An Invitation to the Table: Embracing the Gift of Hospitality

By Michelle Lazurek

Jesus spent a chunk of his ministry eating and drinking with the "sinners and tax collectors" of the world. If we strive to be more like Jesus, shouldn’t we do more of what he did?

Hospitality involves more than the domesticated event we have grown accustomed to practicing. It is an embodiment of all the Christian life stands for: a gesture of love, opening up our hearts and lives, and sacrificing luxury and security for the chance to display God’s glory. To receive hospitality from others is an invitation to receive God’s transformative power to work in their lives.

Readers will ask themselves these questions:

• What is hospitality?
• Is it something I am, or something I do?
• How do I offer my life as a gesture of hospitality?
• What are some practical ways for me to display and receive hospitality?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9780891126232

Michelle Lazurek

Michelle Lazurek is an award-winning author, speaker, pastor’s wife, and a mother. She is a member of the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association and has had over 100 articles published in magazines such as Gifted for Leadership and Encouragement Cafe. She has a master’s in Counseling from Liberty University and teaches public speaking as adjunct faculty for Gannon University. Please visit her website at www.michellelazurek.com.

Book preview

Guide

Introduction

With my bags packed, I had nothing left to do but cry. After just receiving word that my parents were throwing me out of the house, I felt like my world was being torn apart. Scanning my room and seeing all my childhood possessions shoved in black trash bags, my eyes flooded with tears. My mind recalled happy childhood memories of hours singing into my hairbrush microphone to my favorite 1980s tunes, long talks with my sister, and phone conversations with that month’s new boyfriend—all of which vanished along with any hope of returning to a normal life. God promised me he would never leave me nor forsake me, and he was putting my faith to the test that day. Staunch Catholics, my parents disliked my new Protestant faith. Throwing me out was their only hope of getting me to return to my Catholic roots.

I loved church. Every week I would pile into my grandmother’s car, and she and I would file into our seat, the first pew in the second row. Before the service, I’d marvel at the ornate beauty of the stained glass windows and ceiling, their beauty magnified by the sunlight that peeked through. I followed the routines of the service like a pro, kneeling and genuflecting on cue. But in my junior year of high school, my heart began to yearn for something more. Questions filled my mind as to the authenticity of the Catholic faith. I spoke to priests and teachers at my school, but I left unsatisfied.

There has to be more to God, but what? I asked myself.

Three years after that question had started burning in my heart, I knew the answer. Faith wasn’t just a ritual to endure, but a life to surrender. Little did I know God was calling me to a life of sacrifice. As his disciple, he wanted me to abandon a life of luxury and convenience for a life of uncertainty. Like Jesus’s other twelve disciples, I was in good company. In order to be considered one of Jesus’s disciples, I had to live a life of sent-ness.

At the young age of twenty, I had nothing. With only fifty dollars in my pocket and bags filled with old stuffed animals, I relied on someone else’s hospitality in order to survive. God was sending me out, too, to reap the generosity of a family in my church. They heard my story and invited me to live with them free of charge in exchange for babysitting their young children. They interrupted every aspect of their otherwise tranquil life for the sake of my life. They weren’t just inviting me to their dinner table for a brief get-together. They invited me to their table indefinitely.

It was through those years that I learned not only what it was like to function in a healthy family unit, but I also learned what true discipleship looks like. Disciples don’t just become like Jesus out of convenience; they sacrifice their gift of convenience so someone else can become like Jesus. God used that family’s generosity to prepare me for a life of hospitality. After two years of living with virtual strangers, I married my husband and we moved to Canada so he could attend school. It was there that we pastored our first church and thus began our journey into the pastoral ministry.

Hospitality is more than just inviting some friends over for dinner. Hospitality means messing up your life and sacrificing every convenience and comfort for the sake of promoting the gospel. It is what Jesus called his disciples to in Luke 9:1–6:

When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. He told them: Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt. Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. If people do not welcome you, leave their town and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them. So they set out and went from village to village, proclaiming the good news and healing people everywhere.

Jesus set the expectation that if people wanted to follow him, they had to forgo everything they ever knew and, in essence, become foreigners and aliens in the land, relying on other people’s willingness to accept them into their homes.

Jesus also expected the receivers of the apostles to provide for their material needs. Just as the Lord looked to his Father to supply his needs, Jesus expected his apostles to do the same. This is hospitality in the truest sense of the word. Jesus didn’t read the latest book on discipleship or attend the latest Sunday school class; he offered his life as an example of what hospitality means. In the same way, we must offer our lives as an example of hospitality and live hospitably with others.

In Luke, the disciples experienced hospitality in a manner foreign to most Christians today. In relying solely on a generous God to provide their daily bread, they followed the example of Jesus, who accepted the hospitality of many kinds of people and also gave it to many kinds of people. The disciples depended on others to meet their needs so they, in turn, could display hospitality to the sick, demonized, and tormented people who were not accepted in that society. The disciples understood that forsaking a comfortable life came with the territory of following Jesus. They knew that their comfort came secondary to the mission God wanted them to fulfill.

