The hills are alive with the sound of music (aaah ah ah ah) and by that I mean the Highland Hills. I know. I know. It’s corny, but I am going to be a father twice over, so I need to practice my dad jokes. But the truth remains, as I sit in my office looking at the display of brilliant pink azaleas outside my window, I am being serenaded by the angelic voices of the Bibb County Honor Choirs performing in our sanctuary today and tomorrow. Lines of children in matching clothes and nervous smiles have paraded out of their buses, past my office, and up onto the risers to give voice to all their practice and hard work. It has been a gift to me this Thursday and already I have heard from the teachers how our building and grounds and the hospitality of our people have blessed these teachers and students. The openness of our building serves as one expression of the Christian practice of hospitality we discussed on Wednesday night last week. These students and teachers are strangers to Highland Hills, yet, as a church, we have opened our space to them, offering what we have and receiving in return the gift of God’s presence in them. It is, of course, the low hanging fruit in the practice of hospitality. The challenge comes when welcoming strangers makes us uncomfortable or costs us something. When the stranger seems undesirable, unlovable, unworthy, embodying all the fears that strangers and their proverbial danger can evoke. I suppose if hospitality was always easy we wouldn’t have to practice it.
But of course, we do have to work at being hospitable. We have to practice it in tangible, concrete ways, opening our church building, our homes, our tables, and our lives. We have to practice it together as a community. We cannot be secretively hospitable—or at least we cannot only be hospitable in secret. Each time we welcome the stranger, this practice bears witness to our faith and who we believe God to be. We know that the hospitality of God has brought us into the family of faith, and it is with that vision we strive towards a more loving and faithful welcome towards others. And somehow each time we open our arms, each time we say yes to the possibility, to the person before us, we find ourselves surrounded just a bit more by the Kingdom of God that is breaking into our world. I hear choirs of children today, but I wonder if with each passing note if the choirs of heaven aren’t getting just a little bit closer.