Hostility or Hospitality? Fear or Love? Welcoming the Stranger at the Banquet of Divine Love

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday After Pentecost, June 14, 2020 by The Very Rev. Tyler Doherty.

         Our story from Genesis about what has come to be known as, “the hospitality of Abraham” couldn’t come at a more opportune time for a nation in crisis on many different levels. After months of quarantine and lockdowns, people are emerging from their houses (hopefully wearing masks and practicing social distancing), but there is a new quality to our interactions with strangers, with the other. I’ve noticed it even when I’m out for a walk in the neighborhood. Someone approaches and there’s a twinge of fear, panic, and apprehension as we steer clear of each other. What would normally have been an opportunity for encounter, fellowship, and the friendly exchange of pleasantries has been turned into a moment of avoidance, a moment of contracting back into myself, a moment of leery suspicion.

         And, of course, in the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd (may he rest in peace) as a result of military-minded police brutality and systemic racism, we are perhaps more aware than ever before of the fear and hostility that’s built-in to any encounter ordinary African Americans and People of Color have with the police on a daily basis whether it’s going to the store for jug of milk, driving a car, or even just watching birds in Central Park. The story of the hospitality of Abraham illuminates both of these painfully grievous realities for us and points a way forward for as individuals, as the gathered people of God in this place and time, and as a nation. The story of hospitality of Abraham sets before us a clear choice as to what it means to follow after Jesus down the path of love. Will we contract in fear and lash out at the other with anger, hostility and murderous violence, or will we, with God’s help, allow ourselves to be fashioned by grace, into a people for whom the stranger, the other, is someone to welcome, to feed, to worship even, in the recognition that they are not separate from us? Hostility or hospitality? Fear or love?

         Here’s Richard Kearney’s retelling of the Abraham story:

         “It is a hot dry day in the desert and Abraham is sitting under the shade of an oak tree at Mamre. His wife Sarah is inside the family tent sheltering from the midday sun. She is not happy. She is over one hundred years old and she is barren. Her servant woman Hagar is younger and more attractive than she and more fertile. Abraham is brooding about his unhappy wife and the future of Israel when suddenly a shadow flits across the sunlit ground in front of him. He looks up to see three foreigners standing before him and he is filled with fear. Why have they come? he wonders. To kill him and his family? There are, after all, three of them and he has two women to protect, his wife and his servant girl. Should he fight the strangers? But instead of reaching for a weapon or closing his tent, Abraham finds himself running towards the visitors. He greets them, bows to the ground and invites them to a meal. He asks Sarah to knead three measures of the best flour for loaves while he catches a calf and prepares it with curds and milk. Then Abraham stands under the oak tree and watches his guests eat. When they have finished the strangers announce that when they will return in a year Sarah will be with child. The barren Sarah, standing inside the entrance to the tent laughs when she hears this; for it is quite impossible for her to be with child.But the visitors repeat the promise – nothing is impossible to God. The child will be called Isaac, which in Hebrew means 'laughter' because it is absurdly impossible for Sarah to conceive. The strangers are thus revealed to be divine. Just as Zeus appears to Philomen in the guise of a stranger, Yahweh appears to Abraham in the guise of three strangers who invite Abraham and Sarah to an ethic of absolute hospitality.”

         Kearney—a philosopher, novelist, theologian, and Irishman with the gift of the gab—captures beautifully the emotional and existential fraughtness of Abraham and Sarah’s situation. That shadow flitting across the ground just outside the flap of the tent presents Abraham with some powerful and painful choices. He can recoil and contract in fear, to fasten the tent flap and hide out hoping the strangers go away much like we used to do as kids when we thought there was a monster in the room and we pulled the blankets over our heads. Alternately, Abraham can respond with violence—he can rush at the strangers with weapons drawn in an attempt to eliminate the perceived threat. Or, Abraham can choose a third way that avoids both fearful avoidance and violent attack—the way of radical, boundary-crossing, indiscriminate hospitality--welcoming the stranger.

         Thanks be to God, Abraham chooses the last course of action—he runs out to greet the strangers, bows to the ground in a gesture of humble greeting, and feeds them with the very best food he has to offer—the choice flour, the calf tender and good, the milk and the curds. Abraham takes the risk of encountering and communing with the other, he drops his ideas of who the other might be, he drops his fear, he drops his inclination to violence, and welcomes. And what happens? Instead of being huddled up in his tent with a barren wife fretting over the future of Israel, a new possibility, a cacklingly impossible possibility emerges into being in the promise of a child, Isaac. Fear, contractedness, barrenness, and violence are exchanged for welcome, hospitality, abundance and peaceful fruitfulness. But it could have gone either way, couldn’t it? Do you see how tenuous the entire history of the people of Israel was, how it literally hung in the balance, in the choice of how to respond to the shadow flitting across the ground just the other side of the tent flap?

         The great Hasidic philosopher of the twentieth century Martin Buber in his book I and Thou, reminds us of something very similar. We can chose to relate the world and to other people as objects to manipulate, control, exploit, and profit from (as with the transatlantic slave trade). Buber’s term for this is the “I-it” relationship. Alternately, we can choose to relate to the other as a revelation of the divine, an instance of God breaking through and the kingdom manifesting. Buber’s term for this is the “I-Thou” relationship. Abraham could have seen the stranger angels as “its,” as objects, as threats, but instead he saw past his fears, prejudices, and preconceptions to the Thou that was really there. That’s the real power of this story. Everyone we encounter—black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, republican, democrat—are Thous. The whole point of our lives here on earth is to realize that we are one body, members of one another. The whole point of our lives here on earth is to realize the truth of no separation and to love one another as God has loved us. What would have happened to our brother George Floyd if the police officer had seen him as a Thou, rather than an it?

         But the path to the realization of no separation and love requires that we are honest about everything that gets in the way of love. We have to acknowledge the dark, shadowy parts of ourselves that we’d rather push away or split off. We have to acknowledge the ways we, as white people of privilege, have participated in and benefitted from a socio-economic system and a justice system that operates by two very different sets of rules. And we have to, in the words of our collect, proclaim with boldness the dignity of every human being and work to minister for justice with compassion. We have to proclaim with boldness that each person is a Thou, an angel in disguise, and work to compassionately undo our deeply engrained tendency to treat others as objects, as “its,” so that we might make our society a little more just, a little more like God’s dream for the world and a little less the human nightmare it so often resembles.

         I think that’s why our Gospel for today—where Jesus sends the disciples out without gold or silver, no bag, no sandals, no staff—is paired with our story from Genesis. The empty-handedness of the disciples is sacramental—it’s an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual disposition. The empty-handedness of the disciples is what allows them to encounter each person as a beloved child of God to be welcomed home and not just a stranger to be feared or killed. The empty-handedness of the disciples is an invitation to us all to the mutuality of relationship that characterizes the I-Thou. Too often, we approach the other, the stranger, with a whole lot of baggage. We encounter not the flesh and bone and blood reality of that person, but our ideas, preconceptions, and prejudices about that person.

The stories  of Abraham and Sarah, and our Gospel invite us  to something different. They invite us to investigate and acknowledge the baggage we bring to each encounter. They invite us to confess and repent of the ways that this baggage has helped certain segments of society benefit and retain its grip on power while keeping other people down—sometimes with a knee on the throat for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, and other times with more subtle, but no less destructive, structural means. And finally, these stories invite us, by grace, to release that baggage so that we as one people, might feast together—on the choice flour, the calf tender and good, the curds and milk—at the banquet of divine love. Impossible you say? A pipe dream you laugh? Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?