What do you do when someone
comes to your door to announce that your religion isn’t right? that you’ve
gotten God wrong?
If you’re like me, you
probably don’t even answer the door. And the Jehovah’s Witness or young Mormon
missionary moves on to the next opportunity, just like the disciples of Jesus
were instructed to do.
But if you’re like Abraham,
things go a little differently.
Abraham, sitting on his
porch, spots strangers in the neighborhood. He runs to meet them, begs them to come in to the shade, to rest, to
have a bite to eat. When he gets them settled, he rushes in to the kitchen: “Sarah!
Quick! The best bread, hand made, fresh from the oven!” He nips down to Whole
Foods for the finest, tenderest organic free-range veal. Nothing is too good
for his visitors.
And once he’s put a feast in
front of them, he sits down, deliberately, to listen.
Now, he didn’t know that his visitors had come to change
his mind about God, about what God’s promises mean, and what God has in store
for him and Sarah. But I think we’re supposed to understand that he’d hardly
have done less to welcome anyone to his home, no matter who they might be or
what they might intend.
Hospitality
is different in South Jersey in 2017 than five or six millennia ago in
Palestine, back when the world had no hotels, no internet and cell service, no
Wawa for refreshments and refueling. Sharing shelter and meals is no longer a
matter of life and death, most of the
time. But deep in our current understanding of politeness and generosity is
still, I believe, the understanding that true hospitality runs both ways, and
requires openness and attentiveness even more than simple food or shelter,
because it is, still, about giving life.
And Abraham does hospitality without hesitation or holding back:
He runs to welcome them,
sets the very best he has in
front of them,
and then settles in to listen.
And the strangers tell
Abraham that Sarah is about to have a son.
It’s a literally laughable
assertion, that a 90ish year old post-menopausal woman is going to give birth
in the next twelve months. Sarah, out of sight behind the door, laughs out loud
(just the way Abraham himself laughed – fell on the floor laughing – in fact,
when God made this promise to him some time earlier!)
It really is funny. And the
visitors use that laughter to open up the possibilities; to show Abraham and
Sarah that they’ve been interpreting God’s promises wrong all along.
God promised them offspring years ago, when they picked up and moved
from their home because God said so. And then they didn’t start having kids. So
they solved the problem in their own way. They made Sarah’s servant into a
concubine, and adopted her son as their own. Abraham’s proud of Ishmael. He has a son; God’s promise is carried out;
that’s how these things work, right?
And then these strangers tell
him he hasn’t understood God’s promise after all. Abraham wasn’t exactly wrong about God giving them Ishmael. But
perhaps he’s stopped looking for the extraordinary thing God is actually doing.
He doesn’t know how to believe that he and Sarah
will create a son, against all the obstacles of nature (and, judging from
Sarah’s comments, probably a habit of inaction).
These strangers have come to
tell him that God is going to fulfill that long-held promise, now, in an absolutely ridiculous,
dramatic, bizarrely practical way that requires both of them to recommit themselves
and their bodies to their trust in God.
That’s the same kind of news
that Jesus’ disciples are sent out to carry, in the instructions we heard in
the gospel today: Proclaim the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come
near.
Announce that the thing we’ve
been promised all our lives, since before our grandparents’ parents remember,
is about to be astonishingly true, and not in the way we’ve accommodated to. Not
in the way that’s good enough to call it a promise fulfilled, but in a way that
may seem ridiculous, certainly dramatic, and is definitely going to require
some re-assessment and a new surge of effort on our part.
You and I, now, have gotten
used to the bizarre and miraculous way that God fulfilled the promise those
early disciples carried. We’ve gotten used to the resurrection of Jesus, and
the spread of the gospel.
And I’ll bet I’m not the only
one who has, over a lifetime, come to the conclusion that God has already
fulfilled the renewed redemption promised to us after the Resurrection, or
close enough:
a healing of some dangerous
illness; release from a demon of guilt, or addiction, or depression; finding a comfortable
relationship with God with a confidence that things work out in the end; living
in an era that’s managed to defeat some world-threatening horrors and evils…
There’s good reason to believe that God has fulfilled many promises to us.
But even now, people show up
on our doorstep or in our neighborhood to tell us we are wrong about that.
People still knock on your door to tell you how much more true it would be to have their kind of personal relationship
with Jesus.
People appear on the
thresholds of our television and internet to tell you that your understanding
of how God’s commandments to love your neighbor, feed the hungry, make peace,
care for the earth, and heal the sick are wrong – or a misunderstanding – and
that there’s a better way to do it.
They don’t all consider
themselves disciples or evangelists. They go by titles of commentator, economic
policy expert, lifestyle coach, friend (or stranger on airplane!); occasionally
civil rights activist, lobbyist or politician. Whoever they are, they appear
from time to time in all our lives, with something to say that challenges our
assumptions about what God wants, and what God is going to do.
That’s the same experience
people had, some two thousand years ago, when the first apostles of Jesus
showed up in their neighborhoods with a new and different take on the promises
of God, an insistence that God had something new for us to know. It’s the
experience Abraham and Sarah had, much longer ago, when three strangers showed
up in their neighborhood.
And it’s going to keep
happening to us, here and now, because God isn’t done with us yet.
God is going to keep sending us out as apostles. And God is going to
keep sending unexpected messengers to
us. So we have to keep thinking about how we keep our hearts and lives open to
the unexpected or unlikely people that God is sending to shake up our
expectations about God, and ourselves.
That doesn’t mean we have to
convert every time we encounter someone with a new story about God. It does
mean we have to practice hospitality: practice being open-hearted and
open-minded toward all kinds of people who cross our paths or show up on our
doorsteps – or whose doorsteps and paths we
cross; practice being generous with our resources – not only of material
goods, but our time and attention.
Because sooner or later, in
all of our lives, we’re going to encounter someone sent – whether they know it
or not – to blow open our expectations of how God will fulfill the promises of
grace and salvation we inherit – perhaps even with news as laughably ridiculous
as a 90 year old giving birth, or an executed criminal destroying death itself.
News that we’ve actually been setting our expectations too low, and God is
ready for us to recommit our hopes and actions to a radical trust in God.
Sooner or later, God’s messengers
will cross your doorstep.
So how will we greet them,
when they come?
And what will we do when it’s
our turn to bear the news?
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