Stranger-Love
Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7
Pentecost 17
September 20, 2015
Pentecost 17
September 20, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
I have an icon of the scene described in this story. The word “icon” is in common use. We think of an icon as one of those little pictures on our computer screens. We use our mouse to put a pointer over the icon and click on it to open an application or a file. (Do you realize that if I had said that sentence in 1970 no one in the world would have understood any of it?)
The word icon wasn’t invented for computers, though. It was borrowed from Christians. When we use that word we mean a stylized painted image. Icon means “image” but icons work more like windows, the real kind, the ones that let you see through a wall, not the operating system by Microsoft. Icons are like holes punched in ordinary reality. If you look into them long enough and attentively enough, you’ll eventually be able to see heaven, or at least a little bit of it.
Actually, that’s true of almost anything. Look at the stars, or at a tree, or even at each other long enough and attentively enough, and you’ll be able to see a bit of heaven. It’s just easier for some people to use an icon instead, at least until they’re good at that kind of looking.
Anyway, I have an icon of this scene that is called The Hospitality of Abraham. At the center of the icon is a table. On the far side and to the left and right are three men. They have wings to show that they are angels. They each have a nimbus—what we call a halo—of gold. On an icon made in the traditional way, the gold would be gold leaf, not gold paint. The nimbus of the center figure is more elaborate than the others.
Abraham and Sarah stand to either side, attentive to their guests, bowing slightly. There is an oak tree in the background. On the table itself are several dishes. There is always flat bread. One of the dishes contains a calf’s head.
The name of the icon as I said is The Hospitality of Abraham, but something is lost in translation. In Greek the word translated “hospitality” is philoxenia and it’s quite a bit stronger than what we usually mean by hospitality. We usually mean that, when someone is coming pay us a visit, we’ll be prepared to offer them coffee and a cookie or two. It may mean something more formidable, like my Grandma Caldwell would offer. I say offer advisedly because she believed that love was something that was produced in the kitchen and served in the dining room. Consequently, no matter when we arrived or when we had last eaten, there would be a meal ready for us, a meal we had better eat.
Philoxenia was a different and more difficult thing. If we break the word into its parts we can see why. The first part comes from the word philos, one of the Greek words for love. The second part comes from the word xenos, usually translated as “stranger.” It appears in our word xenophobia, meaning “fear of strangers.” Philoxenia is the opposite: love of strangers. Not tolerance of strangers, but love of strangers, stranger-love. How can we love someone we have not met? This kind of love isn’t a feeling; it’s a commitment to action. Philoxenia, then, might best be translated as “the readiness to behave lovingly toward strangers.”
We can see that in Abraham. Abraham was sitting in the shade and saw three men approaching. He ran to meet them, bowed down to them, and begged them to let him provide water to wash their feet, a place to sit and rest, and some bread. When they agreed he used this consent as an excuse to set a feast before them. I’m thinking that the meal preparation must have taken some time. “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, kneed it, and make cakes.” That was going to take some time. It’s not like Sarah had a box of Bisquik in her pantry. The same was true of the “calf, tender and good.”
Today, of course, the guests would have wandered off long before the meal was ready. But it wasn’t today and, once they had agreed to accept Abraham’s philoxenia, his stranger-love, they were obliged to wait for it. And so they did.
Anthropologists will tell us that “stuff” goes on in these events. In the first place stranger-love is a way of defusing what could be a dangerous situation. Philoxenia is vitally important to keep strangers from becoming enemies. This partly explains why Abraham’s hospitality was so over the top.
Abraham offered and the three men received his stranger-love. This placed an obligation on the three to reciprocate, to give back like for like, in some way. The travelers are not really free to continue their journey owing an obligation to someone they are likely never to see again. So they offer a blessing.
If Abraham’s stranger-love was over the top, then the blessing given by the three men is far beyond that: Sarah will, at long last, have what she has desired, a son.
We know how impossible that must have seemed. Sarah thought it was a joke and one in poor taste at that. Her husband had offered exorbitant stranger-love and the strangers replied with an impossible blessing that, since it was impossible, was no blessing at all. Her laughter was a form of disdain. It’s a good thing she kept it to herself, lest these strangers take offense and become enemies after all, despite all their efforts.
