The Story Part 2 - God Builds A Nation

In between two of the most important archaeological sites on Orkney – The Stennes stones and the Ring of Brodgar, there’s a narrow strip of land called the Ness of Brodgar. And for the past ten years, experts have been painstakingly uncovering what’s probably the most significant Neolithic site, not just on Orkney, but in the whole of the UK.
 

What they’ve found, over a site that’s as big as five football pitches, seems to be a huge temple complex with a series of discrete ceremonial buildings, and a protecting wall that’s ten feet high and encircles the entire site.

 

For generations, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over the purpose of the standing stones on Orkney. Now they’ve got even more to be scratching their heads about.

How much they’re going to glean from the rubble remains to be seen, but the sheer scale of these developments is a measure of how seriously our ancestors took these religious rituals; and sacrifice of one kind or another was almost certainly a part of what went on in these hallowed places. 

That’s how the ancient world was – and that’s the world in which this disturbing story of Abraham preparing to offer Isaac as a sacrifice took place. But more of that later.

We’re on Chapter 2 of the story and if you were here last week you’ll remember that the story begins with a God who creates, and who creates human beings with a special endowment of consciousness – an ability to think and choose and love which mirrors his own. In that sense, like no other creature, we are made in God’s image. Made so that we could enjoy him and be with him for ever.

 

But according to the story, our ancestors chose badly. They made the same mistake that all creatures with a conscious self are prone to make. They placed themselves and their desires at the centre of things and pushed God to the margins. And so sin enters the story, and with it comes a breakdown in our relationship with God.

But for all that, God’s intention doesn’t waver. He still wants to be with us, even though our choices have made that more difficult. He determines to find a new way to make himself known and restore our relationship with him. And that’s where today’s story begins, because this new way involves God forming a people to whom and through whom he will make himself known to the nation

As he says to the people of Israel later on through the prophet Ezekiel – “They will know that I am the Lord, when I show myself holy through you, before their eyes”.

God’s plan is to form a nation. So what better place to start than with an elderly couple who can’t have kids and live in a far away country where they worship other gods?

 

Hardly the most likely candidates! But this is the start of a trend. Time and again we’ll find God choosing the least likely candidates for the job. Why? So that people will be in no doubt that it’s God who’s really in charge.

He chooses Moses to deliver Israel from Pharaoh, even though he’s a useless public speaker.

He chooses Deborah to lead her people to military victory, even though she’s never wielded a sword.

He chooses Matthew as a disciple, even though tax collectors are universally despised.

And he chooses Paul as an apostle, even though he’d been instrumental in persecuting churches and killing Christians.

 

From very early on in the story, we start to discover that God can and does use anyone to accomplish his purposes. And rather scarily that ‘anyone’ includes you and me.

So the call comes to Abram and Sarai – “leave your homeland, your people and your father’s house and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”.

 

And this is crucial – right at the beginning of Abram’s story there’s this promise that through him all the nations, not just some, will be blessed. We need to carry that thought with us, because the next few chapters of the Story are going to be very bloody in the Lower Story.

But in the Upper Story, God’s plan from the beginning, was that all the nations would be blessed through Abram’s offspring. And that didn’t mean his son, Isaac, or his grandson, Jacob. But the one who generations later would be born in a stable in Bethlehem and who – in time – would become known as the saviour of the world.

We’re only in chapter 2; we’re two thousand years before Mary and Joseph and shepherds and angels. But already we’re being pointed toward Jesus. He’s the one to whom the story is already bending.

So with God’s promises before them, and in spite of their age and their infertility, Abram and Sarai set out for the promised land together. As the apostle Paul wrote, many years later, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. In other words, he trusted God and that made him right with God.

 

Now those of you with a good memory will remember all the ups and downs of this story from last year. But in the end, many years after they left Haran, a son called Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah. And it’s just when they think things are finally working out that the story takes another unexpected turn.

 

“Abraham” says God. “Take your son, your only son whom you love – Isaac – and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain that I will show you.”

It comes out of nowhere. Only it doesn’t, really, when you think about it, because the world Abraham lived in was one where sacrifice to the gods was a way of life. It was common to all ancient cultures, and I want to talk about that in general terms for a few minutes before getting back to Abraham and Isaac.

