Christian Hospitality: Part One — Bryant Martin — Ep. 116

Well, hello and welcome to this episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here in State College, Pennsylvania, with Bryant Martin, and Bryant is the owner of Seward's Harvest Café, which is where we're shooting here. Bryant, it's just really good to have you here with us today, and we want to talk about hospitality. And I know it's something you're passionate about, you care a lot about. That's something that people notice, people know about you, is that you care deeply about hospitality.

This obviously ties into the work that you're doing here at Seward's Harvest, but it's much broader than that. Tell us how you define hospitality, what's the working definition for us, and why is it important to you? So before we kind of jump in, I'd like to first give credit to two different people in my life and one particular group in my life that have impacted me very much when it comes to hospitality. The first one is my father.

My father has been a truck driver for years, and growing up, we never knew who my dad might bring back to our home with him after a day on the road. He was somebody who loved strangers, and he was somebody who loved Jesus, and he loved telling people about Jesus, about the gospel, and it just came out of him. And so today, even today, he still is driving at 70-some years old, and he still has a circuit that he makes where people that he's looking forward to at these different locations that he picks up at regularly, where he's talking about the gospel with them and engaging with them. And so he's impacted my life in so many ways.

The other one is my wife. I couldn't do, I couldn't take care of our friends and those that we care about without her help. She loves people herself. She herself grew up in a family where it was very hospitable, and that has impacted her. And today she's stewarding that and serving this, joyfully sacrifices herself and pours herself out in serving people who come to our place for meals. So that's a huge, a huge blessing in my life. The third entity is Seward's Harvest and the team here. Just seeing them just reaching out and just in ways that sometimes took me out of my comfort zone, just seeing how vulnerable they were, how kind they were.

And so that has impacted me greatly as well. And so I feel like I stand on the backs of giants, of people who are serving in so many ways. So I want to just share that upfront before we dive in. So on hospitality, what is it? It's actually, it's maybe somewhat of an intimidating word, but just simply, it's just loving strangers or being kind to strangers is just the simple definition of it. And I want to keep it that way in my life. Just being kind, being kind to that person that you meet on your street or when you're out shopping or here at Seward's, being kind, showing them the love of Christ. Interestingly, just yesterday I realized that my own children didn't really know what hospitality meant.

We kind of know what it is, but what exactly is it? And my children have helped serve guests at our place and even here at Seward's, and they love people too. Exciting to see. But the word hospitality was out of their range. And so very simply, it is just loving strangers and those around us. So why does it matter is the other part of your question, or why do I think it matters? And I think more than ever right now, love of strangers or hospitality matters. We live in a world where the rhetoric is so intense and it's only increasing. The heat is on, the pressure is for us to choose sides, and our tendency can be just to capitulate or just to throw up our hands and just back away, bury our heads in the sand, make the field lay longer, put up the walls, whatever, and to protect ourselves from what looks like so much hate and animosity, whether between ethnicities, whether between governments, parties, et cetera.

But I would like to read from Rosetta's Butterfield's book, The Gospel Comes with a Housekey, a book that I recommend reading. She's got, it's incredibly inspirational. I want to read two paragraphs here to challenge us along this line. Living out radically ordinary Christian hospitality means knowing that your relationship with others must be as strong as your words. The balance cannot tip here. Having strong words and a weak relationship with your neighbor is violent. It captures the violent carelessness of our social media-induced age. This is not how neighbors talk with each other. This is not how image bearers of the same God relate to one another. Radically ordinary hospitality values the time it takes to invest in relationships, to build bridges, to repent of past sins, to reconcile.

Bridge building and remaking friendships cannot be rushed. Instead of feeling sidelined by the sucker punches of post-Christianity, Christians are called to practice radical ordinary hospitality to renew their resolve in Christ. Too many of us are sidelined by fears. We fear that people will hurt us. We fear that people will negatively influence our children. We fear that we do not even understand the language of this new world order, least of all its people. We long for days gone by. Our sentimentality makes us stupid. We need to snap ourselves out of the self-pitying revere.

The best days are ahead. Jesus advances from the front lines. Challenging two paragraphs to me. And what I want to lift out of those two paragraphs is this: that the reputation of Jesus, our King, is at stake here. I believe foundationally that's why hospitality matters. Jesus loved strangers. We can just think of so many examples through the Gospels. The woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, Zacchaeus, the list goes on. Even you and I today, he loves those that he maybe has never met personally, but he loved those people, those strangers around them. He said things like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

The verse that we have here in our café, "I didn't come to be served, but to serve." And we see him through his life reaching out in just tangible ways to those around him and even dining with them or eating with them, much to often the shock of his Jewish contemporaries around him. Like one writer says, Mark Langwell, he says, "We learn from Jesus' fellowship meals that our tables should be places of radical welcome, especially for those who feel lonely and on the outside. This is the shape of the kingdom of God." So we need to look, just immerse ourselves in the Gospels, fall in love with Jesus and who he is and what he wants us to do, and allow that just to inflame our imagination.

