Being a
Southerner I grew up rather insular in my ideas of hospitality. When somebody mentioned hospitality, I rather
thought that "we" Southerners were the inventors of it in much the
same way as the Scots were the inventors of the modern world. Since growing up and having seen a bit of the
world, I've come to see that hospitality exists everywhere and every culture
has its own way of showing it. Living
here just north of Brampton
where immigration from India
has been so thick it might do us some good to know something about the way they
show hospitality.
In the
South our ideas about hospitality are rooted in the biblical idea of not
turning away strangers for you might be entertaining angels unawares (Heb.
13:2). For Hindu people hospitality also
has religious roots. They're main
teaching about it is what they call Athithi
devo bhava which means "the guest is God". Treat your guests as if they were God,
worshipfully. Showing hospitality to a
guest for them has five formalities to it that are derived from the way they
worship. First, there is fragrance. While receiving guests the rooms must have a
pleasant smell because odour is the first thing a person will notice and it
sets the stage for the visit. A pleasant
fragrance will put a guest in good humour.
Down South fresh coffee and bacon can serve that purpose. Second, there
must light. A lamp is put between host
and guest when at a table so that facial expressions and body language can be
clearly seen. Third, there must be fresh
fruit and sweets made of milk; hence all the sweet shops in Hindi
neighbourhoods. The fourth formality
involves rice which for them is a symbol of unity. They make that red dot on the guest’s
forehead and then stick rice grains to it.
In Hindu Indian families this is the highest form of welcome. Finally, there must be flowers given to the
guest when he leaves so that sweet memories may linger for several days.
Welcoming
a guest as if they were a god; we of the Christian faith should always pay
attention to how welcoming we are to other people especially the vulnerable for
it says a lot about who we are as persons; persons who know the truth that
Jesus Christ is Lord. Humility,
meekness, honesty, patience and generosity are all expressions of the grace and
kindness with which the Trinity has regarded each of us and are part of the
attracting mechanism (if I may call it that) through which the Father in the
power of the Holy Spirit draws people to Jesus and makes them able to
believe. These attracting qualities
arise in us; I am inclined to say, in a way that resembles how we welcome
Christ Jesus himself into our lives. The
hospitality we show to him results in his showing hospitality to others through
us. Let’s turn to James for a moment.
James
wants us to know something profoundly transformative about ourselves. God the Father of his own will and desire has
made us to be born anew by means of the New Creation Word of Truth that he
spoke and continues to speak in, through, and as Jesus in the power of the Holy
Spirit. The Father by his own choice
(not ours) has spoken a new word of creation like the first one he spoke that
brought the creation into being. He spoke
this Word in such a way as to implant it into us. The salvation producing union of God the Son
to human being and flesh in Jesus has been planted into us by the work of the
Holy Spirit and it is changing us, healing us, making us to be more and more like
Jesus as he shines forth through us in his resurrected and ascended glory. We whom God has chosen to be in him are as
James says “a kind of firstfruits of God’s creatures”. The Light of Christ that the Trinity has
implanted in us at his own choice shines through us as the result of this Word
for all the world to see and to be attracted to like a moth to a flame.
Therefore,
James tells us to welcome the implanted word which has the power to save our
souls, the entirety of who we are. The
depth of meaning there in that verse 21 doesn’t come over into English very
well, but what James is telling us to do is to show hospitality to the
implanted word of God in us. The Hindu
say that the guest is God. Treat your
guests as you would your god. James, on
the other hand is saying that Christian spirituality, the Christian walk, is
based on welcoming the implanted Word of God into our lives as we would a
guest. And there’s more to it. This implanted Word to which we must show
hospitality is not in us by our own invitation, but because of the Father’s
will, the Father’s desire for us. So, we
must welcome the Word even though it is in us as a guest uninvited.
James doesn’t
leave us with just that he goes on to tell us how to show hospitality to this
uninvited Guest. He says “Be doers of
the Word not only hearers, deceiving themselves.” Imagine someone showing up at your house
wanting to spend the night and they start telling you how to live your life
expecting that you will take their advice.
That would take a heck of a lot of trust on our part. According to James it is not enough to let a
guest into your life and all you do is give them lip and ear service. It is rude to be simply a “hearer”. The word for “hearer” James uses is for
someone who sits in a place public speaking listening to what is said, taking
in the ideas, but doing nothing with what they’ve heard and thus treat the
living Word if it were another religious idea to be taken or left according to
one’s own idea of what it is to be “spiritual”.
James says
that people who are merely hearers and not doers are like people who look at
themselves in a mirror and then walk away forgetting what they look like. So it is when we walk away from the Word of Truth
that God of his own free will and love has planted in us. This word speaks the honest to God Truth to
us about who we are as individual persons, but if we don’t listen to this Word
and act on what it says to us about ourselves then we deceive ourselves. To throw a little bit of Paul in here from
Romans 8, this Word of Truth causes us to know that we are beloved children of
God and causes us to lift up our hands in adoration and trust crying out “Abba!
Father!” He also says in Galatians 4:4-9 “But when the fullness of time had come, God
sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were
under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the
Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and
if a son, then an heir through God.”
For the Christian, spirituality is a living,
communicative relationship with the Trinity.
Experientially speaking, this relationship is founded upon God the
Father getting it through our thick ears and brutally deceived minds by the
power of the Holy Spirit that we are his beloved children with Jesus the Son. Our work when we hear that Word is to live
accordingly. Speaking personally, so
much of spirituality for me is reminding myself and settling myself in that
very Word, that I am a beloved child of God and it changes the way I am. It changes the way I regard myself and the
way I regard others. It makes
hospitality to God, to myself, and to other people possible in such a way as it
is God’s grace working through me and not just some religious duty that I feel
I have to do to stay on God’s good side.
Living in the Word of Truth that we are God’s beloved children keeps us
from deceiving ourselves and getting stained by the world. Showing hospitality to God, receiving,
welcoming the Word of Truth means doing the work of daily, hourly, and even
moment to moment of reminding ourselves that we are God’s beloved children. It is difficult and quite similar to having
to be hospitable to an unwelcome guest.
So, be a doer of the Word and not just a hearer. Don’t forget what you look like, because God
is making you to look more and more like Jesus.
Amen.
