Genesis 18: 1-15
The chapter begins by saying that Yahweh appeared to Abraham. However, Abraham lacks the reader’s insight but his first reaction to the arrival of strangers is to offer hospitality, and as a result he finds himself entertaining God. This finding God in hospitality to strangers is also in Luke’s Emmaus Road incident. Last week we were told that Abraham was seventy-five when he began his journey and age again features in this section.
Like Abraham and Sarah, it is important for us not to get tangled up in the biological plausibility
We must but accept the message that there is a reality beyond ourselves that calls us to achievements we easily allow our past to label as impossible. Allowing God to speak to us through the Bible requires us to focus on the meaning contained in the story rather than question the happenstance of the narrative.
Matthew 9: 35-10: 8
The closing verses of chapter nine sum up the essence of Jesus’ ministry of teaching, preaching and healing and anticipates the sending out of the twelve by establishing a great need to expand Jesus’ mission.
The community of the twelve, is not like the hereditary priesthood of the time, but is given authority by God’s action in Jesus. The number twelve reflects Israel’s twelve tribes that formed a tribal confederacy marked by tribal self-governance, egalitarian structure, and resistance to oppressive Canaanite city-states.
Therefore, the suggestion is that this new community will reflect those ideals and be an alternative community of different social patterns, shared resources, and resistance to oppressive structures. Indeed, they were to proclaim ‘The good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matt. 10:7). [1]
The twelve are sent out as apostles which is a Greek military term for an ambassador who, in the days before text messages, had the authority to act on behalf of the general who sent them. We finish at verse 8 but if we continued to verse 23 we would discover that the disciples are to make themselves vulnerable.
They are not even able to take a staff to defend themselves and must rely entirely on the hospitality of those who will receive them.
Sermon
‘I don’t know if things happened this way but I know this story is true’.
In one of his books Marcus Borg quotes an indigenous American storyteller who began their creation myth by making that statement.