At this point, the story takes a turn. The man who has been speaking is revealed to be, not a man and nor even an angel, but the God Yahweh, who wants to know why Sarah has laughed and why she has disdained his blessing since it is not an empty promise.
In our reading the text is interrupted at this point and the reading skips to the birth of Isaac. I understand the choice that was made to do this. We don’t tolerate a three and a half chapter reading very well. It would certainly make recruiting lay readers more challenging. But the events in between the two parts of the reading have their importance in the story.
The next part of the story tells the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Let’s note that these cities were not destroyed because of their alleged homosexuality. That was an idea first proposed in the eleventh century after Christ. Ezekiel says this about Sodom: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”[1] In the story they compound that by their refusal to offer proper hospitality. They do not love their own poor and needy. They do not love strangers. They are destroyed for the failure to love, not for loving the wrong people.
Yahweh tells Abraham about the plan to destroy the cities and Abraham, in a strong display of chutzpah, attempts to strike a bargain with Yahweh to spare the cities. If ten righteous people can be found, Yahweh will leave the cities alone.
But in the event, ten righteous people are not found, though the family of Lot (Abraham’s nephew) is allowed to escape, except for Lot’s wife who famously looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. Lot’s daughters—he has no sons—conspired to become pregnant by their father and gave birth to Moab and Ben-amin who became the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites, two of Israel’s most hated enemies. Meanwhile Abraham and Sarah go traveling to Gerar. Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister (she was in reality his half-sister) and said nothing to Abimelech the king of Gerar when he took her into his harem, knowing that Abraham could do nothing about it. Luckily for Abimelech and for our story, Yahweh spoke to Abimelech in a dream and Abimelech returned Sarah to Abraham, along with sheep, oxen, slaves, and a thousand pieces of silver. In this way Abimelech was saved from his failure of hospitality.
Then, at long last, Sarah conceived and give birth to a son. They named him Isaac which means “he laughs,” but now it is the laughter of astonished joy, not dismissive disdain. So it was that Abraham was repaid for his philoxenia, his extravagant stranger-love.
This is the end of the text, but it is not the end of the story. When Isaac weaned and safely out of infancy and Abraham’s inheritance through Sarah secure, Sarah’s gaze turned toward Hagar, her slave, and Ishmael, Hagar’s son by Abraham, the heir “just in case,” and Sarah hated them and wanted them gone. Abraham didn’t like it. If philoxenia is the readiness to act lovingly toward strangers, what shall we call the readiness to act hatefully toward the members of his own household, toward his son and the boy’s mother? But “ain’t mama happy, ain’t nobody happy,” so Abraham did as Sarah demanded.
Turned out into the wilderness with only some bread and a skin of water, when those meager supplies ran out, Hagar and Ishmael laid down to die. It would have happened, but for Yahweh’s intervention. God both rescued the two of them and promised that Ishmael would become a great nation.
We don’t hear much more about Ishmael in the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the Islamic tradition, however, Ishmael did indeed become the ancestor of a great people: the Arabs. He was a prophet and, in due time, among his descendants Muhammad himself would come to be numbered. But even that isn’t the end of the story.
You’ve heard about Ahmed Mohamed, the Irving, Texas, ninth-grader who made an electronic clock and proudly brought it school to show to his engineering teacher. You may have heard that he was arrested for bringing a device suspected of being a bomb to school. This was not true. The bomb squad was not called. The school was not evacuated. The clock was taken to police headquarters in a police cruiser. No one thought it was a bomb. They did not look at a clock and see a bomb; they looked at one of Ishmael’s children and saw a terrorist. This is racism, pure, simple, and ugly. The officials of one American community were asked the hospitality question and they failed miserably.
Today millions of Ishmael’s children are fleeing violence and severe drought in Syria. They're not trying to get cable TV as one so-called Christian has claimed. They are fleeing for their lives. Four million of them are registered with the UN High Commission of Refugees. Many have fled to other countries in the Middle East. Some have fled to Europe. And now the hospitality question is before us once again. How will Europe and the United States respond? How will Abraham’s spiritual descendants respond? Will Abraham change his mind about his treatment of Ishmael?
The story is far from over. It waits for us to write the ending. Let’s make sure it’s a good one.
[1] Ezekiel 16:49.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment