Loving strangers: even when it's every tent for one's self

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

This is the perfect Biblical story for a day in which we are imagining what intergenerational relationships look like because you don’t get much more inter-generational than one-hundred-year-old-ish first-time parents.

I mean, if you get past the miracle of giving birth at 90 years old, which admittedly is a huge stumbling block, it’s natural to wonder what it would be like for a couple of people in their 100s to raise a child. I’m pushing 30 and some days it feels difficult.

More than that, this is a story of radical hospitality. Welcoming three strangers—three foreigners—lays the groundwork for Abraham to receive the promise of an heir. These men who stand as God before him, and whom Abraham serves without any indication of reward, become agents of grace who offer Abraham an impossible gift. Does Abraham receive the promise of Isaac because of he treated the Lord in the right way? We don’t know. But we do know that he quite literally lives out the reality of Hebrews 13:2, which )warns not to “neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

The morals for us are many. Obviously we are called to be hospitable to strangers and to take care of the needy, and this is ever starker given the context. Abraham and Sarah are on their own. There is no nation. Israel, you might remember, is the name given to the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. There are no Hebrews; no ethnic brothers and sisters. This is the beginning of all that. Before Abraham and Sarah it was every tent to themselves.

And yet, here they are practicing a radical kind of hospitality.

How to read the Bible (courtesy of Genesis 1 and 2)

Genesis 2:4b-24

There are so many different ways to go here with the creation story that it’s hard to pick just one direction. So I’m going to fall back on what I do with this story when teaching Confirmation because I’m sure a few of you could use a refresher back to those days. Creation always comes up when we’re in our Old Testament year, obviously, since it’s the only sensible place a person can start when it comes to the Bible, but it also comes up in our 9^th grade capstone year a couple times when we talk about Heaven, Hell, and New Creation, when we talk about God, the Land, and the Environment, and maybe most importantly when we talk about the Word of God.

            These shouldn’t really be heated verses. Clearly the world was created, surely there was some kind of order to it, and human beings today are this wonderfully complex latest movement in the creation process. But because of how these chapters are read scientists get set against Christians and creationists against just about everybody. We use this chapter in Confirmation to talk about how we read the Bible and why that matters. So, on this Rally Sunday, with new programs starting up and the school year underway, I imagine few better times to talk about how Lutherans read the Bible than today.

            Of course, in saying this I should point out that individual Lutherans read the Bible in all sorts of ways. Moreover, I can’t even say that all Lutheran churches read the Bible in the same way. The Missouri Synod reads it differently than the ELCA, which reads it differently than the LCMC and NALC and all those other initialed churches. If you read the creation stories differently than how I’m talking about today I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m just saying that you might be unorthodox (which some of you would see as a compliment anyway). Today I simply want to illustrate that what many Christians believe to be orthodox (or traditional) is not necessarily what has been orthodox in the Christian church for far longer than they’d imagine.

            Here’s what I mean: When we discuss Genesis 1 and 2 in Confirmation I open up by asking the students how many stories there are of the creation of the world in the Bible. This is universally met by blank stares just like yours right now. For most people it never occurs to them that there could be more than one creation story, because our overriding understanding of Genesis is that it is to be read like a history book. A history book would distill creation to a single unified story by way of retelling, to the best of historian’s knowledge, the way that things happened. No historian worth his or her salt is going to put two accounts side by side with completely different details. But that’s exactly what Genesis does! In fact, it’s the first thing that Genesis does! Immediately after giving us our traditional six day creation with God resting on the seventh day, the book turns to a second account of the creation with things occurring in a completely different order and less emphasis on the chronology but more on the importance of humanity.

Israelites, Immigrants, and the Imprecatory Psalms

Psalm 83

One of the things we have lifted up this summer again and again is the breadth of emotions that can be found in the Psalms. No matter what you are feeling you can find some word in the Psalms that speaks to that experience: joy, sadness, fury, pain, regret, nihilism, hate, love… you can find it all. Today, that is on full display with a couple of the “hardest” Psalms, since these are Psalms written largely against groups of people. One of the things we have to be careful about doing thus far this summer is putting ourselves in the place of another group of people. Just because you feel upset and Jesus once felt upset does not mean that your anger is like Jesus’, and just because you feel particularly happy today does not mean your joy is like Mary’s Magnificat. It seems kind of obvious but it bears remembering when we read scripture that we are not the Israelites, we are not David, we are not Jesus, we are not Mary.

Just because you feel persecuted about something does not mean that you are persecuted like Israel. When we come across the experience of others it is perfectly normal to try to square their experience with our own. It’s why our first reaction to whatever a person is going through is to say, “I know how you feel” even when we obviously don’t. This tendency toward empathy is fine, but sometimes it goes awry, which happens most often when we put ourselves in the victim’s role, imagining that we are the ones persecuted even when we are not.

Psalm 83 lays down a foundation for what will come with Mary’s Magnificat song about turning the world around, but it comes in a very peculiar form. These are the hardest Psalms because they are imprecatory Psalms, and imprecatory Psalms are songs that call on God to defeat, conquer, even destroy the enemy. This is great for morale for those who are oppressed, but tough for us to deal with today because something inside of us knows that the Israelites are less a world power and more a subjugated minority. It causes us to wonder, “Are we the enemy?” From the first few verses of the Psalm: