Invisible Barriers and the Hospitality of God

Part 1 of the series “Hospitality & Revival.”

Article Voiceover

A motley crew hailing from different continents and at diverse stages of life sat together in a small room in a monastery-turned-guesthouse on the island of Cyprus. We were all there to attend a program that oriented us to the Middle Eastern region and learn from some of our favorite Bible teachers. About halfway through our twelve-week training, we heard an inspiring talk on “Discerning the Body,” based on 1 Corinthians 12–14, and decided to put the principles into immediate practice. Taking each person in turn, we named the various strengths we saw in the men and women we had lived, worked, studied, and prayed with every day of the last six weeks. When it became my turn to hear the gifts that my classmates saw in me, a man from Côte d’Ivoire immediately suggested “Evangelism.” 

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Evangelism would never have made any “list of gifts” that I guessed for myself. Shy and introverted, I skew heavily towards non-confrontational. As I tried to process this surprising pronouncement of an evangelistic gift, a memory came to mind of my church teaching on the offices of the church of Ephesians 4:11. At this particular meeting, the speakers asked people to go to different parts of the room according to which of the positions listed in Ephesians 4:11 best described them: apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, or teacher.¹I know the understanding surrounding the role of the offices or gifts of Ephesians 4:11 differs widely in the church. In this case, the gifts were very specifically defined but reiterating those definitions here will get us too far off-topic. “Shepherds” and “teachers” had a robust representation, and “prophets” and “apostles” had smaller but respectable numbers. In the dark back corner were the one or two “evangelists,” eccentric and sorely statistically underrepresented. The visual parable was powerful. Very, very few want to be evangelists, much less claim it as a calling.

When I questioned my friend about what led him to conclude that I was evangelistically inclined, he shrugged and said, “You like to feed people.” This is an undeniable truth. I do like to feed people. But in my mind, my compulsion to host people with good food—beyond it being an expression of love, service, or even an artistic outlet—found more of a parallel with my impulse to teach. But to this West African man, conceptually separating hospitality from evangelism was nonsensical. I gratefully received his observation and pondered its implications both personally and culturally. 

Several years later, I was sitting in another guesthouse many hundreds of miles away from that old monastery in Cyprus, this time in the Golan Heights. One of my German friends, a man named Holger, was visiting. Holger runs a program in his Black Forest home called “Das Experiment.” To truly taste what Das Experiment is, you must hear from Holger himself. Still, my woefully inadequate summary is that he has a group of interested skeptics in his house to discuss the Bible during a weekly meal. Sounds simple enough, but he argues that the meal and fellowship are indispensable to his outreach, the foundation for fruitful discussions and open hearts. The church in the West has lost the vital connection between the table and discipleship. 

“People accused Jesus of being a glutton and a drunkard. My takeaway from that condemnation is that He must have been eating and drinking with people all the time,” Holger reasoned. When I shared the hospitality/evangelism connection I had learned years ago in the old monastery from my Ivorian friend, Holger became even more animated than he usually is. “You must write about this! Write about the invisible barriers we have, the false dichotomies when it comes to evangelism, discipleship, and the table in the West!”

That particular encouragement to write about the invisible barriers that blind us to the table-based anchor of evangelism happened a few years ago. Still, the topic has never been far from my mind. Often, the church of the West, or the Global North, or however you would like to divvy up the world, has relegated hospitality to an admirable personality trait—the mother who always has a cookie jar filled or the conversationalist who puts you at ease and makes you feel interesting—a lovely but inessential thing. Certainly, hospitality is not a universal expectation or a core identifier of a Christian person.²Evangelism and hospitality often share this “trivial” status.

But even the most cursory surveys of hospitality in the Bible will leave you with a very different impression. Once you start reading with the theme of hospitality in mind, it is hard not to become inundated with passage after passage where the welcome of the stranger is more than a convention, a code, or even a command. It is a base essential because it is modeled to us repeatedly through God himself. 

