The Art of Neighboring

Now grab your message notes as we continue this series, Rich Your Life. We are going to look at a kind of generosity that I think most Christians never think about. Even though the Bible commands it, even though Jesus told parables about it, even though it was clearly one of the key values of early Christians, even though it is super fun. You know, the Bible commands us to do a lot of things, and some of the commandments are hard. This is a commandment that's actually super fun, but nobody ever talks about it. I've never done a sermon on it. I've never done a teaching about it. Today is a first for me. I'm talking about hospitality. It is so underrated and so underappreciated, and here's why we need to know this now more than ever.

Have you ever heard of the term cocooning? This is a term that a sociologist named Faith Popcorn coined. By the way, isn't that a great name? Faith Popcorn, with a name like Renee Schlepfer. I am just so envious of her, let me just tell you. But she coined this term to describe how people in America are starting to cocoon and stay inside their own homes and not go out as much to movies and so on. Now she coined this phrase two decades ago, now she says we're going through a new phase that she calls super cocooning. She says, why go chat with your friends anymore when you can just do an instant message over Facebook, right? Why go out shopping when you can just do it online? And she says what's happening is fewer and fewer people are venturing out, and that's why you can drive through whole neighborhoods and never see any kids outside playing. Have you noticed that? And never see neighbors outside walking. She says our neighborhoods aren't filled with neighbors, they're filled with strangers. They're strangerhoods now.

Now watch this. Recent poll, just taken this last month, only one in four Americans now say they even know most of their neighbors. And it gets worse because fewer than one in five say they trust their neighbors. Isn't that fascinating? And that's why society is getting so fragmented and you're seeing people calling each other names and being so fearful and anxious and distrustful. We don't even know our neighbors anymore. How can we trust somebody in Washington DC or across to the other side of some other state that's some other color on a political map, right? Our society is fragmenting. So what can you and I do about this? And maybe most importantly, how can we keep the cocooning virus from infecting what God wants to do through the community of faith?

Well I call this message the art of neighboring. And I want to kick this off by showing you what it looks like to neighbor well. There's a famous writer named Malcolm Gladwell who tells the story of a little city named Rossetto. Rossetto Pennsylvania. And researchers have been studying this city for years because it's a fascinating place. They have fewer heart attacks. They enjoy longer life than almost any community in the United States. They have hardly any heart disease. There's virtually no suicide, virtually no alcoholism, no drug addiction, no crime. And this is not just recent. This has gone on for over a century. People there live healthy, happy, long lives. So experts wanted to know why. And they investigated their diet, their environment. They took DNA samples and investigated their genetics. And finally they came to a conclusion. The reason for their health and happiness and long life has nothing to do with their genetics. It's their lifestyle.

Gladwell writes, "They visited each other. They stopped to chat in Italian on the streets. They cooked for each other, extended families where the town's social structure, many homes had three generations under one roof." And watch this. Researchers saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. In other words, people in Rossetto looked a lot like these descriptions of the early Christians. Look at your notes, all the verses there under Roman numeral one as we begin to investigate the science and art of hospitality. First let's look at the importance of hospitality all through the Bible, like in Acts 2:46. And let's read this verse out loud together since it's about community. All right, let's read it together. They worshiped together at the temple each day, met in homes for the Lord's supper and shared their meals with great joy and generosity.

People were drawn to the Christians because they were the ones having fun. They were the ones inviting people over for meals. They were the ones who were living like these people in Rossetto, Pennsylvania, right? Look at 1 Timothy, the apostle Paul. He's listing all the virtues that church elders should have. You know, the highest office in a local church, kind of like the pastors and the main organizers of the church. And we remember virtues he lists like they should be faithful. They should be self-controlled. But it seems to me like we often forget the last one on this list. They should be hospitable. In other words, hospitality is a sign of Christian maturity. Hospitality is a really big deal to God.

