Radical Hospitality: Breaking the Rules...

I think we are hard-wired to be inhospitable...closed off to those we don't know or those different
from us. It probably comes from a safety/survival need. You stay in clan groups so you are safe, protected, Being hospitable to European explorers wiped out many native populations in this country. Stranger danger was real.

We make rules to protect ourselves...or that we think protect us...from "other" danger. Deep in the South we wanna know "who yo people ahh." If we can find a connection, someone we know that you know, you are safe. If we don't know your people?  Well someone will, honey...just mosey along and keep looking.

We function under rules we are not even aware of. Does the stranger look like me? talk like me? live like me? Does the stranger act like they want to be friends with me? One of my favorite church Catch-22 stories went like this:

Do you know the person sitting at the other end of your pew?

No. Well, I've seen them for a few months.

Why don't you introduce yourself and learn their names?

Because if they wanted me to know their names, they would have told me already. 

Is radical hospitality a willingness to break the rules? Richard Rohr comments that forgiveness is rule-breaking. He says:

...every time God forgives, God is breaking God's own rules, and saying relationship with YOU matters more than God being right! 

Perhaps our new rule of hospitality is that we constantly break our rules of comfort and security in order to say that the relationship with THEM is more important than us being safe.

Radical forgiveness.

Radical hospitality.

Fundamental change in our life together, no doubt.