Jordan Memorial UMC

Journeying in the Footsteps of Paul

Welcoming Like Corinth

This month our summer journey with Paul brings us to the end of the road through Greece. We will pass briefly through Athens, where Paul stood in the marketplace and debated philosophers under the shadow of the Parthenon, before settling in for the rest of August in Corinth, the city where Paul stayed the longest on any of his missionary journeys. Acts tells us he remained there a year and a half, working alongside Priscilla and Aquila, teaching in the synagogue, and building a church that he would go on to write to twice in our New Testament. Something about Corinth made Paul want to stay.

Corinth was a crossroads city, a port town full of merchants, travelers, and people from every corner of the empire. And like much of the Greek world, it operated under an old and sacred understanding of hospitality, what the Greeks called xenia. You welcomed the stranger at your door, fed them, gave them a place to rest, because you never knew who might be standing before you. A traveler in need might just as easily be a god in disguise.

Jaidy and I recently watched the new Odyssey film, and that theme runs through it from beginning to end. Homes are judged not by their wealth but by how they treat the guest at the door, because the visitor you turn away just might be Zeus himself, testing you. We don't share that belief, of course. But our own scriptures carry an echo of it. Hebrews reminds us not to neglect showing hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. And Jesus goes even further, not an angel in disguise, but Christ himself: truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40).

It seems Paul may have found something in Corinth, and in Greece more broadly, that resonated deeply with what he already believed about the gospel. He writes to the Roman church to contribute to the needs of the saints and extend hospitality to strangers (Romans 12:13), and later, to welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you (Romans 15:7). Paul was not always an easy man to have around; he ruffled feathers everywhere he went, Corinth included, and his letters show a church that argued with him and with each other. But he was welcomed there long enough to put down roots, long enough to be shaped by a city that valued the stranger at the door. Perhaps that hospitality, however imperfect, gave him room to do some of his most important work.

This is worth sitting with as we prepare for our 11th annual Back to School Bash. It is not that our church fails at hospitality, far from it. But hospitality is never something we finish learning. There is always a fuller welcome to offer: to the family we don't recognize, the child who needs a bookbag, the neighbor who doesn't look, talk, or believe like we do. Paul's gospel and Corinth's culture agreed on this one thing, that welcoming the stranger is not a nicety on the edge of faith, it is close to the center of it. It is one of the places where being a good Christian and simply being a good human being turn out to be the same thing, regardless of nationality, race, language, or belief.

So, as we hand out bookbags and school supplies this August, as we encounter people in the grocery store or around town, let's remember we may be doing more than meeting a practical need. We may be entertaining angels. We may be welcoming Christ himself. Let's welcome all people knowing this truth because we are all created in God’s image and the reality is when we welcome the stranger, the marginalized, the one that seems different, we are truly welcoming Christ. May Christ be welcomed in our community, our church, and our homes.

                                                                                                 Chris Smith