Check out this next verse. The writer of Hebrews says, "Do not forget," don't forget, "to show," what? "Hospitality to strangers for," watch this, "by doing so, some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." This is probably a reference to a fascinating story in Genesis 18 where Abraham and Sarah in their days in the desert entertained three strangers only later to discover they were angels. And you might think, "Oh, that's Bible story stuff. That'll never happen to me." I can almost guarantee you that it will. Because did you know that the word angel does not necessarily mean heavenly angel? The word angel in Greek just means messenger, a bringer of good news, an emissary. And I can guarantee you from personal experience, when you show hospitality, you sometimes find that the most unexpected people become emissaries, messengers of God's love and hope and grace to you, sometimes even just little children.

Now look at Jesus in Matthew 25. He says to people entering the kingdom, "For I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you invited me into your home." Jesus says, get this, when you show hospitality to somebody, he considers it as if you are showing hospitality to him. There are so many more verses. Do a word search in your Bible program on hospitality and you will find so many verses recommending and even commanding it. But I'm just going to give you one more that you might not think of as a hospitality verse. When Jesus is asked, "What do you think is the most important command in the Bible?" He says, "Well, there's two, love God, love your neighbor." Now I think most churches try to do a pretty good job talking about loving God, but we might under emphasize love your neighbor.

What I'm saying here is biblical hospitality is nothing less than learning to do best what Jesus said matters most. Do you get that? It's learning to do best what Jesus said matters most, love your neighbor. So hospitality is a really big deal in the Bible. Now that I'm convinced of that, what is it? What's it look like? Page two, let's look at Roman numeral two, the nature of Christian hospitality, because there are a lot of misconceptions about what hospitality is. In America, when people in our culture think of hospitality, I think for a lot of people, there is a name and a face that comes to mind. Shout out what names come to your mind when you think of hospitality. What are some of the names? Just start shouting them out. The first person I heard said it, Martha Stewart, right? That's the face of hospitality in American culture. We think of her perfect kitchen and the book, remember the book that kind of made her name, it was titled Entertaining. How many of you have this book? Several of you do, right? That's what we think of when we think of hospitality.

We've got to put on a Martha Stewart worthy entertainment, right? Then there's another thing that comes to mind. I was actually doing a Google search of the phrase, just the word hospitality, and the first several pages of my search, every single site that came up in my Google search was about the hospitality industry. In America, we've industrialized hospitality, right? It's hotels, it's restaurants, and there's nothing wrong with the hospitality industry. What I'm getting at is the perception of it's got to be a hotel concierge level, Martha Stewart level thing I'm putting on. I think that actually prevents the average Christian from actually keeping this command to show hospitality because we think we've got to put on a Downton Abbey level banquet for VIPs, right?

There's a priest named Max King, or rather Jack King, and he has coined a phrase that I really like, scruffy hospitality. Don't you like that? Let's say that together. Scruffy hospitality. Scruffy hospitality means you are not waiting for your place to be perfect before you invite people over. He says, "We tell our guests, 'Come as you are. Maybe we should tell ourselves, 'Host as you are.'" The bottom line is this, scruffy hospitality is not about inviting perfect people into your perfect home. It's about inviting imperfect people into your imperfect heart. It's not about your home anyway. Hospitality is about your heart.

Did you know that Jesus talked about scruffy hospitality? But he took it even a step further. He said, "Not only can you be scruffy, invite scruffy." In Luke 14:12–14, for the rest of the sermon, I want to kind of dial down in this passage in Luke. Jesus is at a dinner and he does some teaching on hospitality. He says, "When you put on a luncheon or a banquet, don't invite your friends, brothers, relatives, rich neighbors, for they'll invite you back and that'll be your only reward. Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who couldn't repay you." Now, what's the point of this? Is Jesus saying, "You can never have your friends over again." That is over now. Of course not. In fact, it's the opposite of that as we'll see.

What Jesus is saying is this, practice grace-based hospitality, not reward-based hospitality. Does that make sense to you? Don't have people over just because there's something in it for you. Do it just to grace them as an overflow of how generous God has been to you. Don't go, "What kind of a little housewarming gift are they going to bring me? Or, well, are they going to thank me enough? Or what are they going to bring over for our meal?" Just don't worry about that. Just do it to grace them. So let's drill down into this. What is grace-based hospitality? This is a term that Tim Keller came up with and he defines it like this, three bullet points. It's welcoming people into your living space. Your living space. Now, I didn't say home because these days housing crisis or you're in college, some of you might be renting a room in a house or even a couch in a house.

