Genesis 18:1-15

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So in hymn bibles in Genesis 18:1 to 15, page 17. If you'd like to follow in the red Bibles, The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great tree of Maya. While he was sitting at the entrance to his tent, he heard that in the heat of the day Abram looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from his entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. He said, if you have found favour in your eyes, my Lord, do not pass your servant by.

Let a little water be brought and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat so you can be refreshed and then you can go on your way now that you have come to your servant. Very well, they answered. Do as you say. As Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah.

Quick, he said, get three sheaves of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread. Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice tender calf and gave it to a servant who hurried to prepare it. Then he brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared and sat these before them while they ate. He stood near them under the tree. Where is your wife Sarah?

They asked. There in the tent, he said. Then the Lord said, I will surely return to you about this next year and Sarah, your wife, will have a son. Now Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent which was behind him. Abraham and Sarah were really old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbirth childbearing.

So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, after I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure? Then the Lord said to Abram, why did Sarah laugh and say, will I really have a child now that I am old? Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you to the appointed time next appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son. Sarah was afraid.

She lied and said, I didn't laugh. But he said, yes, you did lie.

To. Turn to Luke. Luke 1, page 1026, verses 26 to 28.

In the sixth month God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David.

The virgin's name was Mary.

The angel went to her and said, greetings, you who are highly favoured. The Lord is with you. Mary was gently troubled at this words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be that the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, you have found Favour in God. You'll be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.

The Lord God will give him. Give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end. How will this be? Mary asked the angel. Since I am a virgin, the angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Holy the Most High will overshadow you.

So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to have child in her old age. And she who was said to be barren is in her six months. For nothing is impossible with God. I am the Lord's servant, mary answered.

May it be to me as you have said. Then the angel left her. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And thank you, Paul, for reading that for us.

Do keep Genesis open, if that's okay, and that'll be helpful for you. As we go through that passage today, I'm going to pray. I'm just going to ask for God to speak to us. As Christians, we believe that the word that we've just read is God's word, and therefore, when it's read out loud, that he's speaking. And so I'm going to ask that he now takes that and speaks to each of us.

So, Father God, thank you so much for your word, the Bible. I pray that as we study it now, as we look at it, might it be that you would take these events that happened years and years and years ago and, Father, might it be that it might shape not just today, but our entire lives? I pray for. I ask it in the name of that baby we heard about being born, the name of Jesus. Amen.

Do you ever think there are times in life where you kind of think you're either going to laugh or cry? Do you ever get that in the world that we live in, where it comes to a point and it just seems so extreme that you just think, I'm either going to laugh or cry? We live in a world, don't we, this week, where we have literally invented a flying car and yet we're bringing things forward to a food bank because there are people in our society who can't afford to eat. We live in a world where with a few clicks on a keyboard, you can create the most incredible videos with AI. And yet we live in a world where through no fault of any doctor Trying to get an appointment in a crumbling NHS is really difficult.

In fact, frankly, just trying to speak to a human so often is so hard.

You either laugh or you cry. In fact, we live in a world, don't we, where the so called leader of the free world uses that technology I've just been talking about to create videos to mock the tragic death of a person at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. It feels like our world's so broken, doesn't it? And as we live in a world like this, we go, this isn't how it should be. It's as if each and every one of us looks and we love the fact that there's loads of stuff that's been donated for the food bank, but we resent the fact that food banks have to exist.

In fact, we live in this place where we long for a world that we've never experienced. We get the sense that there's something deeply wrong and yet it shouldn't be like this. And actually that's kind of what the feel of this passage is. If you're with us for the first time or just visiting as a church, we are thinking about what happens at harvest, but we're actually thinking about underneath why harvest is needed and why food banks are needed. We're going through the book of Genesis.

The book of Genesis is first book of the Bible. It starts, you might know, with Adam and Eve, a man or a woman, they're in a garden, it's called delight. And God says, you can eat from any tree of the garden except for one. And they say, actually, do you know what we're going to take from that tree and we're going to eat it. And from that point on we see in Genesis as this story just unravels and the world gets more and more broken.

It's almost repetitive as it goes through. But the funny thing is that alongside that story unfolding, there's another story. And it's a story of God saying, do you know the world that you long for that can be restored and it's going to happen through a child of a woman. And we followed that story as well as we've gone on and we've ended up with these two people, Abraham and Sarah. They were called Abraham and Sarai before they changed their name.

It's confusing, but basically they were given this promise and they're told, look, from you is going to come a child and that child is going to spread out into a great nation and that nation is going to bless the whole world and it's going to bring about something of this restoration that we long for. And we get to the start of chapter 18 and that promise is now 25 years old. And you can imagine for Sarah waiting and waiting and waiting. It feels like there's a world as it should be, but it's not the world that she's ever experienced. And here we are.

And what does God do? Well, the first thing we see is that God turns up. Verse big number 18. The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Marmora while he was sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. But he doesn't realise this is God.

So God appears. But what does Abraham see? Verse two, little number two. Abraham looked up and he saw three men standing nearby. And when he saw them, he hurried out from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bow down to the ground.

He said, if I found favour in the eyes of my Lord, that's just like, sir, it's not God. He says, if I found favour in the eyes of my Lord, don't pass his servant by. Let a little water be bought. And then you can wash your feet and rest here and let me get you something to eat so you can be refreshed and go on your way now that you've come to your servant. So what does Abraham do?

He sees three people and he jumps up and he serves them. Now, this is important because actually, as Christians, we're to kind of follow what Abraham does in this passage. Christians are designed to live in a world that is broken and are meant to be part of the solution. This kind of hospitality is actually what Christians are called to do. This passage isn't just about hospitality.

It isn't just about hospitality, but it's not about less than hospitality. What does he do? He sees three people, he jumps up and he tries to serve them. It's the equivalent of supporting the food bank. It's saying, how can I be part of the solution rather than just the problem?

But notice this, hospitality is costly. At this point, Abraham is 99 years old and it's the heat of the day and he sat outside his tent and he's under the shade of a tree. Oh, and he's just been circumcised. So, like, he has every excuse in the book not to be hospitable. If I was Abe at this point, I think I'd sit there and I'd be like, guys, I'm sorry, I'm not feeling great.

It's hot, I'm old. There's some water over there. If you want to sort yourself out, but he doesn't. He jumps up, he runs to them, he bows, he's serving them. So, church family, let me ask you, how is your hospitality?

Are you following in Abraham's footsteps? It's great that we bought food for the food bank today. Are we doing that regularly, equally? It might be that you're here and you're visiting and you're part of the community here. And maybe one of the things that you know about the church is you've seen that we've been through some really, really hard times.

Like when we talk about this idea of a world that we long for but we're not experiencing. Maybe, you know, there are people in our church family who felt that maybe you've seen actually as the church has cared for people and looked after them. And I need to say that that's not something that comes from the vicar or from the office. It's something that just happens naturally in our growth groups as Christians care for each other and look out for each other. In fact, it's one of the things that Jesus says that when people see Christians, they'd notice about them.

I hope that's something that you notice about our church family, caring for, looking after, trying to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

But Abraham, I think, suddenly begins to realise that he's not just dealing with three random blokes. And I think that happens around about verse six, you see, they speak and then verse six. So Abram hurried into the tent to Sarah. Quick, he said, get three seahs of finest flour and knead it and bake some bread. Now, there's a clue here that he realises who he's speaking to.

Look at that little footnote next to B. How many kilogrammes is three seers? Come on, people. It's right there. Sorry.

16. Yes, 16 kilogrammes. How many of them are there? Three. In other words, that's like five kilogrammes worth of flour each.

That is a lot of bread, right? I mean, even if Abraham and Sarah get involved, that's still three kilogrammes of bread. And if that's not enough, then he goes out and he gets them a whole third of a calf. And then he's like, oh, man. Okay, we've got bread, we've got beef.

Oh, we're going to need cheese to make these cheeseburgers. And so he goes and gets a load of cheese and a load of milk for them to wash it down. I mean, this is like, this is a crazy amount of food that he's putting out. It's like the best McDonald's trip ever going off right here. And you see, they've realised, they've realised that they're hosting someone special.

If you were around at 111 Sneedon Hill in London in 1936, you might have been there as there was a knock on the door and Myrtle Logue went and opened the door, the door to a fairly average, normal house. And you might have seen her face when she saw the King and Queen of England stood on her doorstep. If you've seen the film the King's Speech, you've probably seen that moment as she's like, the Queen's in my lounge. I mean, she's getting all the best stuff out, of course. This is incredible.

It's true. It really happened. And here they're hosting God. Wow.

But just think about this for a moment. What would this have been like for Sarah? See, Sarah has lived for 25 years with this God making a promise. You're going to have a child. You can have a child.

It's going to be a blessing. She's heard as her husband's come back in and said, oh, wow, I've seen this incredible vision. God's got this boiling pot, lots of animals, all of this stuff's happening. God's made this promise again, we're going to have a child, we're going to have a child. She's seen recently as he's come back circumcised.

I mean, he's really committed to this thing. They're going to have a child. And imagine what it would have been like for her. You got that promise. It's so exciting.

But then imagine how her heart would shatter piece by piece, every single month. Not for a year, not for three, three years, but for 25 years. Imagine what it would have been for her as finally the blood didn't come. But it wasn't because the baby was on its way, it was because that door had closed. Imagine the real tears, the real pain.