No-one can say when or where the practice of sacrifice began, but it doesn’t take much imagination to guess how it all started.

The ancients lived at the mercy of the rainfall and the sunshine and the turning of the seasons. If the rain didn’t fall, they had no crops and they starved. If the sun grew too hot, their crops withered, and they starved. It was a short step from that to the belief that there were powers who chose whether to send rain or not. Whether to make the sun shine, or not. And those powers, they thought, must be appeased. So they would make offerings, of crops or animals, to keep the unseen powers happy.

But here’s the insidious thing about any unregulated sacrificial system. And remember that Israel’s, in later years, was closely regulated. In a unregulated system, how do you know when you’ve given enough?

If you have a good year, you’d better offer a bit more in thanks to the gods to recognise their bounty. You end up giving more.

And if you have a bad year, maybe the gods are angry at you for some reason. Maybe you didn’t give enough last time. So now you need to give more.

 And if you give more, and the rains still don’t come, maybe that’s a sign that they’re still angry, and that you still haven’t given enough. So you have to give more.

 So before long, things ended up in a vicious cycle. If things go really well- need to offer more. If things go poorly – need to offer more!  You never knew when you’d given enough. And this produced a deep anxiety in the primal psyche. You never know where you stand with the gods.

“I’ve offered everything I can except what we need to live on! What else can I give?”

That’s the point at which they upped the ante.

 Some would cut themselves to show how serious they were.

I’ve given everything I can – all I can do now is harm my body.

Cybele was a fertility goddess worshipped in the near middle east. The centre of Cybele worship was the town of Sardis in modern Turkey and at her great festival male devotees by the thousand would go the whole way and seek her favour by castrating themselves and offering their bodily parts as sacrifices on her altar.

 As recently as 1487, Aztec records show that over 80,000 human souls were offered up in four days at the re-dedication of the great temple in what is now Mexico City. They were seeking the favour of the gods of war and agriculture through human sacrifice.

And in the Hebrew Scriptures we read about the pagan god Molech who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn. The worship of Molech was common in Caanan, and Caanan was the land where Abraham had settled – he would have known all about it.

Maybe now we’re beginning to understand why, when this command to sacrifice Isaac comes to Abraham, he doesn’t stop in his tracks and question it as any sane person would today. This – in his culture – is how the gods are. They demand everything. Is his God any different?

Well on Mount Moriah, he finds out just how different his God is. Molech might require child sacrifice, but Abraham’s God doesn’t. Abraham’s God provides.

As the old man and his beloved son had made their way up the hill, Isaac had been confused. “We have the fire and the wood, Father, But where’s the lamb for the sacrifice?”

“God himself will provide the lamb”

And indeed he did – and still does.

The prophet Isaiah tells us that that descendant of Abraham we spoke of, the one who would be a blessing to all nations, was led like a lamb to the slaughter. God himself provided the lamb. We might even go so far as to say that God himself was the Lamb – the eternal son of God offering himself up for your sake and for mine.

Our ancestors placed more and more on the altars saying – is this enough, is this enough, is this enough?

Christ put an end to all of that by offering himself on the cross for your sin and mine, and saying ‘it is finished’.

Nothing more needs to be offered. All we need to do is accept his self-giving with the profound gratitude that it deserves.

In the ancient world, people would lay the most costly thing they had on the altar to appease the gods. But our God is different. Because he loves us, our God provides.

“This is love” says the apostle John. “Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins”.

What greater offering could there be, for your sin and mine, than the life of Jesus Christ?  Could God have done any more to show us the extent of his love and his desire to be with us? Because, as we said last week and will keep on saying, that is what this story is all about.

Years after Abraham, the prophet Micah wrote these words which have stayed with me from the first time I read them and which felt especially relevant today.

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

The Lord doesn’t require thousands of rams, rivers of oil, or our firstborn children. He never has and he never will.

What he does require is the one thing we find even harder to give. The humility that recognises our need of a saviour.

 

 

Memorial Service 2013

All of us, to a degree, suffer from deafness or hardness of hearing, though not in the physical sense.

