Hospitality means making space for others. Surfaces need cleaning, tables need setting. The carpets need vacuuming, and the floors sweeping. There’s a lot to prepare and put in order. This is what it takes to make our homes big enough for company. Hospitality means making room for another.
As we prepare for guests, more than the exteriors need arranging. Hospitality begins on the inside; first, we must clear a space within ourselves. That’s where the opening up begins. Wide-open doors offer shelter to our guests, but it’s the work we do internally that makes others feel welcome.
Preparing for others pulls us out of ourselves, doesn’t it? Setting a table and making ready a meal involves preliminary consideration of the ones coming over. This is what makes hospitality a spiritual practice. When we welcome others in, we work to make our entire existence an inviting table, a place carefully prepared for another’s comfort.
Hospitality, though, goes much deeper than receiving company. There’s a deeper meaning to it that Christ embodies, and that we should get used to. Gospel hospitality. Gospel hospitality doesn’t have much to do with welcoming another in so much as rolling up our sleeves and giving ourselves away for another’s wellbeing. It’s not opening our homes; it’s setting ourselves aside. Hospitality with Christ at the center of it involves jumping headlong into the mess of things. It also means committing to another’s chaos if that’s what is needed, which makes Gospel hospitality a much more costly endeavor.
Gospel hospitality is the staying and sticking kind. And it’s not something we make room for occasionally. It’s a habit, a manner of spirit, as we realize how immediate Christ’s call upon our lives really is. This is when words like “spirituality” or even “religion” no longer do because they’re too abstract. In Christ, God has moved into our neighborhood. He’s taken up space right next to us. In Christ, God has come alongside.
In Christ, God entered the mess of our days and the particulars of our lives. God knew what he was doing. He was not the least surprised by the clutter and confusion, the disarray and disorder that comes with being human. Nor did He come to iron out all the difficulties or clear up their complexities; He wasn’t out to simplify our tough relationships. Those remain. In Christ, God came to share life with His own.
That’s not anything to overlook—that the God of all creation came alongside us in a way that we could see, touch, sense, and hear. In Jesus, God had a voice like ours, a face like ours, too. In HIm, God lived beside us. God has always lived beside us, but we couldn’t see it, so He decided to do so in a way we couldn’t miss. He took on flesh and dwelt among us. God spared nothing and gave up everything to come alongside us.
Paul brings us this Good News in a beautiful way. This “Christ hymn” describes a God so in love with His creation that He placed Himself inside of it to prove it. If we want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what God cares about, look at what Jesus spent His time doing and with whom. In Christ, God has taught us what it means to be fully human.
But these words from Philippians 2 aren’t here just to let us know what God has accomplished through Jesus. Paul doesn’t write them for the heavens; the heavens already know. Paul sings this song to us that we might come to understand how much Christ’s sacrifice asks of us. This hymn is about the selfless character of Jesus. God sang Jesus into us, and we’re asked to sing Him back to God by taking on the same selfless character. Jesus isn’t an example for us to admire. Jesus is a person who we participate in. God took a chance to become one of us, with and for us, hoping that we in turn take a chance to become like Him, with and for others.
But if we get caught up in the beauty of this Christ hymn, we will overlook Paul’s purpose for singing it to the Philippians. He’s encouraging them to become united, to be one in purpose and voice, that they may live and work together to cultivate a church where their differences are few and the ones still left stand no chance of dividing them.
We are to strive to be one with another in much the same way that Christ is one with God. We do that by placing aside our own desires for the benefit of the whole, all in pursuit of becoming one in Christ Jesus. Paul describes a community where every individual considers the needs of others first, a community whose first reaction is to pull together rather than pull apart. To pull apart is far and away from the majority reaction out there. That’s what will happen when we place ourselves first.
It is Christ’s desire that we are those who, out there and in here, leave behind every instinct to live according to our differences and objects, to pull apart.
“Look not to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”
Christ’s desire for His church is that we all do the hard work of setting aside our first reactions—especially those that separate us one from another—and develop a Christ-centered mindset. Christ calls us to radical unity and hospitality. We are here to make room for one another and place our desires to the side out of service. Christ came close to walk along with us. We who give ourselves to Christ-centered unity do not walk in front of one another but at each other’s side.
God wants us to change our desires. We would do well to give ourselves to regular desire audits, where we search ourselves for any disordered devotions, preoccupations, and their sources, rogue desires, and stray motives. God is at work to carry out His purpose in us, to make real in our lives the reality of Jesus’s life. We share this vocation. It is a calling to the shared pursuit of unwrapping for one another the reality of God’s great gift of His being with us and one of us. God through Christ takes an open stance toward us. So we should take an open stance toward others. This is our shared purpose. God works salvation in; among us, we work salvation out.
Paul encouraged the disciples in Philippi to pull together to regain their Christ-purpose, their first love, and their reason for being. If they recovered it, Paul wanted them to keep desiring it, insisting upon it, to keep it at the forefront.
He expressed how vital it would be for them to let nothing keep them from their Christ-purpose or from interfering with it. He knew that it’s much more likely for a church to be torn apart from the inside than from the outside. Unity is not broken from the outside. It can only be forsaken from within.
Those of us who call ourselves church should strive for deep-seated unity. Unity is not of our own design—such a thing will not stand hardship—but unity accomplished through prayer, shared vision, and life together immersed in scripture and the living out of it. We do not have to accomplish this; Christ's life, death, and resurrection have already accomplished it.
We need only to come alongside. God works salvation in, and alongside one another, we work our salvation out.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.