Like how can we show hospitality to the folks right around us at the end of our lane, on our street, down the block, in our workplace, those we rub shoulders with every day? How can we show them kindness? Christian hospitality is about lifting up Jesus foundationally, seeing him worshiped and seeing more people brought into communion with him through our hospitality, through our kindness to strangers, so that he can be worshiped by people and in places that he's never been worshiped before. So that was the first reason because of Jesus, why it matters. The second reason of why it matters is that the advance of the kingdom of God is at stake.

I was just reading at the end of Acts, and there Luke is talking about the Apostle Paul. And what is he doing? He is there proclaiming the kingdom of God. And we know that many others, all the apostles and many of their followers, were doing that, proclaiming that this kingdom of God has come to earth through Jesus. And the early church changed the world, and they did it through just simple acts of service, through showing kindness to strangers. As someone has said, the early church didn't say, "Look what the world is coming to." Rather, they said, "Look who's coming to the world." And that was the beautiful message of Jesus that they preached in the face of animosity and much persecution.

So they put into action their faith by serving the strangers around them. And so today it's the same way. Today we live in an increasingly post-Christian West, and there's much that comes at us, and we can fear and pull back and become vulnerable, but it's the same way. We still need to step out, as the early church did, and advance the kingdom of God by just showing kindness to strangers. A recent Barnapole poll with a bunch of millennial folks and trying to determine how, if you were approached about religion, how would you like to be approached? And the first one was we would want to be, we would prefer to talk one-on-one with somebody in context of a relationship.

The most negative one on the list was a track on a sidewalk. They would not like from a stranger. And so even like today we see just that the importance of a relationship, friendship, connection, care shown through hospitality to people, and I think that will make them really desire to know more. As someone has said, "You can't answer questions that people aren't asking.

You need to make yourself accessible to your neighbor, to that person in your workplace, to that customer, to that person on the sidewalk. You need to make yourself accessible to those around you. And then as they get to know you and they begin to ask questions, that's when you can give answers." And so to me, hospitality, bringing people into your home, hosting them in an environment like this, even in a workplace environment where you have people coming regularly and sitting down, gives you them opportunity to ask you questions when they're ready. And I think that is so important.

Tim Keller, he planted a church in Manhattan. Recently listened to a blog, a podcast that he gave. And one of the things he said really stood out to me is this person who was interviewing him asked him like, "How did you plant a church in such a materialistic part of the world?" And this is what he said, "Bring people to the place that they wish Christianity was true and then tell them it's true. We first need to appeal to people's emotional sense and then follow that up with logical sense." And so as we become friends with people, as we bring them into our home, open ourselves up, be vulnerable to them, let them see us in our everyday context, that's when I believe that they'll be moved to want to know more.

At that point, we can engage them when they ask questions in that context of relationship. Rosetta Butterfield says this, "In post-Christian communities, your words can only be as strong as your relationships. Your best weapon is an open door, a set table, a fresh pot of coffee, and a box of Kleenex for the tears that spill."

Why does hospitality matter? It mattered because the advance of the kingdom of God, I believe, is at stake on this. We all need to enter into this ministry of hospitality. And finally, my third point of why it matters is my soul is at stake.

That sounds serious, but I believe it's that serious that if we're not entering into the ministry of showing kindness to strangers, being hospitable, that our soul is at stake. Just go to Matthew 25, there Jesus gives a parable of the talents and lets me know the story.

I believe that we in the West here and as Anabaptist people, we've been given five talents. We have so much. And that even in terms of hospitality, I believe we've been taught so much of how to be hospitable, especially to each other within our own culture and our own group. But taking that, what's been given to us and stewarding that for the advance of the kingdom, I believe we'll be held responsible for that.

And then at the end of that chapter, there it says the Son of God is going to judge the world and he's going to separate the sheep from the goats. And he talks about these words. He says, "I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me." To those who did these things, he said, "Welcome into paradise. Well done, my good and faithful servant. For those who didn't, were cast into darkness." And so that's why it matters. At the end of the day, our own soul matters in regards to hospitality and how we're using it and stewarding it for the kingdom of God.

So in a nutshell, what you're saying is that hospitality matters to you because it should matter to each Christian as a part of them living out their call to be a servant of Christ is really what I think I'm hearing you say.

Rosetta Butterfield talks about how, yeah, every Christian is called to this. You don't need a PhD. You don't need to take some kind of classes. We all can do that. We all can be kind. We all can give a cup of cold water. We all can give a smile and a welcome. We can learn their name. We can welcome them many times to our place. And so, yeah, every person, I believe, will be held responsible or accountable to how they have stewarded this ministry of hospitality. Of course, we know even to the apostles talked about it in different ones of their letters to the churches of how important hospitality is. And we're even supposed to be like given to it or just striving after hospitality.

So I want to back up a little bit to a few things you said in your opening statements. One is, I think it was when you were reading in the book, you talked about reaching out to lonely people. And another part you mentioned was the intense just racial divide that we're in in this time of our lives and just the different ethnic tensions. And I'd like to hear a little bit from you about your experience here because you're in state college right next to the Penn State campus.

And there is a lot of diversity here. There's a lot of just different groups here. And most of those people, I think they're coming from abroad to study here. They don't have many friends. They don't have a big peer group. What's your experience here? What are some practical tips that you would give from operating the café and inviting people into your homes completely outside of this work context? What are some practical tips for people who maybe are tuning in here and saying, "Oh, maybe I should be doing better at this." Yeah, Jesus did call us to that.

What are some practical ways that they can start implementing more hospitality in their own lives and reaching out and being a salt and light to others? That's a really good question. And it's something that I'm still wrestling with and wanting to grow more in of how do I reach out to those who are different than me.

But one of the neat things about this context here in a café environment is we have people come all the time or they come repeatedly, right? You got to get that cup of coffee every day, of course. So they come a lot. And we're driven to just show them dignity as an image bearer of God as we are one with them. And it doesn't matter who they are, what narrative they're pushing, which often is visible.

Our goal is to give them a smile, get their name and say, "Welcome here. Thank you for coming. Thank you for choosing us today. Come back again tomorrow." And really soon, you begin to break down that wall that is there. It takes time. Some people take a year or two.

There's just different people going through my mind of the word that has happened. One is a friend that's been coming here ever since we opened. And he's an atheist. And he and I have become good friends. And just on Friday, his family was here.

He came Friday morning. His daughter was having a birthday on Saturday. And we got to sing happy birthday for his family. And got to talk and connect and catch up. We kind of got separated on the pandemic a little bit.

But just showing kindness to people as you are created in the image of God, just as I am. And to try to just look past what's in front, what you see, and see them as a human being, as someone God has created. But yeah, just regular interaction here is probably the strongest point that I can make is finding places where you can meet people over and over again. And slowly, they become your friend. And then at that point, you can welcome them into your home.

But oftentimes, you can't do that right away. It's just in our culture, especially here in the West, if it's an American, not quite as easily. You can't quite as easily welcome them in as soon to your home. But now, in terms of international students, which we have thousands of those here, those tend to be more interested. They want to know that they're in the culture of the West, of the United States.

And so they're often more open to coming into your home. And so we end up interacting a lot with international students. So did I answer your question there? Or what do you think? Yeah, I think so. I think so. You've mentioned about the café here and the opportunities that have been given to you of people coming in day after day. But most of us don't have a café. So too bad. Too bad. So what are some practical tips for maybe the rest of us, so to speak, that don't have a place where people are coming to us? How do we in our day-to-day lives start building hospitality and rapport with other people if we don't have a central location that people are coming to us at?

Well, I wish I could give you a seven-step formula and it would be solved, the problem be solved. But at the end of the day, there's so many different contexts that we all operate in. And so we need to just ask God to open up our eyes to find and see these opportunities. Like I say, opportunities never come labeled, right? So Lord, help us see these opportunities around us where we could interact with people and build those relationships. And then finally, have them into our home, into our context, and get to know them there even more where they can see how we live and operate even into our church. There is a principle that I would like to talk about, and that's called the Emmaus pattern.

And so you think of Jesus on the Emmaus road walking with his disciples there. And so it's just three points: walking, talking. We know that Jesus walked and he was talking with them and sharing them about the Messiah out of the Old Testament. And also then he sat and he ate with them. And that's when their eyes were opened. So something really amazing happened there at that table. But just looking at those three areas: walking, talking, dining, or eating, if we can just somehow figure out how can we walk with people? And it might actually mean going for a walk with somebody. Just this morning, one of the brothers from our congregation went out on a walk with a man he has met here.

And they actually went for a walk. And so walking with people, whether physically, but the general idea is a spiritual walking along with somebody. So finding places that you can get to know people where you can walk with them or you make yourself accessible to them where they can get to know you, observe you. And then finally, you have that bridge built where you can invite them into your home where you can talk more and you can dine with them. So just three things and think about how could I just do the Emmaus road principle of walking, talking, and dining.