A Man at Prayer

Abraham – now there's a man with a calling! God plucked him from the paganism of ancient Sumer, offered to make his name great and his descendants a mighty nation who will be a blessing to all families of the earth; and now here he is, in a land his children will one day inherit when their grand ordeal is done. Abraham and Sarah have a covenant with God, a covenant signed and sealed on his flesh (Genesis 17). To make sure that it didn't migrate to his head, God tested him with an appearance in three strangers, to see whether Abraham's privileges would make him boastful, xenophobic. Instead, Abraham's hospitality proved him humble, welcoming, determined to really be a blessing to others after all (Genesis 18:1-15). And so, on the way beyond his tents, God made clear Abraham's greatness and summons: to live by righteousness and justice, and to disciple his children and house after him to become a nation of righteousness and justice, and to so keep this way of the Lord that they'd pour blessings on all nations (Genesis 18:16-19).

Now, as they keep walking, we hear God speak again. Now it becomes clear why the visitors – the Lord and his two angels, all appearing still as if in human form – have been looking toward Sodom, one of the cities of the Jordan plain down below. “The LORD said, 'Because the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great and because their sin is exceedingly heavy, I will go down to see whether they have made a complete end according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know” (Genesis 18:20-21). Suffice it to say that Sodom and its infamous sister-city Gomorrah and their neighbors have gotten God's attention, enough to warrant a judicial investigation into the charges raised against them.

And so the very travel that afforded Abraham opportunity to receive God was really for a divine inspection visit on Sodom and Gomorrah – God will go down to them, as he 'came down' to see what was the fuss at Babel (Genesis 11:5). Of course, God knew from eternity every detail of what would be done at Babel, and at Sodom and Gomorrah, and on Calvary, and in your life and in my life. But this image makes clear that God is seen to be investigating, seen to be verifying, seen to be ensuring all facts are in evidence before a verdict and sentence are reached. It's possible, from a literary standpoint, that Sodom and Gomorrah will pass inspection; or they won't. From the perspective of time and of man, the fate of the accused is “not yet sealed.”¹ Either way, God is about to get to know them quite intimately, as he knows Abraham, though expectedly with quite the opposite effect (Genesis 18:17).² And if the facts are criminal, all options are on the table.

That's what the Bible is telling us, what God is telling us; but we should realize that God is talking out loud here – and because Abraham chose to escort his visitors on their way for miles, as an exemplary host, he has the rare opportunity to be in the in-the-know club. God is quite deliberately letting Abraham eavesdrop on a heavenly consultation, or maybe is even addressing him directly. Now, why would God let Abraham know what's going to happen, unless God wanted to give Abraham a way to step in? God is implicitly inviting Abraham, as a trainee in dealing out justice, to join the deliberation and to have a say in what takes place.³ God has effectively “expressed interest in Abraham's input” on the matter,⁴ as his new “partner... in executing political justice.”⁵ Or, to put it another way, God “revealed it to Abraham so that he not cease praying.”⁶

So then “the men turned from there and went toward Sodom,” departing from Abraham; although Sodom is over thirty miles away,⁷ the fact that they're actually angels means they'll still arrive by nightfall (Genesis 19:1). But it seems only two visitors traveled to Sodom; one hangs back. “And Abraham still stood before the LORD” – God hung around for Abraham, and Abraham didn't turn for home and leave God to his business (Genesis 18:22). There stands Abraham, and there stands the LORD in human vesture. Any passerby would have seen two men. And I wonder if the human appearance God had taken on here included the same eyes that would look up at Mary and Joseph, the same chest on which John would rest his head, the same feet Mary of Bethany would anoint, the same hands with a spot preordained for the nails. None of this could Abraham yet know.

Then “Abraham still stood before the LORD” (Genesis 18:22), maybe standing at attention or maybe he even ran around to block the Lord's way forward, to stand athwart the advance of God in judgment.⁸ And in the very next verse, “Abraham drew near” (Genesis 18:23), he approached and engaged God. He dared because he had been invited, but he understood he was invited as a special privilege of his right standing before God.⁹ So there he was, “still attending in prayer before the Lord.”¹⁰ Abraham has previously protested or petitioned in prayer for personal needs and wants; in fact, nobody has yet clearly gone to bat for unrelated others.¹¹ But now Abraham “rushes in headlong to recklessly protect human lives.”¹² That's why he “stands before God to plead for the lives of depraved pagans.”¹³ And this conversation is taking place with Sodom and Gomorrah actually visible to them down below, where the people are living and breathing and eating and drinking and working and playing, all utterly unaware of the fate-determining dialogue transpiring on the mountain ridge to their west.¹⁴

So what does Abraham say? He leads off with an incredulous question: “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” (Genesis 18:23). Abraham can't believe he's hearing what he claims to be hearing – although nothing of the sort has been said. But he gives an example: “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city – will you then sweep away the place, and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” (Genesis 18:24). Let's stop Abraham right there. God mentioned the outcry of “Sodom and Gomorrah,” a pair of cities probably standing in for the population of the Jordan Plain, a complex set of social units.¹⁵ Abraham then narrows the focus from “Sodom and Gomorrah” to just “the city,” just one of them, although he doesn't make explicit that he's thinking just about Sodom where they've been looking.¹⁶ Abraham goes on to refer to it as “the place,” and later on he'll repeatedly speak of it as 'there.' He's not treating Sodom as a group of people, but speaking about it – as he thinks God is speaking about them – as a location, a cultural environment.¹⁷

And so Abraham is asking how God means to treat this place, this city, this social unit, this local culture. He's worried about what God is going to do, because Abraham is concerned for “the city of Sodom as a whole.”¹⁸ Abraham knows there are two ways to imagine a city: as a corporate whole, and as a collection of individuals. And Abraham wonders if God is so locked in to his own view that he needs Abraham's human perspective.¹⁹ What if the city has dissenters, people inside it who stand apart from their culture? What if there's a righteous minority that could be a seed of renewal? Would God neglect to treat them accordingly? Couldn't God act more surgically and selectively eliminate the wicked while passing over the righteous?²⁰ Abraham is no fan of collateral damage as an excuse.²¹ And can you really weigh the moral behavior of a corporate body as one thing when that one thing, a city or culture, includes so many people acting in so many ways?²² Would God really be oversimplify real life so as to shower the same judgment on all a city's or land's residents without distinction?

Abraham doesn't like it, and Abraham is convinced God wouldn't and shouldn't do it. “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked so that the righteous fare as the wicked – far be that from you!” he spits (Genesis 18:25). You can tell from his tone he's on a real tear here, that he's agitated by the idea, that he's indignant and incensed. His words are shockingly bold and blunt for the man who has often fallen on his face before the same LORD whom Abraham readily confronts face-to-face. Abraham is horrified in advance over Job's complaint that God “destroys both the blameless and the wicked” (Job 9:22). Abraham longs for a world where, even if “the wicked are overthrown and are no more,” yet “the house of the righteous will stand” (Proverbs 12:7). And in Abraham's judgment, the second half is vastly more important than the first: better for the wicked to thrive with the righteous than for the righteous to fall with the wicked.²³

And Abraham wraps up his case with an incisive question: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?” (Genesis 18:25). That's Abraham's expectation, that's Abraham's challenge for God. If God will expect justice from Abraham and his house, how much more, when God is the universal judge for everyone and everything, must God lead the way in modeling what it means for a man to judge and live justly?²⁴ God can't be like the gods of Abram's youth, whose workings and dealings were opaque and arbitrary; God must be coherently moral in a way that, however mysterious and however transcendent, offers by analogy a pathway to follow on the way of the LORD.²⁵ How would Abraham be able to seek justice if there's no divine legal precedent he can apply?²⁶

So Abraham's raised a problem, “the very problem of the righteousness of God.”²⁷ It's a problem many have wrestled with throughout the ages: can we actually see God doing justice in a world where it seems as if his heavy hand falls on people without regard to their moral standing? This won't be the morning to dive into that problem, but Moses would later sing of God that “his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice” (Deuteronomy 32:4), and the saints in heaven, singing the song of Moses, sing that “just and true are your ways,” “yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments!” (Revelation 15:3; 16:7). God is Justice, and Abraham knows him well enough by now to “assert faith in God's just character.”²⁸

So now we've heard Abraham's take on things – his agonized questions, his burning concerns. But notice that we haven't actually heard God say most of what Abraham has assumed here. When God does speak again, he lets some of the questions hang, but in others he chooses to echo the terms and phrases Abraham used – he's reframing things in a way Abraham can understand.²⁹ Since Abraham focused on one city, God will now refer to just Sodom; since Abraham thinks of it as 'the place,' so will God; since Abraham debates conditions under which God should 'spare' the city, God shifts to that language; and only later, after Abraham first uses the word 'destroy,' will God echo him and begin considering whether and when to 'destroy' Sodom.³⁰

Abraham posited that there could be “fifty righteous in the city,” and he suggests that God ought then to “spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it” (Genesis 18:24). Rather than ask for just those fifty righteous to be set free, Abraham wants their salvation to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, for God to extend his mercy to them beyond themselves to their community as such.³¹ Abraham's vision for divine justice is to save the community, to save the city and its culture, as a guarantee of the safety and stability of the righteous few within it.³²

How crazy is what Abraham's asking? We don't have a census that'd give us the nitty-gritty on the population of ancient Sodom, but in Abraham's day even the big cities of the world had populations akin to Harrisburg. Even a generous guess for Sodom's population would be five thousand, but archaeologists suggest twelve hundred as an upper bound. Sodom, for all its riches, probably has less than half the population of Bowmansville, more on the order of East Earl or Morgantown, while its lesser neighbors might've been more like Churchtown. So when Abraham speculates about fifty righteous in the city, he's suggesting 4-5%, no more than 10%.

