Radical Biblical Hospitality

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”.