So maybe your living space that you can invite people to isn't the space where you sleep. Maybe it's a coffee house. Maybe it's a bench at the beach. Maybe it's a shop where you can meet people, get to know them, right? However, when possible, it is a great idea to have people into your actual home. Why? Because they get to know you better. It's not about your home. It's about your heart. But when they see your home, they get to know you a little bit better. They walk down your hallway. They see the pictures you put up. They say, "Oh, I didn't know. You did this? I didn't know you painted watercolors. Oh, is this you in high school? I didn't know you played trombone in high school. Is this your grandson, Rene? I didn't know you had a grandson. Tell me more about him. Why don't you talk about him more in church?" They'll get to know you.

So you welcome people into your living space and then it's treating strangers as family. Treating strangers as family. Did you know this is actually what the Greek word used in the New Testament for hospitality means? Watch this. Hospitality in the Bible is a combination of two Greek words, phileos, as in we have a major American city that has this as its root. What city is it? Philadelphia. So what does phileos mean? Brotherly love. That's right. It's a combination of phileos and a word that seems to be the opposite, xenos. And xenos is the Greek word at the root of xenophobia, the fear of the stranger. It means somebody who's your stranger, somebody who is a foreigner, even somebody who is an enemy. And so biblical hospitality is treating the stranger, the foreigner, even your enemy, like family.

Now what does it mean stranger? Typically there's two kinds of strangers the Bible talks about actually a lot. And first is refugees, displaced people. And this is in the Bible again and again like Leviticus 19:33 says this. Look at this. When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. That is pretty direct. And no matter what you think of how the governments should respond to refugees around the world, and we can disagree on that, as believers we are to pray for and love and treat these people as our own brothers and sisters according to scripture.

Now that's the first kind of stranger in the Bible, but more often than that in our daily lives the stranger is just somebody who is strange to you, different than you. Maybe they are a different political party than you are. Maybe they have a different opinion on some hot button issue than you have. Maybe they're a different ethnicity than you, a different skin color than you. Maybe they're a different life stage than you. And what the Bible is saying is treat that other as a friend. And this is more crucial than ever before. There's a new book out that introduces the term RCO. I love this because RCO stands for repugnant cultural other. And the author says these days it's like it's feast time for this repugnant cultural other thing. Everybody's got an RCO. People you don't even want to know them. You've decided already they are just repugnant to you.

Now I'm going to be very bold here. I think most of us have at least one group that's your RCO that you just sort of dismiss in your mind. Who is your RCO? Don't say it out loud, but let me just suggest some ideas. Pastors who always brag about their grandsons. No, don't say that out loud. Maybe for you it's Democrats. Maybe for you it's Republicans. Maybe for you it's that NRA crowd with all their guns. Or maybe for you it's that gun control crowd. Or maybe for you it's blacks or Asians or whites or gays. Who is your RCO? Now you might be wondering, well who is yours Renee? Well you know what, I'll tell you. My wife and I were discussing this a couple of days ago because we both read the same book review and we were talking about this concept of RCO and how this is popping up in society all the time. People just hating each other, right? Refusing to even listen to each other.

And I was kind of like, I don't think I have one. I'm not that prejudiced. She goes, oh yeah? And she said, here's what I think it is for you and for me. Maybe this will surprise you. I can view as my RCOs other Christians who are not from the same neighborhood of the Christian world as I am from. For example, I can view other Christians as, well you've got the super hyper fundamentalists over here, right? And they're so literalist minded. They embarrass me when I see them as talking heads on TV. They don't get the Bible. And surely they don't understand the gospel. They don't get grace. They're legalists. I'm not even going to listen to those hyper fundamentalists. They're just all legalists. And then on the other side, here's the progressive Christians. And I think these progressive Christians are so progressive they probably don't even believe in God anymore. And they're from that progressive denomination. So I'm not going to even listen to them. I don't even have to fellowship with them because it's just not worth my time.

