Strangers at Shore

The most meaningful experiences of hospitality, after all, are the ones where the lines between these roles are blurred. You invite someone to be your guest, but by the end of the evening, it feels as if they were hosting you. Or you were invited somewhere as a guest, but there you were given a role to play, a place, a name—you were treated as if you had something to offer. 

Paul comes to the island of Malta as a guest. He shows up as a stranger. But through repeated acts of hospitality, he is transfigured from guest to host, from stranger to healer. And here he stands as a figure of Christ himself, who appears to us first as a stranger, and then as the one who heals. If we let him, he can change our lives even now into little shores of salvation, where all strangers are regarded as friends. If we ask him, he will do it for us.

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From a sermon on Acts 28:1–10.