Missions Catalyst 08.11.10 – Practical Mobilization

In This Issue: Radical Hospitality

Missions Catalyst is a free, weekly electronic digest of mission news and resources designed to inspire and equip Christians worldwide for global ministry. Use it to fuel your prayers, find tips and opportunities, and stay in touch with how God is building his kingdom all over the world. Please forward it freely!

Practical Mobilization by Shane Bennett is published once a month.

FEATURE: Radical Hospitality

You’ve seen this, haven’t you? You hang out with people who’ve traveled some and soon enough the conversation drifts to international tummy trouble. Someone will tell how sick they got somewhere, and the next person will trump them. By the time the third person chimes in, the more sensitive in the group will be feeling queasy and excuse themselves.

India seems to be a particular challenge for Americans. I don’t know if Indians coming to America get sick, but I’m pretty sure they must get annoyed with our bland food! During a three-month stretch in India one time, my daily prayer was, “God give me a cast-iron GI tract.” A prayer God answered for the most part positively. I was sick a little off and on, but never terribly. Except for once.

Our group had been invited to the home of a kind local Muslim family for dinner. We had a bit of trouble finding the place and were feeling peckish when we finally arrived. The family seated us in the living room and proceeded to fill the low table with all sorts of yummy food. At their urging we sampled them all, enjoyed them mostly, and washed them down with copious amounts of warm and comforting chai. After 20 minutes of chatting and munching, I was nicely full and pretty happy about life.

About that time, our host arose, made eye contact with someone in the kitchen and boldly declared, “It is now time for dinner!”

“Dinner? Dinner?” I asked in my head and maybe with my mouth. “What have we just been having?”

“Oh,” my kind host responded, “This is just a snack! Clear it away and we’ll have dinner.”

Away went the “snack” and in came the dinner: platter after plate of aromatic rice, lovingly prepared vegetables and salads, and the piece de resistance – a bountiful mutton curry. Feeling stuffed, I put a teaspoon of rice on my plate, one vegetable, and the smallest morsel of mutton I could find. Seeing these anemic servings, my host bellowed, as hosts have throughout centuries and cultures, “What? Is the food not good? Let me fill your plate.”

He did, saw to it that I was eating, and then filled his own plate. The food was wonderfully delicious, but I knew I needed to pace myself. I used all my tricks: Eat tiny bites. Talk frequently. Spread out remaining food so it looks like more has been eaten. Apparently my host had met and mastered these feeble challenges, likely in his youth. He wasn’t buying it.

I was struggling to ingest the three grains of basmati on my spoon, when he broke my focus with, “Shane, have more mutton.” He spooned up a huge hunk of fat flesh and ladled it onto my plate.

As I pondered this new development, sadly sure that eating the tiniest bite would be my mortal undoing, hope faded, a single tear began to well in my eye … and then light dawned.

My host was called to the kitchen. He stood from his place next to me, excused himself, and walked away. This was my chance. I looked at the mutton on my plate. I looked at his mutton-free plate. I plotted the angles and trajectories and did something I’d not done before or since. I sunk my fork into my sheep shank and, with a deft flick of the wrist, transferred it with a pleasing spluank onto my host’s plate. I quickly spread my remaining food around a bit and took a sip of water. My host returned, enjoyed my mutton, and much later finally let us roll out his door.

The evening air and my vertical position gave me the slightest bit of relief. Even so, I realized I had never felt as bad in India as I did right then. I wasn’t sick. I was stuffed. Stuffed to the point that death did not seem my worst fate at the moment.

Kamikaze hospitality, you might call it. The philoxenia – love for strangers – the Bible often speaks of. Many Americans feel all thumbs when it comes to expressing hospitality or receiving it, apparently. For many cultures, however, it seems as natural as breathing.

In her snappy little book, Foreign to Familiar: A Guide to Understanding Hot- and Cold-Climate Cultures, Sarah Lanier opens our eyes to a fascinating reality: People from “hot-climate cultures,” generally in the southern hemisphere, tend to value relationships over task, and in the process excel at hospitality. People from “cold-climate cultures,” generally in the northern hemisphere, tend to value task over relationship, and in the bargain struggle (to put it mildly) with loving strangers.

