The Gospel Comes with a House Key E-Book

Rosaria Butterfield

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 391

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

What did God use to draw a radical, committed unbeliever to himself? Did God take her to an evangelistic rally? Or, since she had her doctorate in literature, did he use something in print? No, God used an invitation to dinner in a modest home, from a humble couple who lived out the gospel daily, simply, and authentically. With this story of her conversion as a backdrop, Rosaria Butterfield invites us into her home to show us how God can use this same "radical, ordinary hospitality" to bring the gospel to our lost friends and neighbors. Such hospitality sees our homes as not our own, but as God's tools for the furtherance of his kingdom as we welcome those who look, think, believe, and act differently from us into our everyday, sometimes messy lives—helping them see what true Christian faith really looks like.

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“Artfully woven into the fabric of who we are, each of us possesses an urgency to be included, an ache to be known, and a longing to be welcomed. In this book, Rosaria describes how the good news of the gospel not only meets our deepest needs but transforms us into cohosts who invite others to meet Jesus. Rosaria Butterfield’s enthusiasm for the unparalleled expression of hospitality—the Son of God on the cross drawing all men to himself—is what energizes her to practice radically ordinary hospitality and invite us all to do the same. This book will stir your imagination to generate creative ways to incorporate radically ordinary hospitality into your own life as well.”

Gloria Furman, author, Missional Motherhood and Treasuring Christ When Your Hands Are Full

“God strongly advances his cause by raising up prophetic voices of fresh insight, bold words, and powerful impact. Rosaria Butterfield is just such a voice for God in our time. The Gospel Comes with a House Key is Rosaria’s heart reaching out to our hearts, calling us to love our neighbors with sacrificial hospitality. This book is going to shake us all up in the most wonderfully destabilizing way.”

Ray Ortlund, Lead Pastor, Immanuel Church, Nashville, Tennessee

“This book isn’t for those who want to live the comfortable Christian life. Rosaria proves there is no such thing. She has a unique way of blending personal story and theological teaching that challenges the reader to engage in areas of both agreement and disagreement. I was sharpened well in both cases.”

Aimee Byrd, author, Why Can’t We Be Friends? and No Little Women

“It’s easier than ever to live in communities with no real sense of community. Neighbors don’t know neighbors, and our lives are lived online rather than on the front porch. Rosaria Butterfield demonstrates how living a life of radically ordinary hospitality can allow strangers to become neighbors, and, by God’s power, those neighbors can become part of God’s family. I couldn’t put this book down—it’s compelling, challenging, and convicting.”

Melissa Kruger, author, The Envy of Eve and Walking with God in the Season of Motherhood

“One cannot spend any time at all with Rosaria Butterfield without a renewed sense of how good the good news really is. This book is a needed call to the church to model the hospitality of our Lord. As our culture faces a crisis of loneliness, this is the book we need. The book will inspire you and leave you with a notebook filled with ideas for how to practically engage your neighbors with the welcome of the gospel.”

Russell Moore, President, The Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission

“The biblical call to show hospitality is one of the most overlooked or misunderstood commands in Scripture. We either ignore it or mistake it for what our culture calls ‘entertaining.’ Rosaria Butterfield gives us a vision of hospitality that pulses with the beating heart of the gospel itself. We know a God who sought us out, took us in, made us family, and seated us at his table. It’s a vision that is bracing and attractive. It daunts us, but it shouldn’t. I wonder how different our homes, churches, and culture would look if we took it to heart.”

Sam Allberry, author, Why Bother with Church? and Is God Anti-Gay?

“One of the hallmarks of the people of God is supposed to be hospitality. But in an age of commuter churches, towns disemboweled by shopping malls, and lives that are overscheduled and full of ceaseless activity, hospitality is something which, like true friendship, is at a premium. In this book, Rosaria Butterfield makes a bold case for putting hospitality back into the essential rhythm of the church’s daily life. She sets the bar very high—and there is plenty of room here for disagreement on some of the proposals and details—but the basic case, that church is to be a community marked by hospitality, is powerfully presented and persuasively argued.”

Carl R. Trueman, William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life, Princeton University

The Gospel Comes with a House Key

The Gospel Comes with a House Key

Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World

Copyright © 2018 by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc.

Portions of chapter 5, “The Gospel Comes with a House Key: The Seal of Hospitality,” are taken from Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (Pittsburgh, PA: Crown & Covenant, 2015), 147–64. Used by permission.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

First printing 2018

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked NLT are from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL, 60189. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-5786-6ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5789-7PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5787-3Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5788-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Butterfield, Rosaria Champagne, 1962- author.