And of course I see myself in the wise middle, right? How do I know what that fundamentalist thinks? How dare I even judge that person because they're wearing clothes that I think, oh, that looks like the super conservative fundamentalist. How dare I judge this person because they're going to a church that I think is one of those progressive churches? How do I know what they believe? How do I know what their heart is? How do I know about their spiritual journey? How do I know about what they think their mission is in their church? The only way I'm going to know is if I allow these RCOs into my life and I get to know them, treat the stranger as a brother so that God can turn some into friends. And he will.

You know, how many of you ever heard when I was a kid they used to say, "Jesus is the unseen guest at every table." Have you ever heard that? You know the biblical idea is more like he's the unseen host at every table. He's like a host who wants to introduce different people that he loves. And he's like, "You're going to really love this person over here." And you're like, "But that's in my RCO group." But he's going, "No, no, no. I want you guys to get to know each other because you will come closer to me through your relationship with one another." Supernatural things happen when we practice grace-based hospitality. But I have to caution you, Jesus didn't say, "Love your neighbor so you can fix him." He just said, "Love him." And I don't know about you, but my tendency can be to treat people as a project, right? "Oh, yeah, I can do this so I can convert them." You know what I've noticed? That tends to rub people the wrong way.

You say, "But I want them to know Jesus." Well, but that attitude is counterproductive. What you do is you just love them and let the Holy Spirit do his work and supernatural things will start to happen. Hospitality is about giving God space for those healing conversations about, like Jesus, to start to take place. You're going, "Okay, it's important. I can see the virtue of it. So how do I do it?" Let's wrap up by looking at the practice of hospitality. And I want to go back to that passage in Luke because next Jesus tells a parable. And he says it's kind of like this. A certain man was preparing a great banquet and he invited many guests. And at the time of the banquet, he sent his servant to tell those who'd been invited, "Come, for everything is now ready." But they all alike began to make excuses. And they make all kinds of excuses. And of course, Jesus is telling the story about his own ministry. He's saying, "God the Father has prepared this banquet of grace. The gospel is free. It's a banquet he has laid out for people."

But the religious leaders and the social leaders that he first sent this message to rejected the invitation, the respectable people. And so here's what happens. The servant came back and reported to his master. And then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, "Go out quickly into the streets and the alleys of the town. Bring in the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame." "Sir," the servant said, "what you ordered has been done, but there's still room." And then the master told his servant, "Then go out to the roads and the country lanes and compel them to come in so that my house will be full." And what Jesus is saying is, "That's what I have done. And so that's what I want you to do. Go out to the roads. Don't cocoon. Go out to the sidewalk in front of your house and welcome people in."

I want to show you one way that one person is applying this. You can apply this in lots of ways. You don't have to do her thing. But there's a church in Austin, Texas. How many of you have ever been to Austin? Anybody here ever been to Austin? Yeah? We got some Austin natives here. Is it not sort of the Santa Cruz of Texas? It's the one spot in Santa Cruz, and that's sort of the Santa Cruz-y spot. Well, there's a great church there that did a little three-minute documentary about an idea that a woman in their church had just last year. Watch this. I'm Kristen Schell, and I live in Austin, Texas. I am a wife and a mother of four children. Any given day, I am in the kitchen or in the minivan. I am active in the kids' school. I'm a writer, and I volunteer at church. We've been in this neighborhood almost 10 years.

I always knew we were supposed to love our neighbors because that's the great commandment. But how you live that out day to day is hard, especially when you don't know your neighbors, which is the situation I was in. I did not know my neighbors. Sure, I knew a handful of them. So there was this huge question, "What do you want me to do, Lord? Here I am, Lord. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to walk across the street and bang on doors? Do you want me to take cookies? What do you want me to do, Lord?" God answers prayers in really winsome ways. I was hosting a party with a friend in our backyard, and I didn't have any tables. And so I ordered a picnic table from Lowe's. And when it arrived two days later, I knew. I knew that for the purposes of the party, I was going to have it in my backyard. But as soon as that party was over, I was moving that table in the front yard, and it was going to be a gathering place.