Abraham thinks of that as a low-ball standard, one in twenty people. He expects that, in his best-case scenario, God will haggle with him, presenting a more reasonable number – maybe a standard of seventy-five righteous, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, something closer to a chunk of the city you can see on a pie chart with your glasses off.³³ Then Abraham can work on hashing out some compromise figure between the two that they can both live with. That's what Abraham is going for. But God won't play ball. God doesn't submit a counter-offer. Instead, “the LORD said, 'If I find fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake'” (Genesis 18:26), will “remit and pardon all the guilty of the place because of them,” that four or five percent.³⁴

God accepts here Abraham's principle that it's possible that, in the midst of a corporate body which deserves judgment, the presence of a righteous minority could suffice to stave off the otherwise just judgment on the entire body. “Judgment can be held back” on a place or culture or community “by the presence of righteous people in its midst,” even when numerically, democratically, they wouldn't seem representative.³⁵ For the sake of the part, God will spare the whole as a whole; he'll grant amnesty or a stay of execution or maybe even outright forgiveness on account of the faithful presence within the city's walls.³⁶ That's what Abraham's asked, and what God is willing to grant him: that “the entire city be spared for the sake of an innocent minority,” the merits of the few covering for the life of all.³⁷ Many times in history and in our day, often where none of us can hear it, God has declared of a seemingly hopeless place: “I shall spare this place for my own sake and for the sake of those who have served and still serve me genuinely.”³⁸ For “the Lord's goodness is immense, and frequently he finds his way to grant the salvation of the majority of a few just people.”³⁹ In the darkest places, we have no idea just which hidden lives are pillars holding up the falling skies.

When God agrees to spare Sodom in the event there are fifty such pillars there, Abraham is caught off guard. Abraham was almost spoiling for a confrontation, but God isn't putting up a fight. And clearly, that's taken the fire out of Abraham's eyes. He promptly becomes humble, deferential, instead of strident and accusatory. “Behold, please, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes!” (Genesis 18:27). Abraham is a weak mortal creature, derived from dirt; it's madness that he should dare dialogue with Deity.⁴⁰ Abraham calls attention to this strategically as a bid for indulgence, as he courageously and cautiously takes one after another step forward. He “musters all his resources, gentle and hard, love and fear, mildness and boldness, to wage a prayerful war” on the city's behalf,⁴¹ moving “progressively to a smaller and smaller number of righteous” which he hopes suffice for the city's salvation.⁴² “How much righteousness is needed to preserve a... wicked community?”⁴³ Abraham aims to find how far the grace of a yielding God can be stretched.⁴⁴

And so, in verse after verse, Abraham tries modifying his initial bid by lowering the price, you might say, at which he's trying to buy Sodom's salvation.⁴⁵ First he tries a rhetorical trick: “Suppose five of the fifty are lacking; will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” Are those five missing righteous people a big enough deal to warrant death for all? God doesn't fall for Abraham's trick – it's about how many righteous are there, not how many aren't – but agrees: “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there” (Genesis 18:28).⁴⁶ Having met no resistance, Abraham drops the trick and lowers his bid again by five: “Suppose forty are found there?” Once again, God gives in: “I will not do it for the sake of forty” (Genesis 18:29). As the introductions to their respective statements get shorter and shorter, the pace feels like it's speeding up like a game of Tetris; Abraham can only hope he gets a high score, or rather a low score, before it's game over.⁴⁷

With an appeal for God not to take offense at his gumption, Abraham takes a bigger step next, dropping his bid by ten: “Oh, please let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Suppose thirty are found there?” But God rewards his risk: “I will not do it if I find thirty there” (Genesis 18:30). Abraham draws attention to the vulnerability of his effort to engage the Almighty, and wonders what happens if twenty righteous are in the city. “I will not destroy it for the sake of twenty” (Genesis 18:31). Abraham begs the Lord not to be angry and back out of their negotiation, and suggests ten righteous might be in the city. “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten,” says God (Genesis 18:32). Now “if it had ten just men, Sodom would have been saved.”⁴⁸

Let's step back here and call Abraham's actions what they are. Abraham is praying, Abraham is interceding, being the Bible's first intercessor in prayer.⁴⁹ But he's not just lifting up one individual who's sick, as we do; he's lifting up an entire community that's ripe for the judgment of God, and pleading for a justice that knows mercy. Why would Abraham do that? I mean, he's under few illusions about what Sodom's like, having met and snubbed their evil king (Genesis 14:21-24). Is it all for the sake of his nephew Lot who lives there? Maybe Lot's got something to do with it.⁵⁰ On the other hand, Abraham never mentions Lot here, nor is he making the case for Lot's rescue, even if that will later be a fruit of Abraham's prayer.⁵¹ Abraham is praying on behalf of Sodom as a whole, and his motivation is his “concern for justice and righteousness.”⁵² As the man God is seeking to make him, Abraham has to be the kind of man who intercedes for those who wouldn't be grateful. He acts in a “rush of compassion,” driven by love to be to them the blessing he was meant to be to all and any.⁵³

Throughout the course of this dialogue of prayer with the Lord he's met face-to-face, “God is indeed moved by every appeal Abraham actually makes.”⁵⁴ God isn't angry with Abraham, so far as we can tell, no matter what Abraham might have worried. Instead, God “is pleased with the fervent prayer in which faith and love are so manifest.”⁵⁵ Abraham models for those who come after him what it's like to pray with faith, what it's like to pray out of love, what it's like to pray with a “humble courage” on behalf of those who need an intercessor.⁵⁶ If Abraham is a model intercessor, then he shows us something about prayer we might easily neglect. Often, we pray for so-and-so or such-and-such like this: “Please do this for them, thanks.” What's different for Abraham? He's an advocate. And an advocate advances an argument. Abraham intercedes for Sodom by laying out a case, a basis for his appeal, and articulating a reason that he believes will hold merit with God.⁵⁷

The conversation draws to its close: “The LORD went his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place” (Genesis 18:33). Why did the conversation end there? To read that final verse, you might think God was done, maybe God got fed up, maybe God reached his limit of tolerance for Abraham's audacity. But is that true? Rewind a verse, and listen to how Abraham preceded his bid of ten: “Oh please let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once” (Genesis 18:32). God didn't hang up on Abraham. “Abraham abruptly ended the dialogue.”⁵⁸ Abraham “stops his plea” at ten, having decided the end point before he'd even gotten his last answer.⁵⁹ The Lord departed because he respected Abraham's decision.

Did Abraham stop because “there is nothing left to say”?⁶⁰ Did he sense God's tolerance had run out, that God was done and wouldn't hear anything further? There's nothing in Genesis to make us think he was right if he thought so. “Persistence in prayer... does not offend God; it pleases him.”⁶¹ In God's responses to Abraham, the differences are stylistic from first to last; there are no cues that God is tapping on the brakes or discouraging Abraham from keeping his foot on the gas.⁶² Maybe Abraham reasoned that ten people in a city was the smallest group who'd stand even an outside chance of sparking a revival.⁶³ Maybe he stopped because he was afraid of overreaching, concerned that spinning the wheel again would land him on bankrupt.⁶⁴ Maybe he assumed that the number he'd reached was sufficient, and success was at last a sure thing.⁶⁵ Maybe his real concerns about God's style of justice had been satisfied, and Abraham had now gained a contentment in God's judgment regardless of the outcome.⁶⁶ Or maybe Abraham had reached the limit of his own mercy for Sodom.

But what do you suppose would have happened if verse 33 read, “And Abraham said, 'Suppose five are found there?'” or “Suppose three are found there?” or “Suppose one is found there?” Would God have drawn the line he hadn't up to now? Would God have declared that Abraham had finally discovered the limit of grace? Maybe you can think that – but there is no warrant for it in Genesis. In fact, every indication is that God would have been willing to follow Abraham's lead as low as Abraham could stomach. The only limits on God's response of mercy here are those introduced by the shortfall of Abraham's imagination and courage and love.⁶⁷ That's where and when Abraham returned to his place – not, as maybe it could have been, running through the night toward the place for which he prayed, in hopes of being one more righteous person in the city. Abraham very nearly prayed without ceasing – and as a result, Abraham very nearly saved Sodom.

But even though Sodom wasn't saved, Abraham's intercession made a difference – as intercession always does, even if it doesn't look like it.⁶⁸ The standards and reasons for judgment on the city were adjusted. Some, we'll find, were extracted from the city on Abraham's account. And Abraham himself was transformed. He has a better understanding now that “evil cannot go unchecked in the world,” that justice might not be so simple as he thought, that God's focus must be on 'the whole place' as a whole and not just its members.⁶⁹ But on the other hand, Abraham now knows that, whatever happens to the city, “the judgment will not be carried out in anger.”⁷⁰ Abraham realizes that his initial accusations were off-base: the Judge of all the earth does do justice, and that justice is vastly more merciful and flexible and wise than Abraham can understand – now Abraham realizes that.⁷¹ And Abraham learned all this, and could only have learned it, by means of an “apprenticeship in prayer that leads to maturity in interceding according to God's will.”⁷²

Abraham overlooking Sodom is the Bible's first scene of intercession. But it won't be the last. In later days, the same God of Justice “made known his ways to Moses” (Psalm 103:7); and where Abraham had interceded for a foreign city, Moses was forced often to intercede for his own people over whom the Lord had appointed him. Nowhere was that so necessary as when, in his absence, the people demanded gods of gold, a sin of idolatry so noxious that the Lord urged Moses not to stand in his way as Abraham had, but to step aside so “that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you” (Exodus 32:10). But Moses didn't step aside, nor did God actually want him to. Instead, like his ancestor Abraham, he interceded. “Moses implored the LORD his God” to spare them, building his case on three foundations: God should go easy on Israel, one, for the sake of his reputation in front of the watching Egyptians; two, for the sake of his promises to Abraham; and three, because Moses was willing to lay his life on the line in solidarity with them (Exodus 32:11-13, 32). “Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them” (Psalm 106:23). It wasn't the last time Moses' intercession would save them from themselves (Numbers 14:12-20), as would his brother Aaron's ritual intercession (Numbers 16:46-48), later ritualized in the priests who would “draw near” to God's altar to intercede (Exodus 30:20).⁷³

Centuries later, the priest-prophet Samuel warned the people against their evil; and here, for the first time, they asked him to intercede for them (1 Samuel 12:19). Counseling and reassuring them, Samuel then uttered this fabulous line: “Far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for you, and I will instruct you in the good and right way” (1 Samuel 12:23). Samuel was a true son of Father Abraham. Like Abraham commanding his household about the way of the LORD, so Samuel will teach the nation how to keep that way; and like Abraham interceding for Sodom, so Samuel will keep interceding for Israel, regarding his failure to pray for them as a sin as distant from his heart as injustice is from God's.