Title: The Gospel comes with a house key : practicing radically ordinary hospitality in our post-Christian world / Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031557 (print) | LCCN 2018000815 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433557873 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433557880 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433557897 (epub) | ISBN 9781433557866 (hc)

Subjects: LCSH: Hospitality—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Strangers—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV4647.H67 (ebook) | LCC BV4647.H67 B88 2018 (print) | DDC 241/.671—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031557

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2021-05-04 03:34:33 PM

For

Kent Butterfield,

faithful husband, leader of our household, father of our children, my courageous pastor, and humble disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Not one page of this book could have been written or lived without you.

This book is for you, with all of my love.

Contents

Preface

 1  Priceless: The Merit of Hospitality

 2  The Jesus Paradox: The Vitality of Hospitality

 3  Our Post-Christian World: The Kindness of Hospitality

 4  God Never Gets the Address Wrong: The Providence of Hospitality

 5  The Gospel Comes with a House Key: The Seal of Hospitality

 6  Judas in the Church: The Borderland of Hospitality

 7  Giving up the Ghosts: The Lamentation of Hospitality

 8  The Daily Grind: The Basics of Hospitality

 9  Blessed Are the Merciful: The Hope of Hospitality

10  Walking the Emmaus Road: The Future of Hospitality

Conclusion: Feeding the Five Thousand: The Nuts and Bolts and Beans and Rice

Acknowledgments

Notes

Recommended Reading

General Index

Scripture Index

Preface

Radically ordinary hospitality—those who live it see strangers as neighbors and neighbors as family of God. They recoil at reducing a person to a category or a label. They see God’s image reflected in the eyes of every human being on earth. They know they are like meth addicts and sex-trade workers. They take their own sin seriously—including the sin of selfishness and pride. They take God’s holiness and goodness seriously. They use the Bible as a lifeline, with no exceptions.

Those who live out radically ordinary hospitality see their homes not as theirs at all but as God’s gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom. They open doors; they seek out the underprivileged. They know that the gospel comes with a house key. They take biblical theology seriously, as well as Christian creeds and confessions and traditions.

Offering radically ordinary hospitality is an everyday thing at our house. It starts early, with minestrone soup simmering on one burner and a pot of steamed rice warming on another. It ends late, with Kent making beds on the couches and blowing up air mattresses for a traveling, stranded family. A truly hospitable heart anticipates everyday, Christ-centered table fellowship and guests who are genuinely in need. Such a heart seeks opportunities to serve. Radically ordinary hospitality doesn’t keep fussy lists or make a big deal about invitations. Invitations are open.

Radically ordinary hospitality is reflected in Christian homes that resemble those of the first century. Such homes are communal. They are deep and wide in Christian tradition and practice. As Christians we are a set-apart people, and we do things differently. We don’t worry about what the unbelieving neighbors think, because the unbelieving neighbors are right here sharing our table, and they are more than happy to tell us what they think.

Practicing radically ordinary hospitality necessitates building margin time into the day, time where regular routines can be disrupted but not destroyed. This margin stays open for the Lord to fill—to take an older neighbor to the doctor, to babysit on the fly, to make room for a family displaced by a flood or a worldwide refugee crisis.

Living out radically ordinary hospitality leaves us with plenty to share, because we intentionally live below our means.

In radically ordinary hospitality, host and guest are interchangeable. If you come to my house for dinner and notice that I am still teaching a math lesson to a child, and my laundry remains on the dining room table unfolded, you roll up your sleeves and fold my laundry. Or set the table. Or load the dishwasher. Or feed the dogs. Radically ordinary hospitality means that hosts are not embarrassed to receive help, and guests know that their help is needed. A family of God gathering daily together needs each and every person. Host and guest are permeable roles.

Radically ordinary hospitality lived out in the family of God gathers daily, prays constantly, and needs no invitation to do so. And those who don’t yet know the Lord are summoned for food and fellowship. Earthly good is shown as good, and the solitary may choose to be alone but need not be chronically lonely.

We practice radically ordinary hospitality by bearing sacrifices of obedience that God’s people are called to offer. We don’t think we are more merciful than God, so we don’t encourage people to sin against him or violate what the Word of God says. We lament. We soberly know that God calls us to bear heavy and hard crosses, self-denials that feel like death. We trust God’s power more than we trust our limitations, and we know that he never gives a command without giving the grace to perform it. But we know that the struggle is insurmountable alone. When radically ordinary hospitality is lived out, members of God’s household are told that they are not alone in their struggles or their joys. Radically ordinary hospitality is accompanied by suffering.

Radically ordinary hospitality characterizes those who don’t fuss over different worldviews represented at the dinner table. The truly hospitable aren’t embarrassed to keep friendships with people who are different. They don’t buy the world’s bunk about this. They know that there is a difference between acceptance and approval, and they courageously accept and respect people who think differently from them. They don’t worry that others will misinterpret their friendship. Jesus dined with sinners, but he didn’t sin with sinners. Jesus lived in the world, but he didn’t live like the world. This is the Jesus paradox. And it defines those who are willing to suffer with others for the sake of gospel sharing and gospel living, those who care more for integrity than appearances.

Engaging in radically ordinary hospitality means we provide the time necessary to build strong relationships with people who think differently than we do as well as build strong relationships from within the family of God. It means we know that only hypocrites and cowards let their words be stronger than their relationships, making sneaky raids into culture on social media or behaving like moralizing social prigs in the neighborhood. Radically ordinary hospitality shows this skeptical, post-Christian world what authentic Christianity looks like.

Radically ordinary hospitality gives evidence of faith in Jesus’s power to save. It doesn’t get dug in over politics or culture or where someone stands on current events. It knows what conversion means, what identity in Christ does, and what repentance creates. It knows that sin is deceptive. To be deceived means to be taken captive by an evil force to do its bidding. It knows that people need to be rescued from their sin, not to be given pep talks about good choice making. It remembers that Jesus rescues people from their sin. Jesus rescued us. Jesus lives and reigns. Radical hospitality shines through those who are no longer enslaved by the sin that once beckoned and bound them, wrapping its allegiance around their throat, even though old sins still know their name and address.

In the pages that follow, you are invited into my home, into my childhood, into my Bible reading, into my repentance, and into my homeschool schedules, shopping lists, simple meals, and daily, messy table fellowship. You will meet my family, my parents, my children, my neighbors, my enemies, and my friends.

If Mary Magdalene had written a book about hospitality for this post-Christian world, it would read like this one.

My prayer is that this book will help you let God use your home, apartment, dorm room, front yard, community gymnasium, or garden for the purpose of making strangers into neighbors and neighbors into family. Because that is the point—building the church and living like a family, the family of God. My prayer is that you will stop being afraid of strangers, even when some strangers are dangerous. My prayer is that you will grow to be more like Christ in practicing daily, ordinary, radical hospitality, and that the Lord would bless you richly for it, adding to his kingdom, creating a new culture and a new reputation for what it means to be a Christian to the watching world. My hope is that daily fellowship would grow your union with Christ and that you would no longer be that Christian with a pit of empty dreams competing madly with other reigning idols, wondering if this is all there is to the Christian life. My prayer is that you would see that practicing daily, ordinary, radical hospitality toward the end of rendering strangers neighbors and neighbors family of God is the missing link.

If this happens, then my prayer will be answered.

1

Priceless

The Merit of Hospitality

May 12, 2016, 5:15 a.m., Durham, North Carolina

A text message from a neighbor came in: “What’s going on at Hank’s house?1 Why r police surrounding the house? R u OK?” But my phone was turned off and in the other room, so I didn’t get the message.

Peaceful sleep sounds echoed from my husband and two youngest children. Even the dogs were sleeping. My Bible was open, along with my copy of Tabletalk magazine and my notebook. My coffee cup was in arm’s reach, sitting on a calico mug mat that my ten-year-old daughter made in sewing class. Caspian, the enormous orange tabby, was sprawled over the table, under the hedonistic, narcotic bliss of a hastily consumed can of Fancy Feast Mixed Grill. I started my devotions that morning as I have been doing for the past seventeen years and as Ken and Floy Smith modeled for me: praying that the Lord would open my eyes to see wondrous things in his Word.

That morning, after I read through five psalms and one proverb, I began to pray. I typically intersperse prayer with Bible reading and note taking. In the morning, I pray in concentric circles. I start by praying for myself, that the Lord would increase my love for him, grow me in holiness, give me courage to proclaim Christ in word and deed as a living epistle, lead me to repent, and give me the humble mind and heart of Christ and the kind comfort of the Holy Spirit to make me a more faithful and loving wife and mother and friend. I then pray for my family, the church, my neighbors, my nation, foreign missionaries, and missions. I thank the Lord that he is risen, that he prays for me, and that he has sent people into my life, starting with the Smiths, to bring me to himself and to hold me safely close. I thank God for the covenant, of which I am a part. I keep my prayer notebook open, and I flip through the pages as I pray through the names.

