The Sixth Sunday After Trinity (July 16, 2023)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Last week, we read about the reaffirmation the promises God made to Abraham. This week we read an important story about Abraham receiving some mysterious visitors. But there is a story running in the background of today’s reading that occurred in chapter 13. When Abraham was called out of the land of his family, his brother’s son Lot came with him. The problem was that Lot didn’t stay with Abraham after they left because their respective shepherds couldn’t seem to get along. Lot chose to dwell to the east of Abraham—it should be noted that characters going east in Genesis is never a good sign because it symbolizes going back to Eden—and he settled in Sodom, a city described as “wicked” full of “sinners before the Lord exceedingly.” And of course, immediately following our Old Testament reading, two of Abraham’s three visitors will go to Sodom and Gomorrah where the men of the city want to sexually abuse them and they escape with Lot and his family.

Now, last week, we talked about the rhythm in God’s reaffirmation of his promise to Abraham: grace, response, promise. God’s grace was at work in the call of Abraham, enabling him to respond. Abraham’s response was a positive one of faith that involved trust and obedience. As a result, God's promise sustained Abraham and God was faithful to deliver. Today, we are given three pictures of how to respond to grace when God offers it to us: there’s Lot, there’s Sarah, and there’s Abraham.

The geographical locations that events happen matter, especially in the book of Genesis. This encounter happens under a tree in the plains of Mamre. The meaning of Mamre is something like vision, seeing, or understanding. Unlike physical sight, it’s important to note that spiritual sight is not something out of our control. You might be born with an astigmatism, nearsightedness, or farsightedness and the only control you have is whether you wear glasses or contacts. Spiritual sight is something we can condition and it’s tied to what we do. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes, “for they shall see God.” The purer in heart, the less distracted you are by the world, the holier you are, the more clearly you can see things for how they are. Sarah is an example of someone who cannot see, at least not at this point in the story. When she overhears the promise that she’ll have a son, her reaction is to laugh. She can’t see God’s power to transform the situation. Lot is another character who may be able to see some but his vision is obscured. His impaired sight makes him mistake something lesser, the land around Sodom and Gomorrah, as a greater good. In this story, only Abraham possessed discernment and the purity of heart that enables him to not only see God but to feast with God.

Abraham’s response is one of hospitality. It’s important to remember that in the ancient world, hospitality was everything; it often could have been the difference between life and death. Hospitality recognizes someone as worth doing life with, not just in a social sense but also in a literal sense. When a sojourner comes to your house, feed them because they may starve if you don’t. Lack of hospitality was one of the primary reasons that Sodom and Gomorrah is depicted as so depraved. The two angelic visitors are not welcomed except by Lot and exposed to the unnatural violence of sexual assault. Meanwhile, what does Abraham do when his trio of visitors arrive? He washes their feat and prepares them a meal and he does it all with haste. If you pay attention to the verbs and adverbs in the story and you might get tired keeping up with Abraham: he sees the visitors while sitting under the tree and he runs to meet them; he hastened to the tend; he tells Sarah to make the meal quickly; Abraham runs to the herd; and a servant hastens to dress it. Abraham’s hospitality is an extension of his vision: he sees these important visitors because of his purity of heart and he reacts accordingly, recognizing what’s important and being quick to act on it.

It might help us better understand if we think a little about the identity of these three visitors that appear to Abraham. There are two main proposals for the identity of the visitors. The first is that this is the Trinity itself. You may be familiar with the icon called The Trinity or The Hospitality of Abraham by Orthodox artist Rublev which clearly reads this interpretation into the story. However, another reading is that, while this may be an anticipation or symbol of the Trinity, the party of three is made up of two angels and the pre-Incarnate Christ. This is the interpretation I favor because Jesus is the visible image of his invisible Father. This explanation casts light onto why it’s only two angels who go to Sodom and Gomorrah, instead of the three. Abraham’s purity of heart enables him to see God at mid-day; Lot, whose vision is impaired, does not get to see God, though he is rescued by the angels who come to him at night from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The soul prepares a banquet for God. The soul, according to St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:17, is a temple of God. The soul is the bridal chamber being prepared for the Groom. Abraham shows us what it is to welcome God into ourselves.

And so what do we learn from Abraham today? How does this story, which is our story, teach us to live? Three things.

First, it teaches us how to respond. When God comes to us, when God extends his grace to us, we are to respond with all of ourselves. When God comes to us in his humiliated form, in the Eucharist, we hold nothing back from him. We come to the altar and we give him every part of who we are. We make the bread, we kill the calf—we offer ourselves to him, we participate alongside him.

Second, as we practice this self-offering in the sacramental sense, we are given the grace to make this reality in our own lives. We develop a purity of heart, a spiritual vision, that helps us to see things for what they are. Caesarius of Arles, a 6th century Church Father, read the “three measures of fine meal” to be those three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love that we talked about last week. If we, participating with God, develop these three virtues, we will be pure of heart and able to see him. With faith, hope, and love, we see him more clearly in the Eucharist and, perhaps more importantly, we can see him more clearly in our neighbors, those we come in contact with.

Finally, it is very important for us to follow Abraham’s example in how quickly he obeys. Abraham wastes no time; he jumps straight into serving his visitors. There is no hesitation. It’s very easy for us to delay, to procrastinate. Maybe it’s in dealing with a bad habit, a vice, or a besetting sin that we don’t really want to stop and so we put it off: “Oh, I’ll deal with that later.” Guess what? Later often doesn’t come. Maybe we procrastinate performing a positive duty. “I know I should go to Church but I’m just so busy so I’ll start going when things get calmer.” Guess what? Things probably won’t calm down. Now is the time. If you don’t respond to the grace that’s offered to you when it’s offered to you, why is waiting going to magically make you responsive? It won’t. All that exists to us, poor, feeble creatures stuck in a space-time continuum that progresses linearly is the now. And when you’re Creator and Savior shows up to you, now is the only time to respond. Trust and obey with haste.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.