From the fourth day of creation, we have a hint that the crafting of matter is not merely an artistic endeavor but has a hospitable purpose. “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’”³Genesis 1:14–15 The English rendering of this phrase, “signs and seasons,” is quite reasonable, even poetic. The sun and moon are indeed our calendar markers for days, months, and years. But in Hebrew, the word translated here as “seasons” is מועדים, moedim. If we were speaking of seasons of the year, such as spring or autumn (or, in the case of Israel, the rainy season), we would expect to see the more common word for units of time: עת, et. Moedim is more specifically used when it comes to the appointed meeting times of God and his people.⁴See the appointed times of the LORD in Leviticus 23. The purpose of these heavenly bodies is not only to be general timekeeping devices but markers of God’s meeting times with these strange little human beings that were about to enter this universe-home of their Creator

Lest I fail in making the whole case of the significance of using moedim in Genesis 1, let us flip our Bibles from Genesis 1 to the penultimate chapter of Revelation. Chapter 21 begins with this glorious declaration of the consummation of salvation history: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”⁵Revelation 21:3 As we read further details of this magnificent future, we see that “…the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.”⁶Revelation 21:23 Of course, there is no need for the heavenly lights because there is a much brighter and better glory in which the redeemed bask. But there is equally no need for the sun and the moon because God is tabernacling amongst his people, and they do not need to set meeting times, for God and his people are never apart. The ultimate purpose of everything, from the tiniest atom to the farthest galaxy, is to pull us to this abundant, joyful, restful communion. 

In this time between the alienation of man from his Heavenly Father and the adoption as sons for which all creation groans, we still enjoy the hospitality of God. When walks together in the garden in eastern Eden were broken by exile, God still clothed our father Adam, and mother Eve.⁷Genesis 3:21 Later, we hear of Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel, newly sprinkled with the blood of the covenant, summiting Sinai. There they beheld the God of Israel and ate and drank with him.⁸Exodus 24:8–11

After the disastrous and adulterous incident of the golden calf, God suggested that the people make their own way to the land promised to them through Abraham’s covenant. But when Moses refused to journey to the promised land without God’s presence, this gentle answer returned: “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”⁹Exodus 33:14 So the Hebrews brought the tabernacle that Moses had pitched—the אהל מועד, ohel moed, the tent of meeting—with them in their wanderings.¹⁰The moedim, meeting times, and the ohel moed, the tent of meeting, use the same word moed in Hebrew.

God still set a table in the wilderness¹¹Exodus 16:4; Numbers 11:1-9; Deuteronomy 8:3, 16; Psalm 78:24-38, 105:40; Nehemiah 9:15 when his impatient people cast aspersions on his hospitality.¹²Numbers 21:5-6; 1 Corinthians 10:9

When entering into the promised land—the land flowing with milk and honey—God’s Law tutored the children of Israel in hospitality. One such example is in the shmita or sabbatical years. Once every seventh year, the LORD forbade the Israelites from cultivating and harvesting crops.¹³Leviticus 25:1-7 These sabbatical years were years of respite for the land, but they were also a reminder of the wilderness journey from Egypt to Israel, where manna was provided without planting or reaping. The unearned provision came out of this Sabbath rest, not only for the tribes of Israel but also for the enslaved people and resident aliens living in the land.¹⁴Leviticus 25:6 Everyone from the least to the greatest ate from the same table—the uncultivated and non-proprietary fields of the land at rest.

