Twenty-five years before our passage begins, God came to
Abraham for the first time.
Remember? He was called Abram at
the time . . . and God came to him in
Haran and made him a promise: "I will make of you a great nation, and I
will bless you, and make your name great" and that's pretty cool, but
there was catch: "I will bless you," God said "so that you will
be a blessing . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed." And although the covenant
is not dependent upon Abraham's
being a blessing – that is, it's not null and void if Abram isn't – it's clear what God expects,
nevertheless. It's kind of like with us
Christians, isn't it? Our forgiveness is
in no way dependent upon any good works we may do, but God expects us to do 'em
anyway.
And in the years since God's first appearance to Abram, things
have been, well . . . interesting. He is
often held up as a paragon of faith – he just up and went when God told him,
where God told him, and now he's just a-waitin' for the promise to be fulfilled
. . . but if you really look at the story, you'll get a different perspective .
. . somebody counted, and came up with only four instances in the entire,
11-chapter Abraham story where he is shown in a positive light. In fact, Abraham's story is more of a story
of un-faith, or misplaced faith, than anything else.
Let's look at some of the highlights of the quarter-century
between God's first appearance and this ome.
Abram does do as he's told, he heads South from Canaan, but when he gets
there, there's a famine in the land . . . so much for the promise, right? I mean, this God of Abraham and Moses and
Joseph et al., must have a
strange sense of humor to make a huge deal out of sending his faithful follower
to a land where there's no food! And so immediately, Abram
has to leave Canaan, because the only thing you could do in ancient times if
there was a famine was move. So he picks
up and heads to Egypt, and there he gets into a peck of trouble . . . and as
he's approaching Egypt's border, he says to Sarah (who was named Sarai at the
time): "I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when
the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; then they will kill
me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well
with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account." And
he does it . . . he says Sarai’s his sister, and the Pharaoh takes her into his
house – undoubtedly to be just another woman in his harem – and for her sake,
he takes good care of Abram, giving him all manner of good things. But God keeps the promise – God curses Pharaoh,
afflicting him with all kinds of plagues, until Pharaoh throws both Abram and Sarai
out of the country. So much for
Abraham's faith in God to follow through
. . . he's willing to sacrifice his wife to save his own skin. And he's not exactly a blessing to the Pharaoh
and his people, is he?
And what about Ishmael? Sarai
comes up to him and says "Here's my slave Hagar . . . take her to your bed
so you can get yourself an heir."
And Abram thinks that's a pretty good idea: after all, it's been many
long years since the promise, and no heir yet . . . besides, everybody knows that Sarai is barren . . . and so, once again, he takes
matters into his own hands instead of trusting God, and we all know the
disastrous results – Sarai's jealousy gets the best of her, and she almost
kills Hagar and the boy . . . but once again, God's faithful to the promise,
even though Abram has problems, and Ishmael is saved, and indeed Abram's seed
spawns a great nation . . . traditionally, the Islamic nations.
Finally, about a year before our story, God appears to Abram
again . . . and this time he reiterates the promise to Abram: "I will give
to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien,
all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their
God." And oh, by the way, your name
is no longer Abram it's Abraham, and Sarai's now called Sarah, and just so
there's no confusion, your heir will indeed be out of Sarah's womb. And so what does Abraham – avatar of faith –
do? Does he fall on his knees in wonder
at the mighty promise, the power of God to open the womb of a barren woman, to
truly do a new thing? No . . . he falls on his face laughing and protesting the
ridiculous notion that a hundred-year-old man and ninety-year-old wife could
ever have kids, and so God – ever the playful one – tells him that his heirs
name will be Isaac which, of course, means laughter.
And so Sarah's not the first one who laughs, who shows
something less than a full, trusting, faith at the prediction of her pregnancy,
and I detect a little chauvinism in the fact that we all know this story of the
woman laughing, and skip over
the one of Abraham falling on the floor
in mirth . . . after all, Abraham is
the faithful father of a people, and Sarah's just a jealous woman . . . and
Christians over the years have
tended to blame the women of scripture for everything, starting with Eve . . .
but note that it's Abraham
that, not to put too nice a face on it, pimps out his wife, not the other way around . . .
But here, in today's story, we have an example of a benevolent
Abraham . . . he's pictured as a model of hospitality . . . when he spies the
three travelers, he runs from the tent entrance and bows real low, and although
we know that this is – somehow – a theophany, an appearance
of God, Abraham doesn't know it
. . . he looks up and sees three men standing there. And he has no idea who they are – for all he knows, they're bandits or
wandering vagabonds or shepherds looking for work. But he treats them as if they were royalty .
. . he calls them "lord" – and notice that this is in lower-case in
our bible, to indicate that we're not talkin' about God here – and he runs
around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to make them
comfortable. "Let a little water be
brought," he says, "and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the
tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves . .
." There is no thought of
recompense, no thought of currying favor . . . he shows them hospitality no
matter who they might be, no matter what they might have done.
Once again, does this sound familiar? Showing grace, showing loving-care and
nurture to someone no matter what they've done, no matter who they are? Remember back in the creation story, humankind
is made in God's image, God's likeness . . .
and therefore humans represent
God to the rest of creation . . . and here we see Abraham fulfilling that
vocation – for once – through his hospitality.
In the movie Chocolat, a mysterious and appealing woman is blown by the wind into a
small French town . . . she sets up a chocolate shop, with almost
magically-delicious wares . . . she has the ability to see peoples' innermost
needs, and to embody them in her chocolates . . . she invites all she meets
into her shop, from the outcast gypsy-river-rat to the town mayor, who has the
Church under his thumb and is persecuting her.
But her kindness and empathy slowly seeps out into the town, and into
its citizens, until it is clear that a deep and abiding transformation is
taking place. It all culminates when
even the stuffy, hide-bound mayor is transformed by her chocolate, a rebirth, a
resurrection, if you will, that happens just at Easter's dawn.
The woman – whose name Vianne
sounds suspiciously like French for "come" – clearly practices the
biblical concept of hospitality, and the biblical writers knew – as does Vianne – that hospitality has the
power to transform lives. It winds
through both Old and New Testaments, coming to fulfillment in the figure of
Jesus Christ, who taught that hospitality is to be practiced as a matter of
course. And he summed it all up with one
rule, which he described as one of the two greatest commandments: "You
shall love your neighbor as yourself."
And so, Abraham is a pointer to God’s ultimate concern for
"the other," God’s ultimate invitation of all into the loving
embrace, of the divine, and it's expressed in Abraham's simple, heartfelt
hospitality to three men on a dusty Canaanite road.
And as he stands
attentively, as a servant, watching his guests eat, they ask him "Where is
your wife Sarah?" And without
stopping to wonder how they knew who his wife was, he says: "There, in the
tent." And then one of them says:
"I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have
a son." And Sarah, listening from
just inside the tent opening, hears this pronouncement, and it had ceased to be
with Sarah after the manner of women, and so now she laughs to herself –
only a little rueful chuckle, quite unlike Abraham's falling down on the floor
before God– she laughs to herself and says "After I have grown old, and my
husband is old, shall I have pleasure?"
And this question holds more than just a skepticism about opening a
barren womb . . . it's wistful, bittersweet, pensive . . . after all these
years, shall I have pleasure?
Then the Lord's voice booms out – still speaking to Abraham –
"why did Sarah laugh and say "shall I indeed bear a child, now that I
am old?'" and its finally clear just who it is that's visited Abraham and
Sarah there at the Oaks of Mamre . . . or is it? Let's recap: we're told that the Lord appears
to them, not specifically that
God is one of the three men . . . when God finally speaks to Abraham,
questioning Sarah's laughter, we're not told that it's the same person –
identified as one of the three – who predicted Sarah's pregnancy. In fact, there's a delightful, deliberate
ambiguity at play here . . . the three men to whom Abraham shows hospitality
include God in their number . . . maybe.
If you go to a Benedictine monastery, you'll see written over
the portal to the guest quarters "Treat all guests as if they are
Christ." Hospitality is a watchword
for the Benedictine order, it's one of the reasons for their existence. And in this, they are following the dictum of
Christ himself, who will tell those at his right hand "I was hungry, and
you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a
stranger, and you welcomed me . . ." and when those at his right hand say
"When did we do these things, Lord?"
do you remember his reply? "just as you did it to one of the least
of these . . . you did it to me."
Christ himself is somehow – in some mysterious, undefinable way –
identified with the least of these, those to whom we are to show hospitality .
. . and here we see it in a story written a thousand years before Christ, in
the marvelous ambiguity of the three wanderers at the oaks of Mamre, one of
whom may – or may not – be the
Lord God's own self.
Brothers and sisters, as society
gets more and more fearful, as we get more and more isolated and insular, more
and more wrapped up in our own concerns and lives, it's difficult for us to
show hospitality to those who live next door,
much less those we don't know, who show up at our doorstep in need . . . but
that is our lot, it's a part of our creation vocation, of being the image of
God to all we meet. And I'm not gonna
kid you . . . it's not particularly easy.
It's often a hard, thankless task.
But just as in Chocolat,
where Vianne is blown about by the wind, we are powered by the Holy Spirit, who
blows strong through the woods and over the waters of the Ohio, and who cares
for us, sighing with sighs too deep for words.
We are never alone in our work of being a blessing to all we meet, for
Christ is with us through the power of the Holy Spirit, to comfort and teach
and advocate for us, until the Kingdom is fulfilled here on Earth. Amen.
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