Proper 6 A

Genesis 18.1-15, Matthew 9.35-10.23. The mysteries behind our lessons for this Sunday are almost unbearably deep. First of all, the three visitors receiving the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 are also God in some strange and ambiguous way. They are addressed in verse 3 as “my Lord” (adonai), a word with neither gender nor number, which is either a term for God or a general term of respect. Later in the story, “the Lord” appears to be one of the three, as the other two travel off on their own to visit Lot in Sodom. The three certainly constitute a divine presence—and we remember our favourite Orthodox icon of the Trinity depicting these three. In any case, God in Hebrew thinking seems to have had a plural dimension.

We can imagine, in the light of the Matthew story, these three visitors sent to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. They are bringing news of an unexpected inbreaking future. The hospitality factor is crucial. The hospitality is a present reality revealing and anticipating the promised future. In India they have this popular yet profound saying, that “the guest is God”. In Calvinism we have a different saying, “letting God be God”, which has to do with God’s sovereign authority. The Hindu saying is much more relevant to this Sunday’s lessons. The godness of God is somehow connected to the hospitality of the host, which, in a sense, allows God to happen. God is more of a verb than a noun, more of a relationship at least than a something. For the Calvinist the godness of God happens when the believer becomes open to conversion, but such moments of conversion are never genuine unless that include concrete acts of hospitality to ordinary others, both stranger and neighbour. The guest is God. Calvin himself would have understood this. For him the foundation of all theology was an understanding of God unavailable apart from the understanding of self, and the self could never be understood without understanding God. Scholastic Calvinism post-Synod of Dort loses this tension, as do the Barthian neo-orthodox, who put too much weight on God and lose the human dimension altogether. God becomes so removed and abstracted from human experience that he becomes an irrelevant cipher, the sort of thing people like Don Cupit and the God-is-dead movement people used to enjoy writing about. I think the Arminians, defeated at Dort, came closer to maintaining that original tension between God and human experience. Oh dear, I fear I am getting much too academic here. Let's go back to the readings.

The link between the Matthew reading and the Genesis reading is not hospitality as such but failed hospitality. Matthew 10.15 warns that for those who refuse hospitality to the twelve the judgement will be worse than for Sodom and Gomorrah, the story immediately following the Abraham and Sarah episode. You will remember that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the inhospitable reception of the two men who had come to visit Lot, a story that is basically the same story we read in the story of the Levite and his concubine at the end of Judges. Current scholarly opinion is that the Judges story is the earlier of the two. Both stories show that the culture of hospitality so deep seated in the Near East even today is no final virtue. As the Levite gives the crowd his concubine to gang rape, so Lot offers his two (betrothed!) virgin daughters, only to be held back from doing so by the heavenly visitors, who then obliterate Sodom and Gomorrah. Hospitality can be problematic. The promise needs to be bigger than ordinary human convention.

In Matthew of course the story of failed hospitality seems to reflect the trials and persecutions experienced by the early Christian community that constituted his readership. Jesus sends the twelve out as sheep among wolves. Augustine comments that this is a brilliant move. The common strategy is to send out wolves among sheep and, indeed, the well-meaning predatory manipulation of a vulnerable public that passes for evangelical strategy in today’s world tells us what Augustine is talking about. Don’t leave conversions to accident, the professional evangelists say. It is amazing how so many consultants in church growth have adopted the theories and methods of modern marketing. They ought to read Jacques Ellul's book, Propaganda. Ellul's chilling account of how we communicate and how churches have adopted the communication strategies of the business community warns that you cannot adopt the media of communication without adopting the predatory ideology. It comes as a package, and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can separate the two. Most contemporary evangelism operates as wolves among sheep. Jesus wants us to throw off the power evangelism and operate as sheep among wolves.

The twelve are sent empty handed and without resources, vulnerable enough to evoke a spirit of hospitality in anyone with any human sensitivity, and thus enable the God-event to happen. Their unaccomodated journey is stripped not only of its survival kit but of the trappings of office and authority abandoned in the very journey of incarnation, an existential emptiness that, as in King Lear, enables us to touch the deepest dimension of being human, and, so, open to the hospitality of others. This, at the end of the day, is mission in reverse. We allow those we meet to enable the God-event to happen through their hospitality and our capacity to be guests in their presence. Thus the good news, so unexpected and so miraculous that it brought laughter to old Sarah, is experienced when the missionary is able to listen and so confer dignity and authority upon the host. The genius is to be sent as sheep among wolves. This is the way of the cross. It can change the world.

It is interesting to observe that "sheep" occur three times in this reading. First, Jesus describes the harassed and helpless crowd as being "like sheep without a shepherd" (9.36). Second, the twelve are sent to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (10.6), to those Jesus has observed in their harassed and helpless state, but specifically to their particular socio-political situation--not to just anyone, as if the good news had some kind of bland, generic applicability to just anyone. And third, the twelve themselves are to contextualize themselves in the very harassed, helpless world of those who will become their hosts. They are to go"like sheep" into the midst of wolves (10.16). They will have no more protection, no more status than those they are being sent to. This is the gospel narrative in little, isn't it? It also repeats the narrative of the Exodus, in which Yahweh sees the oppression of the Hebrews and sends Moses to deliver them. The same promise, "I will be with you", is repeated in this story: "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me" (10.40). The guest is God. Christ 'R' Us.