That morning, my prayer time stopped at the concentric circle labeled “neighbor.” I was praying for my immediate neighbor, whose house I could see from my writing desk. I have always had a special affinity for front-door neighbors. Renee, Julie, Eddie, and now Hank. I love waking up and seeing the familiar van parked in the same spot, and as the sky yawns open, the house and people in it unveil their morning rituals (lights on, dogs out, paper retrieved, a wave of greeting, maybe a child running across the street to return a Tupperware or deliver a loose bouquet of red peonies). Loving your neighbors brings comfort and peace.

So there I was, praying for my neighbor. A typical morning. Except that the phone I had turned off, which was in the other room, continued to receive text messages alerting me that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong in the house across the street. The house of the man for whom I was praying.

—

Our house and Hank’s house share a dead end that stops where two acres of woods open up. When Hank’s moving van first backed down his driveway in 2014, he was a self-described recluse. He worked in his yard digging ditches—arbitrary and perfectly round holes that delighted my children because of their cookie-cutter symmetry and the very cool black snakes Hank unearthed and shared with them. He played loud music. He occasionally received cell phone calls that got him seething mad and shouting obscenities. He owned a one-hundred-pound pit bull named Tank who ran the streets without collar or tags. Each neighbor can recall how we all saw our life flash before our eyes the first time we met Tank, bounding toward us at full throttle. Hank didn’t cut his grass for three months, and by the time the city fined him for creating a meadow, no regular mower could tackle the cleanup.

Truth be told, Hank was not the neighbor we had prayerfully asked for when Eddie sold the house and moved her family to Wisconsin. But we trusted that Hank was the neighbor God had planned for us. Good neighboring is at the heart of the gospel we know. So when Hank moved in, we shared with him our contact information, introduced him to our dogs and kids, and waited for him to reciprocate.

Instead, he dismantled his front doorbell so that no one else could disturb him.

We prayed for Hank.

We gently rebuked other neighbors for being suspicious or unkind in their questions and concerns about his reclusiveness.

For a year, it was like living across the street from Boo Radley, the misunderstood and demonized character in To Kill a Mockingbird.

And then one day Tank ran away and did not come home. One night turned into two, and two nights turned into a week. In the crisis of a lost dog—one who was also the closest companion of a lonely man—our bond was forged. We offered our help, and Hank received our open hand. We posted Tank’s information on neighborhood listservs and enlisted other neighbors to come to Hank’s aid. My ten-year-old daughter cried herself to sleep each night as she prayed for Tank’s return, and she told Mr. Hank about her prayers and God’s faithfulness.

When Tank was finally found safe and sound, we became friends. We started to walk our dogs together. Soon, we were eating meals together, spending holidays at our table, and sharing life. We learned that Hank lived alone, had severe clinical depression, PTSD, ADHD, and social anxiety.

Hank loved the woods as much as the children and I do. As winter opened into spring, we kept tally of our nesting red-shouldered hawks, our calling American toads, our migrating and returning robins, blue jays, woodpeckers, towhees, and ambling box turtles. Hank helped us chop down our dead trees and stack our wood. In his garage he always had the knickknack one might need: a small flashlight to attach to a reflector vest for a night run, a hook that could hold doggie bags to the leash.

Hank was uneven. His depression made him so. Sometimes he stayed secluded in his home for weeks on end. We’d text and offer to help but to no avail. The only sign of life was that his garbage can would appear at the curb on the appointed night.

—

As neighbors were texting my turned-off phone about danger at Hank’s house, I was sitting at my desk, praying for Hank.

I was praying for Hank’s salvation.

And then I noticed it: burly men ducking around the back of my house, wearing orange shirts marked DEA—Drug Enforcement Agency. Serene darkness exploded with the unnatural intrusion of police lights. Yellow tape appeared everywhere—“Crime Scene.” I left my Bible open to Psalm 42 and ran to wake Kent and the children. I grabbed my phone and turned it on. The text messages bounced into life: “What’s going on at Hank’s house? I hear there is a meth lab across the street from you!”

What does the conservative, Bible-believing family who lives across the street do in a crisis of this magnitude? How ought we to think about this? How ought we to live?

We could barrack ourselves in the house, remind ourselves and our children that “evil company perverts” (see 1 Cor. 15:33), and, like the good Pharisees that we are always poised to become, thank God that we are not like evil meth addicts.

