By now you have
probably gathered that hospitality is sort of my thing. As I confessed earlier, I tend to look for
hospitality in everything. And based on
the title of this post “Radical Biblical Hospitality”, you are probably
expecting me to share stories from the Bible that exemplify this idea of
radical hospitality. But while the Bible
is full of lessons about hospitality, just reading those doesn’t necessarily
lead us to be more hospitable. What
would it look like if we used the Bible as a tool for hospitality? What if did
hospitality with the stories in the Bible?
Let me explain. For those of us whose churches follow the
lectionary, the text that we preach on
and study is chosen for us. This means
when we are presented with a text that is ambiguous, we often seek to “manage”
or “deal with” these texts by picking them apart historically. Which isn’t necessarily all bad, but what if
instead of just dealing with ambiguous texts, let’s seek them out, as an act of
radical hospitality.
I once heard from a
member of the LGBTQ community that “for so long churches have told us that they
hate us; so it’s important for those that don’t to tell us that they
don’t”. And usually those churches that don't accept them have used various biblical texts to support their views. So let’s do the same. Let’s read as much love into the Bible as we
possibly can. And it is these ambiguous
texts that offer us a great place to start.
So I invite you to join me for the next few weeks as I look at “Queering
the Bible as an Act of Radical Hospitality”.
