No. 77 Radical Hospitality

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Group Session Plan from FUSN (developed by Noreen Kimball)

Opening Words
“One New Testament word incorporates a profound truth: xenos, the word that means ‘stranger’ in Greek, also means ‘guest’ and ‘host.’ This one word signals the essential mutuality that is at the heart of hospitality. No one is strange except in relation to someone else; we make one another guests and hosts by how we treat one another.”
Peter Morales, from a sermon titled “Religious Hospitality”

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Topic
We all have different ways of being hospitable and different expectations of others for how they might be hospitable to us. But at the same time we are often overcome by a discomfort that leads us to fail ourselves and to fail others. To turn our backs on the other and even our own self – to shirk both the opportunity and the responsibility. And so it is with others who may fail us in much he same way.

Recall a time when you have failed to be hospitable. What happened? Why did it happen? How would you live that moment again? Recall also a time when you were the shunned stranger, the outsider, the not welcomed. What would you want if you were to meet that moment again?

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Closing Words:
The work of hospitality—accompanying those in pain, listening to one's self and others, welcoming despite the risk of danger . . . is based on acceptance of the other, and on the conviction that every life is sacred.

Radical hospitality leads us to a provocative degree of acceptance, not only of the poor, the stranger, the injured, and the needy, but also those who make us uncomfortable. The challenge for us, the spiritual heavy lifting, comes in dealing with people who appear to be different—people who might make us uncomfortable, people a lot older or younger, people who are conservative, or who believe crazy things, or are mentally ill. When we welcome what is uncomfortable, we grow. When we open our hearts to those who seem strange at first, you and I come to understand what it means to be human. Can we then find a degree of acceptance that is real—even if minimal—that allows us to offer a genuine word of welcome to those who are so profoundly different from us?
Peter Morales