We could surround our home in our own version of yellow crime-scene tape, giving the message that we are better than this, that we make good choices, that we would never fall into this mess.

We could surround ourselves with fear: What if the meth lab explodes and takes out my daughter’s bedroom (the room closest to the lab) with it?

We could berate ourselves with criticism: How could we have allowed this meth addict into our hearts and our home?

But that, of course, is not what Jesus calls us to do.

As neighbors filed into our front yard, which had become front-row seats for an unfolding drama of epic magnitude, I scrambled eggs, put on a big pot of coffee, set out Bibles, and invited them in. Who else but Bible-believing Christians can make redemptive sense of tragedy? Who can see hope in the promises of God when the real, lived circumstances look dire? Who else knows that the sin that will undo me is my own, not my neighbor’s, no matter how big my neighbor’s sin may appear?

And where else but a Christian home should neighbors go in times of unprecedented crisis? Where else is it safe to be vulnerable, scared, lost, hopeless?

How else could we teach our children how to apply faith to the facts of life, a process that cancels out neither reality as it begs Jesus for hope, help, redemptive purpose, and saving grace? If we were to close the shades and numb ourselves through media intake or go into remote monologues about how we always knew he was bad, or how we always make good choices, what legacy would that leave to our children? Here is the thing about soothing yourself with self-delusion: no one buys it but you.

I had other things on my list of things to do that day but none more important than what I was doing. Gathering in distraught neighbors. Praying for my friend Hank.

Quickly and organically, our house became an all-day crisis station.

Neighbors—from children to the aged—who did not have to report to school or work stayed the day with us.

2

The Jesus Paradox

The Vitality of Hospitality

March 5, 2009, Fairfax, Virginia

It is a day before our new son’s sixteenth birthday, and my husband, Kent, and I are about to meet him.

We stand at a precipice both familiar and foreign. Familiar, because we have already adopted three children. Familiar, because one of our children was also a teenager when we met her, and we know (or we think we do) what to expect. Foreign, because as committed pro-life Christians we know this: each life is a gift, each life is a mystery, each life reflects God’s image, each life holds treasures indescribable, some of which take on the form of holes in your walls.

The current living situation of the son-we-have-not-yet-met is what polite company refers to as a “therapeutic group home,” located about an hour from ours. After Kent returns home from work, we put Mary (age three) and Knox (age six) in their car seats and head off. We feel as though we are walking off a cliff. This is the most important endeavor, the most sacred risk, and the clearest picture of God’s covenant I know of.

We enter a house that looks like any other, except the people inside are strangers to each other. The neat rows of children’s shoes that wrap around the outside porch, ranging from very small to very large, reveal that the house is at full capacity. We are warmly welcomed to enter by one of the live-in social workers, and we are directed to sit in a formal living room, heavily reeking of white vinegar and pine room freshener.

None of the bedrooms have doors. Alarms ring upstairs as children with monitors on their ankles set off buzzers when they move from place to place, creating an anxious choir, exposing movement with no escape in sight.

No one is allowed outside.

Everyone is supervised all the time.

Children must seek permission to use the bathroom.

The rule charts on the kitchen walls are endless and daunting. Each child has his own neatly typed list, but they all begin like this: “Rise at five thirty, make bed, take medicine.” The rule charts pour over the kitchen walls and into the hallway, creating a gothic paisley pattern, The Yellow Wallpaper style that forebodes unending potential failure, or madness, just like the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s turn-of-the-century novella of this title.

In the six-thousand-word feminist classic, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator slowly descends into madness, attributing the wallpaper as the source of her mental demise. The wallpaper’s paisley yellow detail, like the ten-point rule charts in this group foster home, covers every base. Rule charts in these group homes record as a goal what the state envisions to be the best course of action for the child. Each child’s “goal” is listed on the chart before the word “breakfast.” The options include: reunification with birth family, adoption, or permanent foster care. Goals depend on either people who have already shown themselves to be undependable or strangers whose prospects are suspicious at best. Reunification with birth parents and adoption are such high-risk endeavors—so few teenagers realize either end point—that it feels hopeless to hope, not knowing if the next day will be a new nightmare or a rerun of an old nightmare.

I look at the charts and can’t wrap my mind around how they can be successfully accomplished. It seems to me that no human being could possibly fulfill the expectations on these rule charts. It seems that creativity of any kind is the great enemy of self-control.

But these children have become robots.

