The first Sunday following Pentecost is called Trinity Sunday, which begins the season of ordinary time-the time that the church considers its mission to the world. It is interesting to me that this season of the church year would open with something called Trinity Sunday. Of course, Trinity is a word that the historic church has used in order to get some kind of handle on the relationship that is shared by God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit, all of whom we refer to as God. There’s an amazing mystery in this, yet the church opens the time of reflection on our engagement with the rest of the world with a focus on the Trinity.

I believe this kind of reflection has little to do with understanding a formal belief system or a call to contemplation on some form of abstract theology, but rather with the fundamentals of relationship. Whatever we can or cannot grasp about the idea of the Trinity, we are missing something if we don’t see that the Trinity is about an eternal relationship of love with the Father, the Son and the Spirit---all of whom are personal expressions of God.

Having said that, I want to look at a short little passage from the New Testament that I believe captures the heart and soul of what it means for us, as lovers and followers of Jesus, to engage with other people and bring that love to them:

We, as followers of Jesus, have a big problem. It’s a problem we share with the culture at large. Our problem is a word that we find troubling---for different reasons than the overall culture, but troubling nevertheless: Evangelism. We also struggle with words related to it, like evangelist.

For us, evangelism is something that other people do, but not us because we don’t have “the gift.” Given a choice, we would rather take a whipping than do evangelism, which is, in essence, telling someone about Jesus who doesn’t want to hear about Jesus. For the overall culture, evangelism is an arrogant intrusion. It is the assumption that what one person has is what everyone needs to have. It is the height of narrow-mindedness and desire for control.

For us, an evangelist is a person who has developed a road show that draws people to his or her gifted preaching that results in large numbers of people expressing a newfound faith in Jesus. For the overall culture, the perception of an evangelist is someone on TV with big hair, flashy clothes, a southern accent, lots of money and, possibly, any number of illicit sexual relationships.

I believe that all these perceptions are wrong. They are caricatures of reality. In the Bible, evangelism is just the English version of a Greek word that means good news. The evangelist was simply the person bringing that good news. It conjured up a picture of a messenger, during a time of battle, running over the hills and mountains to the military leaders to announce the good news that the battle had been won. In the Bible, everything associated with the words evangelism and evangelist has to do with good news.

But in our typical way of distorting things, we have turned good news into bad news. Our culture too often sees our message about Jesus as something political or oppressive. We see our own message as frightening and something relegated to specialists. For us, the word evangelism may be a dead word. We have become numbed when it comes to good news.

I think this is a wonderful opportunity to create a new paradigm. I am coming to believe that at the very heart of the good news of Jesus is not the speaking out of a message, but hospitality.

The word that the verse from Hebrews 13 uses for hospitality (philoxenía) is made up of two Greek words: philos, which means friend; and xenos, which means stranger or alien. To show hospitality is to treat the stranger as a friend; it is to make space for the stranger. That is the essence of our call to engage with the world as followers of Jesus.

Why do I say that? It’s because that’s what God does.

It might help to do a quick biblical theology of hospitality-the idea of making space for the stranger, engaging with the stranger as a friend.

In creation, God made space for we who were not God. It was a space that offered friendship and relationship. It was a space that offered the freedom to love or to turn away. In Jesus, God put himself into our space. He became a stranger in order to bring love and new life to strangers. Perhaps we should see ourselves in a new way: As strangers who have been granted God’s friendship; as ones who now make space for other strangers-engaging with the world as friends.

This quote from the Karl Barth has taken on great meaning for me:

Too may of us have seen “evangelism” as the requirement to engage in conversation with another person-our hands sweating, our hearts pounding-and somehow steer (let’s call it what it is: manipulate) the discussion to something religious. Then we have to call to mind some sort of script that walks a person through something we have come to call truth. Finally, we either close the deal or get on to our next project.

If we buy into that picture then we ought to have sweaty hands. I wonder if we believe what Jesus said:

If God is already at work in people before I ever show up, then maybe I’d better start listening to what he is doing. I am beginning to understand that our engagement with other people-our mission in the world-is a life of hospitality. It is a life of making friends, of listening to what God is doing in each and every person we befriend.

What might happen if we began to start loving the strangers in our lives? What if we simply entered into a place of friendship with people and listened for how God was making space for them before we ever arrived?

What do we think is happening when people talk about their questions regarding God, or human suffering, or loneliness or emptiness or longing? What if those are the places of space that God is creating for them so that they might come to trust Jesus? What if we began listening to the new friends of our lives and led them to Jesus, not by drilling them with a mind-numbing system of doctrinal truths, but by praying with them in the places where God is making space?

But what about knowing all the “big” things? Don’t you have to know about the nature of God and his relationship to broken, weak human beings? Don’t you have to understand who Jesus is and the eternal effects of his life, death and resurrection? Don’t you have to fully grasp the nature of sin and its effect on humanity? Don’t you have to get it all right before you come into this relationship of love with God through Jesus? If so, we’re all in a lot of trouble. These are important questions, but we will spend our lives growing in our understanding of them. We also must be careful about creating a list of requirements that must be met in order to encounter Jesus-the one whose most common invitation to people was “Come…follow me.”

Along with my new interest in the seasons of the church year I have experienced a renewed commitment to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. What I am starting to see in this ancient celebration is the hospitality of God expressed to us in Jesus. At his table, Jesus has created space for us. In the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, we give our weekly thanksgiving that God has extended the ultimate in hospitality to us; he has transformed us from strangers to friends.

The prophet Isaiah wrote,

We come to Jesus’ table as strangers, but we leave it as friends. It is my conviction that our engagement with the world should be characterized in the same way.