A sermon preached at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco

May 11, 2025

Introduction to worship

Good morning and welcome to worship. I am Marci Glass, pastor and head of staff here at Calvary. Thank you for joining us this morning for worship.

Today is Mother’s Day. For those of us for whom this is a day of celebration, we celebrate with you. We also recognize this can be a complicated day for many people, and in this hour, all of our complicated feelings for this day are also welcome. We bring our joy, our grief, our complexity with us to this time of worship. And God meets us here in all of it.

Whether you’re here for the first time or whether you are here every week, I deeply believe that it is God who has invited you here today, and it is my privilege to welcome you as a guest in this place. In the music, in the liturgy, in the prayers, in the silence, I pray you will find what your soul needs this morning.

The scripture passage we chose for our Hospitality sermon series theme is from Hebrews 13:2: Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

That verse is a reference to the story we’ll hear in worship today from the book of Genesis, where Abraham and Sarah see strangers near their camp and Abraham rushes over to them to offer hospitality.

And as we continue our conversation about hospitality, I want to acknowledge that sometimes it is hard to show hospitality even to friends. I mean, I love my friends. But cleaning my apartment and making dinner? I have to gear up for that sometimes. I want to be different about it, because when I do have people over, I am so happy. I love hosting people when they are actually there. And so I try to get out of my own way and not worry about whether everything is perfect. A little bit of clutter is constant companion for me. I need it to stop being a barrier to connection.

As Mary Randolph Carter writes in her delightful book A Perfectly Kept House Is the Sign of a Misspent Life, “A cluttered house is a lived-in house. It is filled with signs of life: stacks of magazines; newspapers spread over a sofa; books piled next to the bed; […] Clutter speaks to activity. A book started, a painting begun (sic.), children’s books opened on the kitchen table, a teacup next to a piece of chocolate cake. Everything in its place may give a certain satisfaction, but a lived-in room exudes comfort and warmth.”

I want to feel this way about my clutter because I think it will help me be more hospitable.

But these stories in the Bible are not about showing hospitality to friends, but to strangers.

I grew up in a family that highly emphasized stranger danger, not stranger hospitality.

My parents were generous in many ways, but something in life led them to be wary of strangers. My mom had a hard time leaving the house if there were people outside because she thought they were casing the house to rob it. The real problem with that is that our home was on a boulevard, much like the panhandle near Golden Gate Park. There were always people in front of the house. Everyone walked their dogs up that boulevard. We were late to school a lot, while we waited for the would be robbers to move on with their dogs to case someone else’s house.

Our country right now is using ‘stranger danger’ as a reason to divide us, to make us fear each other, and to harm people. We must pay attention.

As we talk about hospitality, and welcoming the stranger, I invite us to think about both the gifts that are there for us in hospitality, and the fear that is in us about strangers. We are conflicted internally about hospitality. We know we need it to survive. We fear the risks that come from offering it.

Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic and scholar wrote a poem called the Guest House that speaks to this.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
[S]he may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

This poem speaks to my internal struggles and to our external ones.

As we talk about hospitality, and welcoming the stranger, I invite us to think about both the gifts that are there for us in hospitality, and the fear that is in us about strangers. And who does God call us to be in the midst of it all.

Scripture:

Gen 18:1-10

Romans 12:1-13

Sermon:

Before we dive into the sermon, I want to remind us about Abraham and Sarah. They are important patriarch and matriarch figures in the Book of Genesis. Their story starts with migration. With his father, they leave Ur of the Chaldeans, today in Southern Iraq, stopping in Haran, which is in modern day Turkey. From there, God sends Abraham to yet another place. In chapter 12, the Lord says to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

There are promises of blessings, and descendants. But those promises require him to become a refugee. To leave the people he knows and loves, to leave the things and places that are familiar, and journey to a different country.  We’re told he journeyed in stages toward the negeb, a desert in southern Israel. A journey in stages means it wasn’t a straight shot. He did not have a direct flight from Haran to Canaan. He had to change planes in Atlanta, Chicago, and Denver.

They also end up in Egypt for a time because of famine and other challenges.

So while we tend to talk about Abraham and the promises of God about having descendants more numerous than the stars, let’s not forget that he was a refugee, a sojourner on the road, journeying in stages, fleeing famine, seeking welcome, and knowing real hardship.

There are people today living out Abraham and Sarah’s story, people journeying by stages to a new land, facing struggles, and famine, seeking welcome. Think of them as we think of Abraham and Sarah.

And maybe the journey is easier because God tells you to make it. But if you read their story, I’m not sure that’s true. And maybe the journey is easier knowing God has made promises for you of descendants, but the descendants aren’t showing up and it must have been frustrating to realize you didn’t ask God what the time line was, exactly, for this to all happen.

