The Heart of Hospitality (Hospitality VII)

How then do we move into Jesus’ Ministry of Reality, taking the same posture as our Savior in the world? 

We simply seek to honor humanity as Jesus does. In short, Jesus’ formula for hospitality becomes ours:

·     We ask questions and listen to the stories of those whom God gives us to love.

·     We tell the story of God in all the ways we know how.

·     We share meals.

We ask questions so that he can hear people’s stories and enter into their lament with them. We seek to put words to all the ways we experience God and His goodness at work around us. We share meals in which stories are told and questions are asked. This movement back and forth—of listening and sharing, giving and receiving—is the heart of hospitality. 

Jesus’ way of being with people on the Emmaus Road (and in so many other places) can become our model. It is a picture of how to be with others in their humanity. When we honor people like this, we help to re-humanize them. And in seeking to live into Jesus’ posture, we grow to understand God’s own posture of love and compassion towards us. 

This is urgent work. The world grows increasingly disconnected and increasingly lonely.[1] Technology, for all of its benefit, exacerbates our ability to isolate ourselves and to indulge fantasy, fleeing from reality. The world needs neighbors postured as Jesus and empowered by His Spirit. Jesus was prepared to be a neighbor to those that God gave him to love, whether he lived next to them or encountered them on some forgotten village road. He is our model and our teacher. We must joyfully embrace the reality that we can, in his name, make manifest the reign of God as he did. 

Let’s start with asking questions. 

When was the last time someone asked you questions and really listened? Can you remember? What did it feel like? 

This is what Jesus so often did for others.

So what might questions might you ask those that Jesus gives you to love, in order to honor them?

When was the last time you sought to hear someone’s story—your family and friends, your spiritual family, your neighbors and people of peace? When was the last time you asked a neighbor more about their life? People love to be loved, and we love by asking questions. Here’s an exercise, then: Think of three people you love, and think of one or two questions for each that would honor their humanity by creating space for their story to be told. “Hey Bob, we’ve lived by each other for five years, but I realize I don’t know much about where you come from… Where did you grow up? I would love to hear a little bit about your life.” 

Take a moment to write down the name of each person and the questions you want to ask them. Then pray for opportunities to love them by honoring them with questions, and by listening generously to their stories. 

Hospitality transcends having someone over and involves listening and a posture of curiosity. We can invite people into our homes, but that doesn’t mean we’ve practiced hospitality. It’s not about the act alone, but the posture. Asking questions will lead to more conversation, more dinners, and more opportunities for the Reign of God to be made manifest as we love others.

Of course, we need to be good at small talk, too. We can’t always “turn it up to eleven” with everybody we meet, and that’s not always appropriate. But at the same time, we need to be intentional in training ourselves into Jesus’ way of being with people. Love, after all, is the end-point of discipleship. And the joy of discipleship is getting to be for others in the same way that Jesus is with us. Whenever we get to be forothers, we should give thanks to God because, in the words of one of my favorite musicals, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”[2]

Indeed, Jesus’ picture of discipleship—for all of its trials and all of the “losing of our life”—is also incredibly joyful. It’s full of parties. It’s full of eating meals together, as we see all over the Gospels and especially in the Gospel of Luke. Our challenge is to live into this posture. To learn to be for others. Through us, our neighbors—in our literal neighborhood or wherever they cross our path—may get the sense that God is nearer than they’d hoped and better than they have imagined. Through us, the Reign of God can be made manifest. Through us, Jesus can extend his Ministry of Reality, re-humanizing those he so desperately loves. 

So be it, in and through us all.

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1]See, for example, “Researches Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness” by Kate Hafner. The New York Times, September 5, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/health/lonliness-aging-health-effects.html [May 11th, 2017] 

[2]“Finale” from Les Miserables: Original Broadway Cast Recording.Musical, by Cameron Mackintosh. Uni/Geffen. 1987. 

The Ministry of Reality (Hospitality VI)

Jesus’ ministry had a sharp edge to it—and still does. It is the Ministry of Reality. Jesus cannot heal in theory, he can only heal in realty. Thus, Jesus can only heal when people confront reality, which means confronting all the ways in which they’ve buried their humanity. This is painful, which is why following Jesus is painful. It’s why C.S. Lewis calls Jesus “not safe, but good.”[1]Jesus is not safe to the part of us that wants to avoid reality for the sake of avoiding pain.

For this reason, Jesus is not shy about making people address their hearts. If you don’t understand the Ministry of Reality and the fact that healing only happens in reality, you might just conclude that Jesus is a jerk. He says some hard, even harsh, things. But if you understand his ministry and his aim, you’ll understand the urgency with which he calls people to reality, and thecompassionthat undergirds it all. I don’t whisper when I tell my child not to touch a hot stove, and Jesus doesn’t hold back when calling people into reality. Jesus always stands before people and calls them out of whatever has dehumanized them, separating their true desire for God with all the false ways they have gone about satisfying that desire to their own detriment and to the burying of their heart and their humanity. 

