Why did Sarah laugh?

There is a famous icon, by the hand of Andrei Rublev, called the Old Testament Trinity. Based on a story in the book of Genesis, 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 and Sarah. 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 image to contemplate - if we choose it to be: it can be the opening of a door to the sacred, a doorway to the future.

A future in which all are welcome. Whoever we are, the door is open to us.

You may be a total stranger; but you are welcome. And you are invited to welcome others. 

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: the first heir of a future with hope, not just for themselves but for all who follow them in faith; indeed what God has purposed will happen, and the inheritors of their faith will become as numerous as the stars.

Sarah laughed. Why did Sarah laugh? Perhaps it was doubt. But maybe it was joy.

JRL+

Genesis 18:1-14

"Offer open-handed hospitality even to strangers", Arizona Daily Star, Keeping the Faith, Sunday March 7th 2021 page E3.  https://tucson.com/open-hearted-open-handed-hospitality-even-for-strangers/article_5c886751-b8a3-5282-8c31-8c84a87179fe.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(Andrei_Rublev)#/media/File:Angelsatmamre-trinity-rublev-1410.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Ghiberti_puerta_para%C3%ADso.jpg

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).

he sent them

In the name of God, source of all being, eternal Word, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Bill Pronzini is a mystery writer. He says there are only two stories in the world: some one goes on a journey; and a stranger comes to town. Some one goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town. In fact, there is only one story: just with two points of view.

Strangers came to our village: a pair of them. Fishermen, from Galilee, by the looks of them. Andrew, and the big quiet one, Peter. Rough hands. Rough voices. Rough manners…. They told us straight out – in fact, they blurted it, like bad news: the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. God’s rule is about to begin. Here. On earth.

In this village? I don’t think so, I said. The temple guards come and take their tax. The Romans come and take theirs. And then the tax collectors come again, for theirs.

But they had something to show us. Something to offer us. They healed the sick, they raised the dead – raised the dead! – and all in the name of one Jesus, of Nazareth.

He is the one, they said. The messiah. The one every body has been waiting for, to put things to rights. To put the temple people in their place – and send the Romans back to theirs.

No, no, no. Not yet: already, but not yet.

What’s that supposed to mean?

The kingdom of God is breaking in – like a thief in the night. The Romans cannot even see it; the temple proudies won’t know it until it’s right on top of them.

For now, prepare. Get ready. Tell the word – show the deed. The reign of God: it’s coming. Look sharp – starting acting like it. Start acting like God is in charge of the world. Start acting like the creator is the redeemer, the one who will bring us peace. The one we can rely on. To make us right with God, to make us free of our chains – our chains of misery and of hate and of fear, of suspicion and jealousy. The disease of human weakness, greed, power-hunger, lust, all its many symptoms: he will cure us.

He is curing us. Through these disciples he sent to us he is sending the word – the news. They act as his agents. They bring his message. And they show us the power – the power only the people of God could have.

They want us to join them. To carry the message beyond our village, beyond our borders, beyond our comfort zones – beyond any familiar territory. And they want us to begin by telling our neighbors, people like ourselves, as they have done, telling us.

They were Jews, like us. People who worked with their hands. People who prayed, too, with their hands – hands uplifted to God.

He sent them to us, first, the ‘lost sheep of the tribe of Israel’. For a season, we heard the message. And then they moved on, across the world, finding among us those who would travel with them, work with them, spreading the news and living the word.

Come with us, now: into the new world, the new millennium, the new age. Come into the kingdom of Heaven.

Because there are only two stories in the world – and really, there is only one: it is only a matter of perspective.

There are two kinds of people in the world – aren’t there? Jew and Gentile? Maybe, but maybe not: as Jesus taught us, as he showed us, all are welcome at God’s table.


There was another place, another time, with other strangers showing up – accepting hospitality at the tent of Abraham, the welcome work of the hands of Sarah as she prepared for them quick bread, Johnny cakes made from three measures of meal. She laughed, when she heard their promise: your wife, though she is now old and past the age for childbearing, will indeed bear a son. And in him you will be blessed, and all the peoples of the world will find their blessing as well.

How can this be? It’s past my time. No wonder she laughed.

And then she laughed out of wonder. For they heard her, quietly chortling behind the tent flap – and said, “Is nothing too wonderful for the power of the living God?”

Oh, my. Now she knows whom they’ve got in their tent. God’s messengers. Angels. They might as well be the three persons of the Trinity, in the flesh. And they tell her something impossible, something that only God can do – and they say it with power:

And indeed she laughed again. This time, not out of disbelief or surprise, but JOY. For she had a son, and she named him Isaac, which means “laughter”.

And the sign of God’s promise was there, God’s promise fulfilled, with more to come. The joy of all the nations, the blessing they all would find, came through this little gathering in a tent, where Abraham and Sarah and their household had rested.

They went on from there, into an uncertain future: a future filled with the promise of God and the challenges of the world, and it was only through faith – trusting in God – that they could see that it could ever be made right, ever be made possible.

The strangers who arrived at the tent received the hospitality that was the custom of the desert peoples, the wanderers; the same hospitality that the disciples sought, when they walked the same desert. They too brought news – of the birth, already of a messiah, and soon and already but not quite yet, of the messiah’s heaven-sent rule.

To be right with God arrives for us as an unexpected gift.

Sarah did not expect the good news of a son – and she might well have been worried how she was going to bear such a gift.

The disciples arrived unheralded in the small towns and villages, the countryside and the hinterlands, of a forgotten Promised Land: a place under the thumb of empire, collusion-rent by quislings running temple rackets. And yet they believed; they knew; they’d seen it: the kingdom of heaven was at hand. And they trusted so much what they had seen and heard and held in their arms, that they too could bring the good news, and the healing that heralded God’s kingdom, as they spread the word around the world they knew – and then beyond it to lands unknown.

We follow in their footsteps – the footsteps of the people who trusted God, and carried his promise. The footsteps of Sarah, who brought into life the son God had promised, and of Abraham who with her traveled into unknown lands, following the promise and the guidance of God. The footsteps of the disciples, who brought the word to people eager to hear it – and to be healed, and made right, body and soul.

We follow in the footsteps of the one they followed – the one who bore in himself the kingdom, and shared it, his own body broken for us, his own life given. We follow and find our disbelief turned to joy, our sorrows to laughter, and our prayers to praise. Amen.

AProper6 2008
The Readings for June 15th, the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6):
Genesis 18:1-15 * Psalm 116: 1, 10-17 * Romans 5:1-8 * Matthew 9:35-10:8

"There are only two kinds of people in the world - people who like oregano on their spaghetti and people who don't."--attributed to Jim Shelby, raising his hand to interrupt a lecture in humanistic psychology....

Martha and Mary in the presence of the Lord

CProper11 BCP
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 18:1-10a(10b-14)
Psalm 15
Colossians 1:21-29
Luke 10:38-42

1. This week’s gospel, the story of Mary and Martha, is the second of two stories about the kingdom of God, about listening and not listening to the good news of what it really is, what really is, what we really are. It is also the second of two illustrations of the summary of the law: Love God, and love your neighbor.

Last week we listened in as a lawyer asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” He himself supplied the answer:

Love God, and love your neighbor. These are the first and greatest commandment, and the second, which is like unto it. “Do this, and you will live.” But then, because the lawyer wanted to secure his hold on the kingdom, he asked Jesus to clarify his terms. “But who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, and the lawyer learned there is more to the kingdom than fulfilling his obligation under the law.

In this week’s story, of Martha and Mary, we have another chance to see what the kingdom is – and more explicitly, who Jesus is. We see a woman being reminded of the first law, the love of God: the very reason for what we do, for all that we do, is the love of God.

There are two sisters. Mary takes the place of a disciple, sitting at Jesus’ feet. Martha -- distracted and worried by many things -- objects to this.

What she is doing is fine, in a way: it is the ordinary task of an ordinary day in an ordinary household. This is, however, no ordinary day: Messiah has come and he is under our roof, at this very moment. Rabbi is teaching: what are you doing in the kitchen when you could be listening, picking up pearls as they fall from his lips?

For a woman to take the place of a disciple was NEW: it was unexpected, unheard of. Jesus’ message of the kingdom breaks down traditional barriers. The love he shares with Martha, Mary, and us is so expansive, so outrageous, and so extraordinary that it overflows. The channels of ordinary piety cannot contain the Spirit. It floods into our lives. This is no ordinary day.

Maybe that makes Martha a little nervous. Maybe that is why she is busying herself among the pots and pans. She is doing hospitality – at a moment when the one thing necessary is to wait – to wait not on tables but to wait on the Lord, to listen to what the Lord is saying. To see that this is the day when righteousness and peace embrace: the kingdom has come to our house, Martha, and it is time to rejoice.

2. Like the lawyer Martha made a good effort. She wanted to do what is right. She may even have wanted, as the lawyer who asked the question did, to inherit eternal life. What is missing is that you do not earn your way into heaven. You celebrate its arrival in the midst of you. It is present, even in an ordinary day, even in the completion of ordinary duties. But when the day comes to listen to the Lord, take off your apron, drop the duster, set down your pen, turn off your computer, hang up your cellphone, and sit at Jesus’ feet.

Our culture values the doer. We say: “Come on, let’s get going; let’s get something done.” We get up early so we can ride the elevator up to the twelfth floor with the boss. At least I have. We spend our week getting things done, and at the end lean back in satisfaction at what we have accomplished. At least I have. But then on that same Friday evening, in the very next moment, I asked myself: What was this all for? Have I lost track of the very reason for what I was doing, as I was so busy doing business? Do I need to step back, take a long look, and remember why I am here?

