Talking Wall

The following transcript is a meditation I gave at our church’s Christmas Tea on the second half of Romans 15:7 “Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Some people have asked me for a copy, so I thought I’d dust off the old blog to post it somewhere accessible. I hope you are encouraged!

There is a Greek myth about an elderly couple who once entertained the gods unaware. The story goes that in a small valley in Phrygia the people were not honoring the sacred laws of hospitality. Rumors reached the ears of the gods and so Zeus and Hermes disguised themselves as two poor beggars and went down to test the little village. They arrived in a clap of thunder and trudged through the streets begging for shelter and basic needs in the driving rain. House after house they were denied, until they came to the rustic little cottage of Baucis and Philemon. 

This elderly couple were the poorest in the valley, but they received the guests with everything they had. Baucis stoked the fire and rubbed mint leaves on the furniture to make the damp cottage smell as best it could. Philemon pulled a table and stools together and brought warm water to wash the guests’ muddy feet. They baked with their last bit of flour and served the only meat they had left to live on, all while making merry conversation to pass the time.  Finally, they poured out the last of their best wine.  

To the poor couple’s dismay, one of the guests picked up the empty jug to refill his cup, but instead of finding it empty, the wine continued to pour. At this point they realized they were not hosting mere mortals. The gods revealed themselves and were so pleased with their welcome that they granted them one wish. The couple only asked that when the time came for one of them to die, they could go together to avoid the pain of being separated. Their wish was granted, and they were hurried out of town while the little valley was destroyed by a flood for their wicked rejection of strangers. Their little cottage became a temple and when Baucis and Philemon died, they were turned into two intertwining trees to watch over it forever. 

This myth is a little hint of how the ancients thought about hospitality.  Greco-Roman ethics took very seriously the guest-host relationship. The laws of Xenia (or hospitality)  required men to feed, clothe, and shelter a stranger before even knowing his name. And the guest, of course, was never to betray that generosity. Our modern hospitality is often thinner than this, not altogether different, but we tend to think more of entertaining friends or acquaintances in our homes. We have the hotel and restaurant industry to manage strangers, hospitals for the sick, and programs for the needy. But when the scriptures speak of showing hospitality, we should think more of the ancient idea of xenia. Hospitality is costly. 

While we often spend time considering our practice of hospitality, I don’t think we will get much past mere entertaining, until we understand, first and foremost, that we are the needy guests and God is our ultimate host. We love, because he first loved us. We welcome others because he welcomed us. 

The whole Bible is bookended with God’s hospitality toward us. In creation, He prepared a home with all the comforts and food that man needed to thrive and then welcomed him into being and set him in the garden. But we promptly betrayed our host and were deservedly kicked out. And yet the Bible ends in a beautiful city, in a permanent home, prepared for us by the Lord himself, again. 

How can we get to this new city? We are all still born in Adam, we are all still traitorous guests in God’s world. We may like the idea of a safe and beautiful city to dwell in forever, but not if it means we must accept a Lord over our autonomous selves. It has been shown over and over, in the human heart, that as long as we have other options to entertain, we will not throw ourselves on the mercy and lordship of Christ. 

So the Lord starts his welcome to his people even while we are a long way off. He is the kind of doctor who must first press on his patients their dire need for a hospital. He loves us enough to show us our need.  In 2 Kings 7 we meet 4 lepers sitting in the Samarian gate on the brink of starvation because of a Syrian siege. They conclude they will die if they go into the city, they will die if they stay where they are, but if they go to the Syrian camp, there is a slight chance they’ll find something to eat, so driven by the logic of desperation, they head toward the enemy camp. (Our Lord is so patient to let us come like that. We move suspiciously toward him as an enemy, but he is removing all our illusions and false hopes until we have no other choice but to risk life with Him.)  It turns out for the lepers that the Lord had made the Syrians hear the sound of a great army that wasn’t actually there! They concluded they were under attack, and abandoned the camp, leaving behind everything- food, weapons, clothes, money. The lepers had wished for a meager possibility, but the Lord of Hosts had routed the enemy, and the Lord the Host had prepared a table for them.  

This is the kind of Host he is. He does all the giving, we do all the receiving. He does all the preparing, we do all the consuming. He does the cleaning, we are baptized. He prepares the meal, we eat at the communion table. 

He wants his people to be little hosts after him, to follow the example of hospitality that Christ has shown to us. During the Christmas season we will likely have extra opportunities to practice welcoming others, and they won’t all be easy people. They will be sugared up kids, awkward in-laws, bossy siblings, lonely church members, stressed out strangers, people who need patience and kindness. If we remember how Christ has welcomed us first, as the neediest of all, we will find infinite stores to give from. So, for the next few minutes I want us to slow down and soak in the hospitality of God. It’s everywhere in the Scriptures, but tonight, let’s just look at a few examples of how we come needy and Christ himself cares for our needs.

We come naked, he clothes us in robes of righteousness.

Nakedness, in the Bible, is synonymous with shame, and it is a vulnerable and powerless position. 

• One of the immediate consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3, was to know their nakedness. They were exposed. They tried to make themselves clothes from plants, but that could not cover the shame of death. Blood had to be shed, so God gave them animal skins.
• In Ezekiel 16, Israel is described as a vulnerable, naked infant cast off with no one to care for it. But God himself cares for her and clothes her. He commands her to live, and as she grows he clothes and adorns her as a bride. 
• In Luke 8, the man from the country of the Gerasenes is under the power of a legion of demons. He is wild and naked living among the tombs. After Jesus heals him, he is found self-controlled and fully clothed. 

