The Inconvenience of Hospitality
Friendship and Hospitality: Session 2
When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
The Need for Disillusionment
“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.” – Bonhoeffer
What is the illusion?
- Community, friends, relationship…but in the way we want, how we want it. A “wish dream.” Community as we nostalgically remember it, not as we are currently experiencing.
- “He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter.” - Bonhoeffer
Christian community is both easier and harder than worldly community.
- Easier
- We are all united to Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit, and worship the Father.
- “Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.” – Bonhoeffer
- Harder
- We are not natural friends—the church is full of people from very different walks of life, different interests, different families, different consciences, etc. Church community isn’t like your Fantasy Football League.
- This presents many unique frictions within the church, many opportunities to sin (for example, Acts 6:1)
A large part of what makes Christian community difficult is our insistence of the “dream” we have of what it should look like.
- “God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.” – Bonhoeffer
What should we have instead?
- A posture of gratitude.
- “Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients.” – Bonhoeffer
- “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.” - Bonhoeffer
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. 9 Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. 10 As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
- 1 Pet 4:8-11
