Christmas is a time for hospitality, sometimes painfully offered, sometimes grudgingly accepted. In that, the season reflects its Christian origins. Hospitality is strongly endorsed in Christian rhetoric which commits its followers to welcome others sensitively and painstakingly.
This year hospitality was invoked in the Catholic decision to make provisions for groups of Anglicans to join the Catholic Church while retaining much of their Anglican heritage. The gesture was described as a hospitable response to a repeated request.
But some suspected that beneath the rhetoric of hospitality might have lain a more imperial reality. They believed that the gesture was designed both to show disapproval of Anglican churches that accepted women and overtly gay candidates for ordination, and to welcome converts who shared that disapproval. Of that, more later.
In the Christian tradition hospitality reflects God's hospitality to human beings. The Old Testament emphasis on hospitality to strangers is rooted in God's welcome to the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. In the New Testament hospitality is made more radical. It applies to our enemies as well. We are to walk the extra mile, to offer our suit when asked for our shirt, to treat our enemies as we would our friends.
This deepening of hospitality reflects a change of focus from the one who offers hospitality to the one who asks for it. In the Christmas story, God does not simply offer hospitality to us, but seeks hospitality from us. As the carols tell us, the Son of God comes as a baby needing shelter and food, totally dependent on others. In asking for hospitality, God enables us to accept it ourselves.
Jesus also reverses the usual pattern of hospitality when he sends out his disciples to preach the Gospel without money, spare clothing or food. They have no option but to seek hospitality from the people to whom they preach. Those who offer them hospitality will be more likely to listen favourably to God's word.
To ask for hospitality from strangers, of course, leaves you naked before the calculating. They can ignore your need and use you to send signals to others. But that is also written into the Gospel story. One of the most poignant stories is of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem because the city did not offer hospitality to God's word.
The practice of hospitality is central in the Christian tradition. The unity of the early church was cemented