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.

There’s this great quote from Leon Kass that I want to share on this story. He wrote:

 “Becoming a member of the chosen tribe does not require indifference to the needs and concerns of outsiders. On the contrary, as Abraham shows so graciously, the willingness to walk before God becomes the ground of treating all human beings with the respect and justice that the new covenant with the seed of Abraham was instituted to promote.”

Or as Michael Curry, the now-presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached regarding his son going off to college, he said (paraphrased): You treat the women you meet in college like they are your sister because, as sisters and brothers in Jesus Christ, the truth is they are your sister. And you treat the men you meet as if they are your brother, because they are your brother.

If Abraham, as distinct and separate and alone as he was, could welcome three strangers with the finest offerings he could then so should we. In fact, as chosen people of God our obligation rises and rises and rises. Our distinctness is the very grounds of treating all people with the respect and dignity they deserve, and it is the grounds for proclaiming justice.

We love because God loves us. This is the radical message of Abraham and why he is chosen and set apart to make a new nation, a new people, a chosen people, and that people is obligated all the more to serve God by serving their neighbors. And their neighbors always look funny. They always seem scary. Some of them are scary. But these are not excuses.

Somewhere along the line we lost this sense of obligation to the stranger. Maybe it’s always been rare for humans to act this way. When Jesus came along he had to point us back to the misfits themselves. He lifted up the Samaritan who stopped along the road and the poor woman who gave her last two cents. He lifted up Lazarus sitting at the gate; not the rich man who forgot what hospitality looked like; not the Pharisees who had their Torah in hand but never seemed concerned with stories like these. They couldn’t possibly have read the story of Abraham entertaining God by the oaks of Mamre and then gone about living as if they were set apart.

We cannot live this way. It is not merely the law that we find in scripture that obligates us to love the stranger—the neighbor we don’t know; sure, that’s there rather prominently in the twofold command: Love God and love your neighbor. But it’s also in our nature as people chosen by God to serve and love those who are in need. This is how we show that we are human—by acknowledging and supporting the human needs of others.

Abraham makes no exception. He doesn’t ask around. He doesn’t look for excuses. No background checks. No assurance that these strangers won’t repay his kindness with violence. Nothing.

Instead, “the willingness to walk before God becomes the ground of treating all human beings with the respect and justice.”

All human beings.

In the 21^st century we are part of many tribes. We divide ourselves in so many ways we lose track. We are pitted against one another in battles for everything from grades to promotions to scholarships to starting roles on the football field; we judge one another on our bodies and our humor and our age and our gender and a hundred other things. We make calculated choices of who to support and when. We play politics as if it is just a game. We make exception after exception after exception to support those we like and those we agree with, and to ignore, minimize, or despise the needs of those we don’t. And so it is little wonder that we no longer see the Lord in one another; that we see one another's differences as worthy of fear rather than evidence of God’s handiwork.

            Too busy trying to figure out one another’s hidden motivations, we do not proclaim justice. Preoccupied with tolerance, we miss any chance for respect. Worried about our lives, we can’t imagine the burdens that others bare.

            When we fail to act as Abraham did it’s not mere pessimism about human beings; it’s not mere self-preservation; it’s not mere practical wisdom. It is blasphemy. Not simple breaking of commandments to love the poor, which is bad enough, when we fail to see God in the stranger and the alien, we might as well say, “There is no God.”

            I know a person can come up with a million examples in their heads of how this all can backfire; I know we can never be assured that, like Abraham, our hospitality will be rewarded. We don’t know that. That’s not why we act. But to act otherwise, to let fear rule our lives, is to suggest that I am more important than God, because my judgments about what is good and right and necessary and just are wiser than that one who created me.

            This is blasphemy.

            As chosen people of God, drowned in the waters of baptism, the foundation on which you stand cries out for justice, for goodness and mercy. There is no higher calling as a Christian than to take the gifts that we know are already ours and give of our lives for the sake of the strangers who appear at our tent day after day.

            It’s not that this service will save you. We still need Jesus for that. It’s just that: we all need reminders of why we needed saving in the first place, and the best way to do that is often to serve another child of God, to be the hands and feet of Jesus for them, and to recognize the face of God in them, as they do the same with you. That’s everything being a Christian should be.