I came to know this kind of hospitality as a part of discipleship, too. That family not only welcomed me into their home, but they preached the gospel in a real and tangible way. In the years that followed, we forged a deep friendship, formed through the intimacy of inhabiting the same space. If it were not for that family's generosity, my life could be so different. It was their willingness to interrupt their lives for the sake of the gospel that saved my life. They invited me to pull up a chair, not only to their physical table but to their spiritual one as well, and in so doing preached a gospel that allowed me to taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps. 34:8).

In the chapters that follow, I invite you to pull up a chair and eat at my spiritual table—experience hospitality in a way that allows you to embody it, not merely do it. Because the same invitation God extends to us, to come and eat, is also the one that invites us to come and die.

Through table fellowship, Jesus fulfills the message of the prophets, invites all people to salvation and promises his disciples a place at table in God’s kingdom.

—Daniel Grody, Globalization, Spirituality and Justice

1

Our Daily Bread

Ihave nowhere to go. What do I do?

When we began our church plant, we had many people ask what our church was all about. One of those inquirers was a young woman named Liz. Confused about her life’s direction, her addiction to drugs, and her sexuality, she was broke and homeless.

I knew what I had to do. Without another thought, I uttered six words that would change my life: you can come stay with us. In a moment, I had swung open the same doors of hospitality that were opened to me ten years before. Liz stayed in our home for a month, before she found another residence.

Although I was happy to pay forward the generosity I had received from the church family who allowed me to live with them, it did pose a challenge. My husband and I had to set firm boundaries and ask her to contribute to chores. Her healthy appetite made our food costs skyrocket. Dealing with the angst common to most teens, we became instant parents to a girl whose problems were foreign to us. Although she initially struggled with our rules, she understood that our hospitality was a gift and a privilege, not a right.

WHAT IS HOSPITALITY?

Merriam-Webster defines hospitality as generous and friendly treatment of visitors and guests; the act of providing food, drink, etc. to those who are guests of an organization. As Christians, we welcome friends into our homes, offer meals, and perhaps provide a place to stay. We display hospitality in a way that promotes comfort and peace and invite others into our familiar territory. That’s hospitality, isn’t it?

Or is it?

Hospitality is so much more than a domesticated program we tack on to an overcrowded schedule. It is instead a spiritual gift that should be utilized both for the edification of the body of Christ and for those who do not know him. Because the couple from my church displayed hospitality by opening their home to me, I reciprocated that gift of hospitality to Liz out of my gratitude.

Robert Schnase, author of Forty Days of Fruitful Living, writes, The personal practice of radical hospitality involves both the attitude of receptivity and intentional practice. People who cultivate receptivity look for ways to invite God in, rather than to close God out. They regularly ask for God’s help, simply and humbly. They desire God’s presence. They invite interruptions by God in their lives, interventions of the Spirit and unexpected opportunities for doing what is life giving.¹

Hospitality is not only something you give, but it is also something you receive.

In order to truly experience hospitality, disciples must both display it to others and receive it: Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms (1 Pet. 4:8–10).

WHY HOSPITALITY?

Hospitality is demonstrated throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. The first expression of hospitality comes in Genesis 2:8–9, which says, Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Isn’t it interesting that God chose to reward his first children with an invitation to dine with him? This passage isn’t one normally associated with hospitality, but it establishes God’s intention of welcoming his children into his dwelling place. He not only invites them to inhabit the garden, but he offers them the invitation to eat with him in the form of any tree in the garden. God wasn’t just inviting them to hang out—his invitation to eat of the delicious fruit contained so much more. It was not only his acknowledgement of them as his children, but it was an opportunity for them to recognize God as sufficient provider as well.

AN INVITATION TO RECOGNIZE HIM

Luke 24:13–16 and 28–35 says,

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. . . . As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over. So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us? They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon. Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.

He chose to leave his disciples with the memory of dining around the table, and it’s the same event that allows the disciples’ eyes to be opened and to recognize him as Messiah. Scripture is clear that we are to get together often, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Heb. 10:25). It appears the pleasure of knowing God intimately can best be achieved around a friend’s (or even a stranger’s) dinner table.

The Gospels are filled with examples of Jesus receiving his disciples’ hospitality. From his disciples to Mary and Martha, Jesus spent much of his time eating and drinking with his family and friends. Perhaps one of the best examples of hospitality lies within the account of his last days as a free man, at the Last Supper. In Jesus’s last moments on this earth, he pulled up a chair and invited his brothers to join him at the table. Jesus didn’t invite the people who felt, acted, and thought like he did; instead, he chose a diverse group of people. Among that group, a tax collector was invited to dine next to a zealot. The disciple whom he loved sat at Jesus’s right and his betrayer to his left. Yet he offered the same invitation to them all, regardless of their status or righteousness: Come and eat. If Jesus saw hospitality as important enough to demonstrate during his last moments as a free man, shouldn’t we spend our days demonstrating hospitality to our brothers and sisters as well?

Jesus spent his ministry meeting the physical needs of the world around him in order to transform their hearts and free them from deeper spiritual hurts. Think about Matthew 14:15–21, which says,

As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food. Jesus replied, They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat. We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish, they answered. Bring them here to me, he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples