The Hospitality of Sarah and Abraham

There is a famous icon, by the hand of Andrei Rublev, called the Old Testament Trinity. It shows three angels gathered around a small table laden with food and drink. The icon gives us a picture of three persons in a mutual relationship of commonality and exchange - that helps us imagine the nature of God as one in three.

The Old Testament Trinity changed the subject, literally, of an earlier iconic image, the Hospitality of Abraham. You may see this image in icons and in other art. What it shows is the whole image of the visit of three strangers to the Oaks of Mamre, and the tent of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham humbly greets the angelic visitors, while Sarah looks on from behind the gathered folds of their tent.

The three visitors have just arrived; they are strangers. And yet, unaware that he is entertaining angels, Abraham extends the full hospitality of his household to them.

He offers them everything Martha and Mary and Lazarus combined would give the Lord.

He doesn't know them at all.

But there it is.

Openhearted, open-handed hospitality.

And it is an icon for us, of just that.

It is more than an icon to contemplate - if we choose it to be it can be the opening of a doorway to the future.



On the front doors of Grace Cathedral, in San Francisco, these figures appear. The doors are the twins of the doors to the baptistery in Florence. So this image of hospitality appears as a door to the sacred.

When the doors are opened to you, you face a great basin - on a step above the nave floor is the font, on a line between doors and altar. You must move past the font to make your way in to communion with the people gathered in that place. And you are welcome.

You may be a total stranger; but you are welcome.

As we make our adjustments to our own worship space, we find ourselves encountering fresh the meaning of the gifts of Holy Baptism and Holy Eucharist.

These two sacraments instituted by our Lord offer us his hospitality, as we journey farther up and further in to the kingdom that is eternal, the place where God reigns.

As we welcome others, strangers to us as they may be, and offer to share the gifts with them that God has entrusted us to give, we encounter ... messengers of a hopeful future.

Before they leave Abraham and Sarah the three visitors give them a promise, one only God could keep: that indeed what God has purposed will happen, that the progeny of their faith will be as numerous as the stars.

Sarah laughed.

Maybe it was doubt.

But perhaps it was joy.

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Genesis 18:1-10a(10b-14)

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JRL+
August 2, 2010
For the Gospel Grapevine (September 2010).