The true God, the living God, is a hospitable God. He’s eternally hospitable. The life of God is infinitely faithful, infinitely joyful welcome. God is hospitality.

God is hospitable because He’s Triune. As we confess every Sunday, we believe in one God who exists in three Persons. The Son isn’t a creature; He’s “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” The Spirit isn’t a subordinate being, but is worshiped and glorified with the Father and Son as the third Person of the one God.

God isn’t a blob or a block or a wispy fog. He’s more like a family or a society. He is a communion of eternal Persons. Communion, fellowship, self-giving Love – this is the Life of God. This is our God.

As the Son, Jesus is “in” the Father, and the Father is “in” Him. That’s why we see the Father when we see Jesus. There’s perfect correspondence, a perfect family likeness between Father and Son, because each is within the other.

There’s no stern, merciless, harsh God lurking behind the compassionate Savior. What you see is what you get, because the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father.

Both Father and Son dwell “in” the Spirit, so that when the Spirit comes to be with us, Jesus says, “We” – the Father and the Son – “will come to him and make Our abode with him.”

Here's a great mystery. The Father opens Himself to make room for the Son; the Son is roomy enough to be the eternal dwelling place of the Father; the Spirit makes room in each for each, and in Himself for both. God is hospitable to God. The life of God is God’s joyful welcome of God.

And here’s another great mystery: The Triune God who lives in perfect bliss, whose very being is festive welcome, extends the hospitality He is to make room for what is not God. God makes room for heaven and earth. Creation is an act of divine hospitality in which God extends His hospitality to summon into existence what is not.

Creation is the original house of hospitality, a table where God opens His hand to satisfy the desires of every living thing. The six days of creation end with an invitation to a feast: “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed and every tree that has fruit yielding seed. It shall be bread for you” (Genesis 1:29).

Through Jesus, the Father establishes His table at the center of the church, which is the center of the world. Baptism is your invitation into the Father’s house, where we are more than guests. Receiving the Father’s hospitality, we become the Father’s hospitality.

We are the temple of God, the fulfilled house of hospitality. Hospitality makes the church. Hospitality isn’t just what we get. It isn’t just what we do. Hospitality is what we are.

This is why we gather at the Lord’s table every week. We receive spiritual food and drink for our own strength and nourishment, yes. We keep the feast to proclaim the mystery of faith: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”

We also keep this feast for the sake of the world, so that the Creator’s hospitality will not vanish from the earth.

Since we are God’s house of hospitality, our life together must take the form of hospitality. We exist to invite those who are still exiled in Adam to share the table of the Father through Jesus the Son. Our life together is a life of welcome – to neighbors, friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, strangers, the outcasts and the forgotten.