They take medication to wake up, to focus on school, to remain calm on the interminable bus ride home, and to go to sleep.

They take medicine to forget the past, to remember the math lesson, and to separate themselves from more shattered hope, names to unlearn, memories to flush, a future that slips between fingers.

I want to like the house and the foster parents that run it.

I want to see them in me and me in them.

But this is no home.

This is prison.

And this is one of the finest government-run therapeutic foster homes in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States.

The social worker who runs the house repeats the need to maintain strict rules and regular medication. Our son Knox has brought a present for Michael: an olive-green, plastic triceratops with a foot chewed off, thanks to our golden retriever, Sally. It occurs to me, as I look at the mauled plastic dinosaur, that there are no visible toys in this house. Not one errant Lego or escaped Matchbox car. No clutter.

Let me say right off that I know rules are important. The first question every foster child able to speak asked me upon entering our house was this: “What are the rules?” I know that sin reigns in the heart of man. I know that we are born sinners, that “behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5). I know that sin resides in our patterns, even our patterns of survival.

But this house disturbs me. On the wall are tapestry samplers that display pastel and cursive quilting: “Home Sweet Home.” In the bedrooms are wards of the state, medicated to the hilt, needing permission to use the bathroom.

I know that I can be deluded.

I know that many foster moms, in pride, think, “I can do better than this. My love is bigger than this. I can save this child.”

But that’s not where I’m going with this.

I know I can’t save anyone. Jesus alone saves, and all I do is show up.

Show up we must.

And now, having shown up, I can tell you that this house gives me the creeps.

Numbers go through my head when I am threatened. Now, I think about the seven thousand teenagers who “age out” of foster care and who often end up in prison or homeless or dead. I know that this house is better than prison or homeless or dead. But still. I ponder the 105,000 children in foster care nationwide, waiting for nightmares to end. I sit here in this house, in my class and racial privilege, and I know what it means to pray for the whole lost world of mankind, myself being the chief of sinners, pleading with God to undo me so that I can do good to everyone (Gal. 6:10), so I can honor and respect all (1 Pet. 2:17).

Mrs. Jones brings Michael to us, and I behold one of the most beautiful children I have ever seen. All legs and pimples, he towers over me, long Afro, mild-brown eyes, and caramel-candy complexion. And he is scared. He looks right past me and fixes his gaze on Knox and Mary. He gets down on the floor with them, at eye level. The world stands still, and then suddenly his face lights up with joy. Mary gives him a hug, and Knox gives him a mauled army-green dinosaur. This looks like a family reunion, except that we are all strangers.

Michael jumps up and begs the supervisor to let him please, please, please return to his room to get his family picture. He is talking a mile a minute, and his whole body is gyrating in place. He just must have it to show to this boy here, this Knox boy. This Knox boy must see his family. His brothers. He pleads. He wheels around. He ticks. He won’t stop. She relents.

Moments later Michael returns with something cupped protectively in his hands. A Polaroid picture, lined with tears and sweaty hands, the corners curling in. It is the only remnant of proof that Michael survived another life in another world, with unfinished business in that past world that dogs him. There were good things too, and they call his name, and they are trapped with him in the picture. He is a boy stuck. He can’t get back to this Polaroid world, and without the Polaroid world, he can’t take up residence in this one. Every child I have ever known who spent time in foster care has a picture like this, with a trap door almost impossible to unhinge.

Michael flashes the picture before my and Kent’s eyes briefly and then settles back down on the floor with the children, cupping his hands protectively around this treasure. With his Polaroid in his hands, he no longer gyrates. He breathes deeply. Heavily.

Knox and Mary know that this is a sacred moment, and they wait for Michael to reveal the treasure in his cupped hand. They are expecting him to reveal a just-captured toad or a chocolate kiss.

When no toad or chocolate kiss appears, they seem to have an uncanny sense not to appear disappointed. Of course, they don’t know how to interpret the old picture of three children, one with a bushy Afro, the other with a missing front tooth, the smallest one with a faraway look just like the one Knox always seems to have on his face when the camera flashes. The faraway-look boy is wearing a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt and holding a beige stuffed bear with a red tartan bow. The boy in the picture looks strikingly like both of the boys in the room, my son(s), one whom I have known for six years and the other whom I have known for a few minutes. From that moment on, I had twin boys separated by a decade.

Michael says, “This is a picture of my brother, Aaron.”

Knox says, “I know that is me, but I don’t have that Thomas shirt!”