Sometimes we find it hard to hear what other people are genuinely saying to us – either hard in the sense of difficult, or hard in the sense of painful, and sometimes hard in both senses at once.

Somebody comes up and makes a remark about the weather – and all that we hear, or allow ourselves to hear – is a remark about the weather. “Looks like we  might be getting some rain later” is all that gets through to us, but what he’s really saying – and sometimes we know this and sometimes we don’t – is maybe “I’m lonely. Will you talk to me”. Or maybe “I know that you’re lonely, and I want to try and talk to you”.

But in our deafness, we don’t hear that. We hear the talk about the weather, or the crops, or the family or the ailment but oftentimes we miss what they mean. And more often than not, what they mean is: “I want you to listen to me. I want you to know me.”

When we speak, we’re not just communicating information. We’re also communicating something of ourselves,

Most of the time we’re too busy, or too deaf to pick that up in our conversations, but every now and again something reaches our ears that goes a little deeper.

The writer Fred Buechner tells of a time he went shopping with his wife, and as they stood at the checkout she berated him for adding a tub of full fat cream to the conveyor belt when he was trying to lose weight. “Oh well – you only live once” he said.

“And then it happened” – he writes. “This thing that broke for a moment through my deafness. It was a hot, muggy afternoon and the cashier had been working hard all day and looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of sweets and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said “Oh well - you only live once” she broke into the conversation and what she said was “Don’t you think once is enough?” – That was it.

And of course, they laughed as she’d intended them to laugh. But afterwards, as he thought about it, Buechner found himself wondering where those words had come from within her. What was she really saying? Was she saying “I’m sick and tired of this job”. Was she saying “You’ve no idea how hard my life’s been lately”. Was she saying “I feel trapped, and I don’t see any way out”?

“You only live once” he said. “Don’t you think once is enough?” she replied – straight off the cuff.

Gets you thinking. Especially on a Sunday like this, when a good number of us are here because someone we love experienced too little of life, rather than too much of it.

Why would she say those words?

Well I guess we all know the weariness that can accompany our living at times. There are spells when life seems almost entirely drained of music or colour. Circumstances weigh us down; responsibility narrows our horizons; the drudgery of routine saps us of joy. Life, in those times, gets reduced to the business of simply getting through the day. If you’re speaking out of that place, small wonder that one life seems enough, or more than enough.

Or sometimes we’re just so busy that we miss life even as it happens to us. We’ve got a full schedule, a busy day, a host of commitments at work and at home. But the danger is that life then becomes a game of join the dots between those different commitments; getting from one meeting to the next, one appointment to the next; one task to the next as fast as possible. Kiss the kids on the forehead at bedtime and then get back to it again.

In the middle of that, even the best and most energetic of us find ourselves wondering if this is the life that we really wanted to have.

“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said. And for that kind of life, I guess maybe she’s right.

 

But here’s the thing. All of us know that life has more to offer than that. We’ve tasted it.

We love; we create; we tend and grow; we nurture, we laugh; we share; we worship; we play; we pray.

There are things we can happily lose ourselves in for hours and hours and they’re as unique as our fingerprints. For me it’s playing guitar or shaping words in poetry. Some of you run, some of you garden, some of you walk, some of you read; others love company or being with family, or travelling, or music.

We cherish those God-given moments and experiences, and when they’ve passed, we cherish the memory of them because they are what makes life worth the living.

And there enough of them, scattered throughout our days like little diamonds, to make the leaving of this life hard to bear for everyone concerned.

Hard for those who have lived out their days. Harder still when someone’s taken young and still with so much living to do.

“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said.

Of course once isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough. But on this side of eternity, it seems to be all we get.

And if that were the end of the story, it would also be the end of hope.

I don’t decry the work of the humanist folk who take funeral services. I’ve always believed that as a minister, my job in a funeral service is twofold. To do justice to God and to do justice to the person who’s passed on, and I can’t fault the humanists on how well they do the latter.

But at the end of the day, no matter how much bonhomie and celebration there is of the life departed, a humanist service is devoid of hope. In that worldview, the person you loved, in his or her entirety, has ceased to be.

And as the Apostle Paul once said – ‘if for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men’.

But in Christ, the Christ who IS the resurrection and the life, the Christian dares to hope for more than that.

Fred Buechner puts it this way: “Once before, out of the abyss of the unborn, the un-created, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing became something. Out of nonbeing we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life.”

We live in a cynical, secular age. Any talk of life after death is written off as mere comfort for the gullible. But it’s a brave man who from this side of the chasm dares to tell us what’s on the other side, when he’s never actually crossed over himself.

I came across this wee story the other day which made me smile.

The story is that there were two babies in a mother's womb – we’ll say there was a boy and a girl.

"Do you believe in life after delivery?" asked the boy.

 

“Of course” said the girl. “There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we’ll be later on.”

"Rubbish," says the other. "There’s no life after delivery. What would that kind of life even look like?"

"I don't know” said the girl. “But I’d guess there’ll be more light than here. Maybe we’ll use our legs for walking and eat using our mouths?"

The boy laughed. "That’s nonsense. Walking’s impossible – you know that! And eating with our mouths? Are you kidding? We get fed through the umbilical cord, and any fool can see it’s not long enough to stretch very far.”

"Well I think there is something more than this, and maybe it's different from how things are in here." said the girl

"Wishful thinking” said the boy. “No one’s ever come back from the other side. Delivery’s the end of life. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.”

"I don’t think so" says the girl "I think we’ll see mother and she’ll take care of us."

"Mother??" You believe in mother? Where is she now?”

“She’s all around us. It is in her that we live. Without her this place wouldn’t even be.”

 "I don't see her” said the boy. “And until I can see her I’m not going to believe that she exists”.

 “I can’t see her either” said the girl. “But sometimes when we’re quiet I’m sure I can hear her and sense her. I know it’s hard to believe, but deep down, I’m sure that there is life after delivery. And I can’t help wondering if part of the reason we’re here is to prepare ourselves for what that life is going to be like”

When it comes to life on the other side, we are all still in the womb. None of us have crossed over, and none of us can speak with certainty . But there is one who can speak with certainty about the afterlife. He died on a Friday and was raised on the Sunday, and it’s in his name that we gather here today. And it’s his voice that I choose to listen to.

And he tells us: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die”

 

“Do you believe this?” – he asks Mary, whose brother Lazarus lay in the sleep of death.

This morning he asks you and me the very same question. “Do you believe this?”.

May God give us the faith to echo Mary’s answer –

 

“Yes Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world”.

(This sermon draws from a sermon by Fred Buechner called 'The Killing of Time')

Abraham Part 8 - Hospitality

Years ago when I was fresh out of university I did my apprenticeship as a minister in a part of Glasgow called Possilpark. And chances are you won’t know anything about Possilpark, but if you’ve seen the film Trainspotting, you’ll have a fair idea of the territory.

But although it was scary and challenging at times, it was a really good year. And one of the things I remember most was going out with folk from the other local churches in an act of joint witness to welcome in the Millennium.

We’d bought in hundreds of wee candles and candle holders ,and made up a wee leaflet to go with it, explaining the significance of the Millennium and inviting folk along to the church. And we headed out in twos – a good Biblical principle – to go door knocking over the space of a few evenings, and take these candles and greetings around the parish.

It wasn’t easy. Lots of closed doors, lots of scared people behind those doors. But I’ll always remember one home where we heard someone come to the door, pause for a moment to look through the eyehole, and then start undoing the latches to let us in. She had so many locks and chains you’d have thought she was guarding Fort Knox. But when she finally got the door opened, she listened to us politely and took the candle with gratitude. And just as we were about to move on she said – ‘hold on a wee minute’.

She went off into the flat and came back with an enormous millennium candle, about that big! “There’s one back for you!” she said with a smile.

We went out to spread a little grace in the parish, and we got far more back than we bargained for. God met many of us in unexpected ways and unexpected places over the course of those two or three evenings.

In the course of today’s reading, Abraham too, has an unexpected meeting with God; and it happens as he shares the grace of hospitality with three strangers.

1 The Lord appeared to Abraham at the sacred trees of Mamre. As Abraham was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the hottest part of the day, he looked up and saw three men standing there.

