Always The Guest, Never The House

He has been fed extraordinarily well for eleven years and he could not tell you the last time anybody ate at his.

He is easy to invite. That is the whole of it. He is single, he is pleasant, he brings something, he stays exactly the right length of time and he always does the plates. Every family in that congregation has had him. Some of them have had him forty times.

And he loves it and he means every thank you and he is not being martyred here.

He worked it out at somebody's house on a Sunday, holding a tea towel, while a woman he has eaten with for a decade told him to leave it, leave it, sit down.

And he thought: I have never once said that sentence to anybody.

Because his flat is fine. It is small but it is fine and there is a table. And it has never occurred to a single person that he might host, because he has never done it, because after about the third year the thing stopped being a matter of scheduling and became a fact about him.

He is a guest. That is his role. He arrives and is fed and washes up and goes home.

And on the way home that Sunday, with the tea towel still in his head, the sentence underneath it finally arrived: I do not think anything happens at my house.

Not a self pity thing. A category thing. He had come to believe, without ever examining it, that his flat was a place he slept between other people's kitchens.

You know that tea towel.

Maybe you are the one who is always invited. Maybe you have a family and you still never host, because of the state of the place, or because your cooking is not up to it, or because it was your mother who did that and you never learned. Maybe you have said we should have people round for four years running.

Nobody has excluded you. That is what makes it invisible. Being welcomed everywhere is the nicest possible way to end up believing your own house does not count.

The one meal He asked Himself to

There is exactly one occasion in the gospels where He invites Himself, and it is worth knowing whose house He picked.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house.Luke 19:5

To day I must abide at thy house.

Not, come with me. Not, follow me and we will find somewhere. He picks the house of a man who was in a tree because nobody in that town would have made room for him at ground level.

And He does not ask. He announces it, which is the most extraordinary courtesy in the passage, because a man who has never been the host does not know how to offer, and being asked would have given him a chance to say no out of embarrassment.

He does not give him the chance. Make haste. To day. Thy house.

You are a house and not only a visitor, and He is the kind of guest who invites Himself before you have worked out how to offer. That is what Luke 19:5 does by removing the invitation from the man's hands entirely, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as dwelling in people and not merely calling on them, which settles the question of whether your address is a place anything happens.

The role you did not audition for

Now the mechanics of how this happened to you, because it was not a decision and you should not treat it as a failure.

The first year you were new and you were invited. The second year you were a known quantity and you were invited more. And by about the third year everybody had a category for you, and you had one too, and categories are enormously convenient and almost impossible to notice from inside.

Nobody sat down and decided you were a guest. It settled, the way sediment does.

You have not been overlooked, and there was never a decision anywhere that you were the one who does not host. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister (Hebrews 6:10), and every one of those plates you washed is in that sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept the record of eleven years of tea towels.

And nothing here is prescribing a dinner party

Let me be plain, because this is where a page like this could hand a person a project instead of a gift.

Nothing here tells you to host anything, or how many people, or what to cook, or whether to say anything before the food. There is no form being handed over. If your flat is small then it is small, and two people is a meal, and a takeaway on a table is a meal, and nobody is inspecting anything.

You are not being handed a standard, and no version of this requires you to produce an occasion. The word says use hospitality one to another without grudging (1 Peter 4:9), and notice the whole instruction is about the spirit of the thing and not about the scale of it, and His Spirit is the one who makes a small room a large welcome, which is not something anybody manages by cooking better.