Readings (Track 1)

As summer fast approaches, our lakes become inviting in a new way. For, what do you need to swim? [Water.] What happens if you don’t have any water? [You don’t swim.] So if God came to me and said “You’re going to be a great swimmer,” a fair question would be “Where’s the water?”

This is more or less the situation Abraham was in at the beginning of today’s text. At the beginning of Abraham’s story God promised “I will make of you a great nation.” He was 75 then, and that was 24 years ago. Since then he and Sarah have had exactly…zero children. To make matters worse, his name would have been a sort of standing joke. God had insisted on changing his name to “Abraham,” which was explained as “father of a multitude of nations.”

How many of us have been praying for something for a long time? St. Paul called Abraham the father of all who believe, and he’s also our father in this sense, that he knows what it is to pray for something for a very long time. And one of the reasons this story’s here is to remind us that God regularly works with time frames that we find uncomfortable, painful, and completely inexplicable.

This is particularly difficult for us in this culture, which demands everything now, if not yesterday. So living as a Christian in this culture means being more than a little counter-cultural, being willing to live sometimes for long stretches in the tension between what we are asking God to do and what God is doing.

Anyhow, back to Abraham. After all this waiting, all this predictable scorn, we might expect someone more than a little anti-social. So it might surprise us a little to watch Abraham receiving the three strangers. On the one hand, he is showing the hospitality that custom demands. The frontier between the town and the steppe demands that sort of hospitality, or else no one lasts very long. On the other hand, it is hospitality beyond what convention required, generous hospitality, extravagant hospitality. Watching Abraham and Sarah swing into action we’re given a glimpse as to why God chose them to start a new and decisive chapter in human history.

The narrator has told us what Abraham doesn’t know: these aren’t any three men, but the Lord God. (The narrative, incidentally, goes back and forth between Abraham relating to three and Abraham relating to one, which has lead Christians to see here an early revelation of the Holy Trinity.) Watching Abraham relate to the Stranger or Strangers, we’re reminded of a theme we meet repeatedly in Scripture: how we relate to other people determines how we relate to God. We human beings are simply not designed so we can run one program for relating to people, and another program (a much better program) for relating to God. We’ve got one program that runs for persons, God & others included, so the Judeo-Christian tradition has always encouraged us to pay careful attention to it. This, by the way, is the pragmatic reason for the command to love our enemies. How we treat our enemies spills over into how we treat those we love.

The meal conversation transitions into a conversation about a son, and Sarah, offstage, cannot contain her laughter. The LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” That’s a question the text puts pretty directly to Abraham and Sarah and us.

It’s easy to answer that question in the abstract. But the important questions are never abstract. That situation, that wound, I’ve been praying about for years, if not decades: is it too difficult for the Lord? It’s so tempting to reduce the tension: God doesn’t care. The situation doesn’t matter. We don’t matter. And any of these moves erode the generosity displayed in our first reading.

You may recall how Scott Peck began his classic The Road Less Traveled. “Life is difficult.” But, Peck observes, since we don’t like difficult, we often opt for work-arounds that end up compounding the difficulty. You may remember the sitcom Cheers. In a frequent story line a difficulty appears, the regulars opt for an avoidance strategy, that strategy consumes increasing amounts of energy and resources until it all comes crashing down, the final scene including tacit agreement to learn nothing from the experience. Sounds rather like last week’s “She’s my sister” episode.

As Christians, life is difficult also because we confess “God is faithful” and “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). To live as daughters and sons of Abraham and Sarah is to guard this tension: it’s part of our identity.

Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?  The answer for Abraham and Sarah comes the next year and its narrative is included in the Old Testament reading. Sarah —well, Abraham and Sarah, but particularly Sarah— has a son who is named “Isaac,” which simply means “Laughter.” The laughter of Sarah’s incredulity has become the laughter of her joy, the sort of joy we also see when a child’s put in a bathtub or a swimming pool. Yes, this family is going to become a family of excellent swimmers.

Now, having heard again this rather bracing story that moves from desolation and barrenness to joy and fertility and in the process challenges us to more faith, more faithfulness, we could easily stop.

But the combination of this story and the Gospel suggests a further step. I’ve read the Old Testament lesson as an invitation to learn from Abraham and Sarah: learn from them the wonderful things that God can do, and imitate their faith, their faithfulness. The Gospel reading with the commissioning of the disciples suggests that we go back to the Genesis story and wonder about how we’re called to imitate the three Strangers. Because that’s what Jesus is sending them and us out to do: go to those who’ve had every reason to give up hope with the words of power and deeds of power that will free them to hope and believe. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. And we proclaim this good news in hope, for not all the sick among us are cured, and, barring Jesus’ return, these bodies too will die. This is part of what it means to be sons and daughters of Abraham. And even as we proclaim the good news, we keep the welcome mat out for the Three Strangers who—often in ways beyond our imagination—continue to show up at our doorstep.