Now we could easily pass over those words and move on, but there’s something interesting there that we might miss. A unique part of the Christian understanding of God is that God is somehow three and yet one, all at the same time. Father, Son and Spirit – one God in three persons. We call it the doctrine of the Trinity.

And although that doctrine isn’t spelled out for us in the Bible, there are hints in that direction from Genesis all the way through to Revelation.

And this is one of them. God appears to Abraham. And how does he appear? As 3. Three men.  Is this Father, Son and Spirit? Well we don’t know – it’s not spelt out for us, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

But what’s more interesting, I think, is that Abraham doesn’t seem to be overwhelmed by this divine appearance. We know from the Christmas story that when angels appear people tend to keel over and end up with their faces in the dirt.

 

But there doesn’t seem to be any of that here. In fact, Abraham doesn’t seem to identify these men as different in any way at least, not at first.

As far as we’re aware, he just sees three strangers in need of some basic human comforts: water to drink and wash with, somewhere to rest, and something to eat.

Were they finely dressed? Did they look like ordinary travellers? We don’t know. But whatever the circumstances, Abraham responds to their need with classic middle-eastern hospitality:

As soon as he saw them, he ran out to meet them. Bowing down with his face touching the ground, he said, “Sirs, please do not pass by my home without stopping; I am here to serve you. Let me bring some water for you to wash your feet; you can rest here beneath this tree. I will also bring a bit of food; it will give you strength to continue your journey. You have honoured me by coming to my home, so let me serve you.”

They replied, “Thank you; we accept.”

So there’s running and bowing and fetching and serving which shows remarkable humility from a man of Abraham’s standing; especially toward visitors whom he did not know. Middle Eastern culture placed a high premium on showing courtesy to the stranger; and many folk who’ve travelled in the Middle East will testify that it’s still the same today.

And there are no half measures here…

 6 Abraham hurried into the tent and said to Sarah, “Quick, take a sack of your best flour, and bake some bread.” Then he ran to the herd and picked out a calf that was tender and fat, and gave it to a servant, who hurried to get it ready. He took some cream, some milk, and the meat, and set the food before the men. There under the tree he served them himself, and they ate.

He says ‘do you want a bite to eat’ and then he goes and has a feast prepared! I reckon Abraham must have had some Northern Irish blood in him! That’s typical of the folk that I grew up with - they’d have killed you with kindness. Even higher cholesterol levels than the Scots, and that’s saying something!

But the thing to note is that all this preparation and consumption must have taken time. To bake bread, to have a calf slaughtered and a meal prepared. This wasn’t a fly cup. For the duration of their visit, he was giving them his best – his full attention – even to the point of serving them himself. Whatever else was on Abraham’s  agenda for that day suddenly became less important.

That’s a wee word to all of us, myself included, who are prone to see the other, the stranger, or the visitor as an interruption to our busy schedule. Sometimes our real work is in the interruptions.

So, Abraham created a leisurely space, an hospitable space, within which good things could happen. And as they ate together, the strangers brought their own strange blessing to bear on Abraham and his home.

9 They asked him, “Where is your wife Sarah?”

And I wonder if that’s the point at which he began to realise who he was dealing with here, because in the text at least, nobody’s mentioned Sarah by name so far. How did they know that that’s what she was called?

“She is there in the tent,” he answered, probably more than a little puzzled by now.

 And then one of them says, “Nine months from now I will come back, and your wife Sarah will have a son.”

Now Sarah was behind him, at the door of the tent, listening…..

Not like any woman you or I might know, I’m sure!

Joking aside, Sarah’s listening reminded me of something from years ago. In 1988 I lived in digs with two female student friends in my third year at University, and we were in a semi-detached house next to a kind and devout Muslim family.

I was playing guitar and singing a lot in those days, and at the end of the summer term after I’d gone back home to Northern Ireland, my two flatmates got to know the Muslim girls next door.

They would have liked to have come in and got to know us, but they couldn’t because I was there and they weren’t allowed to be around a Western man without a chaperone. But they confessed to my friends that throughout the year they used to sit in their bedroom and listen to me practicing through the wall!

Sometimes women have to listen or speak in secret, because the culture they live in doesn’t give them any other option.