Abraham and Sarah, as our story begins today, have not built the split level ranch house quite yet, but they are at least somewhat settled by the Oaks of Mamre. They have a tent set up. They have flocks. They have water to drink and flour to make cakes. They have shade in the heat of the day.

And Abraham sees three men, perhaps fellow sojourners. We aren’t told if they look like friendly people, or if they are wearing the right clothes that would indicate they were from the right country, or cheering for the right team, or voting for the right political party.

There are not conditions on welcoming strangers.

God calls us to welcome them. Full stop.

And Abraham does.

I suspect there were stories that didn’t make the Book of Genesis, about when Abraham and Sarah received hospitality. When they were the strangers wandering in the heat of the day, and they came upon a tent by an oasis, with shade from oak trees, and were welcomed in and given food and rest and hospitality.

Abraham goes all out for these strangers. He has Sarah make food. He has a calf slaughtered and cooked. He brings them cheese curds and milk. It was a lot of work, and no small cost, for them to care for these strangers. But the Bible doesn’t record any grumbling about that. Or any concern on Abraham’s part that because they gave this calf to feed strangers, maybe they won’t have enough food for themselves later on.

I know from my own life that my generosity has not caused me harm. I’ve never suffered because I was generous in caring for others. That’s how the abundance of God works. When we live in trust that God will provide, we can share what we have with strangers, and know that our needs will also be provided.

God has provided for Abraham and Sarah as they have journeyed by stages. And Abraham and Sarah participate in that by providing for others.

The God who gave each of us life wants us to give life to each other.

And when we try to live our lives as if we don’t need hospitality from others, it gets us off track. When we forget to ask for help, when we forget to accept the gift of an offered meal, and seat under the shade on a hot day, we begin to believe that we are islands to ourselves, that we aren’t dependent on each other to give life to each other as God has cared for us. It can make us think that people who do need help are somehow weak when we think we are strong, or we think they have made mistakes and we are without error. Buying the lie of our own independence leads us to tell false stories of others, as if they are unworthy of our care.

One of my favorite novels is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. When it came out, I gushed about it. I said it would be my favorite book of the year, even though I read it in January. I was born again about this book, telling strangers on the bus about it. My husband read it, on my recommendation, and hated it. He said nothing happened in it. He’s not wrong. But when it won the Pulitzer, I felt vindicated.

Only my family can turn reading into a competitive sport?

The book is a fictional journal/memoir of an old pastor dying of heart disease in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, writing to his young son, knowing his son will not have many memories of him, and hoping his letters can bridge a gap between them that his upcoming death will create.

The sermon title today comes from a passage in that book, and underscores for me why hospitality is both important and difficult. He writes to his son:

“When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person.”

I offer his question to us, as we consider meeting strangers, and offering the hospitality God calls us to offer. What is the Lord asking of us in this moment, in this situation?

The Bible has very clear instructions about welcoming the stranger. It is all throughout the Old Testament. Paul mentioned it in our passage from the Book of Romans as a Christian ethic too.

And one reason for it, I think, is because all people need help, not just people we know and like. Not just people who look like us, or vote like us.  And even we need help, from time to time.

All people are made in the image of God and God wants all of their children to be okay. As our new pope said, not long before he was elected pope, “Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

And the reason I love that quote from Marilynne Robinson’s book so much is that it is a reminder that the way we behave isn’t supposed to be just commensurate with the way we are treated. It isn’t about whether or not the other person deserves our kindness.

We behave as we do because of who God is and who God calls us to be.

God is the host with the most. We have been welcomed in, not as guests, but as family. We have received grace upon grace, not because we have earned it but because that is who God is.

God came to earth and lived among us, as one of us. And as an infant, Jesus became a refugee, his family having to flee to Egypt because of political threat in their home country. The God who created the universe showed the ultimate form of solidarity with humanity by becoming one of us, and by experiencing the vulnerability of being human. God knows what is at stake when God tells us to welcome the stranger, because God has vulnerably lived it.

Are we willing to be vulnerable in our hospitality? Inhabiting vulnerability is the path into welcoming the stranger.

The poet David Whyte, in his book Consolations, says this about vulnerability:

VULNERABILITY is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice , vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding under-current of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to be something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and  more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.–David Whyte, from his chapter on “Vulnerability” in the book “Consolations”

In the biblical instructions to care for the stranger, God invites us to participate in the grace that has saved us. God invites us to be vulnerable and extend grace to friends and to strangers, not because they have earned it, but because it is who God calls us to be and how God calls us to live.

May we participate in the grace that has saved us. Let us be brave in our welcome of others, as God has welcomed us. Let us be loud in our defense of hospitality. Let us be vulnerable in our welcome, for we may entertain angels without knowing it.