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Howdy, Stranger! Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling Welcome! I mean it. I’d like to infuse some high octane significance into this perfunctory greeting. Welcoming one another well is one of the very best things we can do at Trinity School. The writers of Scripture knew this, and thus they bid us offer hospitality to one another. Each year we choose a verse or two as a school verse, something that can bring unity and focus and a common goal for us all; and this year we’ve chosen Peter’s admonition that we offer each other hospitality. What is hospitality? According to Noah Webster, it is “the act or practice of receiving and entertaining strangers or guests without reward, or with kind and generous liberality.” The Greek word is philoxenia, whose two parts mean, literally, “love of the strange(r).” Hospitality might easily be seen as an ancillary virtue in the Christian tradition. All the cognates of the word occur in the New Testament only five times (1 Pet. 4:9; Rom. 12:13; Heb. 13:2; 1 Tim. 3:2; Tit. 1:8). Let’s face it, hospitality is not as famous as, say, faith, hope, and love in the Christian tradition. But it seems to me that when we look more deeply we find that hospitality has profound connections to these other, fundamental ideas; that there are fascinating links between this particular virtue and the great commandments to love God and neighbor. Hospitality is a very particular manifestation of the Gospel of Christ, and by focusing on it this year at Trinity we have the opportunity to shape our community in some wonderful, Christ-honoring ways. Our God is a welcoming God. The Trinity is, at the heart of all there is and was and ever will be, a community of Beings in love. And by creating the world, God invited us in, made room for others. This is hospitality. But there is more. By our sins, we have offended against our Gracious Host and made ourselves strangers to God’s blessings (Ephesians 2:12). Enter Jesus, the Son of God. God made him who was his beloved Son to be a stranger (John 1), that in Him we might become the sons of God. By his life and death and resurrection, he opens the way for us to live by faith and learn his gracious ways of welcoming others. We don’t need to look much further than Jesus in the Gospels to see one who welcomed the unwelcome and loved the unloved. The Swedish theologian, Krister Stendahl, once said, “Whenever, wherever, however the Kingdom manifests itself, it is in welcome.” Welcome is such a rich and powerful word for a school to embrace, especially a Christian school. Welcome to our new families. Welcome back to those who have been here year after year. Welcome to new staff and faculty. Welcome to new books and new artists and new music which our students have not yet met. Welcome to new ideas which meet us as strangers. Welcome to that new classmate who seems so different from me. Welcome to the Word of God, which is not our word, but His, from above, foreign and transforming. Let him who has ears to hear, listen. I am sure that there are countless ways in which our community can live and share God’s welcome this year. One of the beauties of hospitality is that though it is rooted in the deep things, it is manifest in the small things. The picture of hospitality is a meal shared, a coat leant, a hug given. It is one of the most earthly, tactile, materialistic practices in the Christian tradition. It is learned in small increments. This bodes well for a school, where we bump into one another so much and live so closely, day after day. And it is good news to our youngest members of the Trinity community, who don’t need theologizing so much as they need God with skin on. So let me welcome you all to this, our fourteenth year at Trinity School: Welcome. Come learn together what it means to have generous and grateful hearts. Chip Denton Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill |
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