I know that is me. No this is a picture of my brother. Other brother, not you, brother. Your brother is me. I am your brother. You are my brother, and this is me.

The mystery of the covenant of family unfolds in places like this, with majesty and miracle on display, and in the background the dim thudding of alarm bells that demarcate a child unfairly deemed juvenile delinquent getting permission to leave his room and use the bathroom.

In all my years of parenting, and with all the children I have held, comforted, fed, tucked in, listened to, and prayed for, nothing has prepared me for this moment. For reasons that I cannot explain and that no parenting book has ever explained, my identity as a mom comes into full view when faced with a frightened, angry, misunderstood teenager. I love them instantly. No parenting book, no conversation with experienced parents, and no life experience prepared me for what it means to love at first sight my newly met son: a courageous boy, gangly and awkward, who stands a foot taller than I do.

Teenagers placed in foster care feel broken and unwanted. They have told me that they feel like lepers. They need the Advocate, Jesus himself. Often they feel marked and shamed. Outsiders. Rejects. Even the rules of the system work against them. They need grace. We need grace. Contagious grace.

—

When Jesus walked the earth, leprosy was the worst of all plagues. Not only was it a filthy, deadly disease from which no one recovered, but its contagion spread arbitrarily and wildly, rendering beloved family members outcasts and wanderers in the beat of a heart. Like Frankenstein’s creature, the leper’s skin no longer covered his sinews and muscles. With a pop of white pus, a beloved family member overnight became abhorrent. Lepers—moral and social outcasts, isolated, rejected, feared, despised—banded together in pain, waiting to die, bereft of hope. Leprosy was a medical plague with legal warrants for arrest and disbandment. The ceremonial law deemed the leper morally and physically unclean. Leprosy was more than an infectious skin disease. It rendered the person who embodied it unfit to be part of a healthy community and unable to join in the worship of God. When Jesus walked the earth, leprosy was thus a repulsive corporealization of original sin. It was not caused by a particular sin or behavior. Rather, it pointed to our sin nature, the walking time bomb inside each and every one of us. The only solution was containment of the leper and protection for the yet healthy. Whole chapters of the law—Leviticus 13 and 14— are devoted to how to contain the contagion and restore the healed leper. This disease could transform a beloved father or mother into a despised outcast overnight. One day you could enjoy belonging, touch, recognition, value. The next, you were as good as garbage.

Leprosy was no metaphor.

It was real as rain.

And when God sent his son, Jesus, fully God and fully man, to live on earth, two remarkable things happened.

Luke 5 records how a man “full of leprosy” walked up to Jesus. Let’s stop right there. Jesus was not visiting a leper colony in this particular scene. He was not going to the outcast, out to the margins. No, here the margins were moving to the center. The leper left the leper colony (illegal, dangerous for all parties) and made a beeline for Jesus and fell on his face. The man with leprosy begged, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12). It took mountain-moving faith and courage—perhaps even prophetic faith and courage—to leave the leper colony and head to the heart of the city, to leave the safety of one’s culture, one’s people, one’s appointed place, and go to Jesus. As he approached Jesus, his mind must have been swirling with self-condemnation: You are a danger to yourself and others; you are breaking the law; you will hurt those you love. But his faith carried him with courage. And we know that faith compelled this man, because he called Jesus “Lord”—a title for Jesus that only the faithful in Scripture used. Faith in Jesus made the leper do the unthinkable. The leper risked arrest. The leper risked causing a public health crisis and infecting others. The leper risked a potential mob driving him away, returning him to face the facts squarely: he was damaged goods, with no hope apart from Christ.

And the leper was a better image bearer than we.

He knew he was damaged goods.

The leper knew he needed Jesus, not social betterment.

And then Jesus did the craziest thing anyone had ever seen.

He touched this man—the man who had not been touched since the plague had ravaged his body, the man whose fate was sealed from the moment the first white sore appeared. This very same man was touched by the Son of God.

“And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I will; be clean’” (Luke 5:13).

That touch changed the man. But the touch did more than that. That touch changed the world.

When Jesus touched the leper, he did not invent grace. God the Father did, and we see this throughout the Old Testament, even in healing leprosy. The great Syrian general Naaman was healed of his leprosy by Elisha, thanks to the spiritual wisdom of a nameless Hebrew slave girl who knew above all else that there is a prophet in Israel who heals (2 Kings 5:1–14). Luke records how important Naaman’s healing was: “And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27). I suspect Elisha healed Naaman for the sake of the nameless Hebrew slave, whose faith was strong and more contagious than the leprosy of her master. Indeed, she had faith that Elisha could do something that he had never done before. Because that is what real faith is: resting in assurance on a promise of God that has yet to be materialized.

