I think it’s fair to say that our cultural understanding of hospitality has waned over the past few generations. My mother tells me that in the days of her mother, people would commonly reserve pastries or cake in case of visitors for tea. Bilbo Baggins (admittedly, this would have been back in the Third Age) was able to host a dozen or more guests at the drop of a staff for a tea-time. And Abraham and Sarah went above and beyond when God paid a visit to them around tea-time. And yet I daresay most of us would scramble if someone stopped by for tea today.
So in this blog, I’d like to point out two lessons from the divine visitation to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18. The first is our duty as hosts. And the second is our duty as guests.
At this point in the story of Abraham, Abraham had just talked with God about Sarah bearing him a son and instituting circumcision. Then, post-operation, God appears to him in the heat of the day, as three persons addressed as one (I’m not making that up– but it’s a topic for another day) to visit with him.
- If ever you felt vulnerable when hosting guests, Abraham maybe has you beat. Not only was he recovering from surgery, so was every man in the camp. 16 chapters later, a city in a similar post-circumcised state was so vulnerable that they were overcome and all the men slaughtered by just two men. Yet Abraham ran and bowed himself to the earth to welcome the three visitors.
- If ever you felt unprepared when hosting guests, Abraham maybe has you beat. Food was not ready. There was no warning. Yet he immediately had Sarah bake bread, slaughtered a calf, and got together curds and milk for his guests.
- If ever you felt emotionally ill-equipped to host guests, Abraham maybe has you beat. History-shaking news had just come to his home, which was in the process of changing the dynamics between himself, his wife, her servant, and Ishmael (his son through Sarah’s servant) forever, and incidentally asking all of the men in his camp the question of whether they were loyal enough to Abraham and to his God to endure circumcision. Yet he stood by the guests and made conversation with them.
- If every you felt too tired to host guests, Abraham maybe has you beat. Not only was he post-operative, he was also 99 years old at the time, and it was in the heat of the day that the men arrived. Yet he ran to meet them, ran to Sarah, ran to the herd for the calf, and brought everything to his guests.
All this to say, as hosts, maybe we’re too accustomed to making excuses for why we can’t host right now. If Abraham and Sarah can host three strangers with no warning, maybe we could host one or two people with little-to-no warning.
And as guests? When God paid a visit to Abraham, He knew exactly what state He was going to find Abraham in. He knew exactly how rough it would be for Abraham. He knew the pressure and the pain and the ill-preparedness Abraham was experiencing…and came anyway.
How many times have we talked ourselves out of reaching out to someone because we didn’t know what state we’d find them in? Or worse, we didn’t reach out because we suspected the difficulty of the state we’d find them.
The divine lesson could be to be a guest from time to time, as well as to be a host.
What if we were better prepared to host people? If we had a go-to cookie or pastry recipe that we could whip up in under half an hour? If we always kept tea and wine at the ready for a guest or two?
What if we visited friends and family more often? What if we stopped made excuses for why we might be a burden, and realized instead that one of the best things we can do for someone else is to give them an excuse not to focus on themselves? What if we weren’t afraid of walking into a mess, because we loved those in the middle of said mess?
As with any story in Scripture, so much more could be said, but for now, I’d like to close by saying that while we might be hard-pressed to be as unprepared as Abraham and Sarah, and hard-pressed to be as loving as the divine guests, maybe their examples can inspire us to become better hosts and more frequent guests.