And so I painted it turquoise, which is my favorite color. And I did. I put it outside underneath the tree in the front yard. It was awkward at first. I have this table. It's bright turquoise. It's sitting in the front yard. And now I'm like, "Well, now what do I do?" So I took a whole bunch of stuff out with me. I took my phone and my journal and my computer. And I even had some art stuff that I was working on, because, you know, I needed to look like I was just doing something. But going out front, I was saying to God, "Here I am, Lord. Your will be done. Go before, behind, and beside me into the neighborhood." And that very day, life changed. And I met a neighbor within three hours of putting a table out in my front yard.

A lot has happened since putting the table out there. There are a handful of women who are now very close friends who I did not know. It has become kind of a gathering place. I'm Bob. Nice to meet you. This is my daughter Peggy. So one of the best things is just the sense of normal community, everyday life. When the neighborhood kids come over, they'll do homework when the weather's pretty. We've had lemonade stands, hot cocoa stands. More intimately, it's a place where I can meet and have met neighbors who now pop by with coffee and just for 15 minutes a cup, a conversation over coffee that wouldn't have happened. But the Lord has taught me and I am learning to be present. And that, it sounds like it should be a no-brainer, but listening is not a skill that came naturally at first to me, nor was being present.

It's great to see you here. Loving my neighbors has taught me how to love God better. It's drawn me into deeper relationship with Him. You don't need permission or a program to go outside and be who Christ has called you to be. When we open up our front door and we take three steps right out our front yard, good things happen. Open up your door and let God do the rest. Isn't that awesome? You know what's interesting about this? In less than a year since that video was made, this has turned into a national movement. She wrote a book called The Turquoise Table. There's thousands of turquoise tables across 40 states now. The Today Show even did a story on it about three months ago. And actually this year, my wife, Lori, and I have decided that we are going to do this.

It might not be turquoise, but we're going to repurpose our own front yard and put a little patio out there with furniture and so on. So we hang out there and more intentionally get to know our neighbors. There are neighbors on our street in Santa Cruz that I barely know. I don't even remember some other names. And so how can I love my neighbor when I don't even know my neighbor? So here's what you and I can do. Just start by being inviting. Am I inviting as an individual? That's so important. Do you even know the names of your neighbors? I put this little graphic on the bottom of your notes. Do you see that? And I want to encourage you to just fill in this little chart at home today. And if you're like me, some of those squares will be blank. Well, keep filling them in. And not just their names. Write down their kids' names and what else you know about them. What do they need for work? How can you pray about them? What challenges are they facing? Put it up somewhere. Memorize it. Begin to pray for your neighbors by name.

Again, it is so easy to put labels on people, right? Even your own neighbors. You walk past people whose names you don't know anything about them, but their yard is a mess, so they are probably meth dealers. That is my conclusion about these people. These people have a demon-possessed dog. They are evil Satanists. I just know it. No, these people have stories. They've got backgrounds. So I need to begin seeing them as people. And I'm preaching to myself here, for sure. Start by being inviting. Now, before I get to the final points real quick, I just want to take a couple of minutes to say I hope to apply this as a church in a real specific way.

You might know that today we're launching the pledge phase of phase two of our 2020 Vision Initiative. In phase one, we built our new school building here on our campus and a school and clinic building near Chennai, India. And honestly, I thought of just handing out the brochures today and praying and saying, go home, read these things, because if everybody who pledged to phase one pledges to phase two, then we're going to be able to get it done. But this is such a perfect application of this message. I want to just take a couple of minutes to talk to you about this. Because Twin Lakes Church has a next door neighbor, Cabrillo College. What if we built a front porch that faces the college and the community? A college ministry center. Picture this. Picture an outdoor patio space with tables and chairs, sort of our version of the turquoise table, right on our property that's the closest to Cabrillo College. People can see it from the road.

And then second, an indoor coffee house with places to study. And then a multipurpose meeting space. That's number three for Bible studies, maybe concerts, art shows. Now picture the thousands of Cabrillo College students, many hundreds of which, any given week are sitting in their cars in our parking lot, because it's free to park here. And they're there between classes just kind of hanging out. Picture them here, studying here, making friends here, being introduced to the church community here on our front porch. Now here's why this is, yeah praise God, I think it is kind of an essential ministry. But here's why this is so important. The Fuller Institute did research that says that half of all students with a faith background lose their faith in college. I want you to just let that sink in. Because behind that stat are real people. Picture all the teenagers you know, all the high schoolers and the college age young adults you know.