At the other end of Israel's history, God raised up another priest-prophet, Jeremiah, whom he sent to Jerusalem as he'd sent angels to Sodom, to “search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her” (Jeremiah 5:1). Incredibly, if Abraham bargained God down to ten residents of Sodom being enough to save that city, God offers to spare Jerusalem for one – but poor and rich alike were strangers to the way of the LORD: “they all alike had broken the yoke, they had burst the bonds” (Jeremiah 5:4-5). And so, throughout the rest of his ministry, God ordered Jeremiah: “Do not pray for this people..., do not intercede for them, for I will not hear you” (Jeremiah 7:16). That's not God being callous. It's God finding that the test has failed, and the only way out of the crisis is through.

As disaster began to fall in stages, the priest-prophet Ezekiel, like Jeremiah a distant grandnephew of Moses and descendant of Abraham, wrestled with the problems Jeremiah had probed. If a land as a whole were to sin against the Lord, then even the presence of three men as righteous as Noah, Daniel, and Job wouldn't suffice to save the land; “they alone would be delivered, but the land would be desolate” (Ezekiel 14:13-16). Even so, God assured Ezekiel that he took “no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” but was always seeking their life by repentance. Were an individual to turn from sin to righteousness, then “for the righteousness that he has done, he shall live” (Ezekiel 18:22-23); and if the collective house of Israel should repent like that, they too would live again (Ezekiel 18:30-31), demonstrating the justice of the way of the Lord (Ezekiel 18:25). The rightful role of a prophet, Ezekiel learned, wasn't just to relay to the people what God was saying; it was to stand in the breach, a defender of the vulnerable body, an advocate before God that they be spared (Ezekiel 13:5; 22:30).

Centuries more went by. “For judgment I came into this world,” said the Lord, the same Lord before whom Father Abraham pled Sodom's case. Now, though, he wore not just a human guise, but actual human flesh and actual human blood. He ministered, a prophet often seeking his Father's face in prayer. “I am not praying for the world, but for those whom you have given me,” he told his Father, “for they are yours” (John 17:9). And then he went to the cross, where, as the prophets had foretold, “he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12). His prayer was heard more gladly than that of Abraham, of Moses, of Samuel, of Ezekiel. He made “many to be accounted righteous” (Isaiah 53:11), “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). Being raised from the dead and rising into heaven, he “is at the right hand of God,” from where he “is interceding for us” still (Romans 8:34), petitioning the Father on behalf of the Church on an unbreakable basis.⁷⁴ And now “he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him,” as Abraham did, “since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).

Looking ahead, Christ had told his disciples that there was coming “great tribulation” unlike anything before it, so hard that “if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved.” However, “those days will be cut short for the sake of the elect” (Matthew 24:21-22). But even then, he questioned whether, at his return in glory, “will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). To that end, he left his disciples behind as “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13), a preservative sprinkling within the world, who, if they keep their saltiness, their righteousness, will provide a basis for continual appeal for each part of the world to be spared and saved.

So here we are, seasoning this corner of the earth with, we hope, that righteousness that appeals to the mercy of God. And here we are called, says St. Paul, to “keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints” (Ephesians 6:18). Our Lord has entrusted to us “a continuation and extension of Jesus' intercessory ministry” on earth.⁷⁵ Jesus prays for the Church, for its unity and its holiness, for its firm foundations and for its growth in grace, for its abiding truth and for its abundant peace. And so should we join our supplications for all the saints to his intercessions. By being a preserving presence within our place and by praying for the saints in every place, in a double way we “function as agents of salvation and renewal” in the world, as Abraham did.⁷⁶

But St. Paul adds these words: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people” (1 Timothy 2:1). For the Sodoms of our day, and for the Babylons, as much as for the Salems and the Zions, we're called upon to be intercessors, people “who are able to entreat God for myriads of people” and for entire communities and cultures and places.⁷⁷ The trouble is that, as earnestly as we pray for our loved ones close at hand on an individual basis, we do “not often pray for the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of this world,” certainly not while seeing their true character with open eyes.⁷⁸ Brothers and sisters, it may well be that the justice of God hangs in judgment over one or another city, over one or another land, over one or another polity, and God is asking you to stand where Abraham stood and lift your voice as Abraham lifted his, to make the case for a different kind of justice, one which finds a way to spare and forbear and forgive. It could be that the city or state or country in need of prayer is where you already find yourself. Perhaps God has his eyes on America, or Pennsylvania, or Lancaster County, and is listening to hear if you'll draw near to God on their behalf. Or it could be that God has implicitly invited you to pray for a place you least expected – Tehran or Moscow, Nigeria or North Korea, Cuba or California, Pakistan or Palestine. Be not afraid. Be not slack. The Judge of all the earth will indeed do justice. He will spare; he will forgive. Cautiously but courageously, stand up before him in Christ our Lord. With Abraham's faith, pray as Abraham prayed; perhaps a city will live for a new day. Amen.

The Aim of Faith

This seems as good a time as any to pause in our progress through the Book of Genesis and reflect on the story so far – if not from the dawn of creation, then perhaps from the mission of the man we've been tailing this year. We first met Abram, son of Terah, living on the outskirts of the south Sumerian city of Ur with his wife and his father and his two brothers, one of whom died early. There, in a pagan family surrounded by temples stretching high to the sky, this lowly Abram heard a call. How he heard it, when he heard it, what it meant to him at first, we don't quite know. It was from a god it seems his neighbors didn't know, a god memories of whom had perhaps been handed down in his family despite the heavy admixture of pagan lore.

However he introduced himself to Abram, somehow this god spoke to him and laid upon him a drastic demand: “Go, go away from your land and your kin and the house of your father!” (Genesis 12:1). It was a call to give up everything Abram had ever known – to leave the people who were like him, to break all his traditions, to say goodbye to his family, to forget his legacy. That surrender is what the voice suggested, insisted. It is, in effect, that which was imposed as punishment in the prior story of Babel: scattering, exile, homelessness without a homecoming. Such dreadful penalty is what the divine voice urged Abram to inflict upon himself voluntarily. In exchange, the voice offered him improbable promises in an undefined destination. In some land, a land whose nature was shrouded in mystery, this god would turn Abram into a national founder, an exalted figure like Gilgamesh, a man whose life laboring under a curse would finally be converted to blessing (Genesis 12:2-3).

The journey was a daring one. And it was a faithful one. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out..., and he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). This is the first moment in his life that, even in retrospect, is linked to faith. In response to the voice whose demands were outstripped only by its promises, Abram believed it was the voice of a God worth hearing. He believed this was a God who had power to do for him those things which were promised, however far they exceeded all a nomad could reasonably hope for. He believed this was a God who took an interest in him, who guided him wisely, who wouldn't and couldn't be stymied by confrontations with other gods. Abram believed this God wouldn't steer him wrong and wasn't out for his ruin, but truly meant to do him good. Abram bet on this God – even though Abram kept his name, kept his movable property, kept his servants, kept a few members of his family. All the same, Abram stepped out in faith, and he kept walking by faith until he reached the spot of which God said, “This land” (Genesis 12:7). Defying the presence of a few Canaanite competitors, he believed the promise of inheritance once made, and he built an altar, and he worshipped in gratitude (Genesis 12:6-8). Such was Abram's dawning faith at 75.

The tale of the next quarter century is living and active. Perhaps within his first year there in the land shown as marked out for his future heirs, Abram came into hard times with an exceptionally heavy famine. It was, it's fair to say, Abram's first crisis of faith, his faith being probed more sharply than seems sporting. Faithfulness wasn't feeding him or those who relied on him. Pressed, worried, dissatisfied, disgruntled, Abram held on as long as he felt he could – but he gave way (Genesis 12:10). He didn't ask his newfound God where to turn, what to do; he pushed further to the southwest, through the desert toward Egypt, whose rich Nile could supply what the land of promise seemed unable and unwilling to give. Abram seemingly “fell from the firmness of his faith.”¹

Gripped by fear as the Egyptian border wall came in view, Abram persuaded his wife to conceal their marriage for his security (Genesis 12:11-13), a ploy we only later learn became his standard MO wherever they went (Genesis 20:13). He persisted in it, we'll find, even after it proved such a double-edged sword in Egypt, gaining a multitude of earthly goods while placing his wife beyond recovery (Genesis 12:14-20). Drowning in grief and jealousy, Abram could only pray an anxious prayer to the God in whose good will his faith had flagged. But in the aftermath of divine deliverance, reunited, they ascended from Egypt chagrined but supplied (Genesis 13:1-2), and Abram found “a new faith in God's promises,” enriched more in faith than in sheep (Genesis 13:3-4).²

With his faith restored, it could be tested again, baked to see if it'll rise. Abram and Lot, now living as separate households, held jointly such post-Egyptian prosperity as to be too heavy for the land constrained by rising local populations (Genesis 13:5-7). The strife between their herdsmen over grazing land and water access threatened to spiral out of control a la Cain and Abel. What would Abram's freshened faith in his God lead him to do with it? Abram deescalated with politeness and humility. Abram had been assigned this land they're on by the word of God, but Abram proves willing to forgo some of the promised land in exchange for brotherly peace – even though Abram knows that, in doing so, he might jeopardize his future and that of his house. He even lays down his rights of seniority and forbears tolerantly when Lot exploits his humble generosity (Genesis 13:8-12).

What had this to do with Abram's faith? Simply that his loyalty to God has been shaping him into a lover of peace between brothers. And for all that, Abram knows that God's promises are stronger than man's sacrifices. If Abram does well for the sake of what God loves, then God will find a way to bring good out of it, whether or not Abram can anticipate how. And so he does. Answering Abram's surrender in like tone, God expands the prior promise, rewarding him with a broader land where Abram himself belongs and which will be an extended gift (Genesis 13:14-16). Abram just needs to walk the land to lay claim to it (Genesis 13:17), but instead he perhaps delays obedience, settling where he can keep an eye on Lot, and gives thanks (Genesis 13:18).

Some time later, Abram couldn't help but notice an invading force sweeping down the far side of the river valley into the deserts to the south, then curving up to the sea, fighting all the way – issues beyond Abram's pay grade, so it seemed (Genesis 14:1-11). Until word reached him that Lot with his grand wealth had been seized from Sodom by the eastern invaders, to be stolen away and likely enslaved (Genesis 14:12-13). Though in his prior crisis Abram for fear hadn't dared to rescue his wife from a captivating king, now his faith was alive. Abram believed that, if the hopes of the world were to rest on his shoulders, then God wouldn't let them be nullified by Abram's act of love. So the man of peace rode to war, trusting his God to be his protector and guide (Genesis 14:14). Nor was he disappointed; triumphing by the power of God, Abram achieved Lot's salvation (Genesis 14:15-16), cleansing the land all while unwittingly being led on the journey that secured his claim to the land.

On his return journey, faithful Abram met the priest-king Melchizedek of Salem, who blessed him and fed him and foreshadowed a sacrament (Genesis 14:18-20), but also Melchizedek's opposite in the cowardly and vile king Bera of Sodom, who sought to manipulate and tempt Abram into his service (Genesis 14:17, 21). What's Abram to do but to rely on his faith to be his guide? By faith Abram responded to Melchizedek's blessing and ministry with grateful surrender of a tithe of plunder as a memorial of God's mighty work (Genesis 14:20). By faith Abram had wisdom to preempt Bera's overtures by an oath to eschew all gain, leaving no foothold for the devil and giving Abram the opportunity to testify of God (Genesis 14:22-24). Abram could only do it because his faith was further bolstered by Melchizedek's preaching that God Most High has providence without limit.

Newly provoked by mortality and loss, though, Abram found his stronger faith beset by a new crisis. This was the moment when Abram came undone, his heart's long-oozing wounds gushing forth his fears (Genesis 15:2-3). Intervening, God gave him a twofold promise: first, he'd indeed have a biological son of his own (Genesis 15:4); second, Abram's seed would exceed his numbers as the stars do (Genesis 15:5).

This pledge was clearer, more direct, more expansive, and more demanding than any before it. It's one thing to say he'll yet have a biological son – it's rare but technically not impossible. (There's a rabbi in Israel who had a son born last year when the rabbi was older than Abram is here.) But to believe that in Abram's circumstances, and that his seed will have such a future assured it? The only way Abram can believe it is to believe that the God who populated a vast family of stars can and will give a star-studded family to a man. And so Abram clung to that. He assented to the promise, receiving it in his mind as truth; he took it as the word of God, acclaiming God as trustworthy; he leaned on God, placing his hopes and dreams in God's hands, trusting in God to be good; he decided to invest in God by acting in ways consistent with this reliance and refusing inconsistent behaviors. Anchoring his heart on God, Abram canceled his servant's adoption proceedings and welcomed Sarai to his tent.

Abram “believed with a faith that deserves praise,”³ and that's the faith God counted as righteousness (Genesis 15:6). God received it as a pure interior sacrifice on the altar of Abram's heart, one which glorified God. As such, God reckoned it as a virtuous act and habit of Abram's will. God linked this faith to its unseen object, the future Seed of Abraham who is Christ the Lord. And so God recognized this faith, not so much as a substitute for righteousness as an example of it.⁴ God decided that, on this account, he'd therefore lavish much on Abram, “a commensurate reward for his very act of faith.”⁵

But no sooner had he done so than, hearing God promise him the whole land, Abram questioned: “How can I know?” (Genesis 15:8). The question raises questions: is Abram asking how to recognize fulfillment when it comes to pass, or is he indeed asking how he can be sure whether God's promise is reliable? The human heart is a fickle thing, so perhaps he is suddenly subjected to a temptation to doubt – and, while he wrestles with it, he cries out to God for assurance. He gets it in ritual form (Genesis 15:9), bade to set up the accoutrements for cutting a covenant. But when it happens, God signs on both lines, banning Abram's John Hancock (Genesis 15:17), and the covenant is cut only after an exhausting day battling raptors and a nightmare lecture that the fulfillment of the promise can only come through centuries of woe, with Abram knowing neither the dark nor the dawn (Genesis 15:10-16). The promise and nightmare together conspired to banish Abram's mortal fears, and with the covenant now in place, Abram's faith had a sturdier basis than ever before.

But the promise is slow to come, and his wife Sarai struggles with patience. Long burdened by infertility and now decisively past menopause, she reasons that the promises of God require her orchestration. Turning to her Egyptian handmaiden, she lays out a plan to bear God's fruit from the works of the flesh. Mirroring Abram's former wheedling at the Egyptian border, Sarai tempts him back to a manipulation mindset, “and Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai,” as Adam to Eve, surrendering to her scheme of surrogacy (Genesis 16:1-4). He “listened to a voice other than God's” and “took matters into his own hands.”⁶ The troubling results popped an ugly zit in their marriage, though in the end Abram found God at work in the situation, thinking he's now gained by it exactly what God had pledged: a biological son, Ishmael, to be his heir (Genesis 16:16).

Years passed until God once more appeared to Abram, deepening and expanding the promises. Abram would be fruitful beyond measure, becoming not one nation but many nations with kings and queens; the covenant would be augmented, made firmer and more permanent; God pledged perpetual fidelity to Abram's seed who'll inherit the land of promise. To commemorate it, Abram will be stripped of his name of ninety-nine years, the last thing he has from his pagan father Terah, and be renamed Abraham as a public declaration of what God is now doing (Genesis 17:4-8). To all this, Abram falls reverently on his face, believing in awe that unbelievable blessings will be his if God says so (Genesis 17:3). “The covenant was the consequence of his faith.”⁷

But God adds that all these blessings for Abraham are for Sarai too, now Sarah – that he won't receive a one of them apart from her. God means for this husband and wife to be partners: sharers alike in covenant, producers alike of nations and royal houses, bearers alike of new names and new hopes. God so insists Sarah be included that it's to be her future son, a miracle child yet to be conceived, who will be the heir – not the son whom Abram had believed for thirteen years would inherit from him (Genesis 17:15-16). Abraham falls once more on his face and laughs before God, disoriented and dismayed, “partly out of disbelief.”⁸ As one commentator remarks, “to put it mildly, he is skeptical.”⁹ Speaking from his desires, Abraham interrupts, objects, pleads with God to change his mind (Genesis 17:17-18) – and while God blesses, he does not budge (Genesis 17:19-22).

By this point, Abraham is certainly a man of faith. Even his pushback against God's plan was a confident negotiation with the God he's come to see as a true friend. Abraham believes God's word is true and mighty and good; he's just working on balancing God's seeming zigzags with the path Abraham has settled into. Withdrawn from the encounter, God yields Abraham space to decide how to respond to these modifications of the covenant. For the first time, the covenant has terms on Abraham's side. Circumcision is a paradox of fertile infertility, a sacrifice of blood, an enlistment in God's war on fleshly principles in the world, and a prophecy of a future Seed of Abraham who will fully cut off flesh at the cross and begin a new creation in resurrection. Circumcision is a seal of faith: trust in God to give fertility, devotion to God as worthy of our life and death, loyalty to God in his war on flesh, and reliance on God to bring this True Circumciser into the world. By it, Abraham accepts the covenant as modified, including all the terms to which he'd objected, and yet he applies the seal of the covenant to the very son with whom the covenant can't continue (Genesis 17:25). Yet he doesn't hesitate, but, despite the pain, he carries out the command entirely on the very day when it was given (Genesis 17:23-27).

Days or months later, as we would've heard last Sunday but as I hope you've read, Abraham espied three men traveling on a hot summer afternoon. It was a test of his faith and his character, a test to see whether his faith could rise above boasting in his election and xenophobic exclusion of outsiders to the covenant. And he passed the test. With no prior knowledge of these strangers, he humbly implored them to accept his hospitality, he included Sarah fully in his efforts to provide it, together they pulled out all the stops, and then Abraham himself served the strangers this costly meal as their waiter (Genesis 18:1-8). Only after the fact did it become apparent that the men were travelers from heaven, the Lord and his angels; and they relayed in Sarah's hearing the pledge of a coming son she'd now bear. After a hiccup of bewilderment like his own, she soon joined Abraham's faith in the promise; and thereby “he manifested the victory of his faith.”¹⁰

And now here we are. There's much Abraham's taught us about faith, and one such lesson is that faith can grow. The faith Abram showed in his opening lines was sweeping and impressive and real. But it was a vague faith, latching on to a few promises and rising to a fairly simple demand. It had few details, and Abram carried plenty of baggage as he went. But the faith he's got now, as he escorts his visitors onward, is a bigger, richer, fuller faith than the faith that led him to Canaan. It latches on to more promises. It rises to more detailed demands. It's been refined and purified of much of the baggage with which Abraham began. All though this journey, Abraham has been “growing in his faith.”¹¹ And we know that can and is meant to happen. The apostles prayed for an increase of faith (Luke 17:5), the churches got stronger in the faith (Acts 16:5), and St. Paul gave thanks when believers' “faith was growing abundantly” (2 Thessalonians 1:3).

But Abraham shows us that such growth often isn't linear. If you were to quantify Abraham's faith at each point in these twenty-four years and map it all out on a graph, the line wouldn't be a straight upward climb. In fact, the inflection wouldn't always be positive. It's not as though every advance in time corresponded to an increase in Abraham's faith. That'd be easy, but hardly true to life. Sometimes his faith plateaued. And sometimes it even decayed. Abraham's journey was one of ups and downs alike. The faith he had to go to Canaan faltered when it came to staying in Canaan. The faith he had to hope for a son didn't necessarily stay strong when God said he'd picked the wrong mother. The faith he had to believe God was met with uncertainties and doubts, and probably days where his mind and heart were just elsewhere. Abraham's faith often excelled, but in between the grand summits, he “still displays at times a lack of trust in God.”¹² Sometimes Abraham's faith flourished, and sometimes it floundered. Some tests he passed with an A+; some tests got returned with, “See me after class.”

When Abraham's faith struggled, his faith generally recovered, though sometimes it took a while. But his lapses had their consequences, as they always do. His detour to Egypt introduced him to Hagar, the occasion of his and Sarai's eventual fleshly attempt to force the promise, hence their marital spat, hence Abraham's resistance to his wife's fuller inclusion. It may even be that Abraham's difficulties in believing God's promise of the land led to the necessity of his seed needing to spend centuries oppressed outside the promised land. Lapses bring their consequences, though they may not be seen for years to come. And the same's usually true for us. “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin,” says the Apostle (Romans 14:23). God always offers his ready forgiveness, but that forgiveness doesn't automatically erase the temporal consequences of our sins – the things we've broken, the bad habits we've acquired, the burdens we've adopted, the new obstacles we've invented.

But Abraham also shows us the unthinkable kindness of God, who has a way of bringing beauty out of ashes (Isaiah 61:3). Sometimes, even our lapses turn toward our benefit in his hands – O happy fault! Abraham made such a mess of things in entering Egypt, yet God brought him up richer than ever before, blessing him in the face of his folly. Abraham's household dispute with Lot brought the tragedy of disunity, but God used it to further detach Abraham from his pagan roots, to expand the promise, and ultimately to set Abraham up to meet Melchizedek and bear witness before Bera. Abraham's impregnating Hagar was transparently not what God had in mind, and the fruitful penance of circumcision would become a badge of honor to his children. Lapses yield advances; backtracks are turned around; wounds are transfigured; a cross becomes a crown.

And now, basking in this kindness and mercy of God, Abraham escorts his guests, who seem to be gazing in the direction of Sodom, where Lot is (Genesis 18:16). And Abraham hears his Good Shepherd musing aloud over whether to keep hiding his plans and deeds from Abraham, in light of Abraham's destiny (Genesis 18:17). It's as if God is “communing” with Abraham “like one friend to another” now.¹³ And in this new paragraph, for the first time, we hear God admit why he chose Abraham, why he's decided to 'know' Abraham so intimately as to make him a friend of God. We learn what the point was in God giving Abraham such things to believe in.

The aim of his faith is that Abraham – and each Abrahamic believer – should “keep the way of the LORD” (Genesis 18:19). Keeping the Lord's way means following in the Lord's footsteps, pursuing the path he's laid out, living life the way he leads and directs.¹⁴ It means going where he sends, and not veering off on unethical detours and unspiritual tangents. The big question facing God's people, Abraham's house, would often be “whether they will take care to walk in the way of the LORD as their fathers did, or not” (Judges 2:22). It became a way of expressing the sum total of his law, to “walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you” (Deuteronomy 5:33). This was the way to which God referred in telling Abraham he must “walk before me and be blameless” (Genesis 17:1) – undeviating from the way of the Lord. So “wait for the LORD and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land” (Psalm 37:34).

But how is Abraham supposed to keep the Lord's way? By “doing righteousness and justice,” God remarks here (Genesis 18:19). Righteousness is a word often broad enough to encompass any and all kinds of virtuous behavior, “the cleanness of my hands” (Psalm 18:20), and more specifically to “keep the commands of God,” whatsoever they might be.¹⁵ 'Justice,' or 'judgment,' is originally a government word, meaning to set up and run a community rightly, to enact proper laws; but it also can mean to behave lawfully. The prophets tell us that justice is something God expects from every human being: “to do justice,” no less than “to love kindness” (Micah 6:8). Every human is called to be a person “who does justice and seeks truth” (Jeremiah 5:1).

And the biblical sense of justice especially means to “deliver from the hand of the oppressor” (Jeremiah 22:3), to act in the interest of those in need, intervening to save the vulnerable and endangered in much the way Abram did when he rushed to rescue Lot.¹⁶ So too, righteousness can mean, not just any kind of virtuous behavior, but generosity or benevolence that goes beyond justice (Proverbs 11:4; Deuteronomy 24:12-13).¹⁷ Because God is himself just and righteous, “he loves righteousnesses,” actions that exemplify righteousness (Psalm 11:7). So it's no wonder God loves Abraham as a dear friend, since Abraham had, in his great display of hospitality atop so many other things, “rendered himself deserving of such great regard for his obedience to God's commands,” the obedience of faith issuing in justice and righteousness.¹⁸

This pair, justice and righteousness, when put together, mean to “promote life and well-being for all” – they are social virtues.¹⁹ And they are the guardrails of the way of the Lord. Any man, any woman, can “do justice and righteousness” (Ezekiel 18:5), which is wonderful since “to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:3). Thus, “blessed are they who keep justice, who do righteousness at all times” (Psalm 106:3)! But this was especially necessary for a king, as “David did justice and righteousness to all his people” (2 Samuel 8:15). His heirs were tasked to “do justice and righteousness” in how they governed (Jeremiah 22:3), and when they repeatedly refused, the prophets nursed hopes that one day “in the tent of David” there'd be “one who judges and seeks justice and is swift to do righteousness” (Isaiah 16:5), a “righteous branch” to “do justice and righteousness in the land” (Jeremiah 23:5). We know that their hopes were made good by the arriving of Jesus, an Eternal King, who “teaches the way of God truthfully” (Matthew 22:16). In fact, the first name for Christianity was “the Way of the Lord” (Acts 18:25).

This is the purpose of God knowing Abraham. In fact, God won't be satisfied if Abraham spends his life doing justice and righteousness, and then dies in peace at a ripe old age (Genesis 15:14). That's a fine way for him to spend his life, but Abraham's story isn't meant to end there. “I have known him,” says God, “so that he may command his children and his house after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19). Abraham himself is learning how to do justice and righteousness, but as he begins to raise his children and more fully lead his household, he needs to pass on what he's been given. He needs to see to it, so far as is in his power, that they believe the same faith, do the same deeds, keep the same way of the Lord. In no other way can those after him carry Abraham's life forward than by replicating his same faith and obedience.²⁰

So this line “highlights Abraham's role as a teacher,” and it lays the groundwork for parents to teach their kids, for priests and prophets and preachers to teach the people of God.²¹ Abraham – and those who would continue the Abrahamic tradition – will need to teach the truth, to guide and form those under them, and even to bind them by command, charging them to walk in this way, to do these acts but not those acts.²² Simply put, what God is describing here is what we, taking cues from the Gospel of Matthew, call discipleship.

The aim of Abraham's faith is for him to keep the way of the Lord. He will do that by doing righteousness and justice, that is, obeying God's commands, developing in moral virtue, acting in the interest of the needy, and generally seeking to promote life and peace and wholeness wherever he goes. Not only that, but the aim of Abraham's faith is to disciple those who come after him in his household, both those born of him and those who enter some other way – everyone, especially, who might bear the covenant sign, must learn from Abraham how to keep the way of the Lord which it calls them to.

God explains that these tasks are related to Abraham's special destiny, in that “Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation” (Genesis 18:18). That, of course, is hardly a new thought: this saga began to God telling Abram, “I will make of you a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). It's not going to be enough for Abraham to raise up a few sons; it's not even going to be enough for him to transmit his legacy to his house after him.²³ It's going to take a whole nation, an organized community on the world stage which is ordered on principles of social and political justice, which can strive after the righteousness that exalts a nation (Proverbs 14:34), which can thus become “the righteous nation that keeps faith” (Isaiah 26:2).

Obviously, in one sense, this is about Israel. Israel, as the seed of Abraham's house and the bearers of its sign of its covenant, were to be a great and mighty nation ordered by social and political justice, a righteous nation keeping faith with God. But in a greater sense, amidst Israel's difficulties in transmitting that legacy, they were sent first prophets but finally the promised Messiah. Jesus came as the Righteous One, the King who really does righteousness and justice. Truthfully teaching the things of God, he discipled his apostles in the way of the Lord, charging them to them go forth and disciple others in all of his righteous commandments. Thus, the Church, would be the great and mighty nation, an organized community on the world stage in a radically new way. Discipleship isn't meant to result in a bunch of individuals operating in parallel. Justice and righteousness are social realities, and the individuals discipled by Abraham – and Christ the Son of Abraham – are discipled in the way of the Lord for the life of the Church which is the great nation on the way. Discipleship detached from the Church is just not, then, what the Lord has in mind. The fullness of his commandments cannot be carried out out of communion with the Church of Christ which we confess in the Creed. Discipleship is churchly, and he, the True Teacher, the Lord, “will fill Zion with justice and righteousness” by his Spirit at work (Isaiah 35:5).

But to say that isn't the end of the story either. There's more in these rich words of God! Because God doesn't merely call to mind that Abraham is destined to become a great and mighty nation. God also mentions that “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Genesis 18:18). Again, that's hardly new information: we've already heard this pledged before Abram ever kissed Terah goodbye, that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). But God highlights it again now. However great and mighty a nation this Abraham should become, it will always be for the sake of the other families of the earth. Abraham is meant to be a blessing, Abraham's house is meant to be a blessing, the Church is meant to be a blessing, for all nations.

Discipleship therefore has an outward orientation. It's not enough that we practice justice and righteousness among ourselves, in our ecclesiastical halls. We must teach and model the righteous commandments of Christ to the nations of the earth. We must teach and model justice to the nations of the earth. We must practice justice toward the poor of the world beyond the Church, and must give generously and righteously of ourselves. That is the terminus of this mission: that by the Abrahamic justice and righteousness promulgated and perpetuated in the Church through the ages, these things would spill over as blessing to every nation, drawing them to Christ by showing them the life of Christ offered for the life of the world.

And all this – Abraham leading his house in his example of doing righteousness and justice so as to keep the way of the Lord, resulting in a nation that does such things and becomes a locus of blessing for all nations – is the point, the mission. But then one last phrase wraps things back around on themselves. The point of the point, God adds, is “that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him” (Genesis 18:19).

