This Sunday past Pastor Ray Frangakis brought the message to us from Mark 2: 13-17 From the book: Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer.

It’s no secret that our increasingly post-Christian culture is no longer warm or even neutral to the gospel—it’s hostile to it. Many people perceive “Christianity” as part of the problem, not the solution.16 Most secular people have zero interest in hearing the gospel, preferring to look for salvation in other sources.

But we’ve been here before. Many people in Jesus’ day were just as hostile to the gospel—so hostile they eventually killed him. How do we make space for God in such an emotionally loaded atmosphere? The same way he did: by eating and drinking.

In The Gospel of Luke alone, there are over fifty references to food. Lukan scholar Robert Karris wrote, “In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.”22

The UK pastor Tim Chester wrote a great little book called A Meal with Jesus, where he pointed out there’s an iconic verbal formula that’s used two times in Luke: “The Son of Man came …” Once in Luke 19:10 where he said that “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That was whatJesus did—his mission.

The other was in Luke 7:34 that, The Son of Man came eating and drinking. That was how Jesus did it – his method.26

Jesus lived in a culture where a lot of people were hostile toward him. How did he invite them into his kingdom?
One meal at a time…

This practice of eating and drinking with people far from God is what the New Testament writers call “hospitality.” The word is philoxenia in Greek, and it’s a compound word: philo means “love,” and xenos means “stranger, foreigner, or guest.”27 Meaning: Hospitality is the opposite of xenophobia. It’s the love of the stranger, not the hate or fear of the “other.” It’s the act of welcoming the outsider in and, in doing so, turning guests into neighbors and neighbors into family in God.

We can’t force a person to become a disciple of Jesus, nor would we want to. But we can offer them a space where such a change can occur, even if slowly over time. We can actively seek out the lonely, the newcomer, the uncool, the poor, the immigrant or refugee—those with no family or no home—and welcome them in to a community of love.

As Henri Nouwen so beautifully said:

In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found. … It is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.

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