Pentecost 3 Year A

Genesis 18: 1-15; Matthew 9: 35-10:8

This morning’s reading from Genesis finds Abraham sitting at the entrance to his tent. Immediately we’re reminded that Abraham was a sojourner – he didn’t have a house made of bricks and mortar, he wasn’t living in a settled community but had done his fair share of travelling and this morning we find him by the oak of Mamre at Hebron. He’s sheltering from the heat of the sun when he sees some men he doesn’t know approaching. And we’re told that he runs to meet them. He actively welcomes them to his home. He prepares food and drink for them. He makes it clear that he is happy to engage with them.

As the story unfolds, we realise that he is entertaining angels, although he couldn’t have known that when he made his first contact with them. And the interaction with those angels is the part of the story that we usually remember. Abraham and Sarah are told that they will conceive a child – and Sarah laughed.

What I want to focus on this morning isn’t the message that was delivered, but the strangers who arrived and how they were treated. I wonder whether the fact that Abraham was, himself, someone of unsettled status contributed to his generous response to the people who appeared on his land. We know that although Abraham had nowhere settled to live, he was a wealthy man. He travelled with his household, which was extensive. He had staff to tend his livestock and to help prepare food and drink for the visitors. He didn’t need to engage with these visitors himself, he could have asked someone else to take care of them. But that is not who he was or how he functioned. We’re told that he ran out to greet them. He asked Sarah to make some special food for them. He put himself out in order to make sure that they were appropriately welcomed.

We tend to talk a good talk about welcoming; we know that hospitality is a central tenet of our faith, and yet we are not always very good at putting it into practice. We so readily allow fear and suspicion to get in the way. Who is that? What do they want?

And especially if it’s someone who doesn’t look quite like us – maybe they have a different ethnicity or dress flamboyantly or in a way that we deem to be inappropriate – it doesn’t take much for us to be on high alert.

Even when we get beyond those prejudices, we can be less than generous in our expression of hospitality. We get caught up in trivial detail – plain or chocolate biscuits; tea and cake or an invitation for dinner. I knew someone who kept a shelf of mugs that they only used for tradespeople. That is perhaps a very honest expression of how many of us respond to those whom we don’t know and have little interest in getting to know.

We live in a cultural context that actively encourages suspicion of anyone who we might describe as ‘other’.
We’re encouraged to believe that bad behaviour is committed by people who aren’t like us, people who don’t understand our moral compass, people with a different set of values. We’re perhaps incited to de-humanise those individuals in order to more readily make them objects of contempt or hatred.

I suggest that our responses to those whom we label as strangers are firmly rooted in our own lived experience. If, like Abraham, we have been forced to travel from one place to another, forced to uproot ourselves time and again, then we see the plight of those in a similar situation in a particular way. If you are the child or grandchild of immigrants, especially those who have fled to a place of safety, your perspective will inevitably be more nuanced than that of neighbours who have never experienced real fear of persecution.

Similarly, if you grew up in Belfast during the Troubles or grew up hearing first-hand about them, you are more likely to respond in an adrenaline fuelled way to the call to take action against some group of people who have been labelled as the baddies.

If your lived experience has been in a stable household where one or both parents work, it’s almost impossible to imagine the challenges that face people who are unable to find work, or perhaps have very poorly paid work, and who struggle to feed and clothe their family. It’s no wonder that many of those people are angry. They are angry with governments that have failed them. They become angry with people whom they perceive to be taking the opportunities that they would like to access. They have no interest in welcoming the stranger because the stranger is the person I can blame for all that isn’t right in my own wee world.

And yet, taking the risk and welcoming the stranger, the one who turns up in our communities, the one who has travelled from some other place that we may know nothing about, taking that risk is incumbent upon us if we are to really live out the commitment we make to follow Jesus. It’s a scary path. It requires us to step away from our comfort zones and to turn our faces towards others, even those who make us a little bit uncomfortable; perhaps even those who make us more than a little bit uncomfortable.

In today’s Gospel we’re told that Jesus had compassion for the crowds because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. That was the lived experience they brought; that was the lived experience that shaped their responses to the people and situations around them.
They were like sheep without a shepherd. They were lost in so many ways. They were scared. Scared of the people they didn’t understand. Scared to take a risk. Scared that they were getting it all wrong.

I would suggest that when we find ourselves fearing people we don’t already know; when we find ourselves locking and bolting the doors for fear of the stranger; when we find ourselves supporting the exclusion of one group or another, we have got ourselves lost. We’ve lost sight of the path. We’ve lost sight of our shepherd. We’ve lost sight of the Gospel teaching that can shape our lives. We become disabled by fear.

In a few moments we will share our confession together. We will say: there is no room for fear in love. And that is the crux of this morning’s story. Abraham was able to show love in the form of generous welcome to the strangers who arrived at his tent. His expression of God’s love for those people dispelled any fear, allowed him to welcome them with open arms.

When we allow fear to get in the way, we shut out God’s love and generosity. We become mean and petty. When we step into God’s hospitality we risk being challenged and changed. We risk encounter with one who may turn out to be more like us than we had imagined.