Last night we had some ladies from church over for cake, and, slightly randomly, a tang soo do demonstration by the ladies’ triple black belt three time world champion. It was a lovely night, without incident, apart from how I kept accidentally making people chamomile tea instead of normal tea (which they politely drank with milk which is pretty weird), and thought I was going senile and picking tea bags from the wrong box, until I realised it was the right box, but the wrong tea bags had been put in it. Funny.
Hosting is still a post-covid, new house novelty. I shouldn’t say I’m a natural host either, not organised or relaxed enough, and my long-suffering husband is frequently incredulous that I am still poking at under-cooked food and getting dressed as people arrive. The first time we hosted homegroup, I served semi-raw potatoes and everyone was very gracious as I fished food off their plates to microwave. Last week we also served guests frozen condiments (son one had apparently been doing a science experiment) and water the builders had left behind.
It is a joy to have the space and to be enjoying the state of health to have people round. There is a backlog of people whom I should love to have over, people who I have blessed us with hospitality over the years, or new friends we should like to get to know, but I’m learning you can’t do everything, or at least not all at once.
At Grace church, our generous home group leaders had us and a bunch of other families over most weeks (no one else had a big enough house) and it was such a sacrificial use of their home because we really wrecked it. A curtain got pulled down, a feather cushion exploded, and their carpet got so covered in food they got rid of it and put down laminate. I really hope they know how much we appreciate their generosity; those midweek nights were the absolute highlights of our weeks. We should really have them over for dinner soon…
Although it doesn’t quite work like that, does it? Or I mean, it doesn’t have to. That’s grace.
Today at church the sermon was on these lines spoken by Jesus:
“The next time you put on a dinner, don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbours, the kind of people who will return the favour. Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be—and experience—a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favour, but the favour will be returned—oh, how it will be returned!—at the resurrection of God’s people.”
(That’s the Message translation, because the vicar read it out and I liked it!)
It’s a great practical challenge, isn’t it, to invite not just the people who are like us and who might then invite us back in return. It’s a lot harder to invite people who are harder work (like people whose children destroy the house?) and from whom we do not expect to gain anything in return.
I once had a friend who had a number of challenges in his life, and he told me someone had explained to him that he was like a negative charge that could zap out all the positive energy in a room full of people. Ouch. It’s a powerful image, that I’ve often thought back on. I’m an extrovert and I like people, but in my life I’ve had a number of people who do deplete my positive charge, but I figure that’s why God has blessed me with healthy reserves of positive energy. This is starting to sound weird now.
The point is, Jesus really practised what he preached with this one. He spent time with the undesirable (the tax collector, the promiscuous woman), he welcomed all and sundry. In the parable of the wedding banquet, the master (representing God) invites the waifs and strays: “’So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.”
The God of the Bible is an outrageously inclusive and hospitable God. He welcomes people without prejudice, and there are “many rooms” in his house. And when I see people being generous with their homes, like all the people in my church who are hosting refugees, it’s a beautiful thing because it shows us a bit what God is like.
To conclude, let me share two points of encouragement that I got recently from our current home group leaders.
1) In our old little house, I thought I was a terrible host because we couldn’t easily seat people for meals, so we rarely had people over like that. And I struggled with always being a receiver, and felt like I wasn’t really doing my bit when it came to all those lines from the Bible about offering people hospitality. But my lovely friend told me recently that she thought I always was really hospitable because I was often pinging out messages to people suggesting to people we met in a park or pub, or to have children round to play in the garden, and I felt hugely happier because I think my definition of hospitality had been too narrow. And I do think people appreciate being involved and invited, even if it’s not for a home-cooked meal. One of the moments when I felt most blessed by friends with food was when we were having an awful spell of the boys being ill and having bad nights, and one day at 6.30am a friend arrived at the door with a stack of dairy-free pancakes he’d just made for us. So let that be an encouragement to you if you are not blessed with the seating capacity which we currently enjoy.
2) Last year, the leader gave a sermon in which he said, “If you work hard to stop chaos descending into squalor in your house... still invite people in to share your life and what you have." I’m sure the family won’t be offended that I say they really practise what they preach in this (there are currently 12 people in their house, four of which are Ukrainian). So take heart if your home is not as tidy as you’d like it to be, or if, like me, you serve under-cooked potatoes.
And the hostess trolley? Well, my husband loves it. It helped us do Christmas dinner for 26. So it probably deserves a mention too.
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