Hospitality

I love the game of chess.   Playing since Junior High School and off-and-on since then, I’ve graduated to computer chess.  I lose most of the time unless I choose “easy play.”  I’m especially fond of the chess quizzes found in the The Boston Globe.   Sometimes I will read: “Black to play – Hint: Force checkmate. 

If life’s choices only were accompanied with such hints.  For example: Your play – Hint: Remember to show someone hospitality today.  In other words: Be hospitable.  Most of the time we all forget to make that play.  It’s a choice we fail to make, but it’s one we must make and often.

We’re reminded by Robin Meyers, minister of the United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, of the importance of hospitality.  He said in his 2012 book The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus, “Although these days when we speak of hospitality, we think more easily of Martha Stewart than of Jesus…The first followers of Jesus defined morality as welcoming the stranger...As we know, they argued about all sorts of things (the nature of Christ, the Trinity, circumcision, and so on), but there seems to have been no argument whatsoever about this: hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.  After all, the church began in peoples’ homes, and included offering shelter to widows, orphans, and traveling missionaries and preachers…”

Like him or not, Meyers highlights what it means to be a Christian: “We are to worship God by following Jesus, and we follow Jesus by loving the neighbor – period.”  He quotes the early Church Father and Archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom (349-407), who got right to the point: “This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good…for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors.”  Hospitality was supposed to be the rule. 

Oh, if it were only so today.   Then again, when the chips are down, and people are in need, many hospitable parishioners do step up and in a big way.  We’ve seen many examples here at Christ the King where our Mashpee chess board has its King we won’t let be checkmated.  

Deacon David Pierce