When I tried talking to newcomers, I couldn’t think of what to say. So I carried a little “cheat sheet” of welcoming and informative things to talk about (parking issues, location of Sunday school or bathrooms). Week after week, I took a deep breath and launched out to greet people I didn’t know. I began enjoying giving them this bit of love, and learning interesting things about people. I saw that many people were nervous and longed to have someone talk to them. I realized that I had been cocooning safely in my own space and needed to reach out to others.
Such is the spiritual practice of welcoming the stranger, a characteristic activity for those living in the kingdom of God. Not often listed as a spiritual discipline, welcoming the stranger is a practice Jesus emphasizes by how he received all kinds of people and identified with them: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me . . . just as you did it for the least of these . . . you did it to me” (Matthew 25:35, 40, NRSVUEi). Such welcoming is more than a feeling; it meets tangible needs, such as offering others a cup of cold water (see Matthew 10:40–42; Matthew 18:5, and John 13:20).
To welcome strangers means to cultivate an invitational spirit and offer a sense of “home” to others (see John 14:23). We pay attention to others, inviting them to be at home with us as they unfold themselves before us. “To merely welcome another, to provide for them, to make a place, is one of the most life-giving and life-receiving things a human being can do.”Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002, 183.
Some call this discipline “hospitality,” but unfortunately hospitality has become limited to inviting others to eat with us or stay in our home. While cleaning, bed-making, and food preparation are valuable gifts to offer others, the core idea of hospitality is to be open and vulnerable to a person’s needs.
Additionally, to welcome the stranger is to reach out not just to friends but to those who for some reason are considered strangers. You see this in Jesus’s way of welcoming people whom others routinely ignored: beggars, hobbling lepers, demon-possessed people. Jesus grouped this practice of welcoming strangers with helping others who are often overlooked: the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned (see Matthew 25:35–36). In the sermon He preached upon returning as a teacher to His hometown of Nazareth, Jesus marked out his purpose to minister to such people: to bring good news to the poor, to free prisoners, to restore sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim year of Lord’s favor (see Luke 4:18–19).
Welcoming the stranger was one of the tender commands of the law. Because the Israelites had been sojourners (immigrants) in Egypt, God laid it down that sojourner-strangers were to be protected by the same laws that governed Israel (see Deuteronomy 1:16; 24:17; 27:19). Furthermore, Israelites were to go above and beyond decent behavior and love strangers (Deuteronomy 10:19). In the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus taught about going the extra mile, and later he applied it to a Roman soldier—clearly a stranger who filled Jews with discomfort and disgust (Matthew 5:41). In God’s kingdom, God knows no strangers, and so he invites us to live such a life here and now.