76: Rosaria Butterfield | Radical Hospitality {Part 1}

Rosaria and I chat about her conversion, experiencing Christian hospitality as a lesbian professor, how her family practices hospitality, and how hospitality and the gospel go hand in hand for her. 

6:42 For those who aren't familiar with your books and your story, briefly share with our listeners how you came to know Jesus

"The Lord saved me 21 years ago, and at that point, I was living in serially monogamous lesbian relationships. I was a tenured professor at Syracuse University in English and women's studies, and was the co author of our domestic partnership policy, which was the forerunner for... gay marriage, both the Obergefell decision and prior to that all the little state ones. I've always had a burning desire to be a truth teller and to understand the truth. I had a sticker on my desk that said, 'I'd rather be wrong on an important point than right on a trivial one.'

I just really wanted to know why Christians hated people like me and why they just wouldn't leave consenting adults alone. So after my 10 year book was written, I started working on a book on the religious right. And in the process of that met a pastor, who was also one of my neighbors name is Ken Smith. He and his wife Floy and I became friends. And they entered my world, I entered their world....So there has this Christian world and their hospitality and my gay world and my hospitality and it had enough of a familiar sense that it was not terrifying to walk into that world and that fact that they were willing to walk into mine. Well, it was that that really allowed them to put the hand of this stranger called Rosaria into the hand of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ."

9:51 Hospitality is woven through your story from your years in the LGBTQ community to being welcomed in to Ken and Floy's home to eat and to dialogue with a couple who had vastly different beliefs than you to how you interact with your current neighborhood. How did previous models of hospitality help shape your families current model?

"What we were practicing the Bible wouldn't necessarily call hospitality because that has a particular Christian grounding to it. What we were practicing was a kind of liberal communitarianism. We wanted to create a community that was bound by certain values and was willing to show up in hard places. The gospel is more than that. The gospel is that. But if the gospel isn't more than that, then it's not the gospel. Because what hospitality is, is it's welcoming a stranger to be part of  your neighbor connection and then by God's grace, watching neighbors, come to Christ and become part of your family....there's a there's a difference between liberal communitarianism and hospitality."

"Every layer had so many idols attached to it. It was the idol of feminism. There was the idol of lesbianism. There was the idol of being a tenured professor at an important research university. There was the idol of my students and my dissertations that I had to direct. There is the idol of the books. There were so many idols and you know what, you don't come to Christ with your idols. Well, I mean, you do, but then they have to be destroyed."

SHOW NOTES continued

Follow Rosaria Butterfield at https://rosariabutterfield.com

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