Israel’s tithe feasts also exemplify God’s broad and abundant generosity. The land and its produce are his, and the harvest of grain, wine, oil, and the firstborn of the flock tithe he shares in an annual feast with his people. The households of Israel go to the “place God’s name dwells”¹⁵The place where God causes his name to dwell is understood to be the place of God’s presence, i.e. the Tabernacle and then later the Temple. and eat whatever their hearts desire: oxen, sheep, wine, strong drink—a veritable smorgasbord. Every three years, this feast is relocated to individual towns, where the combined abundance is laid up so that “…the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, who are within your towns, shall come and eat and be filled.”¹⁶Deuteronomy 14:29

These yearly tithe feasts were God’s discipleship tool. They demonstrated God’s character. To partake of the meal was to learn the fear of the LORD.¹⁷Deuteronomy 14:23 Every third year, Israelites had the opportunity to practice godliness by imitating God’s generosity closer to home. The food that first belonged to God he entrusted to his people. His people, in turn, gave to those who had nothing, the marginalized of society. These principles of tithe and gleaning, care for the stranger and the widow, and sabbatical and jubilee are deeply embedded into Israel’s psyche and national life. This spiritual formation occurred at the table.

Perhaps it was this deeply rooted hospitality that later prompted consternation in King David. The King of Israel lived in a “house made of cedar,” but the King of the Universe was dwelling in a tent.¹⁸2 Samuel 7:2 Though David was not destined to build the Temple, his concern for the glory of God’s name brought this stunning promise from the LORD, “I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more. And violent men shall afflict them no more… And I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover, the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house.” Glory, safety, rest, and a home. Here we might be able to take up the traditional exclamation of gratitude from Passover—Dayenu! It would have been enough.¹⁹“Dayenu” is traditionally sung during the Passover seder. You can learn more about this ancient worship song here.  Already God’s generosity has exceeded even David’s wildest expectations. But the Lord is not finished. “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, but my steadfast love will not depart from him… And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.”²⁰2 Samuel 7:9-16

Through this generous impulse to build God’s house, David, the man after God’s own heart, has his household established for eternity. God built him a house and founded a covenant with David’s dynasty. 

Human hospitality, so delightful to the LORD, seems inextricably bound up in covenant and resurrection. The Patriarchs and the Prophets tell story after story to illustrate this pattern, a glorious motif ultimately culminating in the Son of David presiding over an unshakable kingdom. If hospitality finds itself at the center of salvation’s story, maybe, just maybe, it is time for a re-valuation of hospitality in the contemporary church, a breaking down of the invisible barriers.

This post is part of a series on “Hospitality & Revival.” In the next installment of this series, we will trace hospitality’s connection to life from the dead in the lives of the patriarchs and prophets.

Recommended Resources:

Articles

A Call to the Table by Holger Reinhardt

Books

Saved by Faith and Hospitality by Joshua W. Jipp

The Gospel Comes with a House Key Rosaria Butterfield

Formative Feasting: Practices and Virtue Ethics in Deuteronomy’s Tithe Meal and the Corinthian Lord’s Supper by Michael J. Rhodes

Footnotes

• 1
  I know the understanding surrounding the role of the offices or gifts of Ephesians 4:11 differs widely in the church. In this case, the gifts were very specifically defined but reiterating those definitions here will get us too far off-topic.
• 2
  Evangelism and hospitality often share this “trivial” status.
• 3
  Genesis 1:14–15
• 4
  See the appointed times of the LORD in Leviticus 23.
• 5
  Revelation 21:3
• 6
  Revelation 21:23
• 7
  Genesis 3:21
• 8
  Exodus 24:8–11
• 9
  Exodus 33:14
• 10
  The moedim, meeting times, and the ohel moed, the tent of meeting, use the same word moed in Hebrew.
• 11
  Exodus 16:4; Numbers 11:1-9; Deuteronomy 8:3, 16; Psalm 78:24-38, 105:40; Nehemiah 9:15
• 12
  Numbers 21:5-6; 1 Corinthians 10:9
• 13
  Leviticus 25:1-7
• 14
  Leviticus 25:6
• 15
  The place where God causes his name to dwell is understood to be the place of God’s presence, i.e. the Tabernacle and then later the Temple.
• 16
  Deuteronomy 14:29
• 17
  Deuteronomy 14:23
• 18
  2 Samuel 7:2
• 19
  “Dayenu” is traditionally sung during the Passover seder. You can learn more about this ancient worship song here. 
• 20
  2 Samuel 7:9-16