If you’re a hot-culture person, can I ask you a favor? Teach the rest of us how. After I’d spoken on hospitality to my church recently, a mysterious Russian man named Alex came up to me and said, “What you ask them to do, they won’t do. Tell them to go to the Arabs. Watch them. Copy them. Then they can do what you ask them to.” Many of us need to be schooled in hospitality.

If you’re a cold-culture person, as I suspect most Missions Catalyst readers are (having presently prioritized e-zine reading over hanging out with interesting people!), would you like to join me in school? Here are three hurdles that hold us back and three tips that might move us forward.

Hurdles to Hospitality

1. We’re afraid of strangers.

Face it, some of us don’t engage in hospitality because we’re afraid. Maybe we’ve had a bad experience. Maybe we fear losing our privacy. Maybe we’ve bought the televised lie that most strangers are dangerous. Whatever the root, can I ask you to ask yourself if this is an issue for you? Is your hospitality hesitance rooted in fear?

2. We don’t think we have enough to share.

Maybe this is limited to Americans. I hope so. We have tended in the past few decades to increasingly define ourselves by what we own. We are a people of possessions. Trouble is, when we define ourselves so, we increase our reluctance to share what we have and thereby decrease our hospitality. I call it the Tamale Principle. If I have one extra tamale and I invite you over, maybe I should give it to you. But if I want it, I don’t want to give it to you. Then I think WWJDWAET (What would Jesus do with an extra tamale?) and I’m in a conundrum.

Reality check: If you’re reading this e-zine, you’re likely among the richest people on the planet. I know what it’s like to wonder if you’ll be able to pay the bills, but really we’re among the richest. We do have stuff to share. If you can’t invite strangers to your lake house, maybe you can buy them a Coke at McDonald’s, a packet of frites on the Damrak, or a satay in Singapore.

3. We’re too busy.

This is the killer. Many of us have so packed our lives that there’s no room for strangers. Sometimes this pains us. I suspect more often we’re secretly grateful. “Sorry, no room here.” In Leviticus 19:10 the Bible instructs, “Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.” I know we don’t have vines to tend. But what if picking the vines double-clean is analogous to so filling your life that no room remains for the poor – both poor in pocketbook and poor in spirit?

Jesus said he only did what he saw the Father doing. How I need to imitate that. How I need to stop doing some things so that margin remains for hospitality.

Help for the Hospitality Hampered

1. Learn from an expert (not me).

Take a tip from mysterious Russian Alex: Go to the Arabs. Watch them. Copy them. Maybe your grandma (Arab or not) would be a good model too.

2. Keep it simple and comfortable.

Sometimes we want our home and our lives to look like the cover story in Better Homes and Gardens. Instead, aim for comfortable and reproducible. Skye Jethani says in his insightful book, Divine Commodity: “Today, the goal of hospitality has become making the best possible impression upon a guest even if that impression is a false one. We do not wish for guests to see us as we really are, but as we wish we were.”

My friend Micki, who as far as I know hasn’t written any books, but who does live a lifestyle of hospitality, says, “The challenge is to become comfortable with who you are. We need to realize that others like simple, because it doesn’t make them feel bad or inferior because things are over the top. Simple but comfortable. If people fall asleep on my living room floor while visiting, that is a compliment.”

3. Create space to listen and talk.

Jesus, arguably the Billy Graham of his day, carved out time to hang with people, to invite outsiders in. I imagine him at the party at Matthew’s house, drink in one hand, the other hand on a “sinner” or tax collector’s shoulder, hearing the guy’s story. The creator of heaven and earth, saying with his mouth, his face, his time, his focused attention: “Your story matters. You matter. You feel like you’re outside, but I’m inviting you in.”

That may define the essence of radical, biblical hospitality. Or as my friend Val, whose hospitality cred is legendary in many states, several countries, and a couple of continents, says, “You always have a plate, a pillow, a prayer, and a party at our house.”

Not to put too fine a point on this discussion, but here’s a basic motivator for me: Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of international students are moving into our schools and neighborhoods over the next several weeks. I think Jesus would welcome them through us.

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