The lawyer meant well but he may have forgotten the relationship, to God and the neighbor, which was the reason behind the rules. Jesus breaks the rules; but he fulfills the Law. He reinstates the relationship between God and us. He reminds us why we are here. And he does it in part by overcoming judgment with mercy, by showing us the outrageous abundance and the exuberant overflowing of the kingdom of Heaven. Remember this is the Christ who, presented with the need to feed five thousand, had them sit down and share five loaves and two fish – and they all were well fed. Maybe Martha is worrying too much.

3. Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying, took a disciple’s place. Martha, on the other hand, was “distracted and anxious” about many things.

“Mary has chosen the better part” – there is that word “chosen”. As Canon Lynell Walker has pointed out, the good news is that you can choose, that your time has come, that now it is your turn to be in the presence of the Lord. The part “which will not be taken away from her” – what is that? As Dean Brian Baker sees it, clearly Jesus is only there for the night but the Word of God will remain forever … as will the Spirit.

4. By the oaks of Mamre – the scene of this morning’s Old Testament lesson – Abraham, the exemplar of faith, saw three strangers approach. He was host to the three men. Sarah, in the tent, made cakes; a servant prepared a calf; and Abraham served the men himself, standing by them under the tree while they ate. One promised to return in due season, and that Sarah should have a son. [Sarah laughed.]

This is the classic example of Middle Eastern hospitality – the welcome to strangers, preparing them food. The blessing in return, here a promise of children – and thus a future with hope – is probably characteristic too: but here it has a larger purpose. The three men represent the three persons of the Godhead, indeed icons of this scene are entitled “The Old Testament Trinity”.

So here we have the image of hospitality – and the roles of men and women – that Martha and Mary and Jesus grew up with. For Mary to break with this pattern was a surprise. Yet here she is, sitting at the feet of the Lord and listening to what he is saying: she has taken her place among the disciples. This, even though tradition would indicate that those who sit in the presence of the guest would be men – the man of the house – and that the women would like Martha concern themselves with children, church, kitchen. … leaving the men to themselves to discuss man stuff like … what?

Is the Messiah here only for men? Is the Kingdom of Heaven exclusive? No, in one situation after another we see Jesus break the rules. The kingdom of heaven is for all people. He is here to announce it, to proclaim it, to manifest it, to usher it in.

So this is not your typical guest, nor your typical meal. The occasion is extraordinary. Jesus, the Messiah, is here present now in Martha (and Mary’s) living room. What to do?

Maybe it’s all a bit upsetting. I mean, Jesus breaks the rules. Who knows what he’ll do to my life? Maybe he’ll change it all around, stretch my boundaries, and eliminate my preconceptions. Maybe he’ll call me to some new level of service of which I’m afraid.

Martha may want a bit of business, ordinary business in the household, to occupy her hands while her mind races to take it all in. What we hear from her, though, is a plea: Lord, make my sister come help me in the kitchen.

Is this what you would ask Messiah for? If he were to come to dinner today at your home, what would you say to him?

“My Lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree…”

“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”

And what will he reply to you? Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

5. I used to read a lot of mysteries. Mysteries come in several sorts. There are puzzle mysteries, like Agatha Christie novels. There are mysteries that present problems to solve, situations to investigate, and secrets to be discovered. There are stories to be told. Some mysteries are only resolved in the telling of the story. And some mysteries are only fully revealed as they are lived. “The mystery that has been hidden through the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints,” – “which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” – is one of these last. To begin to tumble to the truth, in this story, takes all your living. God, who was present to Abraham and Sarah, Mary and Martha, is present to you, now, this morning.

Your freedom to act is in the present moment. It is today not yesterday or tomorrow that you receive the divine invitation. Now it is your turn. Today you are invited to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to what the Lord is saying. This morning he has come to your tent – and he is here to share with you a meal. The cup is your salvation and the bread his presence.


Sources

Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone (SPCK, 2001)

Herbert O'Driscoll, The Word Today: Reflections on the Readings of the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 3 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 2001)

Herbert O'Driscoll, Patrick's Well (www.herbodriscoll.com)

Barbara Crafton et al., Geranium Farm (www.geraniumfarm.org)

Arthur J. Dewey, The Word in Time (New Berlin, WI: Liturgical Publications, 1990)

Sharon H. Ringe, Luke, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995)

Thomas W. Walker, Luke, Interpretation Bible Studies (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2001)

Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990)

Michael F. Patella, O.S.B., The Gospel According to Luke, The new Collegeville Bible commentary, New Testament; v. 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press)

Keith F. Nickle, Preaching the Gospel of Luke: Proclaiming God's Royal Rule (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000)

Common Worship (Church of England, 2000) http://www.cofe.anglican.org/worship/liturgy/commonworship/

The Book of Common Prayer (Church of England, 1662)

Oremus Bible Browser http://bible.oremus.org/

Stephanie Frey, “Living with Martha (Luke 10:38-42)”, Living by the Word, The Christian Century Magazine, July 13, 2004