When a rich young man came to Jesus asking about eternal life, but was unwilling to let go of his possessions, Jesus looked on him “with compassion” before telling him to go and sell his goods.[2]Jesus makes people address their hearts.This is the only way he can bring them into reality, where they can be saved.Sometimes only hard words can bring someone into reality, where they can be touched and healed. Similarly, when Jesus converses with the Samaritan woman, he is not shy to point out that she has been in a string of immoral relationships, even if this is embarrassing for her.[3]Jesus always points out the things we cling to—money, sex, power, religion—that actually dehumanize us, so that he can reconnect us with our humanity’s deepest longings, which we have often abandoned. Jesus must lead us into the reality of these deeper longings, and crossing through the regret of all our bad choices is painful; nevertheless, across that bridge is the only way back to our own selves. Jesus is like a doctor setting a bone: it’s painful, but it’s the only way you’re going to walk again. 

Jesus goes about re-humanizing those he encounters in myriad ways. With Zacchaeus, he invites himself over. On the Emmaus road, he creates a container for telling the story of God by asking questions and drawing out the story of the disciples, then he completes it by having a meal with them. Jesus must first draw out the humanity of his listeners so that they can hear the divine story. Once someone is standing back in their humanity, they can hear the story of God. By the same token, people can generally not hear the divine story unless their humanity is being addressed. Thus, Jesus first creates a container. If he just gives his Bible lesson on the Emmaus road without first connecting with the humanity of his hearers, they will be much less likely to hear. It will just be theoretical—theology without grounding, big ideas disconnected from the hearts of the hearers. God knows we humans love big ideas that we can bat around without ever having to confront our true selves. On the other hand, once you’re in somebody’s story and once they are connected to their own heart, God can visit there. If we are open to it, God will always visit the unburying of our humanity. Jesus knows this, and so he asks questions. He doesn’t just enter into the disciples’ home, he enters into their story.

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1]Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Puffin Books, New York, NY. 1959. Page 75. 

[2]Mark 10:17-27.

[3]John 4:1-28.

Jesus Re-Humanizes II (Hospitality V)

Forgive the vernacular, but Jesus sees past all the crap you have done and the crap that has been done to you. He sees into the core of your humanity, where you are deeply loved by God. He sees past the drinking of my neighbor and into the core of her humanity, into the shining heart that is still somewhere within her, even if she is now unaware of it. God cannot help but see this core part of you—your true self—as beautiful, nor can the God of love help but love you. He sees past all the false selves that, in your pursuit of comfort and power outside of God, have become disconnected from this true self, leaving you with the sense you are fractured, damaged, incomplete. This is what is so breathtakingly beautiful about Jesus. “A smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”[1]Jesus sees all of our conflicted, unsorted self, and responds with compassion. Jesus always honors our humanity, our original longing for God, even if it has been misspent in the pursuit of pleasure. He invites the moralists to stop pretending that she’s fine without God.[2]He confronts the sin while embracing the longing beneath it, redirecting us away from sin and back to God. 

This changes the way I am withmy neighbor. It doesn’t mean I approve of her drinking, but that’s far from the point. The point is to be with her in a way that helps re-humanize her, that honors her, and that calls out the image of God within her. 

My friend and fellow pastor Jaci Anderson taught me a wonderful frame for helping people see how they are made in God’s image. When she sees certain traits in a friend or neighbor, she says, “I think you and God have that in common.” For example, she might say to a friend who delights in good food or good art, “I think you and God share this love of beauty.” What a wonderful way to point someone not only to the divine fingerprint within them but also to God Himself! It’s a way to both affirm someone while speaking truth about God. Disciples are those who help re-claim the humanity—born in the image of God—of those Jesus gives them to love while telling the story of God in the process.

All of this may be a different way of thinking about our humanity. After all, perhaps we dislike our humanity. We might hold it in contempt. We may have been trained to think of it as bad or depraved. Perhaps we think we just need to whip it until it gets in line. But Jesus makes it clear that our humanity, with all of its weakness, is where and how we connect with God. Before there was any notion of original sin, there was original blessing: God saw that our humanity was good, rooted as it is in the Imago Dei. Even if we are fallen, that original blessing remains.[3]Theologians often beat and berate our humanity, or they curse our bodies as corrupt; meanwhile, Jesus is busy trying to liberate both. 

When Christianity is seen as false or hollow, it’s because Christians are not willing to deal with our humanity in the same way that Jesus did. Jesus wades fearlessly into humanity, confronting all of its pain and messiness directly. Most of his religious contemporaries, on the other hand, just wanted people to put a nice face on and act religious so that they could avoid their humanity and the messiness of their deepest longings. That approach felt sincere to them, yet it's exactlywhat Jesus called them out for. They focused on cleaning “the outside of the cup,” while in their hearts they were full of untouched “greed and self-indulgence,” the telltale signs of a humanity numbed out instead of brought into life in God.[4]Dallas Willard says the same thing about the Church today: “Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally… The current gospel then becomes a ‘gospel of sin management.’  Transformation of life and character is no part of the redemptive message.”[5]

Unless we in the Church are willing to deal with our humanity, and not just the trappings, we cannot deal in transformation in Jesus’ name. The result—what Willard calls “sin management”—is an anemic shrinking-down of the Gospel in which Christians are only focused on going to heaven when they die and being good, religious people rather than people who are actually transformed from the inside out. Again, this is messy! It’s only through the vulnerable unmasking of our humanity that Jesus can bothliberate usand liberate others through us. It’s painful, but it’s at the heart of Jesus’ ministry.

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1]Isaiah 42:3.

[2]E.g., John 4, “The Woman at the Well.”

[3]Genesis 1:27-31.

[4]Matthew 23:25.

[5]Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. HarperCollins, New York, NY. 1998. See Chapter 2, in general; this quote, page 41.