And here is that person who's making that promise. He's come to tea. It gets worse. He asks about her. Verse 9, where's your wife, Sarah?

And then verse 10, one of them said, I will surely return to you about this time next year. And Sarah, your wife, will have a son. I mean, that's triggering, isn't it, really? She thinks, you either laugh or you cry. How absurd.

That day's gone. That ship has sailed. I'm 90 years old.

And Sarah laughed just actually, as Abraham had done the previous Chapter and thought, am I. So after I am worn out and my lord, that's Abraham is old, will I now have this pleasure? She goes, really? And yet there's something interesting that's going on here. You see, that's kind of a weird way to talk, right?

Like, if you're told that there's a baby that's on its way, it's a bit odd to say, well, I now have this pleasure. It kind of sounds a bit Shakespearean. And yet what's going on here is actually that the translators are struggling with a slightly odd sentence. He literally says, will I now have delight? And it's there.

And it's a clue. Because what is the Hebrew word for delight? Can anyone remember, mentioned at the start of this? It's a garden Eden. In other words, she's saying, do you know what this pain that I am in is representative of?

A whole bigger thing. It's representative of all of us who long for a world that we've never experienced. Oh, and if you don't believe me, just think about the story. A man and a woman under a tree. God turns up eating, taking, giving food.

It kind of resembles, doesn't it, that story of Adam and Eve. And some of us go, it kind of resembles it, but it's slightly different as well. There God turns up in the cool of the day. Here he turns up in the heat of a day. There they take and they eat, but here they take and they give to God.

It's almost as if it's kind of a reversal. And that's the point. Sarah's saying, do you know what. What we long for is somebody to come and to reverse all of the problems, to move us into a world that we. That we long for but have never experienced.

We long for Eden to be back. How can Eden return? How could it possibly come?

Incidentally, we don't have time to go into it. There's so much cool stuff in this passage. But incidentally, later on, if you're part of the church family, compare the gifts that they give to the Lord in food to what happens in Leviticus. This is right worship. This is a reversal of what's going on.

And that's really important because all these years later, we sit in a world and we lament that there are food banks, and we lament that there's brokenness. And we sit in a world and we think, God, I long for a place where there's no crying or mourning. And yet as I sit in funeral after funeral, or as I take funeral after Funeral. You sit there and you look out at the tears and you think, gods, what are you doing? Could we ever get back to how this is meant to be, Please?

God says, is anything impossible for the Lord? The incredible thing is, a few years later, as we saw in that second reading, God once more says something very similar. No word of the Lord's going to fail. As once again, a woman who, biologically speaking, shouldn't have a baby has a baby. As once more, God turns up, steps into the world, lives in this world, in the brokenness and the pain of this world.

You say, I weep at funerals. He says, do you know what? I've wept at funerals, too. I have stepped into the pain of the world. I've had the dirt and the grit and the muckiness of this world literally on my feet, says God.

I know what it is.

And I can promise you that the world that you long for but never experience is a world that is one day coming. Because just as my words to Mary came about, just as my words to Sarah came about, so those promises will come too.

If you're visiting today, let me quickly tell you the end of the story. Do you know what Sarah, she has a baby a year later. Do you know what she calls him? Laughter. Laughter.

Just imagine, every time she was calling for that baby. Hey, Abraham, have you changed? Laughter's nappy. LAUGHTER it's time for tea. LAUGHTER get your school things together.

We're off.

Every time she'd be remembering this moment, I laughed. I laughed in cynicism and then I laughed in joy. Do you know the incredible thing about the God of the Bible is he says we live in a world where we laugh in cynicism. You either laugh or you cry at times. But I promise you, one day you will laugh with joy when my promises are fulfilled.

If that's something you'd like to find out more about, can I invite you along? You should have got one of these 3, 2, 1 flyers. It's a course where you can ask all sorts of questions. Maybe you're carrying all sorts of pain and you think, I want to find out more. Just after Remembrance Day, this is starting and you can come along.

It's absolutely free. It's a great place to ask questions. Do grab some of those on the way out. If you want to know why it is that you dream of a world you've never experienced, then come along to that course and find out. Let me pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you that when you make promises, they come true. And Father, we know sometimes they take a long time. And sometimes those promises themselves feel triggering to us because they feel so far from our reality. Now, please help us. I pray to be those who discover a God who brings laughter.

For we ask it in the name of Jesus, that unlikely baby who is you, come to live with us. Amen. Our next song is a hymn. It's a hymn that speaks of faithfulness. God keeping his promises.

That's basically what faithfulness means. It says, great is thy faithfulness. Let's stand and sing together.