That's a fascinating little phrase for God to choose as the closing crescendo of his soliloquy. God has known and chosen Abraham to raise up such a house and such a nation in order that God may bestow on Abraham that which God has already promised to Abraham prior to Abraham following through. Or, to put it another way, that which God promised to Abraham on the basis of faith prior to Abraham's actions will become re-promised and then fulfilled precisely through Abraham's actions fueled by his faith. And that doesn't quite sit so well with our common idea, a deeply Protestant and Evangelical idea, of the supreme superiority of faith – that the best thing, the most beautiful gift of the gospel, is that we are blessed and justified precisely when undeserving, all apart from any works of the law; that then, just then, we may celebrate “the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works” (Romans 4:6). All well and good. But this passage unsettles things.

See, throughout the journeys of Abraham, there's a common pattern, and it really does go like this: God makes a promise to Abraham. Abraham believes that promise; his faith apprehends that promise for him. Faith lays hold... and yet God's method of ultimate delivery is to then make the promise also dependent upon Abraham's works. God delights to involve Abraham's own faith-motivated works into the plan to deliver the promise, so that when the promise is made good, Abraham might thereby “receive reward for his own practice of virtue.”²⁴

God announced in chapter 12 that Abram's seed would own this land. Abram believed and gave thanks. Only later, though, did Abram's faith blossom in a peace-loving generosity that merited from God a deeper, bigger promise of the land (Genesis 13:14-16). And even then, he had to walk obediently through the land in order to establish his legal claim (Genesis 13:17). God made the land promise first when Abram reached the land; but the more developed form of the promise, in hindsight, was reserved for Abram's sacrifices and steps and sweat.

So too, God hinted over and over again that Abram would have seed (Genesis 12:7; 13:16), and finally clarified that the seed would involve a biological son of promise (Genesis 15:4). Abram believed, and that simple belief was itself reckoned as righteousness (Genesis 15:6). Later, God re-proposed the same promise in conjunction with a command: circumcision (Genesis 17:10-16). It was after Abraham obeyed, and after he then went the extra mile in hospitality to the heavenly, that Abraham now received that promise and its fulfillment as a reward, because now he'd done righteousness in his deeds (Genesis 18:6-10). God first counted Abram's faith as righteousness apart from works, so that God could shape Abraham into a more righteous person whose deeds would be righteous deeds indeed, “deeds appropriate to the covenant.”²⁵ What was first offered as a promise to simply believe was later made clearer, later made better, by being newly conditioned on obedience and moral performance.²⁶ But St. Paul would remind us that that still doesn't give Abraham room to boast before God, since even after “he had done many things well,” yet “every deed of his was perfected by faith.”²⁷

Many promises given to Abraham were meant for those who'd come after him – his children, his household, his nation. And the promise was theirs for simply being Abraham's children, inducted into his covenant generally through no action of their own, but called to imitate Abraham's faith. But Abraham must disciple his children precisely so they can be made worthy to inherit in practice what's already theirs by promise, so that they can be changed into people fit for the promises first made to their father.²⁸ Such a transformation is, in the logic of the story of Abraham, “the indispensable precondition for the fulfillment of the divine promises.”²⁹

And so for us. We're absolutely saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:9); that's our basis of grace (Romans 11:6). But God's normative plan for each of us is to transform us through exercising that faith in love, in deeds of justice and righteousness, such that we become people who fit the promises – and then, when God gives them to us, he “will render to each one according to his works” (Romans 2:6). Through the Holy Spirit working in us, in our faith, we are presently being “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Those works are done out of the transforming power of Christ in us by faith.³⁰ Even so, they could never strictly merit any of the things God has promised us; and yet they can help us fit those promises, such that God suitably chooses to reward them as meriting.³¹

Looking just at the moment we're born again, we're initially justified purely by faith; but looking at our whole life from before the judgment seat of Christ, we'll see how he imparted to us a righteousness that increased in us and changed us and worked its way out in our lives, in such a way that, through the holy feedback loops in which he delights, we've become people who fit the promises, people who receive it not only as a gratuitous gift but also as a reward for good and faithful servants, for sons and daughters bearing their Father's likeness. The purity in which the Church is finally clothed is simultaneously “the free gift of righteousness” and “the righteous deeds of the saints” (Romans 5:17; Revelation 19:8), for “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” – so saith the Scriptures (James 2:24). “For the righteousness that he has done, he shall live” (Ezekiel 18:22), and yet “the righteous shall live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). That life by righteousness believed, that life by righteousness done – in the end, it's all one seamless garment of believing God, which is to say, of trusting Jesus, of heeding the Spirit, of obeying the Father, of living out the law of Christ – that is all.  Amen.

Entertaining Angels Unawares

These last two Sundays, we've seen plenty unfolding in Genesis 17. Abram and his wife Sarai, now Abraham and Sarah, were both and each showered with new promises of blessing. Not only would Abraham become a great nation, but he and his wife would together make a plurality of nations; not only would they have seed, but that seed would include kings, effectively making Abraham and Sarah a king and queen in advance; and their royal seed would have the God of everything as their patron deity for all time. All they needed to do, to uphold their end of this covenantal bargain, was for Abraham to circumcise himself and the rest of the house's men; this mark in their flesh might mark them off from other households, giving them something new in common.

Now, it's fair to imagine that all that Genesis 17 stuff might go to Abraham's head. If he's going to make nations and kings, if his plentiful future offspring will have a mighty God all their own – well, how many of Abraham's neighbors can say the same? He's exalted in status beyond his peers on many fronts. That he's marked in the flesh may give him and his house a sense of togetherness that could cultivate an us-versus-them mentality, and it stands to reason that circumcision could incline them to be mistrustful of outsiders, standoffish to strangers, fearful of foreigners. The risks of Genesis 17 are prideful boasting and exclusive self-love. Or... or Abraham might take the last chapter in stride, conquering such temptations by the armaments of faith. He may remember that his blessings are so he can be a blessing – that his circumcision is a humbling of his flesh, not a grounds for boasting; that his destiny of nations and kings are so he can guide the world for the sake of the world. So the question that lingers as we leave the last chapter is: Which way will Abraham take things?¹

We hope for an answer because this new chapter 18 flows so fluidly from what came before it that Abraham's name doesn't appear until verse 6 – until then, he's just 'him,' because this is a continuation, not a new unit.² Abraham might still be recovering from his circumcision,³ or he might have healed up if it's been a couple months but no more.⁴ We open again “by the oaks of Mamre” (Genesis 18:1), “which are at Hebron” (Genesis 13:18). As nomadic livestock breeders, Abraham's family wouldn't be there year-round, but only during the warmer season; this in late June or early July.⁵ We're told the action opens “in the heat of the day” (Genesis 18:1), around noon or early afternoon.⁶ If modern conditions are any clue, the average daily high would've been in the 80s, but it could easily reach the upper 90s.⁷ In any sane culture that lives in such conditions, the 'heat of the day' is downtime. So noon doesn't find Abraham digging ditches or chopping wood; it finds him sitting down. This is siesta time. He sits at the entrance to his tent because, since Mamre is about half a mile higher than we are now, there should be a decent breeze on that mountain ridge.⁸

Whether he's trying to nap or not, he's facing outward from the edge of his tent, and gets a surprise when “he lifted up his eyes, and behold! three men were standing before him” (Genesis 18:2), “three traveling strangers.”⁹ They're out in the brightness and the frying heat, unprotected from the UV rays that could give a sunburn in a matter of minutes. And this seems odd. Travelers back then knew better than to press on during the heat of the day; they'd seek shelter, somewhere to wait out the heat and regain strength.¹⁰ What does Abraham see? Men old or young, looking noble or looking poor, seeming local or seeing very foreign, dignified and put together or “in a lowly and wretched form: naked, hungry, tired from the journey, and as exiles”?¹¹ How do they seem?

The fact that they're 'standing before him' doesn't mean they're hovering close by; they're far enough away, and stationary, so it doesn't look as though they're headed his way, meaning Abraham has a fully free choice how to react to their presence on his horizon.¹² So what will Abraham do? Well, we're told that “he saw them, and he ran to meet them from the entrance of the tent” (Genesis 18:2). That right there says something profound about Abraham's heart: “he ran to receive those strangers with love.”¹³ He chose to intercept them, chose to close the distance, chose interaction over the hope of mutual avoidance. When he got there, “he bowed himself to the earth” (Genesis 18:2), a dramatic gesture of deference he didn't have to make, but he did it as a sign of “his great ardor, his great humility.”¹⁴ When he speaks, he addresses them – or at least the one who looks like he's in charge – as adonai, 'lord' or 'lords' – and he describes himself as “your servant” (Genesis 18:3). He addressed them “with honor and deference,”¹⁵ in a way that went “considerably beyond the requirements of conventional etiquette.”¹⁶ “Without knowing the identity of the visitors, he approached them with such alacrity and respect, like a slave to his masters,”¹⁷ “to offer the grace of hospitality to strangers”¹⁸ whom he treats “like they are royal visitors.”¹⁹ He doesn't treat them as a project of pity or means to an end; he tremendously exalts their dignity.

His voice dripping with politeness, he impresses on them that he'd deem it an honor if they'd be willing to come to stay with him for sanctuary from the day's demands, no matter who they are; and so he rejects the tempting us-versus-them outlook.²⁰ “O lord, if, please, I have found grace in your eyes, please do not pass by your servant” (Genesis 18:3). And so Abraham “saluted them and invited them to lodge with him and partake of his hospitality,”²¹ to “refresh your hearts; after that, you may pass on, since you have come to your servant” (Genesis 18:5). He promises not to delay them beyond the heat of the day; he won't inconvenience them.

What kind of hospitality does Abraham have in mind? Well, “let a little water please be brought, and wash your feet” (Genesis 18:4) – that was the first step in welcome, because when everybody's wearing sandals in a very dusty world, that's the first step in becoming comfortable. Abraham invites them to “rest yourselves under the tree” (Genesis 18:4) – to enjoy the prime location of shade out of the sun, and there to let things be brought to them instead of having to fetch them themselves. Finally, Abraham says he'll “bring a morsel of bread,” just enough that “you may refresh your hearts” by this snack on Abraham's dime (Genesis 18:5). These three things – water for footwashing, shelter to rest, and a snack – were the bare minimums of hospitality.²² In listing just the barebones provisions, he “suggests the poverty of his hospitality..., minimizing it and showing it was nothing extraordinary.”²³ It won't be a burden, just things readily at hand; they needn't feel they're imposing.²⁴

So this triad of passersby agree to not pass by: “Yes, do as you have said” (Genesis 18:5). And Abraham wastes no time – that much is obvious! Already, though he'd begun sitting, no sooner had he seen them than “he ran to meet them” (Genesis 18:2). Abraham “immediately is energetic and eager in his duties,”²⁵ “as if jumping for joy and holding countless good things in his hands.”²⁶ Now, in order to arrange for their needs, “Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah, and said, 'Hurry!'” (Genesis 18:6). Despite it being her siesta too, Sarah hurled herself promptly into action. While she did, “Abraham ran” to the next spot in their compound, assigning a different job to one of his trusted servants, who “hastened” to do just as he was told (Genesis 18:7).

This is all the more impressive given that Abraham's nearly a century old, and it's the hot part of a summer day. It's the wrong time of day, wrong time of year, and wrong time of lifespan to be active – and yet, for the sake of being a good host, Abraham disregarded all those wrong times. “He makes haste in all things; all things are done urgently; nothing is done leisurely.”²⁷ Given how long these tasks will take, there's no sense in being slow to start. “His soul, full of joy, was eager to carry out the reception without delay..., for in a wise man's house, no one is slow in showing kindness,” but rather, all are “full of zeal to do service to their guests.”²⁸

What Abraham promised to his guests was water – presumably some to drink as well as to then wash their feet in²⁹ – and some plain and modest grub in the shade. But it turns out that Abraham's idea of humble service is to “say little and do much.”³⁰ “Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah, and he said, 'Hurry! Three seahs of fine flour! Knead it and make cakes!'” (Genesis 18:6). Fine flour isn't the rough stuff for everyday bread; it's more finely ground, a higher-quality wheat flour closer to our cake flour. So, of course, Abraham asks for round breads, like the ones the Israelites will later make from mashed manna (Numbers 11:8). This was a popular kind of bread baked on hot stones or immersed in hot ashes. And Abraham asks Sarah to use three seahs, one for each of the guests – which makes sense until you realize that a seah is about two gallons of flour!³¹ Now, I know we go overboard with the baked goods table at our church events, but that seems like an unreasonable amount, don't you think? Three guys can't eat all that bread; Abraham's aiming at filling a doggie bag for them.

Alright, but then “Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good; and he gave it to the young man, who hastened to prepare it” (Genesis 18:7). Before industrialized farming and refrigeration, meat in general was only on the menu sporadically. But even then, if Abraham wanted to treat his guests, he might go for sheep or goat; instead, he chooses a veal dinner, a much rarer treat.³² Nor does he select an animal at random or by its expendability. He personally surveys his herd and chooses a calf in the best health, one with the right balance of muscle development and fattening – “a fatted calf.”³³ This is as special an occasion as the return of a prodigal son (Luke 15:23). To Abraham, every guest is as valuable as a lost child come home – such is the heart of Abraham that “the occasion is a treasure for him.”³⁴ So, just as Abraham trusts his wife of many decades with the baking, he trusts his herdsman with butchering and then boiling the meat, probably in a big pot over the same oven where Sarah's baking her bread-cakes.³⁵ This should take a couple hours.

In the meantime, Abraham decides that there's one final element to a balanced meal. So Abraham “took curds and milk” (Genesis 18:8). Goat milk was considered easy to digest and energizing for a journey,³⁶ and Abraham, having milked his flocks this morning, would now boil it to freshen it back up; he didn't know it, but he was killing off bacteria.³⁷ Abraham also gathered curds – churned like butter during the morning work-shift – and then found cups and dishes for each guest. These weren't time-consuming tasks, so imagine Abraham is probably running around checking up on Sarah and the servant, which surely they appreciated (ha!).³⁸

Gathering all these dishes, Abraham takes them to where the three men are resting under the tree, awaiting their meal, which Abraham now assembles “in a much more extravagant manner than he originally promised.”³⁹ He took this food, “and he gave it to their face” – in other words, he served them himself, as a decent host, rather than having his staff of servants serve them and him together. But rather than join them for the meal, Abraham took things a step further: “He stood by them under the tree, and they ate” (Genesis 18:8). While not obtrusive, he let the three sit and eat together, but he stood nearby “like a servant,” a responsive waiter,⁴⁰ so that “if somewhere anything should be lacking for the convenience of the guests, he is eager to set it right speedily.”⁴¹

And all this Abraham did in the heat of the day, at the cost of his own siesta, for three outsiders he's never met. Clearly, then, Abraham's royal future hasn't puffed him up with too much pride to serve, nor has been chosen and marked apart separated his heart from the common humanity he shares with us all; the events of Genesis 17 have, if anything, made Abraham more embracing of outsiders, more accommodating to put others before himself, more eager to bend over backwards to be a blessing.⁴²

Once the trio had finished chowing down, that was the time – after the meal – when deeper conversations were able to take place; you just don't transact business on an empty stomach. So now the guests have something to say: “Where is Sarah your wife?” (Genesis 18:9). Which, first of all, under ordinary circumstances, might be a rude question! The lady of the household wasn't a public person; her whereabouts are none of a male stranger's business, in that culture.⁴³ But, on second thought, they don't just ask Abraham where his wife is; they ask him about her by name. If they'd asked, “Where is Sarai your wife?”, Abraham would have been wondering where he and they had crossed paths before. But they ask him, “Where is Sarah your wife?” – using the new name she's had for, at maximum, three months, and maybe even just a few days, and which Abraham may himself still be getting used to calling her, if he's even started. These strangers using that name is an anomaly that's sure to make the hair on the back of Abraham's neck stand on end!⁴⁴

So it's hardly a surprise when Abraham is too astonished to object to what might otherwise seem impertinence. “Behold,” he confesses as best he knows, “in the tent!” (Genesis 18:9). Unbeknownst to Abraham, actually “Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him” (Genesis 18:10), from the same place where Abraham was when this episode began.⁴⁵ And whereas the guests asked their question as a group, the next comment comes from just one: “I will surely return to you at the time of life, and behold, a son to Sarah your wife!” (Genesis 18:10). It almost sounds like a vague wish, spoken in ignorance of its impossibility; but from someone who knows Sarah's name, the meaning is plain: Sarah will finally have reason to celebrate Mother's Day!

Now, all of a sudden, everything else becomes clearer, too. Clearly, someone in this group, if not the whole group, plans to return to them at the time when a son will be born (Genesis 18:10), the same son whose birth the LORD had previously promised Abraham despite Sarah's absolute natural impediments to that promise (Genesis 17:21; 18:11). Now, is any guest going to declare that the 89-year-old matriarch of the house, who is obviously not pregnant, is on the cusp of bearing a son? Not unless the guest is either an insane person, or a prophet with a revelation, or something not of this earthly plane. And later on, when two of the men peel off to do their own thing, we meet them again next chapter and find them referred to as “two angels” (Genesis 19:1). This group is no set of human men after all; these strangers are stranger than Abraham could have known!

So some early Jewish readers said we have here a group of “three angels in the likeness of men.”⁴⁶ In particular, they concluded, these three were “Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel,” each come on his own particular mission.⁴⁷ And if that's who these are, that alone has dazzled some readers to consider, in their words, “the vast happiness and blessedness of that house where angels did not shrink from halting and receiving hospitality from men.”⁴⁸ As to how they could accept that hospitality, it's generally suggested that “they gave the appearance of eating and drinking,”⁴⁹ so “they gave him to believe that they did eat,”⁵⁰ though – as one reader sharply remarked – “only the worst fool would try to pry further into the ways and means of a holy mystery.”⁵¹

But maybe the mystery is even deeper. This whole chapter opened with the summary statement that “the LORD appeared to him” (Genesis 18:1). During the after-dinner conversation, we suddenly hear that “the LORD said to Abraham..., 'Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?'” (Genesis 18:13-14). And in the sequel, after the two others depart, “Abraham still stood before the LORD” (Genesis 18:22). So it seems more likely that we have here a mixed group: “the one God and the two others following him, his angels.”⁵² For “one of the three, who is both God and Lord..., is Lord of the angels,”⁵³ but “two of the three men were merely angels.”⁵⁴

But didn't Jesus say, “Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day; he saw it, and was glad” (John 8:56)? With the benefit of hindsight, wasn't this meeting perhaps the occasion to which Jesus was referring? So many early Christians quickly realized that the LORD visiting Abraham was, in fact, him – that “two of the three were angels, but one was the Son of God, with whom Abraham spoke.”⁵⁵ Before ever the Son became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, he appeared as “a guest of Abraham.”⁵⁶ The three, then, as one medieval Egyptian hymn suggested, might have been “Michael and Gabriel, with our Savior in their midst.”⁵⁷

Others have probed even deeper, asking why Genesis switches so unstably between the singular and the plural here, and why three measures of flour to accompany a single calf, unless maybe there's something about God that shows three figures and one Lord. So further reflection led some Christians to ponder that, in this scene, Abraham “saw the Trinity typified... He saw three, but worshipped their unity,”⁵⁸ for he “recognized the mystery of the Trinity.”⁵⁹ Whether he did or not, Abraham has the inexplicable role of providing rest for the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28), of bringing water to cleanse the One before whom heaven is impure (Job 15:15), of offering a calf and bread to feed the Owner of the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10-12).⁶⁰ Abraham received God as a houseguest, waited on God's table – as one early Christian remarked, “everything he does is mystical, everything is filled with mystery.”⁶¹ How could it not be?

And this mystery sets the precedent for how Abraham's seed might continue to host God in their midst. After an exodus from Egypt, the LORD told Moses to have Israel “make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8). And at this sanctuary, they were to provide table service to the LORD, just as their Father Abraham had. Within this sanctuary, on the pure table, the priests were each week to “take fine flour,” of the same kind Sarah used, “and bake twelve loaves from it; two-tenths of an ephah” – an ephah being three seahs – “shall be in each loaf” (Leviticus 24:5), meaning each week this bread of the presence would call for more fine flour than Sarah used. Outside the sanctuary, on the Table of the LORD (Malachi 1:7) placed “at the entrance of the tent” (Exodus 29:11), they were to regularly serve meat as good and tender as Abraham's calf, “a male without blemish... from the herd” (Leviticus 1:3), often accompanied by “loaves of fine flour” (Leviticus 7:12). All these similarities are no happy little accident. On Abraham's template, Abraham's seed continued to offer God their hospitality, with priests and Levites standing at attention, having “come near the altar to minister, to burn a food offering to the LORD” (Exodus 30:20). Such was the whole tabernacle/temple system: hospitality!

