The Slow Way: Epiphany and Hospitality

The Christian faith has never seen love as a finite resource. It has always been ever-multiplying. Love begets more love.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you…for I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” - Matthew 25:34-35

Epiphany is a season of reflection on three central stories. Two of them, Jesus’s baptism and his wedding miracle in Cana, are both moments of clarity and transformation—epiphanies—that shape the rest of his ministry and story. The third story is the one that marks the beginning of the season: the journey of the Magi, the “three wise men” who travel from another culture and country, following their knowledge of the stars and prophecies.

The story of the Magi is a bizarre story, one of strangers who pay close enough attention to the skies that a change in one particular star’s brilliance invites them on a months-long journey. It’s a journey built almost entirely on curiosity. And when they finally come close enough to their destination to encounter Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed king of Judea, they’re able to sniff out Herod’s ill intentions, eventually finding their way on their own to Jesus’s unimpressive, migrant family, bringing gifts.

This is a story of hospitality on both sides—a virtue that demands trust, curiosity, and the active meeting of needs. The Magi were wealthy and educated. Jesus’s parents were working class and unhoused. These were people divided by culture, religion, and language. And they lived in a world in which the most common way to engage across difference was through violence.

This is a story in which Jesus’s parents welcomed folks they didn’t know, who had arrived from a journey they knew nothing of, who invaded their private experience of caring for their child. These people from the East came with knowledge, expectations, and a bit of bad news regarding Herod’s shady requests that they inform him on the status of Jesus. They chose to protect the holy family. They showed hospitality with their presence, their information, their choice to protect the meek in front of them, rather than relaying information to Herod, who had power both to harm or reward them. And the Magi were also able to demonstrate hospitality with their curiosity. They weren’t Jewish, weren’t raised with a close reading of the prophetic and messianic texts of the Hebrew scriptures. And still they were open, listening, ready to receive Jesus and his people, no matter how humble they appeared. In that way, this story is remarkable.

Hospitality is a gift we don’t often consider in our culture of accomplishment, busyness, and our sometimes self-obsessed talk of boundaries. We relegate hospitality to hosting parties or contributing to social engagements. But hospitality is actually about how we welcome one another. Hospitality engages across difference, stress, and relational pain. Hospitality is how we make amends. It’s also how we work to make room for those who struggle to belong in our communities.

I was invited this week to a “political salon,” where a few women with different perspectives—a social worker, a doctor, a financial strategist, and me (a Christian thinker and writer) chatted about our concerns around the quick and reckless decisions being made by the Trump White House. And we talked about next steps. What do we do now? What are the action steps we can take? I kept thinking about the large population of Colombian immigrants in our community. What does it mean to practice hospitality at this moment, in my town?

In Soul Feast, the classic book on spiritual formation, Marjorie J. Thompson describes the significance of hospitality in the Jewish and Christian tradition as “a matter of mutual survival. It was a kind of social covenant, an implied commitment to transcend human differences in order to meet common human needs.”

Sometimes virtues arrive out of necessity, out of our human needs. In the ancient world, where roads were always dangerous and a place to sleep along the way was never guaranteed, the idea that we ought to care for the strangers among us was a matter of mutual safety. Virtue has always been born of common survival. But Thompson takes it further in her consideration of hospitality, explaining that in scripture, “hospitality reflects a larger reality than human survival codes. It mysteriously links us to God as well as to one another.” She points to Sarah hosting the three angels in Genesis 18. “Hospitality in biblical times,” she writes, “was understood to be a way of meeting and receiving holy presence.” Entertaining angels unaware. Or as Jesus would eventually teach, “what you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me.”

This feels like a moment in the world when our daily lives are filled with opportunities to show hospitality, to encounter the mysterious connection that sparks between our care for one another and our awareness of God. Or as the writer of 1 John said, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”

God’s love is always expanding. And we can experience that expansion when we tap into it. Loving another person, practicing hospitality, allows us to experience the expansion of God’s love. In other words, the Christian faith has never seen love as a finite resource. It has always been ever-multiplying. Love begets more love. We aren’t bound to love only those we know, understand, or even encounter in our daily lives. In fact, we can make choices to love people we don’t know in the way we shop, the way we spend our time, and the way we vote.

The more we push ourselves toward curiosity— loving beyond the spaces in our lives we see and know—the more we will practice the life-long invitation to understand more than to be understood. How can the love of God be in us? It’s not by simply protecting the people we love. It’s by engaging, asking questions, and meeting the needs of the people we don’t know. There’s some kind of alchemy of connection to the divine that happens when we care for one another, especially for the marginalized.

Hospitality is the invitation to open ourselves to people who need our openness. An invitation to welcome the one who needs a place to rest, to feed the one who is hungry, to delight in the one who needs to be delighted in. Hospitality can be creating a beautiful party. And it can be standing with the immigrant family faced with deportation. It can be listening to the person who is too often ignored. Advocating for the intellectually disabled. Hospitality has never been a side-note in the story of faith. It’s the main thing. It’s the calling we have to look for Jesus in the eyes of the stranger, to build a world where no one is rejected, to honor the lives of every human who doesn’t have a place to lay their head.

And this calling is the calling of all followers of Jesus: This is how we know what love is.

A Slow Practice

This week, I invite you to take some time to research ways you might engage in hospitality toward those outside your circle, those you might consider “other.” Is there a way you might volunteer, advocate, or financially support organizations that seek to offer housing, food, or care for folks outside of your financial or cultural experience?

Some ideas:

• Find an organization that serves immigrant communities and research what kinds of financial, informational, and boots-on-the-ground supports they most need right now.

• Find a local food pantry you can donate to or volunteer at.

• Consider teaching ESL in a local program.

• Read books, listen to stories, stay curious.

• Gather a group of people you wouldn’t usually spend time with for a meal, a book club, or game night. Create an experience of comfort and fun.

• Spend some time looking at the excess in your life and simplifying, donating to an organization that will offer your clothes or home goods to folks who need it.

• Ask your church, your school, or your work questions about how it might become a more inclusive space, and be a force that moves that organization toward it.

There are so many ways to move our lives toward hospitality. I’m sure many more ideas have come to your mind. If you have ideas, leave them in the comments!

As we lean into active hospitality in our communities, neighborhoods, and homes, may we do so with the knowledge that the love of God is always expansive. There is room enough and love enough. And it’s a gift to be a part of expanding the circle.

A List of Things

• I’ll be in Canyon, Texas February 23 & 24, speaking at St. Ann’s Catholic Church about how the wisdom of the Beatitudes can be a companion for us throughout the season of Lent.

• I’ll also be leading the women’s retreat at Trinity Episcopal in Asheville, NC March 28-30, working through the themes of Blessed Are the Rest of Us—how in our limits and longings, God is inviting us into wholeness..

• Speaking of Blessed Are The Rest of Us! Do you or someone you love need a copy? Find it here or anywhere books are sold.