Third Sunday after Pentecost - June 18, 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday after Pentecost June 18, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

Abraham and Sarah are the paradigmatic wanderers of Holy Scripture. As good as dead, old and in the way, they are called out of what they know, a place of comfort and certainty, to the land God will show them. They walk by faith and not by sight with hearts open to the new thing God is doing in and through them. They are powerful, sacramental reminders that in the vicinity of God’s love there is no such thing as too young (think Mary), or too old. Sure, in the eyes of the world which sees only in terms of usefulness and productivity–of earning, winning, doing, and achieving–Abraham and Sarah are washed up. People of no account. But in God’s eyes, they are infinitely precious. In God’s eyes they are finally (and rather strangely) washed up enough to be perfectly receptive, open, and responsive places in and through which the new thing God is doing can happen.

This morning we join our washed up wanderers under the oaks of Mamre. It’s hot and dry. The barren Sarah–over a hundred years old and a little jealous of the young, fertile, and attractive servant woman Hagar–is hunkered down in the tent out of the heat. At the tent’s entrance, Abraham’s got sand in places he didn’t know he had. And he’s brooding–his thoughts at least as oppressive as the unblinking sun. What is the Lord up to? What should he do about Sarah and Hagar? Fruitfulness? As numerous as the stars in the sky? At our age? Come on! Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a flicker of movement, a rustled stirring. His thoughts stop. He comes to himself, and glaces up to see three strange men standing there.

Abraham is faced with a choice we are all faced with every day (indeed in each and every moment). Will we batten down the hatches, fasten the tent flaps, and huddle in fear, or (as Abraham decides) run out to greet the stranger, lavishing ourselves upon them? Richard Kearney likes to point out that the words hostility and hospitality both share the same root–hostis–which can mean both “guest” and “enemy.” How we respond to the stranger depends on which story we are telling ourselves about the other. Are they a threat? Is that teenager turning around in our driveway coming to get us? Or are they lost because their GPS is on the fritz? Do we grab the rifle and start shooting from the porch, or saunter on out and ask if they need directions?

Abraham chooses hospitality in this instance. He opens wide the tent flaps, runs out to meet the strangers, bows at their feet, and offers them a meal of flour cakes, and a calf tender and good with sides of curds and milk. He doesn’t even eat with them. He stands by under the tree and watches them eat. He greets, bows, offers, and attends.

Of course, the fruit of this act of hospitality, the fruit of this choice to greet and welcome, to bow and lavish, is the recognition of the three strangers as angels and more importantly the child Isaac–the Laughter of God soon to come cackling and cooing from Sarah’s as good as dead, and barren womb. Opening to the Other, welcoming the stranger as the face of God, opens a way where there was no way, a door where Abraham and Sarah saw only a dead end–buzzing flies, baking heat, and a poorly ventilated tent. The laughing love of God draws fruitfulness out of barrenness. The laughing love of God prods abundance out of lack. Love chuckles, “I’m not done!” and laughs to Sarah a Laughing Son whose laugh keeps us all in stitches.

So the call to us seems to be to open to the stranger, to choose hospitality over hostility, greeting over huddling up in fear. To run to meet them face to face, to reach out to feed and touch the fringe of strange other’s cloak and discover there the Take Heart God who frees us from twelve years of self-enclosure that only has us leaking oil. But this is always a moment of graced choice. Recall that Abraham himself is no paragon of welcome. He casts off Hagar and leaves her in the wilderness where she would have perished had not an angel of lord pointed the way to a well. Recall again that Abraham chooses hostility over hospitality when he thinks he has to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah. But he also hears another voice that tells him, “Do not kill your son. Release him as possession, projection, idealization, as yourself, and welcome him back as stranger, as gift.”

Great Father Abraham, like each of us, balances on the slippery stone of hostis: guest or enemy? Hostility or hospitality? Which will it be? A particularly potent and convicting question as we celebrate Juneteenth tomorrow, no? A reminder that reconciliation and the building up of Beloved Community emerges as potential in every time and place as the on-going work of love.

And can we welcome the face of God as stranger in someone we think we know? Aren’t even those we think we know best actually holy mysteries when we actually bow and greet, lavish our attention, and attend? That’s why I say I love my wife best when I don’t know who she is. I love my life most fully when it’s irreducible strangeness, its human-divine flickering at the edge of what I know is allowed to emerge just past where I’ve staked my tent: on the sidewalk, in dandelions around the fire hydrant where a dog lifts its leg, in a mother sparrow freshening herself predawn in a pothole.

Abraham and Sarah show us something of how we might greet the stranger as the face of God, but Paul’s Letter to the Romans shows us that it is also God in Godself who comes out to greet us–strangers, and prodigals that we are. Abraham runs out and discovers in the three strangers Angels of the Lord. But Paul reminds us of something equally astounding. God in the person of Jesus comes out to feed and lavish and ravish us–while we were still weak… while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Not because we’ve earned it. Not because we ticked all the boxes. Not because we’re right, or pretty, or nice. God comes to us just as we are before we’ve prettied up the picture or got our unruly ducks in a row because God loves us. Period.

This love, Paul tells us, has always already been given. It is “poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” It’s done. Finished. Accomplished. But we live as aliens in the land oblivious to this stunning reality much of the time don’t we? We are strangers to this wellspring of unconditional love that is who we really are. We are estranged from that poured-into-our-hearts gift of God’s love. And that makes us strangers to ourselves, doesn’t it? The question becomes not just can we welcome the stranger as the unlikely face of God, but can we welcome the love that is always already given to us? Can we come home to the one who has come home to us and live from that good, broad, and boundless land of love that knows no boundaries? What is the way to that land–even here, even now–where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting?

We get a hint from our gospel. Jesus tells the disciples to “take no gold, no bag, sandals, staff.” Poverty, in Jesus’ teachings, is always sacramental–an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace and disposition. What is the spiritual disposition pointed to by no gold, bag, sandal, or staff? If you had to embody that in a gesture, what would it be? The open hand, right? The dropped net. The knowledge of our irrevocable belovedness that endures beyond the blowing this way and that way fickleness of power, prestige, and possessions.

No gold, no bag, no sandals, no staff, no family name, not knowing what you’re going to say all point to the childlike simplicity of just being. We wander, for once, away from all the doings. No methods. No techniques. No shoulds. No doing it well or badly. Nothing to adjust or correct. Nothing to add or subtract. Not how we are, where we are, who we are, but that we are all. The incomprehensible miracle of this. We rest surrendered, trusting, provisioned there in and as the simplest and most overlooked thing in the world: our beingness. We stay, remain, abide and dwell and let all the stories of not enough and this isn’t it come undone. And soon enough our I Amness comes to rhyme with the Isness of all things. Just love.

Soon enough this seemingly barren life starts to ring out with flour cakes and a calf good and tender with milk and curds. Just on the other side of the tent flaps, out past the last tent peg–our Laughing God Laughing us into new being in Christ. Our Laughing God who runs out, greets, bows, lavishes, and ravishes so that we can do the same for whomever is outside the door.