But then, said one of the rabbis, “every action that Abraham performed himself for the ministering angels, the Holy One... performed himself for Abraham's descendants,” reciprocating Abraham's favors as any good guest would.⁶² And that rabbi spoke more truly than he knew. Another rabbi explained that the LORD would repay Abraham's hospitality three times over to his children: once in the desert, once when settled in the land, and best of all, in the days of the Messiah.⁶³ And so, just as Abraham had provided a meal of hospitality to the LORD, now, in Jesus the Messiah, the LORD had returned to reciprocate that service, “giving back to the sons their right to the hospitality which their father had extended to him at another time.”⁶⁴ Now, at the Table of the LORD, it would be the LORD – Jesus Christ – who feeds Abraham and his children. At the Last Supper, as Abraham had once brought water for washing the LORD's feet, so now the LORD kneels to wash the feet of true sons of Father Abraham (John 13:5).⁶⁵ Where Abraham once brought ashen bread-cakes and the flesh of a fatted calf, so now the LORD sets the table with his own body and blood under bread and wine for all true sons and daughters of Father Abraham's life of faith. Where Abraham stood by with sweet milk and butter, so now the LORD Jesus pours out on his diners the sweetness of the Holy Spirit. Abraham's hospitality returns to his children – to us!

His apostles, their hearts refreshed and made strong to serve at table (Luke 22:26-27), went forth to spread this beautiful twist. The Greeks and Romans were firm believers in hospitality, because their myths were also full of gods coming to earth in disguise to test mortals. Homer portrays the goddess Athena, determined to prod lost Odysseus' demoralized son Telemachus into a necessary journey of growth, disguising herself as a man standing outside their house, so as to spur Telemachus into offering her the hospitality his mother's wicked suitors wouldn't; Telemachus does so with an almost Abrahamic gusto, rushing out to bring her in and break out the fine china, and only when she suddenly flew up through the skylight did he realize that “this must be a god.”⁶⁶ The Roman writer Ovid shares a myth where the gods Jupiter and Mercury tested a thousand homes, finding all closed to strangers but the “reed-roofed shack” of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis, who made cushions and a stew for the travelers; in return, Philemon and Baucis saw their shack become a temple and were granted a wish: to never live without each other.⁶⁷ Ovid recounted also another myth where Jupiter, Mercury, and Neptune – three gods – tested a widowed farmer named Hyrieus, who, not knowing who they were, pressed his hospitality on them, led them into his smoky cottage, and served beans and veggies and wine before sacrificing his own plow ox to roast for them; revealing themselves, the gods then offered to grant him a wish, and he requested and received a son: Orion.⁶⁸ No wonder that, when Paul and Barnabas worked miracles in the Gentile world, crowds mistook them for Jupiter and Mercury and shouted that “the gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!”, and tried to sacrifice to them – the crowds were imitating these stories (Acts 14:11-13). Greeks and Romans were chronically on the lookout for the possibility that maybe, in the guise of any stranger, “some god's come down from heaven.”⁶⁹ There were other Greek stories, as that of Euphorion, who “received [gods] in his home” without knowing it “and, from that time on, offered hospitality to all men.”⁷⁰ It's no wonder Greeks and Romans emphasized hospitality – for, as Homer said, “from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”⁷¹

As in the pagan stories, so in Abraham's, the whole episode was like a candid camera show, meant “to get the measure of the man” while he least expected it.⁷² When the pop quiz came his way, Abraham gave hospitality to God and his angels while “their diviner nature was not apparent to him,”⁷³ which is how he “passes and surpasses the test of his virtue and kindness.”⁷⁴ Abraham passed without knowing he was being tested because this must have been what he'd do in any and every such situation – that's why later Jews explained that “the righteous man was very hospitable, for he pitched his tent at the crossroads... and welcomed everyone – rich and poor, kings and rulers, the crippled and the helpless, friends and strangers, neighbors and passersby – all on equal terms.”⁷⁵ And after passing the test, it's no surprise many read the announcement of a son as, effectively, a response – if Hyrieus can get an Orion, all the more should Abraham and Sarah have an Isaac “as a reward for their good deeds.”⁷⁶ “Because of his faith and hospitality, a son was given to him in his old age.”⁷⁷

Other Jewish literature tells similar stories – the Book of Judges has a Danite man named Manoah who, with his wife, unknowingly encounters the Angel of the LORD; they ask him to stay for a meal of roast goat, but he ascends to heaven in the flame, though not before declaring his name was too 'wonderful' for them to know – but their reward was that Manoah's wife, once barren, gave birth to a son: Samson (Judges 13:2-25). Then there is the Jewish novel of Tobit, where a major plot point is God sending the angel Raphael in disguise as Azariah, son of Tobit's kinsman Hananiah, to accompany the blinded Tobit's son Tobiah on an important mission; only at the end does 'Azariah' reveal himself as Raphael, who'd only seemed to eat and drink mortal food and who then blessed them with peace before vanishing. “I was sent to put you to the test,” Raphael explained, but also to bring healing to Tobit and to arrange a good marriage for Tobiah to his cousin Sarah (Tobit 5:4-7; 12:14-22). No surprise that one rabbi decreed: “Let your home be open wide for hospitality.”⁷⁸

Writing to Jews living in Italy, steeped in the Old Testament and surrounded by Roman thought, the preacher to the Hebrews urged them to “not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2), a comment “referring precisely to the patriarch” above all others.⁷⁹ The first Christians persisted to keep open the possibility that any “stranger... should be perhaps an angel” in disguise;⁸⁰ and they had good reason to keep taking “seriously the possibility of angelic visitation to humans.”⁸¹ There was once a monk in the Egyptian desert named Agathon, who one day, on his way in the city to sell crafts, came across a leper too sick and disfigured to walk, who implored him to carry him into the city. There he sat as Abba Agathon sold his wares, and after each sale, the leper needled him to buy him some food or drink. After a long day of these impositions, when Agathon had sold everything and moved to leave, the leper urged Agathon to show him one more act of love and carry him back to his former spot by the desert road. Agathon obliged, but as he turned to go, the leper told him, “Agathon, you've been blessed by the Lord in heaven and on earth.” Surprised at the comment, Agathon turned back – and “he didn't see anyone; it was an angel of the Lord who'd come to test him.”⁸² So “learn from blessed Abraham, brethren, to receive strangers gladly.”⁸³

Suppose we believed, though, that what happened to Abraham, what happened to Manoah and Tobiah, what happened to Agathon could actually happen to us. Would we learn from them what to do? Suppose an angel, disguised now as then, should be sent our way to test our character when faced with a stranger outside “our own culture, clan, or clique.”⁸⁴ How would that test turn out for you and your family? How would that test go for us as a church? What would it tell about our nation, in the year of our Lord 2025 – what do current affairs suggest would befall an angel seeking American hospitality? Do we personally, ecclesially, or nationally follow in the footsteps of Abraham when it comes to the poor, the needy, the downtrodden, the foreigner in our midst, or any other stranger? Or might the angelic test show us up, shame us, condemn us as all too “callous and uncaring”?⁸⁵

When St. Paul wrote to the Romans, he urged them to “outdo one another in showing honor,” to “serve the Lord,” to “contribute to the needs of the saints,” to “pursue hospitality” (Romans 12:13). He's saying that the images from Ovid and even Homer are insufficient. Their characters received their supposed visitations mainly once the disguised deity knocked; but Abraham, like Telemachus on steroids, leapt from the door to intercept and implore – he proactively pursued hospitality.⁸⁶ Perhaps Abraham was sitting at his tent entrance on the lookout.⁸⁷ One rabbi even imagined that Abraham habitually “would go forth and make the rounds everywhere, and when he found wayfarers, he brought them in to his house.”⁸⁸ In the early church, there were a pair of brothers who inherited much from their father; and while one gave all his share away, the other one built a small place where, with some like-minded brethren, “he took in every stranger, every sick person, every old person, and every pauper,” slowly spending his inheritance in supplying their needs, but eventually achieved such zeal that “he even seated himself on the highways and gathered up the afflicted.” In living like this, the verdict went, he “demonstrated the work of Abraham.”⁸⁹ To a greater or lesser degree, St. Paul says, so ought we.

The Lord himself said that, on the Last Day, he'll say to those gathered at his right hand that “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me,” in the same way Abraham had (Matthew 25:35). “When?” they'll ask. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). Not from Zeus but from Christ are all strangers, all beggars, all the least and lowest! And so “when in his name you give evidence of attention to the visitor, you will gain a reward just as if you have welcomed him.”⁹⁰ “We should welcome visiting brothers as if we were welcoming the Lord's arrival..., for in this way Abraham welcomed those who indeed looked like men, yet he saw the Lord in them.”⁹¹ But Jesus broadened Abrahamic hospitality to many works of mercy like unto it (Matthew 25:35-36). So when a young Roman soldier named Martin saw a shivering beggar one winter day, and he sliced his military cloak in half to share it with the man, he dreamed he saw Jesus wearing that half before his angels, declaring “it was he who had been clothed in the person of the beggar.”⁹² As shocking as is the thought that any stranger in need we might meet could be an angel sent to test our mercy, so much greater is the thought that every stranger in need is, vicariously, Christ, insofar as Christ claims for himself whatever treatment we give those in need – and promises to reward us accordingly, as Father Abraham and Mother Sarah learned for themselves. So, as a great bishop once said, “let us all imitate this and display much zeal in practicing hospitality..., to lay up for ourselves as well the enjoyment of immortal blessings. You see, if we practice hospitality, we shall welcome Christ [and his angels] here, and he in turn will welcome us in those mansions prepared for those who love him.”⁹³ May we often pass the test of entertaining Christ and his angels unawares, vicariously or in person in disguise – for in this is the path to blessing and virtue and eternity. Amen.