Hospitality: A Sign of Contradiction

I've just begun to read a new book by Christine Pohl entitled Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition.

I'm reading this book at the start of my first week as the pastoral intern at Redeemer Sugarland.

One of the things that I appreciate and admire about my friend/mentor/pastor Brad Wright is his incurable desire to cultivate community and "make room" for people in his life through the embodiment and enactment of hospitality. I would go as far to say that Brad embraces a hermeneutic of hospitality. Although he hasn't articulated this to me in these exact words, there is a sense in which he would say the best way to "read" the Christian story is (a) as a narrative in which God is opening up his Kingdom to strangers and outcasts to meet with them in communion and (b) that you can't really understand Christianity without practicing hospitality.

That said, I want to follow in Brad's footsteps. As St. Paul once wrote, I want to "seek to show hospitality".

But I don't want to be naive. I know hospitality is a form of death-to-self. It can be joyful but it is not always glamorous.

I'd like to end with this quote that really stuck out to me:

"A community which embodies hospitality to strangers is a sign of contradiction, a place where joy and pain, crises and peace are closely interwoven"

- Jean Vanier