Friday’s Reflection
SCRIPTURE SETS OUT a household rule to practice hospitality (Hebrews 13:2; Isaiah 58:6-9). For someone who loves to entertain friends as much as I do, this is a welcome rule — until I read the scriptures more carefully. The kind of hospitality God is calling for is not just about entertaining friends. It is about welcoming strangers and aliens. Not the ones we know, the comfortable ones, the ones who look and act like us. Saint Benedict said to his monks, “Let everyone be received as Christ.” This kind of hospitality is not so easy.
To offer hospitality is to provide a place where strangers are welcome and where they are accepted as they are, not asked to become like us.
- Weavings, Sept/Oct 1999
Judith E. Smith, in Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, September/October 1999. Copyright © 1999 by The Upper Room. Used with permission. http://www.upperroom.org/bookstore/. Learn more about or purchase this book.
Today’s Question
When have you had the opportunity to practice the kind of hospitality described above? Share your reflections.
Today’s Scripture Reading
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