Just think of who those people are in your life right now. Maybe grandchildren, maybe children and their friends. Picture them all lined up here across the stage in a line, okay? You got that picture? Now go down that line and just count off one, two, one, two like you used to count off for games. One, two, one, two, one, two. Now imagine all the ones stay with their faith and all the twos go out the door and never come back. I mean that's what's happening. And I want to make something clear. The college is not our antagonist. We love Cabrillo and we love UCSC. But at that stage of life people are deciding what are my values going to be and not my parents' values. And I want to be in the mix. I want to be present when they're making those choices as a positive option for them.

Just imagine that taking place on our church campus and imagine having that kind of an influence on these people. Now the answer is not of course just building facilities. I'm happy to say that our college and young adult ministry has tripled in the last two years. The answer is a thriving ministry. Momentum really is already building. So let's give that ministry a launching pad. Jesus said love your neighbor and Cabrillo is our neighbor. So let's apply this. Let's open our living space and welcome strangers into our home so that God can make some of them into friends.

Now as you leave today you're going to get these little orange brochures that have a lot more details in them and questions and floor plans and stuff that answer some of your questions. And they'll detail another part of this pledge drive includes raising a million pounds of food for the food bank this year. A million pounds that's part of being a good neighbor. And it also includes refurbishments for Camp Hammer. That's another great ministry to young people. And I just want to assure you that I do not believe in high pressure building campaigns because people are pressured into giving. They're not going to give after the pressure goes away. So actually we believe in low key building campaigns. We just ask you to read this. Pray about it for about a month. The books all have pledge cards that look like this. We would encourage you to just put this somewhere where you're going to see it for a month and pray about the possibility of your involvement in this.

And then the weekend before Thanksgiving we'll ask you to turn in your pledge cards filled out if you've chosen to participate. And the weekend after Thanksgiving we'll announce the totals. So pray about this. And in fact we're going to pray about it here in just a couple of minutes. But as a church and as individuals we need to start by being inviting and resist the tendency to cocoon. We need to go out to the roads and the byways. And then second consider serving in a hospitality ministry here at Twin Lakes Church. There are lots here. Serving dinner at the winter shelters for the homeless. Our own Wednesday People's Pantry giving out free groceries. Our Sunshine Ministry. If you're interested in getting more information just email Robin@TLC.org and she will direct you where you need to go. But you start somewhere.

And then finally as you do this you make sure you stay rooted in God's hospitality to you. Stay rooted in God's hospitality to you. Because if you think of hospitality as just another to do list on a long list of items that you're supposed to do as a believer. I already had enough on my list now you've added hospitality great. You're going to end up being burned out and bitter and resentful. But the gospel is not a to do list. The gospel is a relationship with Jesus. In fact he compared a relationship with him to sitting down to dinner with him in Revelation 3. And so as we develop that relationship with Jesus enjoying his hospitality to us that is going to naturally come bubbling up. It's going to begin to overflow to others. The bottom line. God shows outrageous hospitality. So should we. Jesus left his palace to come down to our world so we can join him at his palace. To let's do the same have the same kind of attitude toward other people.

And right now let's thank God for his lavish hospitality to us. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father thank you so much for coming all the way from your throne to our world. And help us to be as outrageously hospitable in some way that that fits with us to other people as you have been to us. And Lord I just want to confess personally that this hasn't always been a personal priority for me. So so help me to prioritize this. I really want to. And Lord we would just ask that you would guide us as a church about how you want us to have a front porch ministry toward our neighbor Cabrillo College and the Aptos community. We don't want to do anything you don't want us to do. Yet we do want to risk those talents that you have given us and invest them for the kingdom. So I pray that as we each individually pray about this that you would guide us as a church together and help each of us to see ways that we can be hospitable in your name in our own lives to people who may be strangers to us. To give your Holy Spirit space to do miracles. And we pray all this with gratitude in Jesus name. Amen.