man?  How come I didn’t get an invite?”  In reality, all they could hear was the animated table talk of my parents' evening meal table.

As far back as you want to go in the history of God’s people, one of the God-appointed duties of the righteous was hospitality.  Even when Job was protesting against his sickness, one of the virtues that he said he never neglected was hospitality (Job 31:32). 

You do not have to look far in the Bible to see clear instruction to God’s people to be hospitable – the command in Romans 12:13 reminds us hospitality not just be a 'once a year' thing but a constant attitude and practice. Our homes should stand constantly ready for strategic hospitality – a readiness to welcome people who don’t ordinarily live there.

Being hospitable is a command to be a certain kind of person. 

1 Peter 4:9 says, 

“Practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another.” 

That means, be the kind of people who do it and like to do it! Why?  Well, in the verse that follows, it is clear that your hospitality should be an extension of God’s hospitality to you. Be a good steward of God’s grace.

What Does Hospitality Have to Do with God? 

Leviticus 19:1 provides some clear reasoning, that’s for sure.  

“I am the Lord your God who made a home for you and brought you there with all my might and all my soul. Therefore, you shall love the stranger as yourself.” 

We owe our eternal life to grace, and grace is God’s disposition to glorify His freedom and power and wealth by showing hospitality to sinners.

“By grace are you saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God”

                                                                                                                                                Ephesians 2:8 

The ultimate foundation of Christian hospitality is God’s unwavering commitment to glorify the freedom and all-sufficiency of His grace.  We have come home to God. Everybody who trusts in Jesus finds a home in God.

What Happens When We Practice Hospitality? 

A while back, Kris (my wife) and I were recently challenged by the book “Art of Neighboring” by Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak (2012).  Its thesis is simple – and especially appropriate to ask after the pandemic and all its lockdowns – how many of your direct neighbours do you know?  At all?  Deeply?  Can you name them, and what they do with their days?

In response, we are reviving a tradition of open invitations for Saturday evening meals with our neighbours, every third week or so.  We set the dates, and issue updated “old school” paper invitations into each of their letterboxes.  And, if our previous gatherings are anything to go by – our neighbours – all eight households – will come for simple BBQs in summer or soup in winter, deep conversations or sports watching, games or simply to hang out.  

We’re expecting to engage in amazingly deep discussions about God and life.  Why?  Because we’ve seen God answer our prayers for such conversations at other times, with the same people.  There are conversations and activities for all ages – our youngest attender is four, our oldest is in their 70s – we’re doing life together, hopefully imitating the multitude of gatherings we read in the Gospels that Jesus was involved in.

What might it look like in your context to exercise more strategic hospitality?  How do we draw the most people into a deep experience of God’s hospitality by the use of our homes?

In Conclusion,

Hopefully, there’s plenty of food for thought (!) in these musings.  Now … back to the “Gourmet Hotdogs”.  In all honesty, they tasted awful, but the reality is that the quality of the food that day after church was (a distant) second to the action of hospitality extended by our young adults at church to all those who ventured through the door for church that day.  In taking God’s command to be hospitable seriously, they shone light on the nature of God’s grace extended to all mankind – a pretty amazing outcome, given the nature of the frankfurter sausages being consumed!

Shalom.