So, behind her tent flap Sarah was listening. And laughing. Because the news they brought was so far-fetched, In the past God had promised her a son, and she’d been waiting for decades for him to arrive, but nothing had happened. And now she was old! Her body was so far past fertility it seemed ridiculous to even entertain the idea of a pregnancy.

I like Eugene Peterson’s modern translation of what Sarah has to say here:

“An old woman like me? Get pregnant? With this old man of a husband?”

Small wonder she laughed.

I guess after years of trying and failing, all of us do tend to grow weary and lose hope. It can be hard not to let cynicism take over, and end up greeting any suggestion of newness or change with disbelieving laughter.

But God’s reply gave Sarah pause for thought.

Why did you laugh?  He asks. Is anything too hard for the LORD?

And this part of their story ends with those words hanging in the air; words that re-kindled hope for Abraham and Sarah and reminded them just who they were dealing with. Words that they would never have heard if they hadn’t chosen to be hospitable.

 

One of the things I notice when I speak to older folk in the congregation and parish is how strong the bonds used to be between friends and neighbours in this parish.

People talk to me of first-footing on Hogmanay nights, trudging across snow-covered fields to go and greet their neighbours; of epic dances at the Victoria Hall where they met life partners; of groups of friends in their 80’s and 90’s who’ve been part of the same crowd for almost all their lifetime.

And two things strike me when I hear those stories.

That those kinds of bonds only grow up between folk through years and years of hospitality.

And how hard it is, in our modern world, to make that kind of time for people any more.

 For all our labour saving devices, we seem to have less time than ever. We need two wages, or one big wage, to afford those labour saving devices, so very often both partners are working, and coming home tired at the end of the day. What little energy’s left over goes to the kids, and one another and there’s not a whole lot left over to go around. Certainly not much time to go out of ourselves towards someone we don’t know.

The spirit might be willing, but the flesh is knackered!

And we may, or may not, be able to do anything about that.

But what I want to suggest, in closing, is that even if our time is pressured, it’s still possible to cultivate an attitude of hospitality towards the other. Because at the end of the day, hospitality isn’t about cups of tea and fattened calves, though it can be. At it’s most basic, hospitality is just about openness. About a willingness to see the person who’s in front of you and engage with them as a fellow human being.

Hospitality isn’t just about having people into your home. You can take your hospitality with you in the attitude you bring to your relationships.

 My friend Matt is great at this. His family run a restaurant and a big part of the culture there is to make every guest feel special. And that’s why people keep coming back.

And growing up in that environment has shaped him. He talks to the folk giving out fliers as you make your way into a building, he takes the time to speak to the waiter or waitress and have some banter with them. He registers the check-out girl and makes a point of calling her by name. Just small things, but they’re signs that he’s taking his hospitality with him. This openness to the other.

And the beautiful thing is, he does it not because the other person’s especially important, or because he’s going to get something from them if he treats them well. He does it because he believes in the core of his being that this person before him matters to God. And that means they’re a person of significance, whoever they are.

And here’s the thing – when we cultivate that openness, that attitude of hospitality, not only are we blessing the other, we’re opening ourselves up to more of what God has for us. Because God and God’s truth often come to us in the guise of the stranger.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus talks about how some will be commended some and other reprimanded at the end of days. Why? Because he came to them in the guise of the poor, the hungry, the needy, the stranger. And some were hospitable towards him, while others weren’t.

As I was preparing for today I had a memory of an old Celtic prayer of hospitality, and I managed to track it down for you. It says:

 

I met a stranger yest're'een;

I put food in the eating place,  Drink in the drinking place,

Music in the listening place;

And, in the sacred name of the Triune,

He blessed myself and my house.

My cattle and my dear ones,

And the lark said in her song,

Often, often, often,

Goes the Christ in the stranger's guise;

Often, often, often,

Goes the Christ in the stranger's guise.

As he sat in the door of his tent, with the heat haze shimmering over the baked soil, Abraham glanced up and saw three strangers needing his help; help he was ready to give.

He knew what he could do for them. He had no idea what they could do for him.

And it’s no different with us. It’s as we choose to be open toward the other – whoever that might be - that God does some of his best work: in us, for us and through us.

Thanks be to God.