Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
Special to United Methodist Insight | Dec. 3, 2025
Romans 15:4–13 begins with a strange promise for people who have learned to expect very little from the world. It suggests that the old words, the ones written down “for our instruction,” might still whisper encouragement. These are not phrases that fit on a coffee mug, but the harder kind that keep you at the table with people you would rather avoid.
By the time Paul reaches “Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you,” he has already done something deeply subversive. He has dragged hospitality out of the realm of manners and into the realm of theology. This is not “be nice,” followed by a seasonal emoji. It is not “be inclusive,” followed by a denominationally-approved slide deck. It is a command that ties your habit of welcome to the way God has absorbed you into his own life. You are to welcome as you have been welcomed.
That is the problem. Most of us have been trained in a very different liturgy. The culture of late modern life writes a rival epistle on every phone screen. That letter says something like: “Welcome those who are useful, entertaining, or safely similar. Tolerate the rest from a distance.” Hospitality shrinks to the size of your comfort zone, which is usually the size of your living room, and sometimes not even that. While the text of Romans insists that Christ became a servant to Jew and Gentile alike, our daily reflex is to curate our guest list.
Romans 15 imagines a table at which the old enemies sit together and sing. This means Jews, Gentiles, insiders, late arrivals, the people who kept the rules, and the ones who never even learned them. All are summoned. Many churches read this text on the second Sunday of Advent, then dismiss the congregation into the parking lots, where the real liturgy resumes. Car doors slam. Engines start. Eyes slide past the stranger in the row behind.
The early Christians believed that God’s hospitality broke into history like an invasion. You were being conscripted into a new community that did not obey the usual rules of disgust and preference. The typical story says that the world belongs to the powerful, the beautiful, and the already-arrived. The Christian story says that the world has been quietly handed to the poor in spirit, the meek, and the ones who show up late with nothing in their hands. Advent is recognition season. The church tries to remember who actually owns the place.
In Romans 15, Paul works like a lawyer who knows his jury is suspicious. He piles up quotations from the Hebrew scriptures as if to say: this wide welcome is not a weird new Pauline experiment. The law, the prophets, and the psalms have been hinting at it all along: nations, Gentiles, and outsiders may all rejoice with Israel. Foreigners are not merely tolerated, but folded into the singing.
Set that vision against our reality. Walk through any airport in December. You will see bodies pressed together in security lines while souls remain under quarantine. Headphones form soft padded walls around each traveler. The announcements ask us all to remain patient and kind, and many of us barely obey. We do not punch the person ahead of us for taking too long with their laptop. We do not shove the child who cries. The dominant feeling is not welcome. It is managed irritation. Everyone is technically together, and yet we have never been more alone.
Suppose Paul’s command was rewritten for contemporary ears. In that case, it might sound like an accusation slipped into our feed: “Welcome one another, not as the market has received you, not as the nation has processed you, not as social media has trained you, but as Christ has welcomed you.” How has Christ welcomed you? That is the embarrassing question. Not politely. Not grudgingly. Not after a background check and proper vetting. The Christ of Romans 15 is the one who becomes a servant, who takes on the long story of Israel, who bears the insults aimed at God.
That kind of welcome does not “fit” into an inhospitable world. It contradicts it. The modern habit is to treat hospitality as an accessory virtue, like buying fair-trade coffee. You add it if you can afford it. Romans 15 will not let you do that. Hospitality becomes the visible proof of the gospel. Either the church is a place where enemies learn to sit near each other without flinching, or it is just another club with a stained-glass logo.
The text does not lean on guilt as its primary tool. Paul starts with hope. “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” In other words, the ancient stories are not there for your nostalgia. They are there to train your endurance. The world will not suddenly turn friendly because you have decided to welcome as Christ welcomed you. The world will shrug and laugh at you. The scriptures are supposed to drill into your bones the notion that God remains active, even when the social temperature drops.
Consider what passes for community in many of our lives. We talk a great deal about belonging, yet most systems quietly revolve around exclusion. Neighborhoods gentrify. Schools stratify. Churches segment by taste, income, and theology. Online spaces pretend to be unlimited commons, then fracture into echo chambers. Everyone talks about “creating space” for others. Very few of us actually surrender any of our own. The result is a civilization that looks busy and crowded, yet feels strangely barren.
Into that barrenness, Romans 15 speaks with a strange confidence. Paul prays that the God of hope will fill the church with “all joy and peace in believing,” so that it may “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” This is not optimism. Optimism expects the world to get better if everyone tries a bit harder. Hope assumes that the world might get worse, and yet God will continue to act. Joy and peace are not the trophies handed out at the end of a successful social program. They are the interior evidence that you have been welcomed into a life that does not depend on the mood of the news cycle.
From there, welcome becomes less of a project and more of a reflex. A person who knows they have been taken in without merit becomes hazardous to the usual hierarchies. They will sit with the wrong people at lunch and invite the wrong relatives to Christmas. They will mix the groups that are supposed to remain separate. They will refuse to believe that the inhospitable world has the final word on who gets to belong.
None of this feels natural. Advent never has. The season trains you to look for God in the least impressive places. The story insists that the center of reality lies in a borrowed room, not a palace. If that is true, then every small act of welcome becomes a rehearsal for a greater hospitality already underway.
This may be the most unsettling thought in Romans 15. The command to welcome one another is not a request to start something new. You are not being asked to launch a moral startup. You are being invited to join something that God has already set in motion, something that will continue without your permission. God has decided to make a people out of the incompatible. Jew and Gentile. Slave and free. Refugee and lifelong citizen. Sinner and saint, often in the same body. The church either lives as a preview of that future, or it advertises a lie.
In an inhospitable world, the temptation is to retreat into defensive piety. Pray, sing, and shut the door. Romans 15 does not grant that luxury. It drags worship into the realm of relationships. Glorify God with one voice, Paul says, and then he immediately talks about how you receive one another. The vertical adoration and the horizontal welcome are bound together. Separate them for long, and both will die.
Advent’s second candle sits, waiting in our well-constructed wreaths. The light will not be strong enough to cancel the darkness in the headlines. It is enough to show the faces gathered around you: old believer, new arrival, habitual outsider, awkward neighbor. The epistle shouts across two thousand years and repeats itself: welcome one another as you have been welcomed. The command is simple enough for a child to understand, but the implications could occupy a lifetime.
Richard Bryant
Richard Bryant is an educator who teaches English as a second language and explores the intersection of faith and contemporary life. This post is republished from his Substack blog, Elevate the Discourse.