Jesus welcomes the naked by covering our shameful bodies of death with his righteous blood. Isaiah 61:10 points to the coming salvation of being finally clothed.

 “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.”

We come scared, he is our refuge. 

There are hundreds of commands to “fear not” in the Bible. I think we can safely assume from the sheer number that we are prone to fear. And apart from Christ, why wouldn’t we be?  A traitor exposed before his king would be a madman in any other attitude. Most people in the Bible fall apart in the presence of even one of his messengers. Remember before the Christmas shepherds searched out baby Jesus, they were at first filled with great fear. But the angel answered: 

“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.  Luke 2:10-11

People who need a savior, are in trouble and afraid. The wrath of God is a gathering storm to pour down on us for our sin, but Jesus came to be our shelter. 

Psalm 91: He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.

And he goes so far as to invite us not just as guests into his protection, but as brothers. He calls God our Father, listen to Luke 12 

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 

We belong to him. 

Isaiah 43: But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

We come dirty, he cleans us from the stain of our sin.  

The OT law talks a lot about things that are unclean- diseases, blood, dead bodies. But Jesus is constantly drawing near to unclean people. The bible records many healings of lepers, I think in some way because it is so spiritually significant that he would touch and cleanse such unclean people. In Mark 5, he heals the woman with the flow of blood when she touches his garment while he is on his way to take the hand of a dead little girl to bring her to life. His clean swallows our unclean. 

My kids will tell you that I get pretty excited when I start thinking about vultures. I’m very thankful for this underappreciated bird. They literally eat death for us, saving us from being overrun by feral dogs, rats, and flies, and they digest all kinds of pathogens and disease from anthrax to rabies that would spread rapidly without their clean-up skills. They are a Christ-like creature in this way, and a humble creature. No one wants to pet a vulture.  (or probably thought they would come up at Christmas tea;) . 

In a much bigger way, Jesus was despised and rejected by men, but he despised the shame of the cross to swallow up what is filthy in our humanity and save us from death.  

We come hungry, he gives us a feast.

The story of the prodigal son may be one of the most potent pictures of God’s welcome home party.  If you remember from Luke 15, the younger son of a rich and generous man demands his inheritance early, leaves his Father’s house, and squanders it all in wreckless living. After a while a famine hits and he finds himself at rock bottom. He’s starving and longing for pig food. He is out of options, but considers that his Father might allow him back as a servant. Hungry, dirty, ashamed, and I’d guess a little fearful,  he makes the trip back to his Father’s house, the story continues in Luke 20: 

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. [remember he just came from working with pigs, an unclean animal]  And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’  But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet [he clothes him!]. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate. 

Like the lepers in 2 Kings, he started out with a meager chance in mind and was welcomed to a celebration and a feast. Now this made the older brother mad. He felt he had earned his place and resented the hospitality and welcome his Father showed his ruined brother. 

But he had never been without his Father’s hospitality and forgot what privilege he enjoyed every single day. He did not know his own need and dependence and so could not welcome his brother as his Father had welcomed him.  

We could go on and on:

We come hopeless, he frees us from futility.

We come suspicious, he makes us his friend.

We come homeless, he goes to prepare a place for us. 

We come lonely, he adopts us into his own family. 

We come weary, he gives us rest.  

And all this is free for us. We give nothing for it. In Psalm 81, Israel will not follow God, he implores them, “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it!”  Opening your mouth wide to be fed is actually a vulnerable feeling. Try it. It feels a bit undignified, too dependent for our liking to sit there gaping. But Christ condescends to feed us like babies. It takes faith that he will fill it with good fruit- love, joy, peace, etc… But it is a faith based on reality and the real events of history. It’s a fact. He has given us his Son, how will he not also graciously give us all things? 

Of course the story of Baucis and Philemon we started with is not a true story, but Man cannot escape the reality of the world God made. The myth reveals what human hearts have tucked away in often twisted forms- the guilty feeling that we have betrayed our host, that a higher authority than us must render right judgment on the earth, the notion that the humble should be lifted up and the proud be brought low, the idea that suffering and death could be mitigated for the righteous, that somehow we would be welcomed to a lasting home. 

The true story is that God did come as a man (actually, not in disguise), poor and needy. He came as a vulnerable baby who had to open wide for his mom to feed him.  He was denied xenia over and over again. His first bed was an animal’s food bowl. That’s not farmhouse chic, that’s gross. His life would be in danger early on, he would live in relative obscurity for most of it, and it would end with betrayal, suffering, and death. No welcoming little cottage at the end of the line. Why would the God of the universe, who deserves only worship, do such a thing? 

To be the one to welcome us to his home, because he loves us. The Father sent his Son as a man to prepare a perfect righteousness and take our deserved death. The Spirit raised him from the dead, and now dwells in us to give life to our mortal bodies to enjoy our everlasting home as adopted daughters in our Father’s house forever.  This Christmas as you welcome others (even difficult, needy ones) at parties and church and in your homes, remember first, our Triune God has made all the preparations, and he welcomes you.