Sermon quotes on hospitality
Matt Chandler
Hospitality means opening our lives, and our homes, to those who believe differently than we do.
Peter Leithart
We don’t welcome the naked and hungry so they can be naked and hungry in our company. We clothe and feed. Hospitality is not toleration but transformation.
Henrietta Mears
Hospitality should have no other nature than love.
Henri Nouwen
Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.
Henri Nouwen
Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.
Ministry and Spirituality
Eugene Peterson
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
Cornelius Plantinga
The challenge of hospitality, both personally and professionally, comes when we are stressed out or tired and we offer it grudgingly. The gift of hospitality comes when we find in the welcoming face of hospitality the welcoming face of God.
Christine Pohl
A life of hospitality begins in worship, with a recognition of God’s grace and generosity. Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a response of love and gratitude for God’s love and welcome to us.
Making Room
Benedict of Nursia
Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ.
Elizabeth Newman
Hospitality without a home (a place) is an oxymoron
Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007)
N.T. Wright
When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.
Simply Jesus
Leo Tolstoy
[A good host treats his guest so] that everything that is so well arranged at his host’s has not cost him, the host, any effort at all but has come about of itself.”
Anna Karenina, Bantam
Benedict of Nursia
Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ.
Henri Nouwen
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…If there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality. . . . Old and New Testament stories not only show how serious our obligation is to welcome the stranger in our home, but they also tell us that guests are carrying precious gifts with them, which they are eager to reveal to a receptive host.”
Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Doubleday, 1986)
Yves Conger
The revelation of Jesus is not contained in his teaching alone; it is also, and perhaps we ought to say mainly, in what he did. The coming of the Word into our flesh, God’s acceptance of the status of servant, the washing of the disciples’ feet—all this has the force of revelation and a evelation of God.
Tradition and Traditions: the Biblical, Historical, and Theological Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition, 2nd ed. Basilica Press, 1998, 348.
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.
Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Image Books, 1975), p. 51.
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