It is vital to see what healing and salvation mean when they come from the hand of God.

It is vital to have the eyes to see what Jesus did.

It is also vital to see what Jesus did not do.

He did not tell the leper that God loved and approved of him just as he was. Jesus did not say that the problem of leprosy was a social construction rooted only in the mind of the beholder, and now that “grace” had arrived, “the law” was no longer binding. Jesus did not encourage the leper to develop greater self-esteem. Nor did Jesus rebuke the faith community for upholding irrational taboos against leprosy—leprophobia. No. The problem was the contagion, and the contagion was no social construct. The contagion was dangerous.

When Jesus walked the earth, he wasn’t afraid to touch hurting people.

He drew people in close.

He met them empty and left them full.

Jesus turned everything upside down.

This is the Jesus paradox—the touch from Jesus that launches a contagion of grace for those who believe, repent, turn, and follow, a contagion of grace that allows the believer to love those who hate in return and to pray, serve, and sacrifice so that others, like the nameless Hebrew slave, can know that God is alive and rescues those who call.

Jesus can set into motion a contagion of grace with his touch because the Son of God has fulfilled the law of God and has mercy on his people, knowing that we are sinners, mere men and women, unable to save ourselves. Jesus came untouched by the original sin that distorts, the actual sin that distracts, and the indwelling sin that manipulates. Jesus is no puppet on the strings of Satan, as we too often are. And when Jesus fulfilled the law by dying on the cross and rising by his own power to sit at God the Father’s right hand, he gave his people the power to overcome the sin that enslaves them. He gave us his blood to wash away our sins, he gave us his Word to instruct and heal us, and he sent the Holy Spirit to lead us in conviction and repentance of sin and to comfort us by the assurance that his saving love is rock solid. He gave us our inheritance as adopted children of Almighty God.

But he did not leave us there, little isolated agents of grace, running our own “random acts of kindness” campaign. No, he gave us his bride, the church—his church—to which we who believe are called to make a covenant of membership, to become a family, to be both set apart from and missionally placed in the world, to take care in a daily way of our brothers and sisters in Christ, to receive instruction and rebuke when needed, to support the pastor and elders in church discipline, to act like a visible family of God, and to draw others who do not yet know the pricey love of God into our homes, families, and churches.

The Jesus paradox manifests contagious grace as practiced by ordinary people like me and you, desperately needed, especially now, in our post-Christian world.

But how do we as Christians live in contagious grace?

To see that in action, let’s move to the Gospel of John, to witness the first miracle of Jesus, turning mere water into wine at the wedding in Cana. Here, Jesus models contagious grace through a hospitality so radical, so undeniable, that a common wedding in a piddling, insignificant village becomes host to a miracle, a miracle that takes us from empty to full.1 The key to contagious grace—the grace that allows the margins to move to the center, the grace that commands you to never fear the future, the grace that reveals that what humbles you cannot hurt you if Jesus is your Lord—that grace is ours when we do what Mary says to do in this scene. She says to the servants (and the Holy Spirit says to us): “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).

Simple, right? No. We cannot will ourselves into the deep obedience that God requires. We can’t obey until we ourselves have received this grace and picked up our cross. We can’t obey until we have laid down our life, with all our false and worldly identities and idols. We can’t obey until we face the facts: the gospel comes in exchange for the life we once loved. But when we die to ourselves, we find the liberty to obey. As Susan Hunt explains, “When God’s grace changes our status from rebel to redeemed, we are empowered by his Spirit to obey him. We are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2) into his likeness (2 Cor. 3:18). Joyful obedience is the evidence of our love for Jesus (John 14:15).”2

When we receive God’s saving grace, can we do this? Can we give until it hurts? Yes, because God tells us that we are strong: “I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one” (1 John 2:14). We are stronger than we think. Even in our struggle against sin, God tells us that we, his children, are strong.

Obedience to Jesus—dying to self, doing whatever he wants in spite of the cravings of our flesh—renders liberty, with arms open wide, with bread and fish to give away, with a shocking recognition for the outcast and despised, remembering that we were once her. This was true when Jesus walked the earth, and it is true today, in our post-Christian world, where the Christian faith is dismissed or despised and where Christian values are seen as the enemy of compassion, care, and diversity.

What Is Radically Ordinary Hospitality?